Ed and Lorraine Warren were a husband-and-wife team who became world-renowned paranormal investigators following probes into high-profile cases like The Amityville Horror, the Annabelle doll, and certain spooky events that inspired the Conjuring series.

In 1952, the Warrens founded the oldest ghost hunting group in New England. They also wrote numerous books on their paranormal investigations and developed personal insights into thousands of paranormal cases throughout their career. On April 18, 2019, Lorraine Warren died peacefully in her sleep at age 92. Ed Warren had preceded her in death in 2006 at age 79.

These are their most chilling cases from a history based on discovering the true evil that lurks in people’s homes.

10 The Perron Family

In 1970, the Perron family moved into an old farmhouse in Rhode Island. It wasn’t long before their dream home became their worst nightmare. Carolyn, Roger, and their five children witnessed a tall woman in a gray dress roaming the house. Ed and Lorraine Warren investigated the home and discovered that the woman was a 19th-century witch named Bathsheba who had sacrificed her baby to the Devil before hanging herself from a tree in the backyard.

Bathsheba was a constant penetrating force in the house and fought with Carolyn for dominance. Carolyn’s daughter Andrea recalls, “[Bathsheba] loathed my mother, and she lusted after my father. My mother was never allowed to resume her rightful position as mistress of the house.”

Andrea added, “It wanted to be the dominating force, and we fought it for a long time. I guess we know who won, as [we] left and [the ghost] is still there.”^[1]

9 Annabelle

Ed and Lorraine Warren’s Occult Museum is a permanent home to the Annabelle doll which is kept in a special protected case. In 1970, this Raggedy Ann doll was given to 28-year-old Donna, and it wasn’t long before she and her roommate noticed that Annabelle was moving around the apartment on its own. They also found random notes scrawled on parchment that read: “Help Us.”

At first, they thought this was all a prank. But when events worsened, they decided to call in a medium. During the seance, they were able to contact a spirit named Annabelle, who had died when she was seven years old.

Ed and Lorraine heard of this and warned the women that a demonic presence was manipulating the doll in a bid to find a human host. After the Warrens witnessed Annabelle levitating, they removed the doll permanently from the apartment and placed her in the sealed glass case at their museum. In 2020, social
media abounded with rumors that Annabelle had escaped the museum, but this was later determined to be a hoax—the fault of a poorly translated story into Chinese^[2]

8 Snedeker House

In 1986, the Snedeker family moved from New York to Connecticut so they could be closer to the hospital that was treating their eldest son for cancer. Unfortunately, the family home on Meriden Avenue in Southington that they purchased was a former funeral home, although they had to make this chilling discovery on their own.

After renovations on the house were complete, Carmen Snedeker entered the basement for the first time. There, she found embalming equipment and body tags with the names of the deceased.

The family soon realized that the house was infested with demons. Carmen witnessed the water in her mop bucket turning a different color. She recalled, “The mop water was blood red. I mean a deep, deep red. It made my skin crawl.” The middle son said, “The lights were coming on and off and on and off even though there was no bulbs in it.”^[3]

Ed and Lorraine Warren assisted in performing an exorcism on the house which has brought closure to the family. Since then, no further paranormal activity has occurred. The Snedeker family remained in the house for two more years before they relocated to Tennessee. It is still a private residence, but people have been known to stop by and look at the property from a distance.

7 Enfield Poltergeist

The Enfield Poltergeist terrorized a small London house in the Enfield suburb. Between 1977 and 1979, single parent Peggy Hodgson and her two daughters—Margaret, 13, and Janet, 11—experienced furniture being thrown around, small objects flying across rooms, and picture frames falling from the walls. The children would find themselves levitating out of their beds. These paranormal events were witnessed by their neighbors, journalists, and even police officers.

