The Terrifying Real-Life Cases Featured in The Conjuring Franchise 

In 1971, Roger and Carolyn Perron and their five daughters moved into an 18th-century farmhouse in Burrillville, Rhode Island. The house is still there, and was open for tours until fairly recently.

Shortly after their arrival, however, strange things began to happen. “Mrs. Perron said she awoke before dawn one morning to find an apparition by her bed: the head of an old woman hanging off to one side over an old gray dress.

There was a voice reverberating, ‘Get out. Get out. I’ll drive you out with death and gloom.’”

According to Ed and Lorrain Warren, who “made frequent trips” to the house during the Perrons’ decade-long tenancy there, the house was haunted by a witch named Bathsheba, who had cursed the land upon which it stood.

The story will be familiar to fans of The Conjuring, as it takes up much of the running time of the first film in the franchise, although several elements are fictionalized even in comparison to the Warrens’ controversial accounts.

Perhaps the most memorable figure from the entire Conjuring franchise isn’t a human at all, but the possessed doll known as Annabelle who sits at the heart of several of the films, including a three-picture spin-off series that began with Annabelle in 2014. 

The real-life Annabelle doll didn’t look like the one in the movies, though. It was, instead, a Raggedy Ann doll that took up residence in the Warrens’ occult museum after an alleged haunting in 1970. 

he Warrens described the case in a 1987 lecture at Rutgers University, and some of the specifics of it are used for the opening sequences of the first Conjuring film.

The real-life Annabelle also supposedly got up to an array of behaviors not (yet) presented on film, including causing a priest to crash his new car into a tree, and stabbing a policeman.

While these days Annabelle is something of a household name, until the release of the Conjuring movies, the most famous case in which the Warrens were involved was undoubtedly that of the so-called Amityville Horror, itself the inspiration for a book and popular series of horror films beginning in 1979.

The story of Amityville begins in 1974, when 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot his mother, father, two brothers, and two sisters in their beds at their family home in Amityville, New York.

The following year, George and Kathy Lutz moved into the house with their two children. While they were initially thrilled, they quickly found themselves the victims of various unexplained happenings, and within 28 days, they had moved out.

The subsequent paranormal investigations became some of the most famous in history, and the Warrens’ involvement in what they called one of the most devious hauntings of their long career serves as the opening of The Conjuring 2.

In 1977, Peggy Hodgson, a single mother of four, called the London Metropolitan Police to her rented council house in London’s Enfield borough. Peggy said that she had seen furniture moving on its own, and that her children had heard knocking sounds inside the walls. The police constable who answered the call witnessed a chair “wobble and slide.”

The resulting investigation became one of the most famous (and infamous) in the world of parapsychology, as well as the basis for the main plot of The Conjuring 2.

However, other investigators involved in the case later claimed that the movie massively exaggerated the Warrens’ role in the case, stating that Ed and Lorraine Warren just “turned up” and hadn’t been invited.

The most notorious aspect of the entire ordeal is captured in The Conjuring 2, however, when investigators caught one of the Hodgson children faking at least some of the reported phenomena. In the movie, she is simply trying to keep the investigators there to help her family.

Whether that was actually the case or whether she was responsible for creating an entire hoax is a subject that remains up for debate to this day…

When Carolyn Perron goes to see a lecture given by Ed and Lorraine Warren in the first Conjuring film, they show footage of an exorcism of Maurice, a “French-Canadian farmer [who] had nothing more than third-grade education, yet after he was possessed, he spoke some of the best Latin I’d ever heard. Sometimes backwards.”

This is Maurice Theriault – known as “Frenchy” to his friends – a real person in Massachusetts who exhibited signs that some claimed were evidence of demonic possession, including mysterious wounds that appeared on his body.

“Maurice had a very troubled life, with little to live for and not even an exorcist could bring him back,” Patrick Wilson as Ed Warren says at the end of the scene in The Conjuring.

While that may have echoed the real Frenchy’s story, however, the franchise wasn’t done with him, and he reappears as a major character in The Nun, where it is shown that (at least in the movie universe) his possession was by the demon Valak, and it was through Maurice that the demon initially reached the Warrens.

The third film in the mainline Conjuring franchise (and the first not to be directed by James Wan) takes as its basis the case of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, which is famous for being the first time that demonic possession was used as an attempted defense in a murder trial in the United States.

According to the Glatzel family, the trouble began when 11-year-old David Glatzel was possessed by a demon.

During a long and grueling series of exorcisms, overseen by Ed and Lorraine Warren, the demon was allegedly driven out of the boy to inhabit Arne Johnson, the boyfriend of David’s sister Debbie Glatzel. Johnson later stabbed his landlord to death with a knife, “growling like an animal” all the while.

“I could put the pope on and he’d tell you that if a guy is demonically possessed, he is not responsible,” said Johnson’s defense attorney.

However, the judge didn’t see it that way, and the “devil made me do it” defense was thrown out as unprovable. Johnson was found guilty and sentenced to 10 to 20 years, though he served only five.

Two of the Glatzel children later sued Ed and Lorraine Warren over claims that the couple had made in their books, adding to the controversy surrounding the couple and their claims of spiritual interventions.