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Ed and Lorraine have both since passed, but the Warrens, played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson in the movies, spent decades documenting cases of alleged hauntings, possessions, and demonic activity. Over the years, the films have attempted to juggle these historical details with audience expectations of the genre, while raising the stakes with each subsequent movie. With The Conjuring: Last Rites now officially part of the saga, it’s the perfect time to look back at the stories that inspired each entry and investigate where the movies stretch the truth.
1) The Conjuring
The real Perron family’s story began in 1971 when they moved into an old farmhouse in Rhode Island. The strangeness started with family members reporting hearing voices and smelling a foul stench, but these events eventually became such a concern that the family reached out to Ed and Lorraine, who, upon visit, concluded that the paranormal perpetrator was Bathsheba Sherman, a 19th-century woman accused of witchcraft.
The movie depicts a climactic exorcism, but Andrea Perron, the family’s eldest daughter later wrote about their experiences in her memoir “House of Darkness House of Light.” According to her, no literal exorcism ever took place, but there was a séance, where Andrea claims to have seen her mother speaking in tongues and levitating in her chair. The family ultimately moved away in 1980. While local graveyards do contain headstones with Sherman’s name, historical records don’t support the film’s claims about child sacrifice or cursed land.
2) The Conjuring 2
The second film jumps across the Atlantic to the famous Enfield Poltergeist case, which unfolded in London. Real single mother Peggy Hodgson called the cops when she heard banging in her daughters’ room. She claimed to see furniture slide across the floor and that a curtain attempted to stangle her. What’s weirder is that the cops corroborated her story, filing their own reports after witnessing chairs move on their own. Things reached a breaking point when 11-year-old Janet claimed to be possessed, speaking in the voice of Bill Wilkins, a man who had died in the home years earlier. Ed and Lorraine Warren traveled to Enfield to observe, with a featurette for The Conjuring 2 citing the case as one of the most terrifying encounters of the pair’s career.
The real haunting lasted nearly 18 months and ended without a cinematic climax. In contrast, the movie condenses events into a tight timeline and reimagines the story as a showdown with the demon Valak, a figure created for the film who went on to anchor The Nun spin-offs. The Crooked Man, another creature who menaces the children in the movie, was also a Hollywood invention. In an interview with ITV, Janet even admitted to faking some incidents “once or twice” to test whether investigators would catch her. Photographs of her mid-air, supposedly levitating, remain a topic of hot debate to this day.
