The Real-Life Stories Behind ‘The Conjuring’ Is Even More Terrifying Than The Movie

Most people remember the first time they saw The Conjuring back in 2013. The movie was critically acclaimed no doubt, as the portrayal of a demon haunting an innocent family was matched by few other movies of the time. Most viewers too had the fright of their life on their first viewing and it ended up doing really well at the box office. The story of The Conjuring is, in fact, rooted in the horrifying real-life experiences of paranormal experts Ed and Lorraine Warren. 

Ed Warren was a World War II veteran and a former police officer who later became a self-professed demonologist when he studied the subject on his own. His wife, Lorraine, claimed to have clairvoyant abilities and communicate with spirits through different mediums. In 1952, Ed and Lorraine founded the New England Society for Psychic Research, which is the oldest ghost hunting group in the New England region. They soon gained some notoriety as respected paranormal investigators after their initial investigation of the Amityville hauntings.

Two of their most famous cases were the ones that were sensationalized by The Conjuring film franchise. The movies focus on Ed and Lorraine's experiences exorcising demons from two families who have been possessed and under attack by them. The movies are obviously dramatized for the sake of cinema, yet the real Warrens state that all of the events depicted actually took place. Ed passed away in 2006 and Lorraine was a consultant on the film. She claimed that she did not let directors take any more dramatic license than necessary. 

The first story of the two is the haunting of the Perron family in 1971. The Perrons move into a 14-room farmhouse in Harrisville, Rhode Island, where Carolyn, Roger, and their five daughters start to see strange and mysterious things happening almost immediately. The girls also start to notice spirits around the house and start observing that they sometimes get angry too. When Carolyn finds out that the home had been in the same family for eight generations and many of them had died under horribly mysterious conditions. Despite the Warrens attempting to investigate and rid the house of the spirits, the family continued to live in the house due to financial instability. They finally did move out in 1980, at which point the spirits were silenced, and the hauntings ceased.

Then, six years later, there was another family in Enfield, England that reportedly began to experience similar things. After the strangest of things began to happen regularly, paranormal investigators from all over the world showed up and attempted to contact the spirits in the house. Most of them concluded that these mysterious happenings were a forgery, but the Warrens said that there was something more sinister afoot. Two years after the Warrens began their investigations, the abnormalities stopped, but the family that lived there said that it had nothing to do with them. This story was modified to quite an extent when it was adapted into The Conjuring.