Ed and Lorraine Warren

Paranormal investigators from Monroe, Connecticut, who founded the New England Society for Psychic Research in 1952 and whose cases fed films such as The Conjuring.

ConnecticutHistory.org says the Monroe couple Ed and Lorraine Warren spent five decades and more investigating supernatural claims across the country, with a strong interest in demonology, spirits and haunted houses. In 1952 they founded the New England Society for Psychic Research. Joe Nickell of the Center for Inquiry describes Ed as a self-styled demonologist and Lorraine as a self-styled clairvoyant. Lorraine Warren died in 2019 at 92, CNN reported, and the society announced her death on its Facebook page. CNN's headline linked her to The Amityville Horror and The Conjuring.

One case ended in a killing: Arne Johnson killed Alan Bono, was convicted of manslaughter and spent five years in prison. TIME reports what the Warrens and most Glatzel family members believed: that an entity said to possess a boy in the family had moved into Johnson and, five months on, taken control of him. The Warrens' own site says Johnson's lawyer, backed by the Warrens, set out to argue that demons drove his client to kill. The judge threw that defence out, and the lawyer argued self-defence instead.

Wikipedia says Perry DeAngelis and Steven Novella, both skeptics, reviewed the Warrens' evidence and dismissed it as "blarney". It adds that Nickell and Benjamin Radford found that the Amityville case and the haunting the Snedeker family described, the story behind the film The Haunting in Connecticut, were made up. Nickell wrote that some saw the Warrens as sincere, religious people while critics labelled them scaremongers and charlatans. He described their method as arriving at a house said to be haunted, recasting it as demonic, and landing a profitable book deal.