Diabolical forces are formidable

As I’m staying in a house that’s over 400 years old and it’s guaranteed to be haunted, cos new builds never are, I decided to cover the Warrens.

In case you aren’t aware, they’re the people who were the inspiration for the Conjuring universe and I think, personally, they are charlatans.
For the record, I don’t think that the Warrens set out to deceive anyone, they believed what they were doing but they were influenced by their religious upbringing. If y’all are unaware I’m a skeptic.

Ed and Lorraine Warren were a husband and wife ghost hunting team, who met when they were teenagers. They were both Roman Catholic and this belief would dominate their investigations, at least from my point of view.

Ed grew up in a haunted house, of course he did, and Lorraine was a clairvoyant and medium, of course she was. 
Ed claimed that when he was five years old he saw an apparition that was his family’s landlady, who had died recently. He said she was “semi-transparent, wearing what looked like some sort of shroud … then she vanished.”

Lorraine was twelve years old when she had her first vision and it was about a tree, “just as soon as they put the sapling in the ground, I saw it as a fully grown tree … filled with leaves blowing in the wind”, rather than put this down to imagination she was convinced she could see the future.

In 1952, the Warrens founded the New England Society for Psychic Research, after all Ed was a self taught Demonologist and with Lorraine’s ability for precognition the sky was the limit. 
*On a side note when I claimed to be a self taught gynecologist the judge gave me a suspended sentence, one rule for one one rule for the other I suppose!

The Warrens then travelled the length and breadth of the land investigating paranormal activity and for some reason became famous for it. If you use the dictionary definition of the word solved, the Warrens didn’t really have any success, but if you use the dictionary definition of audaciousness then they were winners!

Their first major case was Annabelle the possessed doll. There is an awesome podcast that covers this case but the broad strokes are that a raggedy Anne doll was possessed by a dead spirit that wanted to find a human host. The Warrens rode in to the rescue and took the doll into their care and, rather than destroy the doll they exhibited it in their “museum”.

Their next case was the Amityville haunting. This case has been debunked by eyewitnesses, investigators and forensic evidence. In 1979, lawyer William Weber stated that he, Jay Anson, and the occupants “invented” the horror story “over many bottles of wine”.

Another case they looked into was the Enfield Haunting. Now this case actually piques my interest, although some other skeptics claim that it was a hoax carried out by “attention hungry children”. Although this case was the inspiration for The Conjuring 2 film, the Warrens input with this investigation was exaggerated, as apparently they showed up without being invited and no one knew who they were. When you gotta explain who and what your profession is, it’s really not a good look!

The latest film from the Conjuring universe is taken from the Arne Johnson case, in which he was accused of killing his landlord and tried to use the “devil made me do it” defence at his trial.
The judge promptly threw this defence out as “irrelative and unscientific” because demonic possession couldn’t be legally (or any other way) proved. 

The Warrens were actually called before the murder took place as Arne’s fiancees younger brother, David, was allegedly possessed. Lorriane claimed to have seen him levitate and contacted the Brookfeild police department to warn them about the situation and how it could escalate.

At one of David’s three lesser exorcisms, Arne Johnson dared one of the demons to possess him and when he examined an old well at the property of the exorcisms a few days later, he made eye contact with the demon and was possessed by it…
Read into that what you will but on the 16th February 1981, Arne, while growling like an animal plunged a 5-inch knife, several times, into Alan Bono to commit the first unlawful killing in the history of Brookfield, Connecticut. 

The Warrens set up a museum which holds all their creepy paraphernalia, Annabelle the doll encased in a wooden prison being the main attraction, in the back of their house. Unfortunately they didn’t have the prerequisite permits and due to off road parking by visitors in a residential area, the museum was closed in 2019. After they passed, Ed in 2006 and Lorraine in 2019, their son-in-law Tony Spera now holds all their relics and continues to run the New England Society for Psychic Research.

The Warrens have been the subject of skepticism, from people better qualified than me, and some quotes that have popped up are:
-“‘If she told me the sun would come up tomorrow morning, I’d get a second opinion'”
-“at best, as tellers of meaningless ghost stories, and at worst, dangerous frauds.” 
-“They have… a ton of fish stories about evidence that got away… They’re not doing good scientific investigation; they have a predetermined conclusion which they adhere to, literally and religiously,” 
When faced with these accusations Lorraine’s retort was that the problem:
“is they don’t base anything on a God”.

As I said at the beginning, I believe that the Warrens were trying their best for the people that reached out to them, but in some cases they entered into the situation without needing to and this, in my eyes, puts them over as putting their interests and their beliefs first. There were people suffering in each of these cases and they refused/didn’t have the ability to look at other factors that may have had an influence on them (mental health/stress/people trying to fool them), whether this was due to their beliefs or the fact they wanted to be the story rather than be a part of it is conjecture on my part, but here we are!

The day I stop being a skeptic is the day the Warrens come and visit me, and who knows in a house that’s over 400 years old, this week may be the week!