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How Lorraine Warren Became One Of The Most Notorious Paranormal Investigators In Modern American History
FacebookEd and Lorraine Warren, the paranormal investigators who inspired The Conjuring franchise.
Paranormal investigators rarely become household names. While shows like Ghost Adventures and Paranormal State have had some success on television, it’s still unlikely that the average person on the street would instantly recognize the name Zak Bagans or the name Ryan Buell.
The same can’t be said for the Warrens.
Ed and Lorraine Warren have been immortalized by The Conjuring film franchise, where they are portrayed as heroic demonologists fighting back against the forces of evil. With the Warrens played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, the horror series has propelled the paranormal investigator couple from relatively fringe figures to pop culture stars over the past decade — though that hasn’t made them any less controversial.
The Warrens have long faced allegations that they exaggerated details about their paranormal cases, fabricated stories outright, and manipulated people in desperate situations to move their own careers forward. Ed was a self-proclaimed demonologist, often turning to scripture to gather evidence or drive away evil, but he never claimed to have any supernatural abilities.
Lorraine, on the other hand, did. She claimed to be clairvoyant and a light trance medium, and her visions supposedly helped with the couple’s investigations. The films lean heavily into this aspect of her story, emphasizing the danger that Lorraine purportedly faced during their cases.
But like anything else with the Warrens, that claim is also controversial.
Ed And Lorraine Warren’s Lives Before Becoming Paranormal Investigators
FacebookLorraine Warren, pictured when she was young.
Lorraine Rita Moran was born on Jan. 31, 1927, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She was raised Catholic and attended Lauralton Hall, a private school in Milford. As a teenager, she met her future husband at a movie theater.
The couple’s son-in-law Tony Spera later recounted the meeting for the New England Society for Psychic Research. He said that a then-16-year-old Lorraine went to see a movie with some friends, and Ed, also 16, happened to be working as an usher in the same theater that day.
At the time, Lorraine “didn’t have any interest in boys,” but she immediately noticed Ed and thought he was a “nice looking young man.”
After the movie ended, Ed offered to walk Lorraine and her friends home. Since Lorraine’s house was the last stop, she felt it was inappropriate for Ed to walk her all the way back alone. Ed understood and left her to continue the rest of the way by herself, but Lorraine later reflected that as he crossed the street, she felt that she had just met “the man I am going to marry.”
FacebookYoung Ed and Lorraine Warren, pictured during Ed’s Navy days.
Though their budding romance was briefly interrupted by Ed serving with the U.S. Navy during World War II — and a terrifying experience in which he nearly died after his ship was sunk — he was given a 30-day “survivor’s leave.” During that time, Ed and Lorraine got married. After the war ended, the couple welcomed their only child, a daughter named Judy.
They didn’t immediately begin working as paranormal investigators, though. Ed had actually been studying at the Perry Art School, a subsidiary of Yale, before deciding that he didn’t need the education and was already good enough that he could make enough money off of selling paintings.
“We were making a fantastic living, selling the paintings for fabulous prices — three dollars, four dollars,” Ed said in the biography section of their old website. “But you’ve got to remember… hot dogs were a dime, hamburgers were a dime, the theater was a quarter, gas was 18 cents a gallon. So, when you made five dollars on a painting, you were doing pretty good.”
Curiously, it was through painting and selling art that the Warrens began their supernatural investigations in the first place.
Ed And Lorraine Warren’s Paranormal Cases
TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock PhotoEd and Lorraine Warren, pictured with their daughter Judy.
Ed Warren was obsessed with visiting haunted houses, especially since he claimed that he grew up in one. He said that, as a child, he would wake up around 2 or 3 a.m. and see what he described as a “Ghost Globule” peering out at him from his closet, with the face of an old woman inside.
So, as an adult, whenever he caught word that a house was haunted, he wanted to check it out. At that time, the Warrens were complete unknowns, which naturally made it difficult to approach people and ask to investigate their homes. Then, Ed came up with a creative way in:
“I would do a really nice sketch of the house with ghosts coming out of it, and I’d give it to Lorraine, she’d go knock on the door and with her Irish personality she’d say, ‘Oh, my husband loves to sketch and paint haunted houses, and he made this for you.’ I made it special for them.”
