Community Corner

Lorraine Warren: Origins

Lorraine Warren started investigating haunted houses in her 20s, but her psychic career really began at age 7.

As a student at Lauralton Hall in Milford, Lorraine Warren started seeing auras. She picked the wrong nun to share it with

"I remember telling a nun her colors were brighter than Mother Superior's," said Warren, who's now 85 and has more than 4,000 paranormal investigations under her belt with her husband, Ed, who died in 2006.

Later, when she was in her 20s and married, they were in New Hampshire selling paintings they had made when they were drawn to a local haunted house there.

As she and Ed and another couple were listening to the resident tell his story, Warren recalled that her spirit floated out of her body. Concerned, Ed waved his hand in front of her face, but she was in a trance.

When she finally returned to her body, the man told her that that happened to all clairvoyants in his house.

Eventually Warren was tested and, she said, it was revealed she had great psychic gifts.

Since 1952, she's put those gifts to good use in paranormal cases all over the world, from the Amityville Horror in Long Island to very local cases in her hometown of Monroe.

Some of the cases can be found at warrens.net.

Still, Warren insists she's not special.

Her daily life is far from paranormal. She lives in a home she designed herself (including a symbolic 7-step staircase), and some of her design drawings are still wallpapered over the fireplace. She does her own grocery shopping.

She lives with five cats, a rooster named Jackie, a hen named Lady Jaye and a dog.

"I'm no different than anybody else in this room," she told a packed house at Masuk High School Wednesday night during her annual Halloween lecture which she takes all over the United States each year. "I don't want to be different. I want to belong."

Warren's next lecture is at Shelton High School on Oct. 18 at 7 p.m.

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