Is The Conjuring Based on a True Story? The Real Cases Behind the Horror Franchise

Every few years, a horror movie arrives with those four loaded words stamped across the screen, “based on a true story,” and audiences lean in just a little closer.

When James Wan’s The Conjuring opened in the summer of 2013, it did not just lean on that claim; it built an entire marketing empire around it. Warner Bros. promoted the film as “based on the true story of the Warrens.”

The tickets sold, the screams echoed, and a franchise worth over two billion dollars was born. But the question that has never quite left the room, even after all the sequels and spin-offs and late-night debates, is a simple one: how much of it is actually true?

The honest answer is layered, contested, and far more interesting than the movie itself.

The Conjuring is rooted in the case files of Ed Warren and Lorraine Warren, a married couple from Monroe, Connecticut, who spent decades presenting themselves as America’s foremost paranormal investigators and demonologists.

Ed Warren was a self-taught ghost hunter, while Lorraine put herself forward as a medium who could communicate with spirits. They did not charge fees for their investigations, which gave them a reputation for sincerity, but they were never exactly strangers to financial reward.

They enjoyed immense financial success through nine books, a busy lecture schedule, and consulting on films based on their exploits. Ed died in 2006. Lorraine passed in 2019 at 92. Between them, they left behind a catalog of cases that Hollywood has been mining ever since.

The specific case at the center of the original 2013 film involves the Perron family, and this is where the “true story” thread gets genuinely complicated. Roger Perron and Carolyn Perron and their five daughters moved into a 14-room farmhouse at 1667 Round Top Road, just outside Harrisville near the Rhode Island border to Massachusetts in 1970.

They lived there for ten years. The daughters were named Andrea, Nancy, Christine, Cynthia, and April, and the oldest, Andrea, eventually wrote a three-volume memoir about the experience titled “House of Darkness, House of Light.” It is worth noting that Andrea herself confirmed the film’s basic premise.

In a letter to Horror-Movies.ca in June 2013, she wrote that The Conjuring “is based on a true story, believe it or not,” while acknowledging that “there are liberties taken and a few discrepancies.” She was also careful to clarify that the film was based on the Warrens’ case files, not her own books.

What those liberties were matters quite a bit. The Perron family did report unexplained phenomena inside the farmhouse, strange odors, knocking sounds, and what they described as a persistent, malevolent presence. After the Warrens heard about what was going on through other researchers, they visited the home and allegedly conducted a séance.

The real Lorraine Warren connected the spirit in the home to a woman named Bathsheba Sherman, a 19th-century figure who had lived on the land and whom the Warrens accused of sacrificing an infant to the devil. The grave of Bathsheba Sherman exists to this day in a historic cemetery in Harrisville, Rhode Island, though historians have found no credible evidence she was anything other than an ordinary woman who lived and died on that land.

Here is where the film diverges most sharply from what actually happened. In the movie, Ed performs an exorcism and dramatically rescues the family from Bathsheba. In the real events, Ed performed a séance, and Roger, the family’s father, who was often away from home working as a long-haul driver, threw Ed and Lorraine out of the house. That is not a minor detail.

The climactic scene in the film, the one that had audiences gripping their seats in multiplexes across the world, simply did not happen the way it was shown. The Perron family did not experience a triumphant Hollywood rescue. They continued living in that farmhouse for years after the Warrens left, and eventually moved out on their own terms.

Whether the house was haunted in the 1970s or remains that way is an ongoing debate. The farmhouse at 1667 Round Top Road has since become a tourist attraction of sorts, drawing visitors drawn by the Conjuring mythology.

Travel Channel and Discovery+ once sent investigators there, and the results were, depending on your threshold for belief, either inconclusive or quietly telling. A realtor marketing the property described it as a place where “countless happenings have been reported,” though when The Boston Globe pressed for specifics, no concrete evidence was offered.

The Annabelle doll, which appears in the film’s prologue and launched its own separate horror sub-franchise, is also drawn from a real Warren case, though the reality looks very different from what the movies depict.

The Annabelle case involved a nursing student named Donna who received a Raggedy Ann doll from her mother as a birthday present. Shortly thereafter, Donna and her roommate Angie began to notice that the doll would switch positions and move around their apartment on its own.

The Warrens took the doll, declared it demonically inhabited, and locked it in a glass case in their Occult Museum in Monroe, Connecticut. The film transforms the ordinary-looking Raggedy Ann into a grotesque, cracked porcelain figure, a change the filmmakers made for visual effect.

The real doll, soft and cloth-faced, sits behind glass in a room full of Warren artifacts, looking nothing like the thing audiences have been afraid of for over a decade.

The second film in the franchise, The Conjuring 2, centers on the Enfield poltergeist, a case from late 1970s North London in which two young sisters claimed to be terrorized by a spirit inside their council house. The Enfield case is one of the most documented alleged hauntings in British history.

