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When James Wan’s The Conjuring debuted in 2013, most people expected a classic haunted house story—jump scares, kids in danger, evil supernatural creatures. But what no one would have expected was that this tale would involve husband-and-wife demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, and that the film would also be a story of their love.

That wrinkle wasn’t some creative stroke of genius on Wan’s part. The Conjuring’s tale of the Perron family really happened. And Ed and Lorraine Warren were real people. In fact, so many scary movies of the last 40 years, from The Amityville Horror and The Haunting in Connecticut to the ever-growing set of Conjuring-related films—including the newest installment, The Conjuring: Last Rites—can be traced back to real-life cases of the Warrens. And yet in real life they were even more fascinating and complex than we’ve seen on screen.

The Warrens' mysterious gifts

The early years of both Ed and Lorraine Warren were touched by experiences of the supernatural that they found impossible to forget. Son of a Connecticut state trooper who never missed Mass a day in his life, Ed grew up dealing with a landlady that hated kids. Anytime you did something wrong, he recalled to author Gerald Brittle in his book The Demonologist, “she’d come flying out of the house, screaming like a madwoman.”

A year after she died, when Warren was still a little boy, he saw “a dot of light, about the size of a firefly” appear in his closet. As he watched, the light expanded to the size and shape of a human being, and took on the form of his landlady wearing a shroud. “She was frowning as usual, just like she looked in life,” he said. “Then she vanished.”

Warren also often had dreams as a boy of a nun he’d never seen in real life. At one point she told him, strangely, “Edward, you will tell many priests the right road to go down, but you yourself will never be a priest.” Listening to his son describe the nun, Ed’s father was stunned. “That woman was your aunt,” he told Ed. She’d died before he was born.

In the same town, just a few blocks away, Lorraine Moran had no idea that the visions she had were unusual. “I simply thought everyone had the same God-given senses,” she said. It was the nuns at her Catholic girls’ school who told her different—and punished her for it. “It was Arbor Day, and we were all on the front lawn” watching a sapling being planted. As soon as it was in the ground, “I saw it as a full-grown tree,” she shared with Brittle. When the nun at the site learned this she sent Lorraine away to a weekend retreat where “I couldn’t talk or play or do anything, just sit there all day long and pray.”

“They taught me,” she remembers. She kept other visions to herself.   

Conjuring the supernatural

Ed and Lorraine met in 1944 as teenagers at the local movie theater where Ed worked and Lorraine used to go with her mother. By the time Ed enlisted in the Navy at age 17, they were dating seriously. Just four months after his deployment into the Pacific theater, the ship he was on sank after a collision with a tanker in the icy North Atlantic. He was one of only a few to survive. While he was on leave afterwards, he and Lorraine got married.

After the service, Ed went to art school. He and Lorraine both thought they’d be artists: “Each of us had skills as landscape artists,” Lorraine explained, “and we each harbored a desire to paint.”

But as they tried to figure out how to make a living, they came up with a most unusual idea. They researched homes that were supposedly haunted, then went to the sites and sketched them—all while the homeowners looked on, no doubt puzzled at the young couple standing outside their homes with sketchpads. Upon finishing their work they’d approach the owners and offer the sketches in exchange for more information about what had gone on in the homes. “If the story was engrossing enough, we’d paint up the house for our collection, then sell it at an art show,” Lorraine shared. There was nothing like tales of a haunted house to get potential buyers interested.

Ed and Lorraine traveled the country doing this for five years. At first, Lorraine was not convinced of the reality of the stories they were hearing. But slowly the consistency of those stories changed her mind. “We would be in vastly different places, one week in Iowa and one week in Texas,” she said, “but there was often a similarity, even an exactness, to the stories these people would tell.”

Those patterns taught them many lessons about spirits and hauntings.  They began to be looked upon by those homeowners as a valuable spiritual resource. “There Ed and I would be,” recalled Lorraine, “paint all over our hands and arms, offering consolation to folks who were often twice our age, telling them what we knew about the workings of the spiritual realm.” Without intending it, the supernatural became their work. In 1952, they began the New England Society for Paranormal Research (NESPR), and dedicated their lives to helping people deal with the uncanny and the supernatural. 

