CONJURING COINS

The Enfield poltergeist case of 1977 has just made it to the big screen in the Conjuring 2. If you’ve seen the other horror films by James Wan, you can imagine how this director’s take on the famous haunting is a touch more sensational than the recent down to earth television dramatisation with Timothy Spall.As with the first Conjuring film, it follows the paranormal investigations of New England demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. The picture above shows Lorraine about to meet one of the Enfield entities. Fortunately, these demonic types didn't appear in the council house until the Warrens got there, as I can't imagine how Timothy Spall's character Maurice Grosse would have coped with them.Ed passed away in 2006, but the Warrens were the researchers who investigated Amityville and Lorraine is also the owner and ‘custodian’ of Annabelle, the possessed doll who starred in the 2014 film by the same name. After terrorising its owners, the doll was locked in a special cabinet in Lorraine’s occult museum in Monroe, Connecticut where its evil is contained and it can hopefully do no more harm.For some reason, the makers of the film didn’t feel the genuine Annabelle doll looked scary enough and decided upon a new design. I can’t think why.The only problem is the cabinet design, which has a sign saying: Positively Do Not Open. Unfortunately you can’t see the word Open until the door has been opened.I met Ed and Lorraine back in 1984 at the site of Borley Rectory on the Suffolk, Essex border. The pair arrived at the tiny village in a coach, leading a bunch of Americans on a paranormal journey of the British Isles. They’d taken their tour group around various UK haunted spots, such as York’s Treasury House, and Borley was the much anticipated highlight. After the rectory was demolished in 1944, the spirits naturally moved over the road to Borley Church and the tour group wandered quietly around the old building hoping for glimpses of phenomena.Lorraine and I talked at length about her interest in Borley and how on a previous visit, she’d witnessed an ‘apport’, a rare supernatural event where an object literally appears from nowhere. In this case it had been an old pre-decimal penny, an obvious sign from Harry Price, she claimed, who wrote books about the Borley hauntings. Harry and Lorraine were more or less on first name terms as she’d spoken to him psychically on several occasions.As we were chatting, one of her group, a young man, suddenly spotted a penny on the aisle carpet. Everyone agreed it hadn’t been there moments before, and picking it up, Lorraine felt the definite presence of Harry Price. If proof was needed, it was right there in the date of the coin – 1940, the year Price published his first book on the rectory, the Most Haunted House in England.The picture shows Ed and Lorraine on either side of the guy who noticed the coin. The 'paranormal apport' now resides in Lorraine’s museum, close to the case containing the evil Annabelle.