In a world of scary nuns, possessed moving dolls, and loving mothers turned into murderous demons there are Ed and Lorraine Warren, well-known paranormal investigators. Not the young fictionalized Ed and Lorraine you remember from the movies but the real people who, believe it or not, did experience paranormal encounters but not necessarily to the same extent the movies may portray them to be. 

While many movies add drama and action to the story to keep the audience interested and engaged nevertheless they still slap the label, “based on a true story” despite the fact that it is typically a very loose basis. As it may have stemmed from a true story, adding many separate elements is misleading and therefore leads to misinformation taking the credibility out of the movie and for a lot of people, out of Ed and Lorraine. Gary Everding did an interview with Andrew Bulter who did a study on the challenges of separating fact from fiction and he found that “when information in the film directly contradicted the text, people often falsely recalled the misinformation portrayed in the film, sometimes as much as 50 percent of the time.” This shows that when movies stray too far from the truth, there is a turning point where it is no longer credible and leads people to believe false information. 

Ed and Lorraine were real-life people who were paranormal investigators for over 50 years. They traveled around the world to investigate places such as the famous Amityville Horror and the Enfield Poltergeist. They are most known for the movies made based on their investigations, best known as the Conjuring series. The main issue people have with them is based on the movies. If people conducted thorough research on the Warrens instead of relying on the movies, more individuals may believe in them and their studies. It was the movies that exaggerated what really happened during their times spent with the paranormal making it harder for people to believe any part of their stories and that the paranormal as a whole could be real in any way. 

Misinformation information spreads like a bad cold person to the next until it is suddenly so commonly believed that the truth becomes buried. That is what happened with many of the Warren’s cases. After they became movies, the movies were so exaggerated to entertain audiences, that people stopped believing it really happened, some even having a strong disbelief in the paranormal. The harm this caused was endless. 

The creation of misinformation has altered people's beliefs, perceptions, and even attitudes toward certain subjects, ultimately changing their personalities as a whole. A student attending Westchester Community College wrote, “Warren, along with her late husband, Ed, are audacious and unabashed frauds, capitalizing on the completely meritless superstition which is all too common in modern society.” It was clear here that she did not do her own research. The Warrens didn’t actually make any money during investigations because they didn’t charge. It wasn’t until they wrote books and the movies came out that they made any money. With that being said, the student made an attempt to discredit the Warrens, and to the people who believed her, she may have succeeded. False information in any setting can be detrimental to the individuals it's about, and to the audience who's learning it. People talk and rumors spread, but the real issue that stems from it all is writing based on a true story or speaking as if the events actually happened in an article that can cause real damage. This is why we as consumers should always fact-check something we hear before continuing to speak on something before we have knowledge on the topic they researched from multiple sources. Without fact-checking, once something is out, it will only continuously be spread until someone publicly debunks it and even then sometimes it is still seen as the truth leaving the real truth to be lost for eternity.