Lorraine Warren started seeing auras around people since she was 9, Ed's prayers saved him from mid-sea death
Ed and Lorraine Warren had been the best known paranormal investigators whose real-life encounters and experiences inspired franchises such as 'The Conjuring' and 'The Amityville Horror'. The couple had investigated a large number of high-profile supernatural cases which included incidents of the Lindley Street poltergeist, the Smurl Haunting and the Perron family haunting, to name a few. The life and story of the couple have been captured in Travel Channel's new documentary, 'Devil’s Road: The True Story of Ed and Lorraine Warren'.
The pair had started to experience their share of paranormal encounters from a young age, way before the two had met or knew each other. Both Ed and Lorraine Warren were fascinated with the supernatural world and their interactions with it go way back.
Lorraine Warren's childhood
Lorraine Warren was born as Lorraine Rita Moran on January 31 in 1927 to an Irish family. The documentary reveals that Lorraine believed she could see a certain light around people as a child, and for the longest time she thought that like her, everyone could see those lights too. "It started when I was probably about 9 years old when I first had experiences where I could see lights around people. But the lights I could see around people, I thought everyone could see that," a voice recording of Lorraine revealed. She had attended a Catholic school called Laurelton Hall and there were two nuns overseeing everyone - Mother Superior and Sister Joseph.
One day suddenly Lorraine pointed out that Sister Joseph's lights were brighter than Mother Superior's lights. Lorraine's son-in-law, Tony Spera, said, "What she was seeing was, the aura around Mother Superior and Sister Joseph. Anything that is alive, that God has created, has an aura. Certain psychics can see the aura. When she said her lights were brighter, she meant the aura was spectacular, more colors emulating from her body." "Mother Superior overhears this conversation about the lights and says 'Lorraine, we don't speak of things like that here'," Spera added. Lorraine's recording shares that she had tried to talk about it at home after being forbidden to speak of it at school. She revealed that it was fine to make a joke about the lights here and there but it was never discussed seriously.
Spera says that on many occasions Lorraine has said, "I never wanted to be different." Her entire life changed when she met Ed at the age of 16.
Ed Warren's childhood
Ed Warren had always been obsessed with understanding and dealing with the paranormal since he was a young boy growing up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In a voice recording, Ed can be heard talking of his first experiences with the supernatural world. "I lived in a haunted house when I was a boy. Many times I would hear the closet door opening up. I'd look into that closet darkness and start to see a light starting to form and it went into a ball shape, then I'd see a face in the ball. It was the face of an old lady," Ed said.
"Next thing, the ball came out into my bedroom, the room became icy cold. I could hear footsteps. I could hear heavy breathing. I'm saying to myself, there's a logical reason for all of this," Ed added. Spera shared how Ed went to his father and said weird things happening in this house and tells him he sees shadows and an old lady. Ed said his father told him that there is a logical reason for everything happening in the house but failed to give him any specific reason.
Ed and Lorraine Warren
The couple met at the age of 16 when Ed worked at the theater. The two became friends and one night, he asked her on a date. Ed went off to the navy at 17 though the two kept in touch. When Ed was serving in the navy during WWll, a life-threatening experience showed Ed that there was "a greater spiritual dimension to life". In a terrible shipping disaster, where two ships, including an oil tanker, collided causing an explosion, Ed was left swimming for his life in the icy Atlantic. After jumping into the ocean, he sees one of his fellow soldiers in trouble and swims over to him and tries to pull him away. He could not see where to pull him and where to go as there was a huge wall of flames around him.
Ed says, "I said a prayer to the blessed mother and that gasoline opened up and went around us. Then, a coast guard's boat comes through the flames and pulls us out of the water. Is that miraculous, is that an angel?" When Ed got back, he decided to marry Lorraine, and the two wed in Bridgeport. They even had a daughter, Judy Spera. When Ed returned from the war, he became an artist to support his family. However, the couple was always interested in haunted places. Eventually, they became well renowned paranormal investigators trying to use their gifts to help destroy and remove all evil. With the more cases they did, the more the word spread and the more cases they would receive.