Lorraine Warren sees colored lights around people.
Warren and her late husband, Ed, built their abilities into a cottage industry. The Warrens made a career out of evicting demons from so-called haunted houses and giving speeches to university students.
On Wednesday, Warren, who lives in Connecticut, will be at the University of Texas at Arlington to tell ghost stories.
The Warrens are a family of ghostbusters who have written several books and have seen at least two films based on their work play to worldwide audiences. The family created the New England Society for Psychic Research in 1952.
Ed Warren died last year. Tony Spera, the couple's son-in-law, now directs the Society for Psychic Research after working with the Warrens for more than 25 years. The Warrens were principal investigators during the supposed haunting of a house in Amityville, N.Y., on Long Island, in the 1970s. The story of the haunting was made into the movie The Amityville Horror.
Warren, 80, said that she started seeing auras when she was 9 but that others could not see the lights and frowned upon her stories. "So I suppressed it," she said.
As she grew older, Warren learned that she was seeing the auras that some people say exist around every living thing. Others, however, contend that auras have no spiritual significance and are merely a natural physiological phenomenon. Those who doubt her stories have been around from the beginning, Warren said.
How did you meet your husband?
I met him with a group of girls. I was 16. He was an usher at the theater. He brought us each a Coke and walked with us. His house came first, and as he ran up the stairs, I didn't see him as a young man, I saw him as he was just before he died -- old, portly, with gray hair. I wrote in my diary that night that I would spend the rest of my life with him.
We got married and had a daughter, and in 1969 our lives changed. Ed began painting homes that were haunted and gathering up the stories about them. Later, after an exhibit, offers to talk about them came. The more we talked about the paintings, the more offers came our way. The hauntings started making national news, then international news. We lost our quiet life. We were in the spotlight. When it happened, we realized it was meant to be.
How do you respond to people who do not believe in ghosts, or the paranormal, or any of the things that you have dedicated your lives to studying?
I look at those people and ask them if they believe in God, if they believe in the personification of all that is evil and I see what they say to that. We did not choose this life for ourselves. My husband and I made our living as artists. My husband grew up in a haunted house, and he heard strange sounds and saw an apparition of an old lady peering out from his bedroom closet. His father was a state trooper who told him to forget what he saw and not tell anyone. My husband did keep quiet about what he saw and heard at his house, but he never lost his sense of curiosity about it.
What have you been investigating lately?
I just got back [in late September] from a town in Maine where there are two very serious hauntings. One house is a split-level home only 10 years old. The vibrations there were horrible. I asked the mother, an educated lady, if anyone at the house had practiced the occult. She said, "I wouldn't do that." But there was turmoil there between the mother and an older daughter who was pregnant.
Turmoil throws off the energy these things need to manifest. I found out that they did seances there and used a Ouija board, which are occult practices. She said one of the beds in the house goes up and down all the time. A Pentecostal minister that I was working with said that he had been warned in prayer about what was happening and he left, saying that he was unprepared to deal with what was in that house.
Were you ever afraid?
You better not get scared. You better keep your faith. You can help a human spirit pass on. You can help them make a choice. You cannot communicate with an inhuman spirit. We come against demons. The devil is involved.
How do you defeat an inhuman spirit?
Every religion deals with this in a different way. The inhuman spirit is cast out in the name of the religion of the family.
If you go
Where: University of Texas at Arlington, Rosebud Room, University Center
Price: Students: Free with university ID. Faculty/staff: $3 with university ID. General public: $5.
Information: 817-272-2963
http://www.star-telegram.com/arlington_ ... 67854.html
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