The younger daughter, Janet, had also begun speaking in a deep masculine voice which was believed to be the spirit of an old man. The family had received a lot of negative attention in the press as the young girls were accused of “attention-seeking behavior.”^[4]

When Ed and Lorraine Warren investigated, they found it was a case of “demonic possession.” Janet later admitted that she had played with a Ouija board before the disturbances had begun and that she was unaware that she fell into the trances until she was later shown the photographs. The family continued to live in the house even as people attempted to debunk the story as only a money-making plot. Mary Hodgson died in 2003, and her daughter, Janet, still believes the possession actually occurred.

6 The Donovan Family

In the early 1970s, Ed and Lorraine Warren met with the terrified Donovan family at their house. On arrival, the Warrens witnessed loud pounding coming from inside the walls, peeling wallpaper, water running blood red, and beast-like noises echoing throughout the home.

The Warrens questioned the Donovan family. Had they purchased any unusual secondhand items or had a family member passed away recently? Nothing was discovered until the youngest daughter, Patty, made her confession. She had used a Ouija board to communicate with a “teenage boy” who had died in the neighborhood 10 years earlier. The spirit never revealed his name to Patty, and the Warrens knew this was more than likely a demonic entity disguised as the boy.

The Warrens immediately called for a priest. Following an exorcism, life inside the Donovan home slowly returned to normal. Ted Donovan’s brother, who was a witness to the possession and the exorcism, wrote in a report: “I, nor anyone else in my family, have ever before witnessed anything so weird and terrifying.”^[5]

5 Smurl Family

In 1974, the Smurl family went through their own personal hell after moving to West Pittson, Pennsylvania. Janet and Jack Smurl, their young daughters, and Jack’s parents all lived in the house together and suffered the worst 13 years of their lives.

The paranormal activity began when their home renovations were found to be destroyed. New wallpaper peeled from the walls, freshly painted windows cracked, strange odors filled every room, and disturbing voices were heard throughout the house. Janet even revealed that she was molested one night in her sleep by a malevolent force.

The Smurls were terrified and decided to contact Ed and Lorraine Warren for help. Lorraine discovered that the Smurl family home was infested with four spirits— a harmless elderly woman, an old man who had died at the house, a young and violent girl, and a demon that controlled the other spirits and had turned them against the family.^[6]

The incidents stopped by October 1986 and the family moved back to Wilkes-Barre in 1988. Reportedly, a church-sanctioned exorcism took place there, and the property has been cleared of all activity ever since.

4 Demon Murder Trial

In 1981, 19-year-old Arne Cheyenne Johnson fatally stabbed his landlord, 40-year-old Alan Bono, with a pocketknife more than 20 times. It was the first murder to have occurred in Brookline, Connecticut, in 193 years.

Shortly before the murder, Johnson had moved in with his girlfriend and her brother David who claimed he was being tormented by a demon. The family of Johnson’s girlfriend called in the help of Ed and Lorraine Warren.

They performed an exorcism on David, which successfully expelled 42 demons in his body. During the exorcism, Johnson dared the demons to enter his body instead. One month later—with no history of violence—he killed Bono in cold blood.

In court, Johnson’s claimed that he was not guilty by reason of demonic possession. However, he was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter and received a sentence of 20 years. He only served five years due to good behavior.^[7]

3 Union Cemetery

There are many eyewitness accounts of the “White Lady” who haunts the Union Cemetery in Easton, Connecticut. It is known as one of the most haunted cemeteries in the United States.

The White Lady has also been seen walking in front of people’s cars as they drive along Route 59 late at night. Concerned drivers believed that they had hit a person and exited their vehicles only to discover that nobody was there. The “White Lady” name came from witnesses saying she wore either a white gown or what appeared to be a wedding dress.

In 1990, Ed and Lorraine Warren set up their cameras in the cemetery to record the investigation. Shortly after 2:40 AM, they heard the sound of a woman weeping, and a female form had begun to move several feet in their direction. As Ed approached the woman, she vanished from sight.^[8]

Nowadays, the cemetery is known to close after sunset.

