The Warrens: Ghost Hunters or Grifters?
Ever since they investigated the chilling Amityville Horror case, self-proclaimed paranormal experts Ed and Lorraine Warren caught the attention of all the skeptics in America. But if the Warrens' long career hunting ghosts provides more questions than it does answers…the answers that we do have are utterly bone-chilling.
1. They Were Different From Other People
The paranormal was always a part of Lorraine Warren’s life. Since she was seven or eight years old, she reportedly could see auras around people, though she was too scared to tell her parents what she was seeing. Then years later, as a 16-year-old, she met Ed Warren—and her visions kicked into high gear.
2. Lorraine Had A Vision
According to Lorraine, when she and the also-teenaged Ed went on their first date, she had a vision of him as a much older man and instantly knew he would be her husband. As she recalled, she thought, “I’ll spend the rest of my life with him”. She was right, and they were married within two years. But this wasn’t the only eerie thing about their meeting.
3. They Were Strangely Alike
Lorraine had been suffering through her alarming gifts alone and in silence, but that all changed when Ed came around. Presumably after hearing about or picking up on her abilities, Ed soon confessed that he himself had grown up in a haunted house, and that it had driven him to start studying as a demonologist.
It was the beginning of a terrifying partnership.
4. They Founded A Ghost Society
Over the next decades, after having a little girl, Judy, together, the Warrens dedicated themselves to the study of the paranormal, founding the New England Society for Psychic Research, or NESPR, the oldest ghost-hunting group in the area.
They soon garnered enough trust that people began coming to them with their most blood-curdling cases—and one of their most infamous investigations was also one of their first.
5. They Met A Possessed Doll
Around 1970, Ed and Lorraine received an alert about a Raggedy Ann doll named Annabelle. After receiving the doll as a gift, the nurse who owned Annabelle began to notice disturbing signs. She swore the doll would change positions, and she and her roommate stumbled across parchment paper with messages like “Help me, help us”—despite there being no parchment paper in the house.
6. They Looked Into The Allegations
When Anabelle suddenly seemed to start leaking blood as she still mysteriously traveled around the house, the two roommates turned to a medium, who told them the doll was haunted by the spirit of “Anabelle Higgins”.
It was this that brought the case to the attention of the Warrens, and the concerned couple contacted the women and asked to evaluate the doll. Their findings were notorious.
7. They Sensed Danger
The Warrens took one look at Anabelle and concluded that she wasn’t strictly possessed—instead, she was “manipulated by an inhuman presence”. More worryingly, they believed the spirit in the doll was looking for a human to possess. Fearing for the women, they took Annabelle from the house…and nearly perished in the process.
8. They Were In Peril
As the Warrens were driving away with the doll, they claim they found out just how dangerous she was. As their car pulled away, the brakes failed again and again. It took Ed and Lorraine getting out of the car and soaking the doll with holy water for the mechanical trouble stop.
When they got home, they put her in an unusual spot.
9. They Had To Lock The Doll Up
Ed and Lorraine developed a family “Occult Museum” in the back of their property in Connecticut, and they displayed Annabelle there in a large, locked glass case bound with a prayer….partly to show her off, and partly to control her. Apparently, when Annabelle got to their house, she kept moving around until they locked her up; there’s now a sign warning “positively do not open”.
To this day, however, Annabelle still gets her revenge.
10. Anabelle Can Still Cause Trouble
The Warrens’ son-in-law later named Annabelle as the one object in the Occult Museum “I’d be most frightened of”—and for good reason. One couple apparently began snickering about Annabelle after their visit to the museum, only to get in a motorcycle accidentally almost immediately afterward. But Annabelle was just the beginning for the Warrens.
11. They Met A Besieged Family
In the early 1970s, the Perron family came to the attention of Ed and Lorraine, and their troubles became perhaps their most lasting case. Carolyn and Roger Perron, along with their five daughters, moved into a farmhouse in Harrisville, Rhode Island in January of 1971. But right away, they noticed they weren’t alone.
12. Small, Strange Things Began Happening
At first, there were just small, unsettling occurrences around the house. A broom all but disappeared, and when it reappeared it was in an unusual place. Sometimes, a scraping sound came from the kitchen, and Carolyn Perron would often find piles of dirt just after she’d cleaned the floor. Before long, though, the situation escalated.
13. Spirits Surrounded Them
What began as a missing broom soon turned into appearances by various spirits around the house. The girls in particular noticed these ghosts, though they claimed that many of them weren’t dangerous. Some, however, radiated angry energy, and still more smelled like rotting flesh.
