The Truth About Ed and Lorraine Warren

Incidentally, his real name was Edward Warren Miney, so at the turnstile the thing getting ‘ghosted’ is reality.  This article concerns a five-year-old boy who alleged to be haunted by the apparition of the landlady in his childhood home.  As to what really happened, no rational person knows, and Ed has moved onto the grand finale.  He said that the figure was translucent and wearing some sort of shroud.  Perhaps her unfinished business was to collect the rent?  In any case, this event was the catalyst for burgeoning greatness, Ed decided.  According to Adam Hunter in his expose of the Warrens in Mental Floss, the previous would learn to see dead people, including a deceased, prophetic aunt; would rise to become a champion to the demonically oppressed, obsessed, and possessed, and an ally of mostly unidentified priests everywhere. Roman Catholic traditionalist Bishop Robert McKenna, weakened to the point of serious health issues, loved Ed so much he was driven to retire.  According to author Ray Garton, Ed was the guy “crazy people” came to.  This article will take a brief glimpse at Ed Warren’s memoir, and then segue into unbridled candor about his paranormal research, or lack thereof.  

As a gifted sixteen-year-old, Ed Warren secured employment for himself as an usher at a Connecticut movie theater.  He ultimately crossed paths with a ticket holder who likewise asserted to be the survivor of an unprovable haunting—this, and she upped the ante by saying that she began to have visions of an Arbor Day sapling after it reached maturity.  When a usable, anonymous nun quizzed her as to whether, or not she was seeing the future, this young movie goer responded by saying “Yes.  I guess I am.”  Enter Ed Warren’s future spouse, and self-described trance medium, care bear of 50 years, Lorraine Rita.  Dating began, courtship, yes.  Soon though, Ed was imposed to enlist in the navy where he began to fight during World War II.  Four months later, his ship sank from beneath him in the North Atlantic, and the seventeen-year-old returned home on a 30-day survivor’s leave.  Lorraine was expecting him, and Ed got bound in the bonds of matrimony.  Following Japan’s surrender, the solid couple was in need of money, so they supported themselves for five years as landscape artists, but they were illustrators with a twist.  Like everyone else, Ed would find haunted houses listed in the newspaper, and the two would go there.  They would render a sketch of the property, and then waylay the owner—their drawing in exchange for information about the residence.  If the yarn met the Warrens’ seal of approval, they would produce a painting, and sell the artwork later.  Whether the “crazy people” got a percentage is unknown, and by her own admission, Lorraine was wary of their patrons whom she regarded as attention seekers, and Pinocchio’s cousins.  Regardless of her innate abilities as a clairvoyant, she contended to be mired to her kneecaps in skepticism.  She said it was the continuity of the accounts from diverse individuals that made her a believer.   

Demonologists, chroniclers of the unexplained with fifteen books, or more; the paranormal McMillan & Wife with over 10,000 cases; diviners, and screenplay crafts persons—you supply the term, the Warrens did it all, and the investigations were done gratis.  Everything else was not done gratis.  Fancying themselves educators, the couple founded the NSPR in 1962.  It was not long after that they opened The Occult Museum in their home in Monroe Connecticut.  They began to take on larger, more controversial cases—the Enfield Poltergeist; the Snedeker House; the Amityville Horror.  In 2013, their exploits were brought to the big screen in a trail of hogwash in Director James Wan’s supernatural thriller The Conjuring.  Ed departed from us on August 23, 2006, and Lorraine followed thirteen years later.

So, the great skunk in the room is this: were the Warrens metatextual gurus, or were they pioneers of a neo spiritualist faction, or did they just make the crap up as they went along?  As Christian Demonologists and lay investigators are dutifully aware, conning people is like playing a tuba; both require practice.  According to Christopher Shultz in his Ranker article “All of Ed & Lorraine Warren’s Most Controversial Cases” much of their research was half baked, transcendental bull. Take for example the infamous photo taken of the Amityville Boy—speculated to be the spirit of one of the DeFeo children who perished in the house in 1974—but who happens to look uncannily, just like an employee of the Warrens named Paul Bartz.  Again, writer Joseph Laycock recounts the iconic Warren case that involved the nursing student who was being vexed, and beleaguered by a Raggedy Ann Doll that was possessed by the spirit of a woman named Annabelle Higgins.  Curious how this case is like a direct lift from a popular, 1963 Twilight Zone episode titled “The Doll.”  In that story a woman—Annabelle by name—gives her daughter a toy that comes to life and threatens the family.  According to the aforementioned Ray Garton, a novelist, he was given carte blanche by Ed Warren to write anything he wanted about the Snedeker house.  Make it up, Garton was instructed.  Say anything you like as long as it’s scary.  That is not the Scientific Method.  There have also been alternative explanations to what was happening at that location—opines from people who would know that suggest drugs, and severe mental illness as the clarification for the Haunting in Connecticut.   

Many of the whoppers to come out of the Warrens’ jaws were so impracticable as to be affronting.  In Chrissy Stockton’s “10 Times Ed and Lorraine Warren Were Outed as Frauds” the writer has done her due diligence mathematics.  Forget Ed’s bluster, and personal history—such as his claim that he was almost ordained as a priest, but he never even attended a seminary.  How could they investigate 10,000 paranormal cases in this lifetime?  At one case per day, the amount of time required would be 27.3 years, and most of these encounters went on for days, and even months.  Attorney William Webber did major damage to their already mythological credulity when he said that the house in Amityville was largely a drunken, moneymaking contrivance concocted by the Lutz’s, the Warrens, and himself.  Even the facts of what really happened in the case that inspired The Conjuring have been brought into question.  One of the recent owners, Norma Sutcliffe researched her home, and produced a video that detailed her findings.  For example, Sutcliffe revealed that the nineteenth-century Rhode Island woman made infamous by the Warrens, Bathsheba Sherman, was anything, but a witch and a Satan worshipper; likewise, the infant sacrifices were pure fabrication—the final being a synonym that seems too frequently a descriptor of Ed and Lorraine Warren’s legacy. 

Tracy Garnett holds a BA in English, with a minor in Radio & Television from Northern Kentucky University. He also holds certification in Parapsychology from the Koestler Unit at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and is a trained Lay Demonologist with the Fraternity of Christ the King.