The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren (7 page)

Or more straightforwardly:

D E A T H T O G O D

"When it didn’t scrawl blasphemies," says Ed, "then it would scribble debasing, vulgar obscenities. The first time I saw these filthy markings, I thought someone in the house had a
really
sick mind. Naively, I tried to wipe these graffiti off the walls and mirrors so that Lorraine wouldn’t be exposed to them. But no sooner did I wipe them clean than they’d appear again in front of my eyes. It soon became apparent to me this wasn’t the work of human beings—
or
human spirits.

"At first," Ed admits, "the whole concept of demoniacal phenomena was incomprehensible to me, as I’m sure it would have been for anyone caught up in the same situation. Yet it was also apparent to me that these disturbances were totally unlike those brought on by earthbound human spirits. Not only did these entities write on walls, in rare cases they even
spoke—
with a physicalized voice. Still, neither Lorraine nor I could accept it These consistently negative powers were so powerful and menacing that we did our best to avoid them in our work. Just to be in the vicinity of the phenomenon was emotionally abysmal. Although I knew we were making real progress categorizing the behavior of the earthbound human spirit, this was something we never planned on."

For Ed Warren, discovery of the demonic realm was not some end point in an overblown religious quest. He had not gone out in the world and found "demons" to suit his fancy. "We came across this activity inadvertently, in the process of our investigations.
It was there when we walked in.
But unlike human spirits, these things were nothing to mess with. We kept our distance and studied their workings as much as we could, while helping the person or family involved. Only later did we find out how viciously these inhuman entities attacked any religious emblem—and then, how grave a problem the demonic really is to the pious clergy." Could the Warrens’ religious beliefs possibly affect what they see? It rather seems that a person would be more prone to perceive supernatural activity if he or she believed in it first.

"That sounds reasonable," Ed agrees, "but what we’ve seen in our work couldn’t have been influenced by what we believe. We have no reason to put our thumb on the scale: we’re not Bible thumpers; we don’t charge money for our services; and we’re both physically and mentally fit. You have to understand that we’re called in by other people who are
already
experiencing troublesome activity. Their children have suddenly begun acting peculiar, or things are flying around the house and they don’t know why it’s happening or how to stop it; so eventually these people call on us for help. When Lorraine and I get involved, it’s
after
the disturbance has erupted, not before—at which time we do our best to identify the source of the disturbance, and act accordingly to stop it, or bring in someone who can.

"These days," says Ed, "people who aren’t familiar with the problem like to philosophize about the demonic as being a purely psychological event, or say it’s not even there at all. But these people have never witnessed the phenomena themselves, or they would not make such empty statements. Just
once,
they need the experience of walking into a home where these inhuman spirits have manifested.

"Outside, neighbors will be milling around on the sidewalk. They instinctively know something is wrong. When you go inside, the family is liable to be sobbing or huddled together in terror, totally petrified from some horror they’ve been through. Their clothes could be half torn off. In the air, there may be a powerful stench of sulfur, ozone, or excrement. If there is possession, that individual is liable to come at you like a hulking monster. Objects will be levitating. The inside of the house may be completely vandalized by unseen forces; everything, big and small, turned over and broken. Very often there will be incredible poundings coming from the walls. And
on
the walls themselves, there are liable to be obscene or antireligious statements written by unseen hands in any of a dozen languages. Things will materialize and dematerialize right in front of your eyes. Religious objects will be desecrated or hung conspicuously upside down. Little fires may be flickering on the corners of chairs; the curtains may already have gone up in flames. Sheer havoc! And over it all there’ll be an atmosphere of evil so thick you could cut it with a knife. Ungodly screams, deep baleful moaning, or maniacal laughter will rise up, enough to make your blood run cold. Then, somewhere along the line—if you’re unlucky—the spirit itself may come through the doorway, or the wall, or manifest behind you and suddenly it all becomes quite clear this is not some explainable twist of fantasy. This is a real physical attack on humankind that occurs in a purposeful, directed way."

