Amityville, Part 3 - A Date With the Warrens

This is the My Dark Path podcast.

In Hollywood, summer is a time for big stars and big action. It’s the blockbuster season,
when massive spectacles of visual effects take over the screens at movie theaters
around the world. With kids out of school and looking for something to do, it’s the
perfect time for movies that entertain people of all ages; for superheroes and sequels,
names we recognize right away.
Which is why it was so unusual when, on July 19, 2013, Warner Brothers, one of the
biggest studios in Hollywood, opened an “R”-rated horror film made for less than a tenth
of the budget of your average superhero movie. Its lead actors were mostly known for
independent films or TV shows, it was set in the 70’s, and instead of space battles or
car chases, it followed a pair of real-life people investigating a spooky house.
It was called The Conjuring and, while on the surface it may have looked risky to put it
in theaters to compete against Hollywood’s biggest investments, Warner Brothers and
its studio partner New Line Cinema believed they had something special on their hands.
Test screening audiences loved the film, and while that “R” rating may have prevented
younger audiences from seeing it, the filmmakers took it as a badge of honor – because
the movie didn’t have sex, or nudity, or gore, or even cigarette smoking. And even
though it’s a horror film, spoiler alert – nobody dies. And yet the ratings board was
adamant – the movie was simply too frightening for a “PG-13”.
Beloved by fans and even by critics, who normally dismiss horror films, The Conjuring
grossed twice its production budget just in its opening weekend; and although it’s the
Marvel superhero adventures which have given rise to the term “Cinematic Universe”,
this unlikely box-office hit has created its own universe of sequels and spinoffs – with
films like Anabelle, The Nun, and The Curse of La Llorona all sharing characters and
plot elements in an interconnected franchise. Anabelle, you may recall, got a mention in
our first season episode about haunted dolls. The eight movies tied to The Conjuring
are now considered the second most successful horror franchise in history, behind only
Japan’s Godzilla movies.
And the protagonists – the real people whose fictionalized exploits tie this whole movie
series together – before The Conjuring, their names were only really known among
paranormal enthusiasts. But now, they were a pop culture phenomenon – self-

proclaimed independent demonologists and collectors of paranormal artifacts, Ed and
Lorraine Warren, played on-screen by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.
The movies all purport to be based on their real-life research – and they found their way
into some of the most infamous stories of hauntings and possessions in the 1970’s and
80’s. In our last episode about Amityville, you heard their names as part of the gaggle of
local psychics and ghost hunters who descended on 112 Ocean Avenue at the invitation
of a local news team.
In the film series, they are a loving, earnest, and pious couple who put their lives at risk
to battle dark and demonic forces and protect the innocent. In real-life, they were called
conmen, hoaxers, and kooks, self-promoters exploiting confused and distressed people.
Along the way, they’ve inspired an entire community of amateur ghost-hunters on TV
and online. My Dark Path can’t resist stories like this – did the Warrens really believe
the stories they told?
And it just so happens, a member of our team has a terrific personal tale to tell about Ed
and Lorraine. Kevin Wetmore visited them in their home in Monroe, Connecticut,
explored their self-proclaimed “Occult Museum”. He’s even seen the real Anabelle. His
story is so funny and strange that the only proper thing to do would be to let him tell you
himself. So – after I give you some background on the demonologist and the medium,
we’re going to have a conversation with Kevin that you’re going to love. Stay tuned.
***
Hi, I’m MF Thomas and welcome to Season Two of the My Dark Path podcast. In every
episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal. So, if you geek
out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. We hope you’ll
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special miniseries, a My Dark Path tour of history, science, and the paranormal in Cold
War Moscow.
Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with
me. Let’s get started with Episode 33: A Date With the Warrens
***
PART ONE
Edward Warren Miney was born on September 7, 1926 in the old industrial city of
Bridgeport, Connecticut. Lorraine Rita Moran followed him into this world just four and a
half months later on January 31, 1927 in the same city. They lived the love story most
people dreamed of back then – high school sweethearts who stayed together their
whole lives. They were sixteen when they started dating; when Ed turned 17 at the

