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| (Photo Credit: 826 Paranormal, Flickr) |
Say what you want about the Warrens, but there’s absolutely no denying the impact they made both on the paranormal community and on pop culture. Not only were they directly connected to some of the most notorious hauntings in history, they’ve also been the caretakers of some of the most infamously unnerving haunted objects. Agree or disagree with their methods, Ed and Lorraine dedicated their lives to fascinating the public with tales of alleged paranormal phenomena, and the Warren Occult Museum was a very big part of that.
There’s a reason the Warrens are so synonymous with the paranormal. From the Amityville Horror to the Enfield Poltergeist, they played central characters in many of history’s most legendary paranormal investigations. With the recent popularity of The Conjuring films, the Warrens have again become a part of the pop-culture consciousness, throwing their Connecticut-based museum, filled with plenty of supposedly haunted objects, into the spotlight.
“This world-renowned museum has attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the world. Inch for inch their Museum houses the largest array of obscure and haunted artifacts. Items used in extremely dangerous occult activities and diabolical practices around the world…” – Warrens.net
The Warren Occult Museum is packed from floor to ceiling with an innumerable number of reportedly diabolical objects, many collected from Ed and Lorraine’s own investigations into supernatural activity around the world. Some of the more famous pieces include vampire coffins, Satanic altars, haunted masks, summoning mirrors, and of course, the most famous item in the Warren Occult Museum: Annabelle.
For those of you unfamiliar with Annabelle, here’s the abridged version: According to the Warrens, the doll itself is home to an inhuman, demonic spirit, and has a history of moving around on her own, leaving hand-written messages, scratching museum visitors, and has even supposedly killed those who’ve made the mistake of mocking her power. For years, Annabelle has been stored carefully in her wooden box inside the Warren Occult Museum, occasionally taking short trips to terrifying curious onlookers at events thrown in her honor.
“The Warrens had a special case built for Annabelle inside the Occult Museum, where she resides to this day. Since the case was built Annabelle no longer appeared to move but she is thought to be responsible for the death of a young man who came to the museum on motorcycle with his girlfriend. The young man after hearing Ed’s account of the doll, defiantly went up and began to bang on the case insisting that if the doll can put scratches on people then he wanted to also be scratched, Ed said to the young man “Son you need to leave” and put him out of the building
On the way home the young man and his girlfriend were laughing and making fun of the doll when he lost control of his motorcycle and went head on into a tree, the young man was killed instantly but his girlfriend survived and was hospitalized for over a year. When asked what happened the young woman explained that they were laughing about the doll when they lost control of the motorcycle. Ed warns you do not challenge evil, that no man is more powerful than Satan.”
Over the years it’s become harder and harder to visit the Warren Occult Museum, and many of the events scheduled around the objects have become few and far between, which is understandable when you consider that Lorraine is 89 years-old. Luckily, for those of us who have yet to visit, there’s a treasure trove of images taken by fans and colleagues over the years, that only continue to fuel our daydreams about spending an afternoon exploring every nook and cranny of the infamous collection.
For most of us, our fascination with the Warrens revolves around a time period long before paranormal television, when there were only a few select people around the world who had dedicated their lives to shedding light on the supernatural — for whatever reason. And though there were many fascinating investigators during their time, Ed and Lorraine managed to inspire countless people to go beyond their comfort zone and to seek the strange; because of that, The Warren Occult Museum has become a relic from a period in paranormal history that set the tone for much of what it has become today.
If you’ve never had the opportunity to visited the museum, you still might be in luck. Fans of the Warrens and their objects can take part in the Evening with Annabelle events, where brave guests dine alongside Annabelle in the flesh (er, cloth). The event has also recently added a lecture that gives visitors have the rare opportunity to listen to some of the actual audio recordings taken during their three-day investigation of the Enfield Poltergeist case.
Ed and Lorraine’s museum has been a source of curiosity for both believers and skeptics alike, and thanks to The Conjuring films, and the countless people who continue to keep the Warrens relevant today, they’re likely to continue inspiring future generations to follow in their footsteps. Hopefully their stories and objects will continue to be preserved for those of us who obsessively investigate claims of the paranormal, because in many ways, the objects themselves are what directly tie us to a time period when only a few were brave enough to search for the answers to the strangest questions.
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