Curiously, the Warrens came to find that the phenomena brought about by inhuman spirits occurred in stages. In the beginning, the activity was relatively mild as the spirit took hold, cautious not to cause alarm. However, not everyone was subject to the phenomena. Often specific individuals were singled out for encroachment or attack. And there was a reason
why
they would be a target—as two young nurses recently found out.

III
Annabelle

When the telephone rings at the Warrens’ house, and a somber-toned clergyman on the other end of the line asks for Ed Warren, there’s a better than even chance that something serious has happened. Such was the case with “Annabelle.”

The referral this time came from an Episcopal priest. Calling from the Church’s administrative offices in Connecticut, the clergyman was relaying a message he’d received from a minister elsewhere in the state. Though the information the priest had was sketchy, he nonetheless told Ed Warren that two young nurses had “communicated” with what they took to be a human spirit. The priest doubted that was the case, however, because the plea for help included the fact that one of the girls’ friends had been attacked—physically. Though the wounds were not serious, activity was still in progress, and one of the girls seemed to think there was something alien inside her apartment “Would you,” he asked, “investigate the case further, and as a demonologist, recommend if any formal church action should be taken?”

Agreeing with the clergyman’s assessment that something of a negative spirit nature might conceivably be at work, Ed Warren accepted the referral. With that, the priest gave Ed the phone number and names of the two young women. After speaking with the priest, Ed immediately called the number he’d been given. Upon reaching one of the nurses, Ed verified the existence of the problem and told the young women that he and Lorraine were on their way.…

Though traffic was light on the Interstate that day, it took the Warrens well over an hour to reach the address of the modern, low-rise apartment complex. After parking the car, the Warrens walked up to the front door and Ed rang the bell. He carried with him a tape recorder, camera, and black attaché case. Footsteps soon approached from inside. Bolt locks were unsnapped, and the door was opened by Deirdre Bernard, an attractive but sober-faced young lady of twenty-five. Ed and Lorraine Warren introduced themselves, and were then ushered into the apartment

The young nurse led the Warrens through a spacious living room into the kitchen. There Cal Randell and his fiancée, Lara Clifton, sat at the table drinking coffee. Deirdre introduced the Warrens to them, but the young people said very little. The serious, drawn look on their faces said it all. The Warrens then took a seat with the others at the table. After loading a cassette into the recorder, Ed switched on the machine and entered the time, date, address, and full names of the principals.

“Okay,” Ed began, “I’d like to hear the whole story, right from the beginning. Who here can tell me?”

“I can,” said Deirdre.

“All right. Cal, Lara, please add any details she leaves out,” Ed directed.

“There are two stories, really,” Deirdre said. “One that began earlier in the week with Cal. The other one’s about Annabelle. But I suppose they’re both about Annabelle. I’m not sure.”

“Who’s Annabelle?” Ed promptly asked.

“She belongs to Deirdre,” Lara replied.

“Belongs?”
questioned Lorraine. “Is Annabelle a live, breathing being?”

“Is
she alive?” Deirdre repeated quizzically. “She moves. She acts alive. But no, I don’t think she’s alive.”

“Annabelle’s in the living room,” said Lara, pointing across the table. “She’s sitting on the sofa.”

Lorraine looked to her left, into the living room. “Are you talking about the
doll?”

“That’s right,” Lara replied, “the big Raggedy Ann doll. “That’s Annabelle. She moves!”

Ed got up and walked into the living room to inspect the doll. It was big and heavy, the size of a four-year-old child, sitting with its legs stretched out on the sofa. The black pupilless eyes stared back at him, while the painted-on smile gave the doll an expression of grim irony. Looking it over without touching the thing, Ed then returned to the kitchen.

“Where did the doll come from?” Ed asked Deirdre.

“It was a gift,” Deirdre replied. “My mother gave it to me on my last birthday.”

“Is there some reason why she bought you a doll?” Ed wanted to know.

“No. It was just something novel—a decoration,” the young nurse answered.

“Okay,” Ed went on, “when did you first start noticing activity occur?”

