Authored by Imtiaz Ali
Every horror fan who walks out of a Conjuring film asks the same question on the drive home: How much of that actually happened? The franchise has made a fortune on two words โ “based on” โ and the Warrens, Ed and Lorraine, the demonologist and the clairvoyant at the centre of it all, claimed every one of these cases was real. The truth is stranger than a simple yes or no. Some of it happened. Some of it was exaggerated. And some of it โ the best parts, the scariest parts โ was invented for the screen. What follows is the record as it stands: what the films show, what was actually claimed, and what the skeptics answered back. Because with the Warrens, the rule is always the same โ the Warrens claimed X; the skeptics answered Y.
You decide what survives the collision.
Annabelle: The Doll That Was Never Porcelain
The films give us a porcelain doll with a cracked, grinning face โ an object that looks evil before it does anything evil. The real Annabelle was a Raggedy Ann cloth doll. Friendly. Floppy. The kind of thing you would not glance at twice in a charity shop. It was bought as a birthday gift for a nursing student named Donna in the Hartford area in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and what Donna and her roommate Angie reported was, by haunted-doll standards, almost gentle; the doll moved on its own, changed positions, and notes appeared on parchment paper that neither of them owned.
A medium told the girls the spirit of a dead seven-year-old, “Annabelle Higgins,” was attached to the doll. This is where the Warrens entered the story and changed its shape entirely. They said it was not the girl at all โ it was a demonic entity using the doll as a conduit, working its way toward possessing a living person. They took the doll to their Occult Museum in Monroe, Connecticut, sealed it in a locked glass case with a warning label, and there it stayed. Note what is missing from the real claims: the murders, the satanic cult, and the violent deaths. None of that appears in anything except the films. The Warrens’ own later stories โ a psychic slashed, a priest’s car crash, a stabbed detective โ have no documentation beyond the Warrens’ retellings and Gerald Brittle’s 1980 book The Demonologist. No news reports. No police records. No named victims.
So the film kept the doll’s menace and invented almost everything else: the porcelain design (the real Raggedy Ann likeness would have needed a licensing deal with Hasbro, and a friendly cloth doll does not read as scary on a cinema screen), the cult backstory, the body count.
The doll’s afterlife is its own strange story. The Occult Museum closed to tours in 2019 over zoning violations, and in August 2025 the comedian Matt Rife and Elton Castee bought the Warrens’ property and took guardianship of the roughly 750-item collection on a five-year lease, with the Warren family retaining legal ownership. As of this writing the doll is on limited public display in Salem, Massachusetts. The viral “Annabelle escaped” panics of 2020 and 2025 were rumors, debunked by the Warrens’ son-in-law Tony Spera. The most frightening object in the Conjuring universe spent the last few years sitting quietly behind glass while the internet screamed about it. That feels about right.
Amityville: The Murders Were Real; The Haunting Is the Argument
The Conjuring 2 opens at 112 Ocean Avenue, and this is the one case where the horror starts with an undisputed fact. In November 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed his parents and four siblings in that house with a rifle. He was convicted and imprisoned. That is not contested by anyone.
What happened next is the most legally argued-over haunting in American history. In December 1975, George and Kathy Lutz bought the fourteen-room house for $80,000 โ a bargain price, because of its history โ moved in with their three children, and fled on January 14, 1976, twenty-eight days later, leaving furniture and clothes behind. The Lutzes claimed foul odors, green slime oozing from walls and keyholes, swarms of flies in the dead of winter, cold spots, slamming doors, marching-band music, cloven hoof-prints in the snow, a pig-like entity called “Jodie” seen by five-year-old Missy, a priest told by an unseen voice to “get out” during a blessing, and George waking at 3:15 every night. Jay Anson’s 1977 book The Amityville Horror: A True Story, built from some forty-five hours of the Lutzes’ tapes, sold over ten million copies; the 1979 film followed. The Warrens investigated the house in 1976, and Lorraine later called it “the personification of evil.”
Now the other side, which is unusually strong. DeFeo’s own defense attorney, William Weber, told People magazine in 1979 that he and George Lutz “created this horror story over many bottles of wine.” The parapsychologist Stephen Kaplan spent twenty years investigating and called it a hoax, suggesting the motive was a mortgage the Lutzes could not afford. Weather records show no snowfall on the day of the alleged hoof-prints. Police received no calls from the Lutzes in twenty-eight days. The skeptic Joe Nickell found the original fixtures undamaged. Father Pecoraro, the priest, reportedly only ever spoke to George Lutz by phone and never visited the house. A federal judge publicly found the story “largely a work of fiction.”
The Lutzes, for their part, never changed their story โ George and Kathy maintained it was true until their deaths (his in 2006, hers in 2004), and took polygraph tests that did not indicate deception.
Fair framing, and the only honest one: the murders are historical fact; the haunting is disputed at a level no other case on this list reaches. The film kept the house and the dread, and left the courtroom out of it.