It worked, and suddenly, the Warrens found themselves chatting with homeowners who believed that their homes were haunted by spirits.
TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock PhotoThe Warrens, pictured during one of their investigations.
Though Lorraine initially expressed some skepticism about what Ed believed to be paranormal, she would later claim to have clairvoyant powers that allowed her to see beyond the physical world and glimpse the future. While not everyone believed she had supernatural abilities, they certainly made for compelling storytelling, as they later played a key role in The Conjuring films.
Curiously, Lorraine also claimed that she was aware of her clairvoyant powers when she was a child, but she kept them to herself out of fear that people would think she was crazy. In any case, Ed seemed to understand.
Eventually, the Warrens founded the New England Society for Psychic Research, or NESPR, in 1952 and later pivoted into full-time ghost hunting. This led them to some of their most famous cases, including the Amityville Horror, the Perron family haunting, and the highly publicized case of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, who claimed that the Devil made him commit murder.
The Warrens would later say that they investigated an estimated 10,000 paranormal cases throughout their entire career.
Controversies And Accusations Of Hoaxing
PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy Stock PhotoLorraine Warren with the actress Vera Farmiga, who portrayed her in The Conjuring films.
The Warrens kept detailed notes of most of their cases, later turning some of them into books that proved to be popular with the public.
Critics, however, often accused the Warrens of fabricating parts of their stories, and even taking advantage of people who may have been suffering from mental illness. In the case of the Smurl family haunting, for instance, the family declined to undergo free psychiatric examination after claiming their house was haunted — a claim backed up by Ed and Lorraine Warren.
In regard to the Amityville Horror case, many of the Warrens’ claims about the “haunted” house were later disproven or strongly doubted by investigators, historians, and other experts. Meanwhile, some of the Warrens’ best known cases, like the Enfield haunting, portrayed in The Conjuring 2, actually saw little involvement from the Warrens in real life.
Furthermore, Ray Garton, a co-writer of one of the Warrens’ books, claimed that the couple were fully aware that a case they were writing about was likely a hoax and allegedly encouraged Garton to make things up in the book.
Then, there were the abuse allegations against Ed Warren that surfaced in 2017. It was revealed that a woman named Judith Penney had accused Ed of entering a sexual relationship with her when she was just 15. Penney claimed that the seemingly devoutly religious Lorraine was aware of the extramarital relationship, which allegedly lasted for decades. In addition, Penney said that Ed was physically abusive toward Lorraine and that Lorraine pressured Penney to get an abortion when she became pregnant with Ed’s child.
FacebookLorraine Warren, pictured with the allegedly haunted Annabelle doll at the Warren Museum.
Ed Warren died in 2006, years before the allegations were made public, and so he was never able to address them. But even before The Hollywood Reporter story about the alleged abuse broke in 2017, some behind The Conjuring were already in a panic about Ed Warren’s true nature.
In September 2013, producer Tony DeRosa-Grund emailed top Warners and New Line executives, informing them that the film they released was very far from the “true story of the Warrens,” explicitly writing that “Ed was a pedophile, a sexual predator and an [sic] physically abusive husband. Lorraine enabled Ed to do this, she knowingly allowed this illegal (read criminal) relationship to continue for 40 years. They lied to the public.”
Lorraine Warren was still alive when the news spread, but her lawyer at the time stated that she was in declining health and unable to comment. By the time of her death at the age of 92 in 2019, she had still never spoken publicly about the allegations. Because of this, both she and her husband leave behind a questionable and controversial legacy. Some have even suggested that the Ed and Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring films share little in common, other than their names, with their real-life counterparts.
After reading about Lorraine Warren, learn about George Lutz, the man whose claims about paranormal activity inspired “The Amityville Horror.” Then, go inside the true story of “The Haunting In Connecticut.”
The post How Lorraine Warren Became One Of The Most Notorious Paranormal Investigators In Modern American History appeared first on All That's Interesting.
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