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My Date With ‘The Conjuring’’s Lorraine Warren
Everyone wants a prestige haunting; no one wants their house haunted by the toilet repair man.
To get this out in the open: I, much like Rob Lowe, believe in ghosts. In my New England hometown, this was probably the one thing about me that didn’t make me an oddity. Everywhere you went, people were just dying to tell you about this ghost or that ghost. And I’m not just talking about, like, mall goths, or the one weirdo science teacher who goes around town on a recumbent bike, either. I hail from the unexpectedly haunted state of Connecticut, where even the fanciest Pilates moms want to tell you about the Revolutionary War ghost who lives in their half-bath and is always knocking the decorative soaps off the shelf (it’s funny how it’s always a Revolutionary War soldier, right? It’s like how everyone always assumes they were a princess in a past life. Everyone wants a prestige haunting. No one wants to their house haunted by the local toilet repair man. But I digress).
I’m sure it’s like this in plenty of areas that hold their history close, right? I mean, what’s more “the past isn’t even past” than believing that the spirit of a colonial soldier materializes in your house at night, bumping into things and disrupting your viewing of the Friends reunion?
I should note that all of New England is haunted as hell, and full of regular-seeming people who want to talk to you about their poltergeist in the same blase tone they’d use to describe their problems with their septic tank. But I specifically hail from the southern Connecticut town of Trumbull, which, for whatever reason, is located in a place of high supernatural drama. I was raised just a few miles away from an eerie haunted cemetery, an eerie abandoned psychiatric hospital that has now been turned into eerie public administrative buildings, and the eerie grave of a colonial-era lady who everyone said was demonic witch (but probably just had armpit hair or refused to share her berries with the mayor or something).
I also grew up near the Warrens, the real-life supernatural-crime-fighting couple depicted by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmigia in the Conjuring films. They were, depending on who you talk to, two of the most high-profile ghost-hunters in the world, or two first-class hoaxers. They claimed to have battled…