height of the Second World War, he enlisted in the Navy. The ship he was assigned to
went down in the North Atlantic, but he survived this terrifying brush with death, and was
sent home for a 30-day “Survivor’s Leave”. He didn’t pass up the opportunity, and
married Lorraine during that month at home. On January 11th, 1946, Lorraine gave birth
to their only child, a daughter named Judy.
From their first meeting they had a shared interest in the supernatural and the
paranormal. Ed would often say that he grew up in a haunted house, and saw his first
apparition at the age of five. Lorraine believed herself to be a psychic medium, able to
see both the future and the past. She would tell friends that, as a child at a Catholic
school, she looked at a sapling and was able to envision the tree it would become.
After his service, Ed went to art school – they dreamed of making a living as artists.
They also had a deep, shared faith, raised as devout Roman Catholics in the era before
the Second Vatican Council, the transformative period in the 1960’s when the Church
revised and attempted to modernize many of its practices. This combination of beliefs
and experiences made them feel called by their God to battle demonic activity on Earth.
They had an unusual method for conducting their investigations; but it seems to have
worked often enough. If Lorraine, using her psychic sensitivity, believed that a house
contained malicious spirits, Ed would paint a picture of the house. Then he would knock
on the door, and offer the painting as a free gift, if the homeowners would allow the
Warrens to conduct an investigation. I’m not sure how I would react to such a
proposition, though I admit I would be awfully flattered if someone painted a picture of
my home.
After five years of this, they founded what they called NESPR – the New England
Society for Psychic Research. It’s the oldest ghost-hunting group in the American
Northeast, and it became their permanent full-time pursuit. They hired a manager, who
would book them to deliver lectures around the country about hauntings and demons.
Interestingly, this was their primary source of income; because they kept to their
standard of never billing any of the people for whom they conducted their investigations.
I’m going to come back to that detail later.
In 1972, that manager got them a speaking slot at West Point, the nation’s premier
military school. America was having something of a fever for the supernatural at that
point, driven in part by the best-selling book The Exorcist. While they were at West
Point, they were invited to investigate alleged hauntings at the school. And it was this
high-profile case, followed by their appearance in Amityville, which made them
celebrities.
The media theory philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “The medium is the
message” – what it means is that you should pay as much attention to how you receive
information as to what the information is. Interview requests for the Warrens
skyrocketed after their West Point speech, and now frequently included local television
appearances. They didn’t come across like razzle-dazzle magicians or zealous

crusaders – but their devotion to one another, and the confidence and detail of their
stories, was very effective on television. So TV wasn’t concerned with whether or not
what they said was true, they kept getting on because they made good TV.
Ed styled himself as, quote, “the world’s only Catholic lay demonologist.” Which
sounded like a very exciting thing to be. When author Gerald Brittle wrote a biography of
Ed Warren in 1980, he called it The Demonologist. This book describes a number of the
investigations the Warrens claimed to conduct. What’s interesting is that it was never
just a ghost they were chasing. It was always evil spirits, demonic possessions – the
Warrens weren’t just studying these phenomena in the name of research, they were
agents of the Lord, battling for the soul of the human race. At least – that’s how they
described themselves.
And this was their full-time career for the rest of their lives. They hired authors to co-
write books with them about their investigations, they delivered paid lectures, they
appeared in documentaries; and if a haunting received major media attention, you could
bet they would make an appearance. In 1977, they flew to London to investigate the so-
called Enfield Poltergeist – this case formed the basis of the movie The Conjuring 2.
Despite the hair-raising events of the movie, witnesses have claimed that, in reality, the
Warrens’ “investigation” amounted to little more than showing up uninvited and loitering
for an afternoon.
In all their years of work, they never produced anything which you might call conclusive
evidence of the paranormal. Occasional photographs with odd shadows or blobs of light
seem to be about the closest they got. Neither of them had any scientific training to
speak of; and, to take them at their own word, they weren’t on a mission to persuade
the world that demons were real. They were there to drive those demons out as quickly
as possible. There’s no real way to judge how successful they were at that; so to
everyone else, their greatest talent was for using America’s own fascination with ghost
stories to make their living.
***
PART TWO
The Warrens were a persistent presence in pop culture for years. That TV show we told
you about in our previous episode, “In Search Of”, featured them in their episode on
Amityville. They appeared on talk shows with Mike Douglas, Tom Snyder, Merv Griffin.
In 1992 they appeared on the Sally Jesse Rafael show, where the topic of the day was
“I’ve Been Raped By a Ghost”. The Warrens offered their expert opinion on sexual
demons known as incubi and succubi.
One of their cases was turned into a made-for-TV movie in 1983. It was called The
Demon Murder Case, and their characters were re-named Guy and Charlotte Harris.
Guy Harris was played by, of all people, Andy Griffith. Later, a moderately-successful
horror film called The Haunting in Connecticut was based on another case which the

