Ed Warren died in 2006, after spending 60 years investigating alleged paranormal activities with his wife, Lorraine Warren.
TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock PhotoEd Warren, the paranormal investigator who inspired The Conjuring.
Ed Warren, the self-proclaimed demonologist whose paranormal investigations inspired films like The Conjuring and The Amityville Horror, had a controversial life. Critics claim that Ed and his wife Lorraine were fraudsters, perpetuating hoaxes and taking advantage of scared, misled people in order to turn a profit. Believers, on the other hand, would prop up the Warrens as the most famous paranormal investigators in history. But in the years since Ed Warren’s death, his story has become even bigger.
Ed Warren died in 2006, seven years before the first of The Conjuring series premiered. Lorraine lived long enough to see how she and her husband would be immortalized in film. She ensured that, to the average movie-goer, the Warrens’ legacy would be a positive one. But the true stories behind The Conjuring movies played out differently than they did on-screen.
Indeed, real life is not as black-and-white.
This is the story of Ed Warren, from his life as a self-professed demonologist, to his long decline and death in 2006 at the age of 79.
How Ed Warren Entered The World Of Paranormal Investigation
Born Sept. 7, 1926 as Edward Warren Miney, Ed Warren’s interest in the paranormal began in his childhood. According to the Hartford Courant, he believed that the house he grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was haunted.
Still, his early life was relatively normal. Ed served in the military during World War II, and married Lorraine Warren — whom he’d previously met when both were teenagers — while on leave from the Navy. Like her husband, Lorraine had an interest in the paranormal. She told Entertainment Weekly in 2013 that she was born with the gift of clairvoyance.
In the early days of their marriage, the Warrens made money from a surprising source: painting. Ed Warren would paint a house which he thought was haunted, which Lorraine would offer to sell to the house’s owners.
TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock PhotoEd and Lorraine Warren.
“I would do a really nice sketch of the house with ghosts coming out of it,” he later explained, “and I’d give it to Lorraine, she’d go knock on the door and with her Irish personality she’d say, ‘Oh, my husband loves to sketch and paint haunted houses, and he made this for you.’ I made it special for them.”
From there, the Warrens would often investigate these allegedly haunted houses. Lorraine would use her purported clairvoyance to search for spirits, while Ed would examine the house for physical manifestations of haunting.
Ultimately, Ed Warren dreamed up a solution to people’s paranormal problems with the New England Society for Psychic Research (NESPR). Proclaiming himself a “demonologist” and claiming that Lorraine had a psychic connection to the spirit world, the Warrens soon began conducting more official “investigations” into hauntings across the globe.
The Warrens’ Most Famous And Controversial Cases
Ed and Lorraine traveled far and wide, from West Pittston, Pennsylvania, to Enfield in North London. They brought specialized equipment, as well as their alleged skill as a demonologist and clairvoyant, to assess whether or not the hauntings they investigated were real.
It was after Ronald DeFeo Jr murdered his family in Amityville, New York, in 1974, however, that the Warrens truly broke into the mainstream. The Amityville murders drew national attention for the brutality of the killings, but when the Warrens arrived and declared that demons had influenced DeFeo in the home, the incident came instead to be known as the Amityville Horror – thanks largely to a book of the same name written by Jay Anson. Anson allegedly based on his book on the experience of the Lutz family, who purchased the home not long after the DeFeo murders.
TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock PhotoEd and Lorraine with their daughter Judy.
Perhaps inspired by the success of Anson’s book, the Warrens went on to publish several books of their own in the 1980s and 1990s. They covered case of the Enfield poltergeist, the public case of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, the Smurl haunting, and the Perron family haunting, which inspired The Conjuring films.
Throughout it all, experts pushed back against the Warrens. Amityville in particular drew public ire, as if their conclusion of paranormal activity had excused DeFeo’s horrific crimes. But other cases received criticism as well. And the Warrens had even testified on behalf of Johnson, who infamously claimed that the Devil had made him commit murder.
Bettmann Archive/Getty ImagesArne Cheyenne Johnson arriving at court.
Still, Ed and Lorraine Warren continued to have a successful career, even housing their many “paranormal” objects in an occult museum that attracted thousands of guests over the years.
And though Ed Warren never lived to see the films his tales inspired, The Conjuring series would prove to be a box office hit that, according to Box Office Mojo, has pulled in nearly $3 billion to date.
But despite the seeming hazards of his chosen profession, it was no ghost or demon that killed Ed Warren. So how did Ed Warren die?
The Death Of Ed Warren — And His Legacy Among Paranormal Investigators
Ed Warren had spent more than 60 years of his life courting ghosts and demons – a dangerous occupation, if his claims are to be believed. The Conjuring films imply that the Warrens were stalked and targeted by one particular demon, and the films also suggested that Ed Warren suffered a near fatal-heart attack during an especially intense exorcism.
But it was not a demon that caused Ed Warren’s death. It was years of bad health.
TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock PhotoEd and Lorraine Warren at home.
Ed Warren’s health problems seem to have started in the 1980s, when he had several heart attacks (not demon-related) including one so severe that he had to use a wheelchair. Then, in 2001, Ed Warren collapsed in the middle of the night while letting the family cat into the house. Paramedics restarted his heart, but though he was still alive, his life would never be the same. He spent 11 weeks in a coma and never regained his ability to speak
Five years later, on Aug. 23, 2006, Ed Warren died. He was 79 years old.
His story, on the other hand, did not.
Despite their controversies, the Warrens had gained a rather devout following of paranormal enthusiasts. By the early 2000s, people like Zak Bagans and Ryan Buell had started following in the Warrens’ footsteps, hosting ghost-hunting television shows like Ghost Adventures and Paranormal State. Another influential force in Hollywood had also been a fan of the Warrens for years: James Wan, the director behind Saw and Insidious.
TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock PhotoThe Warrens with some of their equipment.
“People that are fans of the horror genre, follow sort of real-life supernatural cases, and all that, we’ve all come across the Warrens,” Wan told Entertainment Weekly. “I remember saying to my agent, ‘I’m curious if there’s anyone in town who’s potentially doing a real-life biopic on the two of them.'”
What followed was 2013’s The Conjuring, directed by Wan, which became a massive commercial success.
However, the debate over whether or not the Warrens were fraudsters continues to rage on, later compounded by claims of abuse levied against the Warrens by a woman named Judith Penney. Penney claimed that not only had she witnessed Ed behave violently toward Lorraine in the past, but that she had also personally been involved in a sexual relationship with Ed Warren when she was underage, which resulted in her becoming pregnant and coerced into getting an abortion by Lorraine.
None of this, however, made it into any of the Conjuring films. Lorraine Warren’s contract with Warner Bros also included stipulations that the films would not depict extramarital affairs, sex with minors, or domestic abuse. Clearly, she had wanted to preserve their image as a moral couple.
As such, the truth of Ed Warren’s life — played out in real life and on the screen — is much murkier than Ed Warren’s death.
After reading about Ed Warren’s death and legacy, read about the life of his daughter, Judy Warren. Or, read about America’s first ghost hunter, Hans Holzer.
