'The Conjuring': The 'Real' Story in Pictures (2024)

In director James Wan's haunted-house horror movie The Conjuring, Vera Farmiga plays real-life paranormal investigator Lorraine Warren, who died in 2019, and Patrick Wilson portrays her late husband, Ed.

Lorraine, who claimed to have clairvoyant powers, met Ed at the age of 16 when the pair went on a date. That evening, she saw a vision of the athletic teenager as a much older man. ''I said, 'I'll spend the rest of my life with him,''' she recalled. They married two years later, and were only separated when Ed died in 2006 at age 79.

The Warrens would frequently find out that a purported haunting had a non-supernatural explanation. ''They'd say, 'You don't have a ghost—your house is warping because of a water leak,''' said Conjuring director James Wan, whose other credits include Saw, Insidious, and Aquaman. ''But every now and then there would be really messed-up stuff.''

In October 1973, the Warrens began to investigate the alleged haunting of Roger and Carolyn Perron and their five daughters who claimed to have been visited by an array of entities after moving into a farmhouse in Harrisville, R.I. ''These were spirits who had an attachment to the property,'' said Andrea Perron, the oldest of the Perron children, who was 12 when they started living in the house. ''Eight generations of one extended family had lived and died at the farm, and some of them had never left. My mother did historical research and found that virtually every [entity] we were able to name had, as living beings, either died by their own hand or died so traumatic a death and so sudden a death that they didn't seem to know they were dead.''

In The Conjuring, the Perrons are played by Hayley McFarland, Kyla Deaver, Shanley Caswell, Joey King, Mackenzie Foy, Ron Livingston, and Lili Taylor, who plays the much-tormented Carolyn. ''I was in my bedroom, about 5 o'clock in the morning when I had the first visitation,'' recalled the real-life Carolyn Perron. ''I opened my eyes and saw the most frightening thing I have ever seen in my life. It was a very tall woman. Her head was like a sack of cobwebs with little tendrils of hair hanging out.''

In real life, the Warrens' investigation of the Harrisville case came to an end when Roger Perron ordered them to ''get the hell'' out of the house after a dramatic séance in which Carolyn began speaking a strange language and levitated out of her chair. ''The only time I was ever truly frightened was during the séance,'' said Andrea Perron, who has written a three-volume history of her family's haunting called House of Darkness House of Light. ''There are no words to adequately express that event.''

In the years following their investigations in Harrisville, the Warrens would look into many more alleged hauntings, but Ed never forgot the time they spent with the Perrons. The Warrens' son-in-law, Tony Spera, said he would often talk about how ''the bewitched farmhouse in Rhode Island'' would make a good film. ''Out of all the cases, that's the one Ed wanted to make into a movie,'' Spera said. ''What's being made into a movie? THAT one. I think he's working from beyond to make this thing happen.''

On the ground floor of Lorraine's former house in Monroe, Conn., is the Warren's Occult Museum, a collection of artifacts the pair retrieved from hauntings. The items include a doll named Annabelle, which is featured in The Conjuring and received its own spin-off franchise. At the time, Lorraine claimed the doll gave off such bad ''vibes'' she refused to even look at it.

Among the other artifacts in the Warren Occult Museum is the skin of a tiger, which—so the story goes—killed 33 people in India while possessed by a demonic spirit.

Before Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga shot The Conjuring, the pair visited Lorraine Warren at her home in Connecticut. While Wilson braved the Warren's Occult Museum, Farmiga did not. ''Patrick's just like Ed, he's the more practical of the two of us,'' Farmiga said. ''I had read all the stories about these articles. I didn't go down.''

Over time, the Warrens drew a legion of critics who disputed the allegedly scientific nature of their investigations. Dr. Steven Novella, an assistant professor of neurology at the Yale School of Medicine argued that paranormalists such as the Warrens can exacerbate the problems of people whose belief in the supernatural may actually be rooted in mental illness. ''They'll say, 'Yes, your child is possessed by a demon.' That's the worst thing you can do to somebody with a delusional problem,'' Novella said. ''It's like saying, 'Yes, the CIA really is monitoring you through the fillings in your teeth.'''

Even at the age of 86, Lorraine Warren still went out on cases. ''I feel I have an obligation,'' she said at the time. ''I think that's why I was given the gift.''