Arts & Entertainment

'The Conjuring' Unearths Questions from the Past

A reporter recalls his encounter with the blockbuster movie's real-life counterparts.

By Roy Rivenburg

The brilliantly creepy trailer and good reviews lured me to the theater, but any chance of getting spooked by “The Conjuring” vanished once the main characters’ names were revealed: Ed and Lorraine Warren, self-described demonologists from Connecticut. 

While my date screamed as the "based-on-a-true-story" plot unfolded, I mostly chuckled. That’s because I’ve met the Warrens and the film’s evil Annabelle doll (which is a giant Raggedy Ann in real life).

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In the mid-1980s, I toured the couple’s bizarre basement museum and interviewed Ed Warren (now deceased) for a story on exorcism that eventually appeared in the Los Angeles Times. I later wrote a separate article about the Warrens for the Hartford Courant. It’s not online, but here’s the draft I submitted to the paper in 1991:

Inside a glass case that warns “Danger, positively do not open,” lurks a smiling Raggedy Ann doll that purportedly slashed one man and injured others. Nearby is a plastic dinosaur that supposedly came to life and spoke.

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Out in the hall rests a coffin slept in by a man who visualized himself as a werewolf.

Standing in the midst of it all is Ed Warren, a self-described demonologist who with his wife, Lorraine, investigates reports of satanic activity from their Monroe, Conn., home

The Warrens, both in their mid-60s, chase devils and ghosts for a living--from the celebrated haunted house in Amityville, NY, to a Florida exorcism shown last year on ABC-TV’s “20/20.”

Along the way, they claim to have encountered all manner of weirdness, and they store a collection of mementos in an unheated museum next to their house. The room is kept icy, Ed Warren says, because evil spirits “don’t like the cold.” He warns visitors not to touch anything, as if demons could be picked up like germs.

“There is a power out there,” Warren says. “It can tear apart a house, create fires and slash, claw and burn people. The final confrontation [between God and the devil] is here right now.”

Not surprisingly, such claims attract plenty of skeptics. Even people who work with the Warrens sometimes offer stories that seem at odds with the couple’s version of events.

Bishop Robert McKenna, a Latin rite priest who broke from the Roman Catholic church in 1973, has performed dozens of exorcisms for the Warrens, but says he’s never seen any of the strange phenomena they describe. Nevertheless, he trusts the couple, reasoning simply that God spares him from the trauma of direct encounters with diabolical powers.

Others are less charitable in their assessment. Francis Virgulak, a former exorcist who left the Catholic priesthood several years ago, said in 1984 that he wavered between thinking the Warrens were sincere but misguided or just in it for the money.

Ed Warren admits to being publicity-hungry, but says his purpose is to expose satanic activity, not make a buck. He says the couple doesn’t earn more than $45,000 a year: “That’s almost poverty-level here.”

Questions about the Warrens’ credibility are further clouded by the way their stories are presented. Although reputable news outfits such as the New York Times and BBC occasionally report on their activities, their exploits are more often chronicled in supermarket tabloids.

And the Warrens split royalties from books written about their cases with the families involved, Warren says.

Nevertheless, the Warrens do enjoy support. Father James LeBar of New York, an authority on exorcism, says he regards the couple as sincere and credible.

And the Warrens seem to have no trouble finding an audience for their stories. They travel the college lecture circuit (receiving upwards of $1,800 per appearance), handle several calls a day about possible new cases and, in 1991, saw a movie version of one of their investigations, “The Haunted,” air on Fox-TV.

Says Ed Warren: “Somebody has to get out there and let people know what’s going on.”

Copyright 1991 by Roy Rivenburg


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