Ghosts and demons

Those early years taught them that paranormal situations actually came in two very distinct kinds, each requiring their own approach. Most hauntings, they found, involved human spirits trapped here after their death. Usually the cause was tragedy—a death that had come about unexpectedly, or a life that had been marked by unresolved trauma, leaving them unable to let go. “Many times the ghost isn’t even aware that death has taken place,” Ed revealed. “You often have to tell them—in fact, you’ve got to convince them—they’re dead.”

The Warrens had many stories of situations like this. There was Sister Catherine, the nun who died alone in her room in 1949. Decades later, sisters in the convent began hearing a strange screaming in their chapel each night. The Warrens discovered it coincided with the exact moment of Sr. Catherine’s death. Communing with the nun’s spirit, Lorraine deduced she needed her death to be acknowledged. The community of sisters held a special Mass for her; in the midst of it they heard another cry, this one of relief. Then she was gone.

Investigating a haunting in the residence of a West Point officer, the Warrens likewise discovered the presence of a Black porter named Greer who had been accused of committing a murder at West Point in the 19th century. Despite being exonerated at the time, Greer still felt that he had dishonored the Army. It took Lorraine reassuring him that his superiors past and present did not feel this way for him to move on. 

In these cases the Warrens served like counselors, trying to understand the behaviors of the dead and offering comfort and release.

At other times, as depicted in The Conjuring or Annabelle, the Warrens were struck by the total lack of humanity in the spirits they encountered. Unlike normal ghosts, these spirits actively intended to terrify people, and their presence in the house was physically repelling. “These consistently negative powers were so powerful and menacing that we did our best to avoid them in our work,” Ed revealed of those early years. “Just to be in the vicinity of the phenomenon was emotionally abysmal.”

As we now know, the Warrens would prove unable to stay away from these demonic forces forever.

Evil creeps in 

They say that when you stare into the abyss you must be careful, lest it stare back into you. The Conjuring films don’t hesitate to explore this; Lorraine suffers greatly as a result of the work they do, and daughter Judy often finds her life at risk, as well.

But in real life an even deeper darkness may have grown in the lives of the Warrens. As covered by the Hollywood Reporter, Judith Penney was 15 when she first met Ed, then in his 30s and working as a city bus driver to cover the family's costs. In a sworn statement given to a lawyer (but which she never intended to be publicly released), Penney testified that the two entered into a sexual relationship which went on for 40 years. Penney in fact lived in the Warren house for decades. “One night he’d sleep downstairs [with Lorraine],” she said, “One night he’d sleep upstairs [with Penney].”

In 1978, by her account, she became pregnant. The Warrens gave her the choice of saying she had been raped by an unknown assailant or having an abortion. Penney ultimately chose the latter. “I was so scared,” she said. “The night they picked me up from the hospital after having it, they went out and lectured and left me alone.”  

Penney would also report that Ed could be quite abusive of Lorraine, once hitting her so hard that according to Penney she was knocked unconscious. “Some nights I thought they were going to kill each other.”

Lorraine, who lived for 13 years beyond Ed’s death in 2006, would never confirm any of Penney’s claims. Daughter Judy told the Hollywood Reporter by way of her lawyer that her parents had “opened their home to Ms. Penney when she was 18 and had nowhere else to live following a childhood of neglect,” and denied Penney’s claims of violence, molestation, and adultery. But when Lorraine agreed to allow their work to become the basis for the Conjuring series, she had it written into the contract that the two of them could never be portrayed as having extramarital affairs or engaging in crimes which included sex with minors, child pornography, or sexual assault. A talent attorney reviewing the contract told the Hollywood Reporter she had never seen such specific language used in protecting the subjects of a film.

In an interview James Wan admitted that he’d never been to the real haunted farmhouse that was the basis for The Conjuring. “Just because I make movies in the scary world doesn’t mean I want to visit scary worlds,’ he said.

The Warrens spent their lives visiting scary worlds. Perhaps those scary worlds also visited them, even more than we knew.

The Conjuring: Last Rites comes out in theaters September 5th.

In the immortal words of Danny Elfman, "Life's no fun without a good scare." Join Popverse's weekly explorations of the best opening moments of horror cinema in The Coldest Open, and then check out:

• The best horror movies of all time, according to horror aficionado Greg Silber
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And much gore. Er, more. Much more.