The Warrens are portrayed in the film as central investigators in the case, with Lorraine receiving a vision of Ed’s death that ultimately drives the story. Ed and Lorraine had barely ever visited Enfield, and when they did, they were given short shrift by the actual investigators working on the alleged haunting and sent packing back to the United States.

The real investigators on the Enfield poltergeist case were British researchers from the Society for Psychical Research, and they were not especially impressed by the Warrens’ brief appearance. The fact that New Line Cinema chose to build a major Conjuring film around a case in which the Warrens played almost no role tells you a great deal about how loosely the franchise uses the word “true.”

The third film, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, released in 2021, is perhaps the most unsettling in terms of real-world consequences. The movie was based on a real family whose preteen son saw visions, quoted from the Bible, and spat at and hissed at people.

The boy, David Glatzel, was eventually declared by the Warrens to be demonically possessed. His sister’s boyfriend, a man named Arne Cheyenne Johnson, then invited the demon to enter him instead, in a ritual the Warrens encouraged. When Johnson later murdered his landlord with a pocketknife, the Warrens pushed him to plead not guilty on the grounds of demonic possession.

At trial, Johnson attempted to plead not guilty by reason of demonic possession but was unsuccessful. He was convicted of first-degree manslaughter. The Warrens turned the entire episode into a book and, eventually, a movie. Critics of the couple have long pointed to this case as an example of the real harm their involvement could cause, steering vulnerable families away from mental health care and toward supernatural explanations with no clinical basis.

The real people who became characters in The Conjuring movies suffered from terribly sad backstories that often included histories of substance abuse, other forms of abuse, generational trauma, and mental health crises. That observation, from author and horror historian Grady Hendrix, is one of the more clarifying things ever said about the franchise.

The Conjuring universe is built on the suffering of real families who were in genuine distress. The Warrens arrived with no medical training, no clinical background, and a very firm belief in demonic forces that aligned neatly with their devout, conservative Catholicism.

Usually, when they would arrive at a home, what had been considered a ghostly haunting would be transformed into the work of demons, in accordance with their own very stringent Catholic belief system. The movie frames this as heroism. A significant number of researchers and skeptics frame it as something considerably darker.

The Warrens were not without critics even in their own time. Horror author Ray Garton, who wrote an account of the alleged haunting of the Snedeker family in Southington, Connecticut, later called into question the veracity of the accounts in his book, saying the family involved “could not keep their story straight.”

To paranormal investigator Benjamin Radford, Garton said of Lorraine Warren that if she told him the sun would come up tomorrow morning, he would get a second opinion. The Amityville Horror case, in which the Warrens were deeply involved, has been extensively investigated over the decades and characterized by multiple researchers as a fabrication.

The couple’s methods were not peer-reviewed or scientifically validated. They were theatrical, media-savvy, and extraordinarily effective at generating a story.

None of which stopped the films from working brilliantly as horror. James Wan directed the original with a craftsman’s respect for tension and atmosphere, and the performances by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga gave Ed and Lorraine Warren a warmth and moral authority that the real couple’s biographical record does not entirely support.

Movie marketers have long found value in claiming that films are based on fact, but there are no explicit rules governing how far filmmakers can deviate from the truth while still including “based on a true story” in advertisements. The Conjuring franchise has tested those limits more aggressively than almost any other horror series in recent memory.

What you are left with, when you strip away the jump scares and the period set dressing and the swelling orchestral cues, is something genuinely fascinating. Real families, experiencing what they believed were real terrors, whose pain was absorbed into a commercial mythology that made studios enormously wealthy.

The Perron family was real. Their distress was real. Arne Cheyenne Johnson killed a man, and that is real. The Glatzel family’s anguish was real. The Smurl family, whose story anchors the most recent installment, The Conjuring: Last Rites, reported real phenomena that frightened them through much of the 1980s.

A local priest eventually claimed that prayers had chased the foul smells and violent demons from 330 Chase Street, and one of the Smurl daughters, Carin, later became a part-time paranormal investigator herself.

What was not real, or at least not demonstrated to any verifiable standard, was the supernatural framework the Warrens placed around all of it. The demon Bathsheba tormenting the Perrons, the demonic possession of a Connecticut boy, Ed Warren’s dramatic exorcisms, Lorraine’s clairvoyant visions, none of it has ever been substantiated outside the Warrens’ own accounts and the testimony of families who were already under enormous psychological strain.

Well-respected skeptics have debunked the bulk of the Warrens’ work as exaggerated or exploitative, and a 2023 Netflix documentary depicted them as figures who preyed on vulnerable families, feeding them fantastical tales mixed with pseudo-science to create narratives from which they themselves could profit.

So is The Conjuring based on a true story? The most accurate answer is yes, and no, and it depends entirely on what you mean by true. The families were real. The fear they felt was real.

The investigations happened. But the Conjuring version of those investigations, in which heroic, God-fearing demonologists stride into darkened homes and triumph over ancient evil, is a Hollywood construction built on top of something far more morally ambiguous and considerably more sad.

The next time those four words appear on your screen, it is worth remembering that “based on” is doing a tremendous amount of work.

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