In America, the grandmother of the most terrible scarecrows, Lorraine Warren, has died.
Hollywood favorite Lorraine Warren has died. One of the most famous ghost hunters of our time. Whether she was joking when she said that she had seen people's auras from childhood, or was telling the truth, is no longer so important. But if you look at the photo of Lorraine, you can see how similar she is to Helena Roerich. Not even a hairstyle, that there is a hairstyle, but an expression on his face, a strange, slightly mocking smile of thin lips. In all the photos, Lorraine and her husband look like they are vigorously taking air in their mouths so as not to burst out laughing. And there is something for a ride.
Many of us watched the film about "The Curse of Annabelle" and various horror stories and paid attention to the postscript "based on real events." It was the Warren couple who taught Hollywood directors to make such a postscript. Based on their paranormal investigations, Hollywood removed the scarecrow darkness.
Lorraine was born on January 31, 1927 in America. She was only 16 when she married her Ed. A chubby guy with three chins (their number increased with age, in proportion to the ghosts caught), as he himself claimed, grew up in a house teeming with ghosts and learned to defend against them on his own. Ed and Lorraine came up with a good side job: they drove around the States in a small car and Ed sketched houses in which, according to rumors, ghosts lived. Then these pictures were presented or sold to the owners of the houses, and they let the couple of eccentrics into them and showed the most intimate and demonic places of their house. With the help of fantasy and prayer, the family expelled the spirits with varying degrees of success.
For more than sixty years of marriage, the Warrens have accumulated about ten thousand scary stories. In 1952, Ed and Lorraine Warren formed an organization for paranormal research. People of different professions and different levels of insanity entered society with pleasure. Doctors, psychologists, police officers and others. The whole world, all the people, the whole family, enthusiastic citizens developed methods of fighting evil spirits.
But the real fame fell on the Warrens, of course, when the family began to collaborate with filmmakers. One of the first occasions to bring fame to the Warrens was The Amityville Horror. The owner of the house killed his entire family, obeying the will of some voices, and the new owners of the house fled in horror. The cursed building is empty to this day, and at the screenings of the film about Amityville, the apple had nowhere to fall.
Today it is already known that more than half of this story is a well-played hoax.
At first, directors were puzzled by the moral ethical issues of collaboration. After a short time after communication, it became clear that the family had a cuckoo. But the husband and wife did not deny this and reasonably informed the quick-witted: “Actually, everyone who addresses us has a cuckoo. What do you want. If you don't like it, get out of it. If you like it, make the story look scarier. People like it."
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On the basis of cooperation with Hollywood, other famous horror stories "based on real events" such as "Ghosts in Connecticut" and "The Conjuring" were created.
Ed and Lorraine have invested notably in the US economy, building a museum in which they exhibited the most terrible artifacts from the houses in which they expelled the ghosts. There is a piano in the museum, which sounds by itself at night, it is not clear what the mummies of Aleshenek are made of, and, of course, the famous doll Anya, known to us as Annabelle. The evil doll had the ability to penetrate the master's sleep and kill him with a heart attack. The film about the curse of Annabelle, of course, we all watched. But in reality, the doll does not look so scary: an ordinary rag ugly creature with a triangular nose, wasted by a moth. The spouses could not get the evil entity out of Annabelle, so they hid the artifact in a glass birdhouse and signed it “Beware, evil Anya”.
More than ten years ago, Lorraine suffered a terrible loss. Her husband and mastermind Ed died. However, before his death, the ghost hunter bequeathed to his wife not to leave a profitable business.
The spouses have repeatedly tried to bring to clean water. They were sued for the fact that the Warrens performed a ritual of exorcism on mentally ill people who did not need holy water, but medical help. The Warrens got burned when they figured out that the killer could be justified by insisting on his demonic possession. They were trying to implement this procedure for the protagonist and prototype of The Devil in Connecticut, a teenager named Arnie Johnson who killed his landlord. The ghostbusters promised the teen's relatives that they would get rich if they insisted that the boy was not crazy, but possessed by demons. However, the experiment failed and Johnson was jailed.
But in all situations, the husband and wife came out victorious.
People like to be afraid. Aristotle wrote about this in his poetics. Famous children's and folklore horror stories are based on this effect. Frankly, my great-grandmother Masha owned the genre of horror stories more abruptly than grandmother Warren. Her stories were scarier and smarter, and with the involvement of historical realities that our country is rich in. However, it did not occur to my great-grandmother to capitalize on her talent. And old Lorraine was smarter about that.
So it doesn't matter at all whether the grandmother was a liar or not. Let's pay tribute to her as a popularizer of the horror story genre. Everyone who had a chance to communicate with the old woman claimed that she was an excellent storyteller, to which it was a pleasure to listen.
PS: Or maybe there really was something. After all, the ghosts with Lorraine Warren were not very eager to meet. The old lady lived a very long 92-year life.
SERGEY SELEDKIN