2 The Demonic Werewolf in London

Bill Ramsey was considered “living proof” that werewolves really do exist. Born in Southend-on-Sea, England, Ramsey recalled an event in childhood in which he felt “strange” before a powerful rage came over him, and he was able to uproot an entire fence. As an adult, he would witness his face transforming into a wolf and his hands twisting into claws.

Ed and Lorraine Warren became involved when London police officers reported being attacked by a werewolf. Ed said:

This was the first case of lycanthropy that we had ever come across. I interviewed the police officers that this man actually attacked. Now he stands about [170 centimeters (5’7″)] and weighs about [68 kilograms (150 lb)]. But he would take some of these [police officers] who were well over [183 centimeters (6’0″)], and he would throw them around like they were kindling wood.^[9]

In 1989, the Warrens convinced Ramsey to come to their church in Connecticut and undergo an exorcism. During the event, Ramsey’s face contorted, and he launched at the exorcist. Then all was calm, and the exorcism was a success. Since then, there have been no more incidents recorded.

1 The Amityville Horror

On November 13, 1974, at 3:15 AM, Ronald “Butch” DeFeo Jr. killed his parents and siblings with a .35-caliber rifle while they slept peacefully in their beds. Butch later told the police, “Once I started, I just couldn’t stop. It went so fast.”

The following year, the Lutz family moved into the house on Ocean Drive in Amityville. A priest was called to bless the house, and he warned the family, “Do not use the upstairs room as a bedroom, and do not let anyone sleep in there.”

Within days, they knew something was wrong. Their young daughter made an imaginary friend with a red-eyed pig, foul odors filled each room, furniture levitated, and banging occurred throughout the night. Finally, they fled from the house.

When Ed and Lorraine Warren investigated, they discovered that the land had been used previously by a practicing black magician. He had requested to be buried on the land and remains there to this day.

Kathy Lutz said, “Things of this nature happen quite frequently, and when they happen to families, they usually close the door, and they don’t talk about it; and unless these things are talked about, they’ll never be understood.”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsX9HMzWg_E” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>^[10]

Cheish Merryweather is a true crime fan and an oddities fanatic. She can either be found at house parties telling everyone Charles Manson was only 157 centimeters (5’2″) or at home reading true crime magazines. You can follow her on Twitter.

Solving crimes was a lot harder before DNA testing. Detectives today have a whole arsenal of crime scene investigation tools and gadgets to help them prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but it wasn’t always that easy.

Crime investigators have been around for thousands of years. All the way back in ancient Egypt, there were men hired to solve crimes. The Egyptians kept incredibly detailed records about it—and because of that, we have a pretty good idea what it was like to be a detective more than 3,000 years ago.

10 Trained Monkeys Would Attack Thieves

Ideally, a crime would be stopped before it was committed. Most of the police force in ancient Egypt were posted as guards around the cities, keeping an eye on the tombs and the markets to make sure nobody got out of line.

It was a pretty good deterrent. After all, if you got caught breaking the law in ancient Egypt, you might just end the day with an attack monkey on your face.

Guards in ancient Egypt would often have trained animals with them. Most of the time, they were dogs, but more than a few walked around with monkeys on leashes, poised to attack. There’s even a picture of them in action in one servant’s tomb. It shows a thief at a market trying to make his getaway, only to have an attack monkey on a leash tackle his leg, pulling him down to the ground and holding him in place until help arrived.^[1]

9 Snitching Was Mandatory By Law

When the detectives were called in, their jobs weren’t easy. Tracking down a criminal with ancient Egyptian technology can be tough to do without a good witness. So, the Egyptian courts made sure they had a witness by laying out serious penalties for failing to report a crime.^[2]

When Ramses III was assassinated, the police didn’t just round up the people responsible. They rounded up their butlers and servants, as well. They’d had plenty of chances to overhear the conspiracy, the courts ruled, and their failure to report it made them criminals. As punishment, their ears were cut off—since, as far as the courts were concerned, they weren’t making good use of them, anyway.

