With the latest Conjuring movie, The Conjuring: Last Rites, released just a month ago, audiences are once again asking the question: Did any of this actually happen? With a cinematic lineage that has captivated viewers for over 10 years, the series creators said two of modern history’s most famous paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren, are the genre’s bread and butter. But whether or not the stories themselves are real or Hollywood horror wrapped in folklore, nothing really comes to mind. Supporters say many of the cases were real, at least to those families who witnessed them firsthand.
For instance, Andrea Perron, whose family’s accounts inspired the first Conjuring movie, has chronicled the Rhode Island farmhouse where she reported they encountered apparitions, unexplainable sounds, and even violent encounters. In talking to People, Perron has repeatedly argued that “something” occurred at that house that isn’t normally explained. Likewise, figures in the Society for Psychical Research, including Guy Lyon Playfair, traced the Enfield poltergeist in England and came to the conclusion that much of what they witnessed could not be dismissed as trickery. To believers, the consistency of accounts by different families and countries provides corroboration for the Warrens’ investigations.
Skeptics, however, point to evidence that appears to be exaggeration and fabrication. Ray Garton, who co-authored In a Dark Place about the Snedeker haunting, would later agree that the family suggested several contradictory stories to him and that the Warrens pressed for him to “make it scary.” Joe Nickell, a star investigator for Skeptical Inquirer, researched the Enfield case and believed the alleged supernatural events were stunts played by children and magnified by a sensational media outlet. Even among relatives, disputes have arisen; Carl Glatzel Jr., whose sibling’s supposed possession had inspired The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, came to court for libel, accusing the Warrens of making much of the story up.
So, we all wonder — or at least, were we supposed to ask? The truth almost certainly depends on what beliefs you have about the supernatural. For the Perrons and others who wrote about them, what they went through was real, terrifying, and life-changing. For skeptics, the tales blend folklore, family pressure, and opportunism rendered in Hollywood horror form. The audience is left to wonder in the end, do the Warrens’ files make a full and true record of any haunting, or does fear and storytelling blur the line between fact and fiction?
