Chris McKinnell and The Warren Files

Chris McKinnell and The Warren Files Chris is the director of the Warren Legacy Foundation for Paranormal Research. He began working with the Warrens in 1980, at the age of 16.

The Foundation carries on the good work of Chris's grandparents, Ed and Lorraine Warren: helping people around the world who are suffering with the paranormal. Chris McKinnell is the director of the Warren Legacy Foundation for Paranormal Research, which carries on the work of his grandparents, Ed and Lorraine Warren. After his first incredibly intense night of poltergeist activity, two demons walking in the room, pounding that shook the walls, levitation, growling, upside down crosses, and physical assault of the woman of the house by an entity, Chris never looked back. He has assisted or led investigations on some of the Warrens most famous cases, as well as several thousands of others. He now leads an international network of paranormal researchers that continue the Warren's mission all over the world.

I wrote this for someone I care about deeply, on her birthday. She's young, and she's been through more than she should ...
10/09/2026

I wrote this for someone I care about deeply, on her birthday. She's young, and she's been through more than she should have had to. But when I read it back, I realized these are just the things I had to learn the hard way myself, and I wish someone had handed them to me sooner.

So here they are, in case one of them is the one you needed today.

1. Be kind to yourself. You are the only person you will go through your entire life with. You should be your own best friend.
2. Forgive yourself when you make mistakes. That is just an opportunity to learn something you didn't know before.
3. Hold on to the people who lift you up, and be willing to let go of the ones pulling you down. The connections you make in life don't have to be permanent. Keep the ones that help you grow.
4. Believe in yourself as much as the people who love you already do. You can accomplish more than you think.
5. Never put limitations on yourself. The moment you do, you build the wall you'll spend your life trying to get past. Believe that you are limitless, and you are.
6. Selfless love, love that asks nothing back, is the highest form of love in the universe. Love will cost you. Almost all of it ends in loss, because one of us always goes first, and that grief is simply the price of having loved at all. It is worth paying. But that is very different from being made to suffer by the person you love. If someone cannot appreciate what you are giving them, let them go, and let them go with love. Love costs. It was never meant to wound you.
7. Sometimes fear is a reasonable response to something genuinely dangerous. Other times it is only doubt wearing danger's face. Learn to tell the difference. Fear is natural, but it can be overcome once you understand what you are actually facing.
8. Know what is right and proper in your life, and live by that code. Not to be rigid, not to judge, and not to hold anyone else to that same standard. But because every time you act against what you know is right, you sacrifice a little of who you are, and a little of your belief in yourself. Keep your compassion and your understanding soft, and hold yourself to your own high standard. Living with integrity gives you the strength you need to meet your challenges and accomplish what you set out to do.
9. Death is a necessary part of life, not separate from it. It teaches us to love while we still can. It gives life its urgency, and reminds us to tell the people who matter how we feel, before we run out of time.

I spent a lot of years judging myself too harshly and punishing myself for not measuring up to the expectations of others, instead of believing in my own path. If you are doing that right now, I would start with number one.

07/09/2026

Today, Monday, September 7, would have been my grandfather’s hundredth birthday. Ed Warren, though that wasn’t the name he was born with. He came into the world as Edward Warren Miney, and only later, when the work became public, did he become the Ed Warren most people know.

I think about him as a boy more than you would think. We were both touched by the paranormal at a young age and it shaped the rest of our lives.

There was an elderly landlady in the building where his family lived, a strict woman, particular about evening curfews, not someone he especially liked. She died, and not long after, he was climbing the stairs one night and found her standing in the hallway, just watching him. He ran and told his parents. They didn’t believe in ghosts, and they dismissed his story as pure imagination.

He might have let it go at that, except a second visitor came not long after. He was lying in bed when a middle aged woman sat down beside him. She wasn’t frightening. She talked to him, kindly, and told him her name was Babe. In the morning he described her to his father, expecting to be brushed off again. Instead his father went quiet, because he knew exactly who she was. His own sister, dead before my grandfather was ever born.

I don’t think a boy comes back from a night like that unchanged. That was the beginning of everything he spent his life chasing.

His older brother Frank enlisted in World War II first, and watching Frank go was part of what pulled at him. He tried to follow at sixteen, marched himself down to the Marine recruiting office, and got about as far as you’d expect before his father found out and hauled him back out the door. He waited a year. At seventeen he joined the Navy, and this time no one could stop him.

