Chris McKinnell and the Warren Legacy

**Chris McKinnell** (0:02)
Astonishing Legends Network.

**Scott Philbrook** (0:05)
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**Forrest Burgess** (0:49)
For the first 16 years of his life, Chris McKinnell couldn't sleep without a light on. It started when he was three, locked inside his grandparents' now infamous museum of haunted objects as the sun went down.
Masks, dolls, and a snarling tiger skin, everything in it pulled from somewhere it had frightened someone so badly they wanted it out of their lives. He screamed until someone let him out.
After that, the dark was never empty for him. He heard whispering in it. Things moved at the edges of it. His mother took him to social workers and psychologists. But for him, all of those visits couldn't quell the sense that he was almost never truly alone. The summer he turned 16, his grandfather called and told him to get in the car. A husband and wife in Lee, Massachusetts, wouldn't go back into their house and needed help. When they got there, the walls were being struck from the inside, creating a loud hammering sound in groups of threes. Chris' grandfather heard the pattern and named it on the spot. Three knocks, he said, was an insult to the Trinity, the mark of something demonic. Chris had no reason to doubt him. They sat him in the dark of the master bedroom with crucifix and a telephone, while live on an overnight radio call-in show, while the adults tried to carry blessed incense up a staircase that kept being snuffed out before it got to the top. At three in the morning, he watched two hulking black shapes come down those stairs. He also watched three claw marks open across a woman's face and bleed in real time. A pot of incense flew the length of the house and passed his head, smashing into a window behind him but without breaking the glass. The front door locked itself, the chair he'd been sitting in crossed the floor at him, and then the door swung open on its own and let them out.
He went home that night and slept in the dark for the first time he could remember. He'd just been through something terrifying, and after that, he was never afraid of it again.
The voice at the top of the show was his grandfather, Ed Warren. Ed and his wife, Lorraine, built two of the most recognizable names in American ghost hunting, and to the end, they believed the dark was full of things that could be understood. Angels on one side, demons on the other.
Chris grew up inside that certainty, and he spent 40 years since coming to believe the thing that Ed called a demon was something of a different shape entirely. He stopped being afraid of the dark in that house in Lee. Somewhere in the decades after, he stopped asking whether any of it was real, because by then, he knew.
What he still doesn't have, after a lifetime of chasing it, is the full answer to what it might be. But tonight, he takes us as far into that question as he's gotten.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:09)
Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess.

**Forrest Burgess** (4:13)
Liz showed us what appeared to be two claws that had pierced her scalp while she was doing laundry in the basement. I brought them back to the University of Connecticut zoology department and was astounded by what came back. They were the two halves of the first premolar of a one to two year old domesticated pig broken in half.
The roots looked like claws. They had been pushed into the poor woman's head. From The Warren Legacy by Chris McKinnell.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:37)
Join us tonight for a lively discussion with Ed and Lorraine Warren's grandson, Chris McKinnell.

**Forrest Burgess** (4:48)
And we're back.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:49)
That we are, folks, and it's good to be back. Our guest tonight carries one of the most famous names in American paranormal history, though it isn't the name on his business card. Chris McKinnell is the grandson of Ed and Lorraine Warren. And if you spent any time at all in this field, you know what that means. He grew up inside it.
His grandfather brought him on to his first case as a teenager, and he spent the four decades after that in rooms most of us only ever hear about secondhand.

**Forrest Burgess** (5:13)
Which is all why we're very excited to have him on, because this may not be the conversation you're bracing for. Chris has told the stories behind the famous cases, the ones that became the movies, and many times in a lot of other places, though, and we'll point you to some of those in the show notes, if you're curious. But that's not the ground we're spending our night on tonight. What we're after is the part of those conversations that tend to get skipped.