But you didn’t have to overlook a plot to overthrow the king to get in trouble. Any failure to report a crime carried heavy consequences, and that was a serious motivator.

One man, after hearing his boss for conspiring to rob a tomb, immediately sent a letter ratting him out. In his letter, he made it clear that it was fear of punishment that motivated him, writing: “I report them to my lord, for it were a crime for one like me to hear such words and conceal them.”

8 Ancient Egypt Had Crime Scene Investigators

Most investigations started with somebody ratting someone out. A citizen would get in line outside the court to complain about his neighbor, and if it was a serious enough crime, an investigator would be sent out on the job.

These investigations were surprisingly thorough. They didn’t just draw straws or go off a hunch—they would round up suspects, questions witnesses, investigate the crime scene, and even arrange reenactments to test theories about the crime. They even had detailed records of past accusations they could check to monitor peoples’ criminal histories.

When a tomb was robbed during the reign of Ramses IX, he sent out a team of investigators to check every single tomb in the area, just in case the thieves had broken in anywhere else.^[3] The team found the tunnel that the thieves had used to break in, measured its width and length, and even made educated guesses on the tools they’d used to get in.

Then they went to work rounding up suspects. They checked the city records for people with a knowledge of mining and a criminal history of robbery, brought them in, and started their investigation there.

7 Suspects And Witnesses Were Beaten Until They Talked

When it came time to get answers, though, the detectives didn’t exactly play nice. They just beat people senseless until they confessed.

They were very cavalier about torturing people. In the court records we have today, they very casually talked about it, with one quickly noting that the “examination was held by beating with a double rod.”

Typically, they’d tie the person to a stake and beat his hands and feet until he gave them the answers they wanted.^[4] If he denied all wrongdoing, they’d beat him again—or, as they worded it in one document, the witness would be “further examined with a rod.”

This wasn’t limited to suspects. Sometimes, witnesses who had done nothing wrong would be beaten until they gave their side of the story, especially if they had a reason to protect the accused. There are records of suspects’ sons, slaves, and wives being pulled out of their homes and beaten with a rod until they told the police exactly what they’d seen.

6 Confessions Were Compared To The Evidence

That all might sound barbaric today, but to the Egyptians’ credit, they did realize that beating prisoners could lead to false confessions. That’s why they spent so much time investigating crime scenes. They wanted to make sure these people weren’t just saying anything they wanted to hear.

Criminals’ testimonies would be compared to what they’d found at the crime scenes. Or, if a gang had worked together as a team, they would be separated before they were tortured to make sure their stories were the same.^[5] If all the details matched up, they knew they had the right people.

In one case, a man who had confessed to robbing a tomb was blindfolded and carried out to the valley where the robbery had taken place. Once he was there, the vizier who’d questioned him showed him rows upon rows of tombs. The suspect had to show him which one he had robbed so that they could see if he’d point at the right one.

5 Witnesses Had To Describe How They Would Be Mutilated If They Lied

It would have been easy to lie and feign ignorance, of course, but the consequences for lying were often worse than the consequences for the crime itself. In the case above, the coppersmith was warned that if the investigators were satisfied that he had lied, his nose and ears would be cut off, and his body would be stretched apart on the rack.

Threats like these were fairly common in ancient Egypt. When a witness gave a testimony in court, they wouldn’t swear an oath on the Bible like we do today. They’d outline in graphic detail exactly how the court could torture them if they found they’d lied.^[6]

The tortures varied. The judges would make them up on the spot, based on how serious they felt the crime was and whether the witness was rich or poor.

One woman was ordered to swear before the court: “Should witnesses be brought against me [ . . . ] I shall be liable to 100 blows.” Another was ordered to declare, “Should we speak falsely, the servants shall be taken away from us.” And a poor field laborer was ordered to tell the truth “on pain of mutilation.”

4 Corruption Was Rampant

All this investigation would be a lot of work—and there’s a lot of reason to believe that if you weren’t important, the courts didn’t bother doing much about it. There’s every indication that bribery and corruption were rampant in the ancient Egyptian courts, and a wealthy man could get the verdict he wanted by slipping the judge a few golden coins.

