Ghost movies based on true stories, and what is actually true

The card at the start of the film says it is based on true events, and for most of the famous ones that is partly right. Behind nearly every film below there is a real family, a real address and a real year. What there almost never is, is a record that shows what the film shows. The ghosts rest on the families’ accounts and on a small group of investigators, above all Ed and Lorraine Warren.

Here are ten films, nine built on a claimed case and one that never claimed anything. For each: what the story says, and what the record shows. If you hold a document on any of these cases that we have not seen, send it to us.

The Conjuring (2013): the Perron farmhouse

In 1971 Roger and Carolyn Perron moved with their five daughters into a farmhouse in Harrisville, Rhode Island. The family said the house was not theirs alone, and Ed and Lorraine Warren came to investigate. Those are the facts James Wan’s film stands on: a family, a house, two investigators.

The film adds a witch. Bathsheba Sherman was real, a resident of the area in the nineteenth century. The story that she practiced witchcraft, and that her malice lived on in the house, is not supported by any record. The film took a real neighbor’s name and gave her a legend. How this film fits the wider haunted-house tradition is in three kinds of ghost movie.

The Amityville Horror (1979): 112 Ocean Avenue

On November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot six members of his family at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. That part is a criminal case, and he was convicted.

In December 1975 George and Kathy Lutz moved into the house with their children. They left after twenty-eight days, and their account became Jay Anson’s book and then Stuart Rosenberg’s film. Here the record splits. William Weber, DeFeo’s defense lawyer, later said the haunting story was invented with the Lutzes. The Lutzes told it as true. The two accounts cannot both be right, and the file does not settle which.

The Exorcist (1973): the boy in 1949

In 1949 Jesuit priests, among them Father William Bowdern, performed an exorcism on a boy known to the public only by pseudonyms, “Roland Doe” and “Robbie Mannheim.” The case moved between Maryland and St. Louis. William Peter Blatty took it as the starting point for his 1971 novel, and William Friedkin’s film followed.

The record shows that the rite was performed, by named priests, on a real child whose identity was protected. It does not show the film. Blatty turned the boy into a girl, moved the story to Georgetown and wrote the rest. What happened in the rooms reaches us through those present. The Washington Post reported the case on August 20, 1949, without naming the boy, and the fullest primary account is a diary kept by one of the Jesuits present, Father Raymond Bishop, later reproduced in Thomas B. Allen’s book Possessed (1993).

The Conjuring 2 (2016): Enfield

From 1977 to 1979 the Hodgson family, in a council house in north London, reported what became known as the Enfield poltergeist. Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair of the Society for Psychical Research investigated, and Playfair later wrote it up as a book.

James Wan’s film puts Ed and Lorraine Warren at the center. In the record, the Warrens’ visit to Enfield was brief. The two men who did the long work on the case are pushed to the edge of their own story. The case itself is part of our hauntings coverage.

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009): the funeral home

In 1986 the Snedeker family rented a house in Southington, Connecticut, that had once been a funeral home. They said the house was haunted, and the Warrens investigated. In 1992 the story became a book by the writer Ray Garton.

Garton later said that the family’s accounts did not agree with each other. The funeral home is a fact; what happened in it rests on those accounts. Peter Cornwell’s film chose one version and told it straight.

Annabelle (2014): the doll

The doll is real. It is a Raggedy Ann, given to a nursing student in 1970, and it ended up with Ed and Lorraine Warren, who kept it in their museum in Connecticut, in a glass case. John R. Leonetti’s film, and The Conjuring before it, replaced the rag doll with a porcelain one.

What the record shows is an object, a year and the place where it was kept. What the doll is said to have done reaches us through the Warrens. No independent account has been published, and the student is known only by the first name they gave her. The central evidence could be looked at through glass, and what you would see is a rag doll.

The Entity (1982): Culver City

In 1974, in Culver City, California, Doris Bither said she was being attacked in her home by a presence she could not see. Two investigators, Barry Taff and Kerry Gaynor, looked into the case.

Sidney J. Furie’s film is built around the most violent part of her account and makes it the whole picture. Bither was a real woman, and her account is hers; the film is a dramatization, not a record of what the investigators found. Taff and Gaynor were attached to a parapsychology laboratory at UCLA at the time, and their findings reach us through Taff’s own later writing and interviews, not through a report published in 1974.

Winchester (2018): the house that kept being built

Sarah Winchester’s house in San Jose, California, was under construction from 1886 until her death in 1922. That is the record, and it is strange enough on its own.

Michael and Peter Spierig’s film uses the story told about why. The legend has it that she kept building to appease the spirits of the people killed by Winchester rifles. Her biographer Mary Jo Ignoffo, in Captive of the Labyrinth (2010), found nothing in Winchester’s own papers to support the séance story, and offers a plainer explanation: a very large fortune, no heirs, and a lifelong habit of building. The house still stands, open to visitors, and the building is the one part of the story nobody disputes.

Veronica (2017): the Vallecas case

Paco Plaza’s film draws on what Spain knows as the Vallecas case: Madrid, 1991, and a teenager named Estefanía Gutiérrez Lázaro, who died that year.

What sets this case apart from every other entry here is the kind of record behind it. There is a police report, and in it officers recorded events they could not explain. That is not a family’s account or an investigator’s book, and it does not say what the events were. The report was filed in 1992, more than a year after Estefanía’s death, by officers called to the family’s flat in Vallecas; it describes, among other things, a door that opened by itself while they were there.

Poltergeist (1982): the one that never claimed it

Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist is not based on a true story, and it never presented itself as one. Neither does Other Mommy (2026). It turns up on lists like this because of the so-called curse, which refers to the deaths of two members of its cast. Dominique Dunne, who played the older daughter, died in 1982. Heather O’Rourke, who played Carol Anne, died in 1988, at twelve.

Both were real deaths of young people, and both have their causes in the public record. The curse story was built out of that grief after the fact. How the film brought its ghost in through the television is covered in how ghosts got on screen.

The same few names

Set the files side by side and the investigators repeat.

The houses are in three countries and decades apart, and the people who came to say what was happening in them were, again and again, the same few.

That proves nothing in either direction. A small field has few specialists. But it means that for most of these films, what we know about the ghost is what a handful of people wrote down, and the families reach us through them. The rest of the films section goes back to those accounts one by one.

Which leaves the case in Madrid, the only one here that did not pass through their hands: a report by police officers who were not ghost investigators, and who put down in an official document that they could not explain what they had seen.