“About a year ago,” said Deirdre. “The doll started to move around the apartment
by itself.
I don’t mean it got up and walked around, or any such thing. I mean when we’d come home from work it would never be quite where we left it.”

“Explain that part a little more,” Ed requested.

“After I got the doll for my birthday,” Deirdre explained, “I put it on my bed each morning after the bed was made. The arms would be off to its sides and its legs would be straight out—just like it’s sitting there now. But when we’d come home at night, the arms and legs would be positioned in different gestures. For instance, its legs would be crossed at the ankles, or its arms would be folded in its lap. After a week or so, this made us suspicious. So, to test it, I purposely crossed its arms and legs in the morning to see if it really was moving. And sure enough, every night when we’d come back home, the arms and legs would be uncrossed and the thing would be sitting there in any of a dozen different postures.”

“Yea, but it did
more
than that,” Lara put in. “The doll also changed rooms by itself. We came home one night and the Annabelle doll was sitting in a chair by the front door. It was kneeling! The funny thing about it was, when
we
tried to make the doll kneel, it’d just fall over. It
couldn’t
kneel. Other times we’d find it sitting on the sofa, although when we left the apartment in the morning, it’d be in Deirdre’s room with the door closed!”

“Anything else?” Lorraine asked.

“Yes,” said Deirdre. “It would leave us little notes and messages. The handwriting looked to be that of a small child.”

“What’d the notes say?” questioned Ed.

“It would say things that meant nothing to us,” Deirdre answered. Things would be written like HELP US or HELP CAL, but Cal wasn’t in any kind of jeopardy at the time. And who ‘us’ was—we didn’t know. Still, the thing that was weird was that the notes would be written in pencil, but when we tried to find one, there was not one pencil in the apartment! And the paper it wrote on was
parchment.
I tore the apartment apart, looking for parchment paper, but again neither of us had any such thing."

“It sounds like someone had a key to your apartment and was playing a sick joke on you,” Ed stated flatly.

“That’s exactly what we thought,” said Deirdre. “So we did little things like put marks on the windows and doors or arranged the rugs so that anyone who came in here would leave a trace that we could see. But never once did it turn out that there was a real outside intruder.”

“While the doll was moving around, and we’d become suspicious of burglars, something else screwy happened,” Lara added next. “The Annabelle doll was sitting on Deirdre’s bed, as was usual. When we came home one night, there was blood on the back of its hand, and there were three drops of blood on its chest!”

“God, that really scared us,” Deirdre said frankly.

“Did you notice any other kind of phenomena occur in the apartment?” Ed asked them.

“One time around Christmas we found a little chocolate boot on the stereo that none of us had bought. Presumably it came from Annabelle,” said Lara.

“When did you come to determine there was a spirit associated with the doll?” questioned Lorraine.

“We knew something unusual was going on,” Deirdre answered. “The doll
did
change rooms by itself. It
did
pose in different gestures: we all saw it. But we wanted to know why. Was there maybe some plausible reason why the doll was moving? So Lara and I got in touch with a woman who’s a medium. That was about a month, or maybe six weeks after all this stuff started to happen.”

“What did you find out?”

“We learned that a little girl died on this property,” Deirdre told the Warrens. “She was seven years old and her name was Annabelle—Annabelle Higgins. The Annabelle spirit said she played in the fields long ago before these apartments were built. They were ‘happy times’ for her, she told us. Because everyone around here was grown-up, and only concerned with their jobs, there was no one she could relate to, except us. Annabelle felt that we would be able to understand her. That’s why she began moving the rag doll. All Annabelle wanted was to be loved, and so she asked if she could stay with us and move into the doll. What could we do? So we said yes.”

“Wait a minute here,” Ed interjected. “What do you mean it wanted to
move into
the doll? Do you mean it proposed to possess it?”

“Right, that was the understanding,” Deirdre replied. “It seemed harmless enough. We’re nurses, you know, we see suffering every day. We had compassion. Anyway, we called the doll Annabelle from that time on.”