An Egyptian writer wrote a song begging the god Amun to help out the poor that gives a little insight into how people saw their legal system. In it, he complains that “the court extorts” the people in it, demanding “silver and gold for the clerks” in exchange for justice.

It was a major political problem. The head of Tutankhamun’s army put the judges in the country on trial for corruption, declaring: “They will not show mercy and be compassionate on the day they will judge the poor.” Those he convicted had their noses cut off and were sent off into exile.

But more than 200 years later, Rameses XI was still struggling with the same problem. When two policemen were accused of framing an innocent man, his general sent an order to “put them in two baskets and they shall be thrown into the water at night.”^[7]

He wanted to get rid of the problem before word got out that the police were unjust. The next words of the letter read: “Do not let anybody in the land find out!”

3 Infidelity Could Be Punished By Death

Divorce court was brutal. In ancient Egypt, anyone could take anyone else to court for having an affair. Unlike most of their neighbors, this wasn’t a right reserved for men. They let women sue their husbands for infidelity and divorce. They even let people sue random neighbors in their town who they thought were cheating on their wives.

The punishment was severe. If a woman was found guilty of cheating on her husband, she could have her nose cut off or, in some cases, could even be burned alive. Men, it seems, never got the death penalty for infidelity, but breaking the marriage bonds could still get him 1,000 blows and a writ of divorce.

In one case, an Egyptian official describes catching a mob prowling through the streets, yelling out that they’ve “come to beat up” a man in town who was caught sleeping with a woman who wasn’t his wife. After hearing them out, the official said in a letter, he decided to just let them do it.

“Indeed, [even] if I can repulse them this time, I shall not be able to repulse them again,” he wrote. Instead, he just admonished the girl for sleeping with a married man and ordered his men to let the beating happen and keep it quiet.

“When this letter reaches you,” the letter ends, “do not go to Neferti with this matter.”^[8]

2 Even If You Were Innocent, You Were Labeled A Criminal

The overwhelming majority of court cases in ancient Egypt ended with a guilty verdict. There only a handful of records of people leaving the courts as free men, and even then, they weren’t left off free.

One court record describes a man named Amenkhau who was repeatedly beaten by the police. No matter how hard they hit, he kept insisting: “I haven’t seen anything. Whatever I’ve seen you have heard from my mouth.”^[9] When no amount of torture would loosen his tongue, they decided he was probably telling the truth and let him go.

He wasn’t totally free, though. Even after he was found innocent, the accusation was permanently kept in the record books with the words “great criminal” next to his name.

That was just how it was done in ancient Egypt. If someone was accused of a crime, they believed, they’d probably done something wrong. And so, even if it was clear that you were innocent, you were labeled a “great criminal” for life.

1 Toward The End, They Just Let A Statue Decide

The above entries, at least, are how Egypt laid down the law during their prime. Sometime around 1000 BC, though, they gave up on this whole system of law and justice and settled in for one that was completely and totally insane.

In the last several hundred years of ancient Egypt’s power, the priests of Amun had taken over most of the country, including the legal system.^[10] Whenever a charge was filed against someone, they decided the verdict by asking a statue what to do.

The priests would ask a statue of Amun questions and watch how it moved to get their answers. If the statue moved forward, they told people it was saying “yes,” but if it moved backward, it was saying “no.”

Of course, the statue wasn’t really moving on its own. Secretly, they had a man inside or behind it pretending to be a god.

Sometimes, there wouldn’t even be an investigation. A court record from this time shows that in the trial of a man named Thutmose, they just put two tablets in front of the statue and asked Amun to move toward the verdict he wanted. They didn’t just say “guilty” or “not guilty”—the tablets were to decide whether they should bother investigating the case at all.

Thutmose, it seems, had some friends in the priesthood. In the new Egypt ruled by the corrupt priests, he was let go without a single witness being questioned.