The Warrens’ Occult Museum

Update: Lorraine Warren died on April 18, 2019, and the museum has closed. The Warrens are buried less than a mile away, at the Stepney Cemetery. Their nephew and collaborator, John Zaffis, is currently seeking a new home for his own museum of the paranormal. And one of the Warrens’ paranormal investigation sites, Snedeker House, is 30 miles away in Southington, Connecticut.

Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren operated for decades as the preeminent voices in the believer community, and their strange career of ghost-hunting and demon-busting is on display in their very own Occult Museum.

Open since 1952, when the Warrens founded the New England Society for Psychic Research, the ever-expanding collection of knick-knacks and artifacts that had been touched by evil is kept in the basement of their own home. When they weren't delving into high-profile cases of demonic mischief as the Amityville haunting (the murderer who claimed demonic possession as his defense) and the exorcism of the witch Bathsheba (a case which was most recently portrayed in the film, The Conjuring, which also featured a version of the museum), the Warrens were popular lecturers in their day. Throughout these cases, the Warrens collected trinkets and totems they claimed were defiled by evil, locking them in the museum to keep them safe from the public.

The eccentric collection contains everything from an alleged vampire's coffin to a child's tombstone used as a satanic altar. Death curses, demon masks, and psychic photographs line the museum's walls accented by a Halloween store's bounty of plastic props (assumedly for mood). However, the most prevalent item seems to be the cursed Raggedy Ann doll by the name of Annabelle, which was said to have killed a man. Annabelle sits in her glass case, backlit by a haunting red light. 

Looking at the Warrens' collection, one might begin to think that Hell has a thing for dolls.   Unfortunately, Ed Warren passed away in 2006, but Lorraine Warren and their son still attend the museum. Whether or not one believes in the paranormal, the Warrens' Occult Museum may be one of the preeminent chronicles of modern culture's obsession with the supernatural.

Of course, it could also be just a spooky collection of stuff in an older woman's basement.