Ed and Lorraine Warren were American paranormal investigators whose claimed cases inspired The Conjuring films.
Quick Specs
| Ed | Edward Warren Miney, born September 7, 1926, Bridgeport, Connecticut; died August 23, 2006, Monroe, Connecticut, aged 79 |
| Lorraine | Lorraine Rita Moran, born January 31, 1927, Bridgeport; died April 18, 2019, Monroe, aged 92 |
| Married | 1945, for 61 years; one daughter, Judy (born 1946) |
| Self-described roles | Ed, a self-taught demonologist; Lorraine, a clairvoyant and light trance medium |
| Founded | the New England Society for Psychic Research (NESPR), 1952 |
| Best-known cases | Annabelle, the Perron farmhouse, Amityville, Enfield, the Arne Johnson trial, the Snedeker house, the Smurl house |
| On screen | Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga in The Conjuring films (2013 to 2025) |
| Buried | Stepney Cemetery, Monroe, Connecticut |
Who They Are
Edward Warren Miney was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on September 7, 1926. By his own often-repeated account, he grew up in a house he believed was haunted. Lorraine Rita Moran was born in Bridgeport on January 31, 1927, and raised Roman Catholic; she said she could see auras from about the age of seven. They met as teenagers in 1944, when Ed was working as a theater usher, and married in 1945 while he was home on Navy leave. Ed served in the US Navy in World War II and was afterward a Bridgeport police officer. He also went to art school and sold paintings, many of them of haunted houses. Their only child, Judy, was born on January 11, 1946. She later married Tony Spera, who ran the couple’s society and museum after their deaths.
Neither held any academic qualification in theology, psychology or parapsychology. Ed was a self-taught, self-professed demonologist; Lorraine professed to be a clairvoyant and a light trance medium. Both were devout Catholics, and Lorraine said she believed a lack of faith was often what opened the door to malevolent forces. In 1952 they founded the New England Society for Psychic Research, which bills itself as the oldest ghost-hunting group in New England. They claimed to have investigated well over 10,000 cases, a figure no one has audited.
Ed died at home in Monroe, Connecticut, on August 23, 2006, aged 79, with Lorraine at his side. Lorraine died in Monroe on April 18, 2019, aged 92; her family said she died peacefully in her sleep. Both are buried at Stepney Cemetery in Monroe.
The Work, and What They Did in It
Their own favorite origin story is that Ed would sketch a reputedly haunted New England house, Lorraine would carry the sketch to the door as a gift, and the conversation got them inside. Through the 1950s and 1960s they lectured, investigated locally and built up the society, whose roster, by its own account, included doctors, police officers, nurses, students and clergy.
Annabelle comes from around 1970, in the Warrens’ telling. A student nurse they called Donna was given a Raggedy Ann doll by her mother. She and her roommate said it moved on its own and that notes appeared reading “Help us.” A medium told them the doll held the spirit of a dead girl named Annabelle Higgins, and a friend, Lou, said he dreamed the doll attacked him and woke with scratches. The Warrens concluded it was not a child’s ghost but an inhuman, demonic presence using the doll as a conduit, and they took it to their Occult Museum in a glass case with a warning not to open it. The religious-studies scholar Joseph Laycock calls the legend “an interesting case study in the relationship between pop culture and paranormal folklore,” and the science writer Sharon Hill argues that its mystique comes largely from the Warrens’ own promotion. The doll itself is an ordinary, mass-produced Raggedy Ann with red yarn hair. The cracked porcelain doll is a film invention.
In January 1971 Roger and Carolyn Perron moved with their five daughters into a farmhouse in Harrisville, Rhode Island, and lived there until 1980. The family said disturbances began almost at once. The Warrens researched the property, concluded it was haunted by several spirits, and named the dominant one as Bathsheba Sherman, a 19th-century resident they said had been suspected of witchcraft and of killing an infant. Bathsheba Sherman was a real woman who died in 1885, and no court record convicts her of either. Andrea Perron recounts that during one Warren seance her mother appeared to be possessed, and that her father threw the Warrens out. No exorcism of the house by the Warrens is documented. The case became James Wan’s The Conjuring (2013), with Patrick Wilson as Ed and Vera Farmiga as Lorraine. It was made for about $20 million, grossed more than $300 million and launched the Conjuring Universe. Lorraine consulted on it and visited the set.
Amityville rests on a documented crime. On November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot six members of his family at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island, and was convicted of second-degree murder in 1975. In December 1975 George and Kathy Lutz moved in with their three children and left 28 days later, claiming paranormal terror; their account became Jay Anson’s 1977 bestseller The Amityville Horror and the 1979 film. The Warrens were among the first investigators in 1976, after the Lutzes had gone. They held a seance, Lorraine said she met an overwhelming demonic presence, and Ed later rated the case a 10 on a scale of one to 10. They concluded the house was demonic and defended the Lutzes for life. The other side is as loud. DeFeo’s lawyer William Weber said that he and the Lutzes “created this horror story over many bottles of wine.” The parapsychologists Stephen and Roxanne Kaplan argued deliberate fraud and listed discrepancies, such as storm damage on nights with no recorded storm. Joe Nickell called it “a hoax, or… at best, not proven,” and Snopes rates the “true story” claim false. George Lutz denied the hoax claim and maintained the story was substantially true until he died in 2006, and the Lutzes and Weber sued each other. The record is disputed, and it stays that way.