Enfield: The Best-Documented Case โ Where the Warrens Mattered Least
Here is the irony the films would rather you missed. The Conjuring 2 makes Enfield the Warrens’ great London triumph. In reality, it is the most thoroughly documented case on this list โ and the one in which Ed and Lorraine Warren mattered least.
From August 1977 into 1979, about 18 months, single mother Peggy Hodgson and her four children lived through something extraordinary at a council house on Green Street in Enfield. Knocks on the walls โ confirmed by a neighbor, Vic Nottingham. Furniture moving. Photographs of eleven-year-old Janet apparently levitating in her red nightgown. Janet speaking in a deep, scratchy voice, claiming to be Bill Wilkins, a previous resident who had died of a hemorrhage in the living room โ a detail confirmed by Wilkins’ own son, Terry. The tapes of that voice still circulate; some of them play over The Conjuring 2‘s end credits. The real investigators were Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair of the Society for Psychical Research, who spent over a year on the case and recorded more than 250 hours of audio. A police officer, WPC Carolyn Heeps, signed an affidavit after watching an armchair move across the floor. More than 30 witnesses reported phenomena. The BBC covered it live in 1977; Channel 4 revisited it in 2007; Apple TV+ built a docuseries from the original tapes in October 2023.
The Warrens, by Playfair’s account, visited once, uninvited, stayed about a day, and were asked to leave. Their starring role in the film is inflated beyond recognition.
The skeptics’ case deserves its airtime too. The children were caught bending spoons. Janet admitted on ITV in 1980 that they had faked phenomena “once or twice… just to see if Mr. Grosse and Mr. Playfair would catch us.” Later she estimated about two percent of the activity was faked. The family insists the rest was real, and Peggy Hodgson never changed her story before her death in 2003.
What the film invented: the upside-down wooden crosses turning on their own never happened at Enfield, the levitation and shaking-furniture scenes are exaggerated, and the Crooked Man and the demon Valak framing the whole thing are pure fiction.ย
Kept: the voice, the knocks, the sheer strangeness.
Changed: who the heroes were.
The Perrons: The Case That Ended With the Warrens Being Thrown Out
The Conjuring (2013) is the Perron family’s story, and it ends with Ed Warren performing an exorcism and saving the day. The real ending was the Warrens being thrown out of the house.
From 1971 to 1980 โ nine years โ Roger and Carolyn Perron raised five daughters in an 18th-century farmhouse in Harrisville, Rhode Island, and reported voices, footsteps, objects moving, foul smells, freezing rooms, and full-bodied apparitions. Carolyn said she was slapped, pinched, and pierced by a mysterious needle. The Warrens were called in, and they tied the haunting to Bathsheba Sherman. Then came the sรฉance in the basement, and by the eldest daughter Andrea’s account it went badly wrong: her mother spoke “a language not of this world,” her chair levitated, she was thrown across the room. Roger Perron threw Ed and Lorraine out. The family stayed until 1980 and left on their own terms. Andrea wrote it all up in House of Darkness House of Light. The farmhouse is now a tourist attraction.
And Bathsheba Sherman โ the film’s child-sacrificing witch who hanged herself and cursed the land โ was a real woman, and almost none of that is true of her. Bathsheba Thayer Sherman (1812โ1885) was a real Harrisville resident. An infant died in her care; the village accused her of witchcraft; she was cleared of wrongdoing. She died of natural causes โ records say a stroke, in 1885 โ and received a proper Baptist burial in Harrisville Cemetery. There is no evidence of satanism, child sacrifice, or suicide. To put it plainly, Bathsheba Sherman existed, but the witch in The Conjuring is essentially a fictional character.
Two more film inventions worth naming: Carolyn possessed and trying to murder her own daughter never happened, and Ed Warren never performed an exorcism โ the real Warrens were explicit that they performed no exorcisms, because they were not priests and had no such authority.ย
What the film kept: the house, the family, the dread.
What it changed: the villain. What it invented: the rescue.
The Mythology Business
Step back and the pattern is unmistakable. The Warrens took local tragedies โ a grieving family in Amityville, a struggling single mother in Enfield, a frightened household in Harrisville, a nursing student’s odd doll โ and turned them into a mythology, with themselves at the center of it. Then Hollywood took the mythology and turned it into a universe, sanding off the disputes, the failed investigations, the thrown-out demonologists, until what remained was sleek and terrifying and “based on a true story.”
I spend my days writing and collecting exactly these kinds of stories โ original horror tales and unsolved mysteries โ for my blog StoryVerse HQ, and the Warrens taught me something I did not expect: the scarier truth was never the ghosts. It is how willingly we all signed up for the mythology โ the Warrens, the studios, and every one of us who whispered “but it really happened” on the drive home.
—
About the author: Imtiaz Ali is the creator of StoryVerse HQ, a blog publishing original horror stories, unsolved mysteries and animal rescue narratives, and of The Haunted Reel YouTube channel, which releases daily narrated horror stories.
—
AI Disclosure: The author confirms that this article is their original work and that AI was used for light editing purposes only.