Warrens made themselves a part of – but in this movie, their role was played by a single
priest rather than a lay exorcist and his psychic wife.
The Conjuring, though, was the first high-profile Hollywood project to put the Warrens in
the starring role. The screenwriters, Chad and Carey Hayes, were veterans of the
genre; and the director, James Wan, had something of a golden touch for launching
horror franchises. He was responsible for the movies Saw and Insidious, both of which
inspired multiple sequels. Although Ed Warren had passed away by the time the film
was made, Lorraine served as a consultant, which the studio heavily promoted. As
Hollywood did with The Amityville Horror, they marketed The Conjuring as being based
on a true story.
To the extent that it reflects any real events, it focuses on an incident in which the
Warrens investigated an 18th-century farmhouse in Rhode Island, the home of the
Perron family. From what we can tell, the family had been experiencing innocuous
strange events since 1971 when they moved in – imagining the house to have prankish
spirits in it was either a family joke or a harmless supernatural belief. But it seems that
things gradually turned darker. Around 1974, the Perron family suddenly claimed to see
terrible apparitions, hear voices ordering them to get out, and see doors open and slam
shut on their own.
The Warrens, as in other cases, weren’t specifically invited by the family, but showed up
with a group of paranormal enthusiasts. It was Lorraine who declared that the dark spirit
behind these incidents was Bathsheba Sherman. The Warrens claimed that Bathsheba
had been a Satanist who lived there, sacrificed her own daughter in an unholy ritual,
and hung herself from a tree on the property so that she could haunt it forever.
The Perron children do believe to this day that they experienced a real haunting, and
they watched as the Warrens brought a number of people to the house to perform what
seemed like an exorcism on their mother. Even they will admit, though, that much of the
movie was fictionalized.
But the expertly-made film did its job, raking in money for the studio and making Ed and
Lorraine Warren household names. The average person is now more likely to picture
the actors that play them than the real couple that made so many fleeting talk show
appearances in the years before. But it was back in those more obscure days that our
own Kevin Wetmore, a self-professed nerd about horror and the paranormal, paid to
have an exclusive meeting and tour with the couple themselves, at their Connecticut
home which also housed their occult museum. And now, as promised, his story.
***
INTERVIEW AUDIO
***

PART FOUR
I’ll admit something – that walking the dark path through the story of the Warrens, I
haven’t ended up quite where I anticipated. We’ve done a fair amount of debunking on
this show, and given what Kevin and myself have described to you, I think it would be
easy to land on the side which describes Ed and Lorraine as simple con artists, publicity
seekers spinning yarns. But then I think about the fact that they never charged money to
any of the people they investigated – the money they brought in was from television
producers, book publishers, or even people like Kevin, who were just fascinated enough
to want to hear them tell their stories.
It seems to boil down to whether they believed in what they’re saying, or if it was all a
front. Funny enough, what the Warrens remind me of is the legendary knight Don
Quixote de La Mancha. In the masterwork of literature by Miguel de Cervantes, Don
Quixote is an aging nobleman who is overtaken by the belief that he is a heroic knight,
and sets out in a battered old suit of armor on a journey to slay monsters and protect
the virtues of honor and chivalry in the world. He mistakes a local inn for a castle,
charges at a windmill, believing it to be a giant, and no matter how many cynical people
he encounters, no matter how often he is mocked or beaten or exposed as a fraud, he
still insists he is a knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha.
The epic novel is over 400 years old and, to this day, scholars and book lovers debate
whether it is a tragedy about a delusional fool, or a biting comedy about the lack of
honor and romance in the modern world. About whether or not there’s any virtue in
defining your own reality. And by the way, Miguel de Cervantes’s book also claims to be
based on a true story.
To the extent that any of us can guess, I think that, as with Betty and Barney Hill in the
UFO abduction case we told you about, Ed and Lorraine Warren genuinely believed that
they were finding and doing battle with evil spirits. Now, this is the sort of thing that
leads to cults, but other than training a few younger people to carry on their study of
demonology, this doesn’t seem to have happened. Certainly nothing on the scale of the
episode we produced on the self-proclaimed UFO abductee and Messiah who led a
terror cult in Brazil. And, given how Kevin described their home, their career didn’t
provide them a life of luxury.
Ed Warren died on August 23, 2006, at the age of 79. He was buried in Union
Cemetery, which Lorraine and himself had actually written a book about. In Graveyard,
co-written with Robert David Chase, Ed Warren claims to have captured on film the
“essence” of the lady-like white figure who allegedly haunts the grounds. So Ed Warren
was buried in a haunted cemetery. There’s something absolutely fitting about that to
me. After his passing, Lorraine would arrange outings for interested fans to visit Ed’s
grave with her, after which they’d dine at a favorite local restaurant. And when Lorraine
finally passed away in 2019 at the age of 92, she was buried next to her husband.

Whether they haunt the grounds of Union Cemetery, or have gone on to some other
reward for battling the forces of darkness, none of us can say. But it makes for a great
story, doesn’t it? Why is that? Is it because we envy the singular sense of mission they
had in their lives? Is it because we are secretly moved by the idea that any ordinary
folks can turn themselves into anti-demonic crusaders? Is it because just pondering it all
makes life feel a little more adventurous? What the Warrens tapped into wasn’t just the
spirit realm, it was something in our own natures that makes stories like theirs
irresistible. Try as we like, we can’t ever exorcise it completely. And I’m not sure we
want to.
***
Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host. I produce
the show with Courtney and Eli Butler; and our creative director is Dom Purdie. This
story was prepared for us by Kevin Wetmore, who has actually published a book about
The Conjuring and its related films – it’s called Devil’s Advocates and we’ve linked to it
on our website. Our Senior Story Editor is Nicholas Thurkettle, and our fact-checker
Nicholas Abraham; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.
Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening.
It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you.
Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me.
Until next time, good night.
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