Guarding a legacy is easy when the legacy is simple. The Warrens’ is anything but: an occult museum in a quiet Connecticut neighborhood, a shelf of world-famous case files, and a film empire that turned two investigators into horror royalty. Since her parents’ era ended, that guardianship has belonged to Judy Spera and her husband Tony — and in 2025 it faced its biggest test yet.
The Speras co-direct the New England Society for Psychic Research, the organization Ed and Lorraine Warren founded in 1952. As museum curator in all but title — Tony is still listed as the museum’s curator on the NESPR website — they oversee the collection the Conjuring films made famous, from the Annabelle doll to the Perron family files.
(Montclair Film / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0))When Fame Outgrew the Neighborhood
Success created the crisis. The Conjuring films turned the Warrens’ Occult Museum, housed in their old home in Monroe, Connecticut, into a massive tourist attraction in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Visitors brought noise, litter and property destruction, and the museum closed in 2019, citing local zoning violations. A cultural phenomenon had simply outgrown its street.
By 2025, the economics had become impossible too. In late August 2025, the Speras posted a statement on the NESPR Facebook page explaining that they could no longer afford to maintain their own home and the Warrens’, and that they had not taken the decision to sell “lightly.” “We wanted to sell for a while, but were in a quandary over the artifacts,” they wrote. “What would we do with the museum artifacts? We vowed that we would never sell them, nor just throw them into some storage unit, or worse, destroy them or throw them away.”
Matt Rife, Elton Castee and the Five-Year Guardianship
The answer arrived in August 2025, when comedian Matt Rife announced that he and YouTube creator Elton Castee had purchased the Warrens’ Connecticut home and museum and were “the legal guardian for at least the next 5 years, of the entire haunted collection including THE ANNABELLE DOLL.” Both Rife and Tony have since clarified the arrangement: Rife and Castee are temporary guardians only. In Tony’s words, the pair are leasing the artifacts “for a fee” and at “NO TIME will they own” them. When the five years end, the lease can be renegotiated or the artifacts return to the Speras.
Crucially, the handover came with supervision. The NESPR team oversees museum operations to “ensure that the artifacts are safe and treated with respect,” and Tony remains curator. Rife and Castee now host overnight stays at the Warren House and Museum, and in August 2026 they opened a temporary museum — the Haunted Warren Museum in Salem, Massachusetts — with a permanent location planned. The legacy, in other words, is touring; the ownership is not.
(Joella Marano / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))The Faces That Keep the Story Alive
None of this guardianship would be necessary without the films. Judy and Tony walked the red carpet at the Annabelle Comes Home premiere at the Regency Village Theatre in Los Angeles on June 20, 2019, alongside Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga — the screen Ed and Lorraine. The franchise has spawned 11 films so far, and Judy herself is a character in 2025’s The Conjuring: Last Rites, portrayed by Mia Tomlinson in a role the actress said she felt passionate about playing.
Tomlinson described the challenge to Entertainment Weekly in September 2025: “I’m quite an expressive and bubbly person, so it’s really interesting for me to play somebody that’s got to keep that all inside and force it to come out.” Each sequel renews the stream Judy once described — her belief that “a person is not really dead until the ripples in the stream stop,” and that her parents endure because “people are still interested in everything they’re doing.”
(Jaime Aquino / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0))The Work That Continues Behind the Headlines
The museum deal is only the visible half of the Speras’ stewardship. NESPR itself still operates as the Warrens designed it in 1952: the team “carries on the exploration and investigation of paranormal and demonic entities as initiated by Ed & Lorraine Warren,” conducting investigations and appearing for interviews and panels at conventions. Its website remains the public archive of the enterprise — archival footage of the couple’s interviews alongside case files for the investigations that made them famous, from the Annabelle doll and the Amityville house to the Perron family, whose story opened the Conjuring franchise in 2013.
The division of labor inside that work is deliberate. Tony, a former police officer who first met Judy in the late 1970s and has now been married to her for more than four decades, largely leads the organization and remains the museum’s curator. Judy, NESPR notes, “does possess psychic ability” but has kept it deliberately undeveloped — she “serves as our voice of reason, offering useful insights into methods and techniques” rather than chasing phenomena herself. It is the same role she played in the Travel Channel’s 2020 documentary Devil’s Road, where she became a central figure to give the firsthand account of her parents she felt she owed her mother. Guardianship, in the Spera model, is as much about what is said — and who is allowed to say it — as about where the artifacts sleep at night.
What Guardianship Really Means
Strip away the headlines and the Speras’ model is conservative in the truest sense: nothing sold, nothing destroyed, nothing handed over without oversight. The house can change hands, the museum can travel to Salem, fans can sleep over — but the collection remains on loan from the family that built it. For a daughter who once could not sleep in that house, it is a remarkable final arrangement: the legacy protected, at exactly the distance she always needed.