The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the ground. Well, just as soon as they put the sapling in the ground, I saw it as a fully grown tree. I looked up into its massive branches, filled with leaves blowing in the wind, with no idea I was experiencing second-sight. The nun standing beside me prodded my arm and said in her usual stern way, ‘Miss Moran, why are you looking up at the sky?’ I told her I was just looking up into the tree.… ‘Are you seeing into the future?’ she asked me, just as sternly. ‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘I guess I am.’
    “Well, that did it—I was immediately sent off to a retreat home for the weekend. I couldn’t talk or play or do anything, just sit there all day long in church and pray. That taught me. After that, when it came to things involving clairvoyance, I kept my mouth shut.”
    In retrospect, Lorraine’s experience that Arbor Day served to channel her abilities toward the good, toward becoming a tool that would eventually help many thousands of others. Although Ed, like most people, possessed no overt psychic abilities, the continuous input of psychic data during the late 1940s and early 1950s (garnered during the Warrens’ “ghost-hunting” period) caused Lorraine’s clairvoyance to develop significantly. Later, in the 1970s, Lorraine was tested at UCLA, where her clairvoyance was judged as being “far above average.”
    One might be inclined to call it fate how the Warrens came together. Ed and Lorraine did not originally set out to make the supernatural their vocation. Instead, as Lorraine explains, it was a vocation that found them.
    “Ed and I got married—both at the age of eighteen—while he was in the Navy. In fact, our only child, Judy, was six months old before Ed came back from the Pacific Theater and saw her for the first time. Once World War II was over, we had to find a livelihood like everyone else. Each of us had skills as landscape artists, and we each harbored a desire to paint. Ed had already attended art school in New Haven before the war, so we began our marriage under the assumption we were going to be artists.”
    The art, however, turned out to be a steppingstone to psychic research. “You see,” Lorraine continues, “we needed a subject to paint—a good subject, something people could relate to. Well, haunted houses proved to be that subject. Ed would find a haunted house written up in the newspaper, or get a lead on one from the locals in town. Then we’d drive to the site in our old Chevy. Ed would do up a complete sketch of the house and grounds. All the while, of course, the owner of the place would be peeking out the window wondering what the heck was going on. We were just kids then, so one of us would knock on the door, show them the sketch of the house, then offer it in exchange for information about the haunting. If the story was engrossing enough, we’d paint up the house for our collection, then sell it later at an art show.
    "All in all, we spent five years traveling around the country painting and investigating haunted houses—and not exactly by coincidence, I might add. Before we were married, Ed had already devoured all the available books on the supernatural, although I didn’t know it at the time. So in addition to painting he was fully engaged in field research, all the while making notes on where the books were wrong.”
    In a very real way, the Warrens used the world for their university, acquiring a wealth of information in the process. Often they were the first, and sometimes the only researchers to investigate the site of a haunting. Although as a child, Ed had seen phenomena go on around him that would make other people’s hair stand on end, Lorraine had no experience at all with ghosts and hauntings. As an adult, therefore, she remained naturally skeptical.
    “In the beginning,” Lorraine remembers “I was more than a bit wary of the people with whom we spoke. I thought they were kind of suffering from overactive imaginations or were just making