But while they still stubbornly lived in the farmhouse, there was one place they never wanted to go.
14. The Basement Was Vicious
One of the Perron children, Andrea, was particularly forthcoming about her time in the haunted farmhouse, and she claims the basement was one of the worst spaces there. Though they tried to avoid it, the heating equipment would often suddenly fail and send her father Roger down there, where he would often feel a “cold, stinking presence behind him”.
But Carolyn Perron seemed to have it worst of all.
15. She Was Scared Out Of Her Wits
Carolyn Perron’s description of the first full-on “visitation” she had is bone-chilling. As she described it, she was in her bedroom at 5 o’clock in the morning when, "I opened my eyes and saw…a very tall woman. Her head was like a sack of cobwebs with little tendrils of hair hanging out".
Terrified, Carolyn decided to look into the history of the home, and was astonished at what she found.
16. The House Had A Bloody History
Apparently, before the Perrons came to the farmhouse it had been in the same family for eight generations. However, many of its inhabitants had perished in violent circumstances: Multiple children had drowned on the property’s creek, more than one hanged themselves in the attic, and one had even been murdered.
But this was nothing compared to the true demon in the house.
17. One Spirit Ruled Them All
Among the spirits, there was one particularly resentful presence, who “perceived herself to be the mistress of the house” and saw Carolyn, as the Perron mother, as a rival. When Carolyn found out about Bathsheba Sherman, a woman who lived on the property in the mid-1800s and was accused of being a Satanist and killing a child, she felt sure that this was her “mistress”.
18. They Intervened
With paranormal activity like this, it wasn’t long before the Warrens got into contact with the Perrons, and they made several trips to the farmhouse in the decade that the family lived there. They, too, witnessed many of the same phenomena as the Perrons, and also concluded that the spirit of Bathsheba was tormenting the family. But the Warrens’ solution ended in horror.
19. Lorraine Held A Terrifying Seance
In order to contact the spirits, the Warrens sat Carolyn Perron down and began a seance. It didn’t go smoothly: During the communication ritual, Carolyn reportedly became possessed by one of the spirits and began speaking in tongues, levitating in her chair, and was thrown across the room.
Andrea Perron, who says she secretly watched the seance gone wrong, recalled, “I thought I was going to pass out”.
20. The Family Kicked Them Out
After witnessing the seance, Roger Perron lost it on the Warrens, terrified for his wife’s sanity and no doubt shaking from the scene he had just witnessed. The Warrens only came back once more—to make sure that Carolyn was alright.
Though the Perrons, thanks to financial instability, lived in the house until 1980, they did eventually move. But as time went on, their story grew.
21. It Became A Movie
Today, the Perrons’ horrific experience became the basis for the film The Conjuring, which included Ed and Lorraine Warren as characters and used Lorraine Warren as a consultant. But even so, there was one thing the movie got very wrong: Instead of the seance Lorraine really performed, The Conjuring shows an exorcism.
As the Warrens firmly believed only Catholic priests should perform exorcisms, they never would have done one. For their next case, though, they might have wished they could.
22. There Was A Terrible Incident
One night in November of 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr, the oldest child in his large family, fatally shot his parents, his two brothers, and his two sisters while they were sleeping in their beds in their house in Amityville, Long Island. The senseless violence rocked the sleepy community—and it became a catalyst for one of the most haunting events in American history.
23. Another Family Was Haunted
Two years after this infamous night, George and Kathy Lutz moved into the DeFeo house with their two sons and, much like the Perron family’s farmhouse, began feeling disturbing presences almost immediately. George reportedly hallucinated Kathy turning into a 90-year-old woman and levitating, as well as slime coming out of the walls. These frightening scenes then got violent.
24. They Fled The House
As the days passed, the Lutz family claimed to see a menacing creature reminiscent of a pig around the house, and recalled instances where knives would hurtle off the counters and right into their paths. Eventually, the family took to walking around with a crucifix and praying, but nothing seemed to shake the spirits.
28 days after moving in, they fled. Enter: Ed and Lorraine.
25. They Braved The Haunting
In the wake of the DeFeo tragedy and now the stories coming from the Lutz family, rumors began flying that the house was haunted, and that these presences could have very well driven Ronald DeFeo to his evil act. Ed and Lorraine Warren certainly thought so, and 20 days after the Lutz family abandoned the house, they stepped through its threshold.