The Enfield case began in 1977, when the Hodgson family in a north London council house reported poltergeist activity that went on for about 18 months: knocking, thrown objects, and a gruff voice said to be a former resident. The investigators on the ground were Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair of the Society for Psychical Research. The Warrens visited briefly, pronounced it demonic possession and left. The counter-record carries equal weight. A camera caught 11-year-old Janet Hodgson bending spoons and trying to bend an iron bar. Grosse saw her bang a broom handle on the ceiling and hide his tape recorder. SPR investigator Anita Gregory concluded the girls had staged incidents, and former SPR president John Beloff concluded Janet was practicing ventriloquism. Janet later said she and her sister faked “about two percent” of it, to see if Grosse and Playfair would catch them, and maintained the rest was real. The Conjuring 2 (2016) makes the Warrens the leads, which they never were.
The Arne Johnson case is a matter of court record. On February 16, 1981, in Brookfield, Connecticut, Arne Cheyenne Johnson, 19, stabbed his landlord Alan Bono to death with a pocketknife during an argument after a day of drinking. The Glatzel family, Johnson’s fiancee’s family, had said her young brother David was possessed. The Warrens said he was possessed by multiple demons and took part in exorcism sessions that they said were attended by priests. They also said Johnson had challenged the entity to leave the boy and take him instead. The day after the killing, Lorraine told police that Johnson had been possessed. His lawyer, Martin Minnella, tried to plead not guilty by reason of demonic possession, the first known US murder case in which that defense was sought. Judge Robert Callahan rejected it as “irrelative and unscientific,” and the jury never heard possession testimony. Johnson was convicted of first-degree manslaughter on November 24, 1981, sentenced to 10 to 20 years, and served about five. The case became The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021). In Netflix’s documentary The Devil on Trial (2023), members of the Glatzel family give materially different accounts.
The Snedeker family said the Southington, Connecticut, house they rented in 1986, a former funeral home, subjected them to demonic attack. The Warrens claimed former morticians there had committed necromancy; skeptical researchers found no evidence. This case has the strongest counter-record of all. The Warrens hired the novelist Ray Garton to write it up as a true story, In a Dark Place (1992). Garton has said the family’s accounts didn’t agree with each other, and that when he raised the problem, Ed told him: “You’ve got some of the story. Just use what works and make the rest up. Just make it up and make it scary.” Benjamin Radford found “little or no proof that anything supernatural occurred,” and Nickell calls the case a hoax. The 2009 film The Haunting in Connecticut loosely dramatizes it.
Jack and Janet Smurl of West Pittston, Pennsylvania, said their home was demon-infested from 1985 and went public in 1986. The Warrens concluded a demonic presence was at work, which led to the book The Haunted (1986) and a 1991 TV film. A later occupant told reporters she never encountered anything supernatural there. The case is the loose basis of The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025), Wilson and Farmiga’s final Warren film.
Their books were written with professional writers, mostly Gerald Brittle, whose The Demonologist (1980) set the template for their public image. They were in demand as college lecturers for decades. The Occult Museum in their Monroe home held objects they said were cursed, with Annabelle’s case at its center. It closed to the public in 2019 because of zoning: a residential property couldn’t legally run as a commercial attraction.
Cool Verified Facts
- The real Lorraine has a cameo in The Conjuring, seated in the front row of the lecture audience while Wilson and Farmiga present the “three stages.”
- In 2025 Annabelle went on NESPR’s “Devils on the Run” tour. Investigator Dan Rivera, 54, who presented the doll, was found dead in his Gettysburg hotel room on July 13, 2025. State Police found “nothing unusual or suspicious,” and on September 4 the coroner ruled the death natural and cardiac-related, noted Rivera’s known heart history, and stated that “Annabelle was not present in the room.”
- In August 2025 Matt Rife and Elton Castee bought the Monroe house and museum property and became legal guardians of the collection, Annabelle included, for at least five years. Tony Spera says the artifacts still belong to the Warren family, which leases them.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
For fifty years the division of labor never changed. Ed interviewed, researched, sketched, theorized and lectured, and he pronounced the diagnosis on their staged model of “infestation, oppression, possession.” Lorraine supplied the perceptions the diagnosis was built on. Friendly and hostile accounts describe the same two-person machine.
Their creed, in the society’s own words: “The fairy tale is true. The devil exists. God exists. And for us, as people, our very destiny hinges upon which one we elect to follow.” That is a statement of faith, not evidence.
The museum was archive, lecture backdrop and press opportunity at once. Journalists were routinely photographed beside Annabelle’s case, and its “Positively Do Not Open” sign did as much for the legend as any case file.
The skeptics have been just as blunt. Perry DeAngelis and Steven Novella examined the Warrens’ evidence and called it “blarney.” Nickell and Radford concluded that the flagship cases, Amityville and the Snedeker house, did not happen and had been invented. In a sworn declaration surfaced in 2017 Conjuring litigation and reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Judith Penney alleged a sexual relationship with Ed that began when she was 15. The claim was never tested in court, Ed was already dead, and Judy and Tony Spera said they never saw any such conduct.
Why They Matter
Ed and Lorraine Warren invented the modern ghost-hunting career. Before them there was no template for the married paranormal act: the society, the museum, the college lecture circuit, the ghostwritten case books, the televised seances. Reality-TV ghost hunting, the haunted-object museum and the “demonologist” as a media profession all descend from what they built in Monroe.
Their cases became horror’s most valuable modern mythology. Amityville was a phenomenon a generation before James Wan, and the Conjuring Universe built on Warren cases has grossed over $2 billion worldwide, with Wilson and Farmiga’s warm, devout Warrens at its center. For most people now, the film Warrens are the Warrens, which is exactly why their claims need attributing.
They are also the test case for how horror handles “true stories.” Amityville’s wine, Enfield’s bent spoons, Garton’s “make it up and make it scary,” and a coroner in 2025 confirming that a doll was not in the room all belong to the same story. It is a modern legend in full, with sincere believers, frightened families, professional storytellers, documented fakery mixed into real distress, and a franchise that turned it all into a love story.