He served in two theaters, the Atlantic and later the Pacific, and somewhere in that his ship collided with a tanker. In the chaos afterward he went into the fiery water after a fellow sailor and pulled him out alive. He was still recovering from that when he married my grandmother, the woman he’d loved enough to leave behind to serve his country in the first place. Not long after, while stationed in Japan, half a world from home, he learned that my mother Judy had been born, on January 11, 1946. He didn’t hold his own daughter until the war finally let him come home.

When he did, he used the GI Bill for art school, and for the rest of his life two things held onto him and never let go, art and the paranormal, in whatever order the day demanded. He was stubborn as a fence post. He was also the kind of man who’d drop everything, any hour of the night, if you called him and said you needed help.

We carry that forward now, his memory and my grandmother’s both, through the work we do in his name at the Warren Legacy Foundation for Paranormal Research.

Happy hundredth birthday, Gramps.

05/09/2026

As I prepare to move to Albania on September 15, and then on to my lecture tour in England and Ireland, I wanted to take a moment to thank all of the wonderful people in Latin America who opened their homes and their hearts to me over the past six years. 🇲🇽🇧🇷🇵🇾🇨🇴🇨🇷🇵🇪

Please forgive my poor Spanish. The message came from the heart. 😊

Mientras me preparo para mudarme a Albania el 15 de septiembre, y luego continuar con mi gira de conferencias en Inglaterra e Irlanda, quería tomar un momento para agradecer a toda la gente maravillosa de América Latina que me abrió las puertas de su hogar y de su corazón durante los últimos seis años. 🇲🇽🇧🇷🇵🇾🇨🇴🇨🇷🇵🇪

Perdonen mi español, no es muy bueno. El mensaje viene del corazón. 😊

Somewhere on the haunted coast of Britain there’s a town where the sea brought mysteries and horrors.Ancient stones on t...
03/09/2026

Somewhere on the haunted coast of Britain there’s a town where the sea brought mysteries and horrors.

Ancient stones on the headland. Sailors’ legends. Strange sightings that were never quite explained.

And a writer who came here on holiday, read something in the local library, and left with a story that has terrified and captivated people for over a hundred years.

I’ll be there on 30 October.

Will you join me?

01/09/2026

The Conjuring. Annabelle. The Nun. I was in those houses. I know what the films left out.

Sixteen years old on my first case with my grandparents, Ed and Lorraine Warren. Ten thousand cases since, across six continents. And I still can’t tell one of these stories without telling you what it means.

Some of what I’ve encountered was somebody who never left. Some of it was never human.

You’ll walk out with more courage than you walked in with.

Ireland and Great Britain. October and November. All four Sharon Rectory nights already sold out.

chrismckinnell.com/tour

30/08/2026

👻 🎉 WIN 2 FREE TICKETS TO SEE CHRIS McKINNELL FOR OUR SOLD OUT EVENT AT SHARON RECTORY! 🎉👻

We're giving ONE lucky winner the chance to win 2 FREE tickets to join Chris McKinnell at Sharon Rectory on Saturday 17th October 2026 as part of his first-ever Irish Book Tour!

👻 How to Enter:
✅ Like this original post
✅ Comment below and tag a friend
✅ Share this post
✅ Follow Chris McKinnell on Facebook
✅ Follow Sharon Rectory on Facebook

Please complete all of the above steps to ensure your entry is valid.

📅 Competition closes: Wednesday 30th September 2026
🏆 Winner announced: Thursday 1st October 2026

Important Information:
• This competition is open to entrants aged 16 years and over only.
• The winner will receive 2 tickets for the Saturday 17th October 2026 event at Sharon Rectory only.
• The prize is non-transferable, cannot be exchanged for cash, and cannot be moved to another event date.
• The winner will be contacted only through the official Sharon Rectory page. Please be aware of fake accounts or scam messages. We will never ask for payment or bank details.
• If the winner does not respond within a reasonable timeframe, another winner may be selected.

Good luck everyone! 🍀 We can't wait to welcome one lucky winner for what promises to be an unforgettable evening at Sharon Rectory. 👻🕯️

Tickets went live minutes ago and people are already booking.Newcastle, 9 October. London, 11 October. Manchester, 2 Nov...
29/08/2026

Tickets went live minutes ago and people are already booking.

Newcastle, 9 October. London, 11 October. Manchester, 2 November. Plus eight nights across Ireland through October. All four Sharon Rectory nights are already sold out!

The true stories behind the films, told by someone who was in those houses, working those cases alongside my grandparents. Not the Hollywood version. What actually happened.

Rooms are small. When they’re gone, they’re gone.

chrismckinnell.com/tour

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Claudy, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Claudy
BT47 4

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