26. The House Wanted Them Out
According to the Warrens’ report from the Amityville Horror house, Lorraine instantly felt an overwhelming demonic presence. Ed, meanwhile, felt physically pushed to the floor the minute he entered, confirming for them that the family’s experiences weren’t fabricated. They even claimed to catch a photograph of a little boy’s spirit near the stairway.
As we'll see, the Amityville haunting brought some of the biggest criticisms to Ed and Lorraine, but their next case—though lesser known—was just as terrifying.
27. There Was A Haunting In England
In the summer of 1977, paranormal activity took the Warrens across the pond to Enfield, England. In the quiet London suburb, the Hodgson family had been reporting strange happenings all around the house, one of the most alarming being when 11-year-old Janet Hodgson witnessed her dresser sliding all the way across her room.
It was far from the only sign.
28. They Thought It Was Burglars
In addition to moving furniture, the rest of the Hodgsons also experienced knocking throughout their house, as if people were living in the walls. In fact, that’s exactly what the Hodgson adults thought—Janet’s mother began to believe there were burglars or even drifters hanging around, and called the authorities. Which is when it got even stranger.
29. A Stranger Witnessed It
An Enfield officer duly followed up on the call, probably thinking he was in for another routine check. If so, he got way more than he bargained for. The investigator himself apparently reported seeing a chair rise up off the floor and then move across the room on its own.
In fact, the more people who knew about the so-called Enfield haunting, the seemingly worse it got.
30. The Whole Town Investigated
Soon, reporters were checking out the Hodgsons’ claims as well—and finding them all too convincing. They reported legos and marbles flying around the house, and discovered that when they tried to pick these objects up, they were scalding hot. Folded clothing would also leap around, phantom dog barks filtered through the house, and lights would flicker.
But it took one last straw to bring Ed and Lorraine to the Hodgsons’ door.
31. There Was A Huge Disruption
With all this going on, the area around Enfield was certainly aware of the paranormal happenings, but it hadn’t yet gone international. Until, that is, a heavy iron fireplace in one of the upstairs bedrooms was ripped clear from the wall, with no apparent culprit. This news drew ghost hunters from around the world, including the Warrens. But their conclusions were different from their peers.
32. The Warrens Believed Them
The Hodgsons believed they had some kind of ghost, but not many experts did. The overwhelming belief from the paranormal investigators was that the children were making up most of their experiences and imagining the others. The Warrens, however, put forward that the family was indeed haunted—and by a poltergeist no less.
If this all sounds familiar, there’s a reason for that.
33. It Got Turned Into Another Movie
Just as with the Perron family’s experiences being turned into The Conjuring, the Enfield haunting became the basis for The Conjuring 2, where the Warrens head to England to fend off a malevolent presence stalking and possessing a family. Only, in real life the couple weren’t as welcome in Enfield as you might think.
34. They Were Turned Away
In reality, Ed and Lorraine were far less involved in the Enfield haunting than The Conjuring 2 would have you believe. When the couple showed up to the house that day, they hadn’t even been invited by the Hodgsons. Consequently, they were actually turned away from the home—and never tried to enter it again.
35. They Had Other Terrifying Cases
Following the success of The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2, many of the Warrens’ other cases have made it to the big screen, including the story of Arne Cheyenne Johnson. Disturbingly, Johnson met with the Warrens about the potential demonic possession of his fiancée’s younger brother—just before he allegedly took the life of his own landlord.
For the Warrens, this indicated that Johnson was also possessed, and the story was turned into The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.
36. They Have A New Chilling Story
Most recently, The Conjuring: Last Rites explores the Warrens’ dealings with Pennsylvania residents Jack and Janet Smurl, who were tormented in their home by various sounds, smells, and visions. Eventually, the couple believed the Smurls were being harassed by a group of four spirits, plus a demon.
37. They Owned A Possessed Tiger
The Warrens’ Occult Museum houses many of their famous artifacts, like the Annabelle rag doll, but one object in particular is as outlandish as it is terrifying: There is the skin of a full tiger, who reportedly slayed 33 people in India while possessed by a demon.
38. They Called Out Fakes
Though they have their skeptics, the Warrens could be skeptical themselves. They did come across false paranormal cases, and they had no problem telling the “victims” so. As Conjuring director James Wan put it, "They'd say, 'You don't have a ghost—your house is warping because of a water leak”. But some of the cases do still haunt people today…
39. They Have True Believers
Many of the people who were involved in the paranormal events the Warrens investigated still swear to what they saw. Andrea Perron, of the farmhouse haunting, admitted, “It still affects me to talk about it today…Both my mother and I would just as soon swallow our tongue than tell a lie”. Likewise, the Hodgsons from Enfield never recanted their own story.
40. They Got It Wrong
Andrea Perron wrote her own book about her experiences, focusing on the “mistress of the house” Bathsheba…and she had quite a different take than the Warrens. While Lorraine insisted Bathsheba was a fundamentally malevolent presence, Andrea has deep empathy for the ghost who, while certainly an angry spirit, was likely more sinned against than sinning in a time when women were often falsely accused of witchcraft.
As Andrea once said, “I cannot absolve her of guilt—I don't know what the circumstances were—but I can be her great defender”.
41. They Thought Victims Had One Weakness
It may come as no surprise that Ed and Lorraine Warren were devout Roman Catholics, and frequently used holy water and other Catholic rituals to combat the spirit forces they saw around them. Indeed, the couple believed that demonic possession was more likely to happen to people who lacked or had lost their faith.
Yet, when you scratch the surface of the God-fearing couple, they don’t come across as good Christians at all.
42. They Had Harsh Critics
Many critics of the Warrens believe they were, as the New England Skeptical Society put it, "at best, as tellers of meaningless ghost stories, and at worst, dangerous frauds”. Indeed, this opinion extends beyond the skeptic community. Horror author Ray Garton, speaking of Lorraine, reportedly told a contact, “If she told me the sun would come up tomorrow morning, I'd get a second opinion”.
But it gets more alarming than this.
43. They Were Money Hungry
Parapsychologist Guy Lyon Playfair was in England with the Warrens during the Enfield haunting, and his comments about the couple’s role in the proceedings paint an unsettling portrait. According to Playfair, not only had the embattled Hodgsons “[n]ever heard of” the Warrens until Ed showed up, but the demonologist also reportedly told Playfair they “could make a lot of money” from the case before he was turned away. And still, it gets worse.
44. Their Most Famous Case Fell Apart
One of the Warrens’ most famous cases is also perhaps their biggest failure. Despite the hold the Amityville Horror has over paranormal believers, and despite the fact the Warrens insisted it wasn’t a hoax, there is abundant evidence it was all made up. Paranormal investigator Benjamin Radford asserted that the story was “refuted by eyewitnesses, investigations and forensic evidence”.
In 1979, a lawyer named William Weber even confessed that he, author Jay Anson, and the house’s occupants came up with the story after a night of drinking. But we’ve saved the worst for last.
45. They Retired
In 2006, Ed Warren passed, at the age of 79, from complications following a stroke, leaving Lorraine alone for the first time in decades. Almost immediately, she retired from investigating paranormal activity, though she did continue working as a ghost hunting consultant until her own passing in 2019, at age of 92.
Just before she passed, horrific accusations came out.
46. His Mistress Surfaced
In 2017, more than a decade after Ed Warren passed and just two years before Lorraine Warren would, a woman named Judith Penney came forward with a jaw-dropping story. She claimed that she had an affair with Ed for over 40 years, and that it had started when he was 27 and she was just 15. And that was just the start.
47. They Could Be Vicious
According to Penney, she eventually became pregnant with Ed Warren’s child—which is when Lorraine, who apparently knew about the affair, pressed her to get rid of the baby, since a love child would shatter the couple’s image as holy hunters and ruin their business.
Ultimately, Penney agreed…but the secrets kept coming.
48. They Hurt Each Other
Judith Penney had, at least according to her, been intimately close to the Warrens for over four decades, and during that time she saw a side of them no one saw—a side that could also ruin them. Penney claimed that the Warrens physically harmed each other, once more collapsing their image as good Christians.
Unfortunately, there is some evidence that backs Penney up.
49. Lorraine Had A Suspicious Clause In Her Contract
Evidently, Lorraine Warren was fully aware of Penney’s arsenal of information, because when she was a consultant on The Conjuring film series, she had it put in her contract that she and Ed couldn’t be seen doing two things: engaging in affairs, or engaging in intimate acts with a minor. Though the Warrens’ daughter Judy refutes Penney’s claims, those stipulations are certainly very…specific.
50. They Were Deeply Flawed
For all their controversy, scandals, and chilling history, Ed and Lorraine Warren were neither demons nor angels—but they still kept scores of skeletons in their closets, locked up tight. In the end, their ghost hunting may send shivers down your spine, but their real life was just as blood-curdling.
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