The Conjuring (2013) ending explained in short: Ed Warren performs an exorcism on the possessed Carolyn Perron without a priest present and without the Vatican’s approval, which arrives only after the fact. What actually breaks the possession isn’t his Latin. It’s Lorraine Warren reminding Carolyn of a specific family memory — a photograph from a day at the beach — while the youngest daughter, April, is found buried under the farmhouse kitchen.
I spent three hours once with a Catholic priest in a small town in interior Texas, a man who spent his days attending to people who had no access to a psychologist or a psychiatrist because none existed within a hundred miles of where they lived. He wasn’t claiming faith replaced medicine. He was being pragmatic about it: he was what was available.
What stayed with me wasn’t his certainty. It was his honesty about the cases where he’d failed, and his clarity about exactly what he could and couldn’t do for someone in a room with nowhere else to turn. I think about that interview every time a horror film stages a priest, or a church, or the word “faith” as something a story can lean on for free.
The Conjuring leans on it harder than almost any studio horror film of its decade, and the Conjuring (2013) ending explained here is, underneath the theatrics, a story about the gap between what an institution is willing to authorize and what a person in a burning building actually has time to wait for.
What Happens at the End of The Conjuring (2013)
Here is what happens, cleanly, because the plot mechanics of this climax get mangled in casual recap more than almost any other scene in the franchise. Carolyn Perron, fully possessed by Bathsheba Sherman’s spirit, drives off with two of her five daughters, Christine and April, back to the farmhouse the family has already fled.
Ed and Lorraine Warren race there, along with Roger, their assistant Drew, and a local police officer named Brad Hamilton — the film is quietly insistent, in a detail worth noticing on its own, that nobody in this rescue acts alone.
April goes missing inside the house during the chaos and is found buried in a hole under the kitchen floor — the exact spot, the film has already told us, where a ghost boy named Rory hides when he’s afraid, a detail planted earlier in the film that pays off with more precision than most horror climaxes bother to earn.
Ed decides, on the spot, with no ordained priest available and the Vatican’s approval still pending somewhere in the Boston Archdiocese’s paperwork, that he is going to perform the exorcism himself. Lorraine, over Ed’s objection, stays. What breaks Carolyn free of the possession is not a Latin phrase, not holy water, not the sign of the cross, though the film stages plenty of all three.
It’s Lorraine reminding her, specifically, of a photograph taken on a family drive along the coast — a day, established earlier in the film in a quiet scene between the two women, that Carolyn had already told Lorraine “meant so much to me.” Lorraine tells her she’ll be leaving that behind. Carolyn comes back. The Vatican’s approval arrives afterward, which is the blackest joke the film tells and the one it never quite acknowledges as a joke.
It’s worth crediting the daughters for how much of that rescue they actually engineer themselves, because the marketing around this franchise tends to flatten the Perron girls into interchangeable screaming props. It’s Nancy and Andrea, back at the motel, who piece together that something is badly wrong when Carolyn drives off with Christine and April and won’t explain where she’s going.
It’s that phone call to Roger — Carolyn took off, she smelled like rotting meat, nobody knows where they went — that sets the entire rescue in motion before Ed or Lorraine are anywhere near the house.
The film moves past it quickly, though the detail holds up if you check the actual sequence of events rather than remembering it as an adult-only climax: two teenage girls, alone, correctly identifying the moment their mother stopped being their mother, and getting an adult moving in time to matter. Whatever this ending believes about who’s equipped to notice a real emergency, it isn’t limited to the people with religious training.
Why Ed Warren Performs the Exorcism Without Vatican Approval
I want to sit with the mechanics of that approval plot for a minute before going further into what this Conjuring (2013) ending explained piece is really arguing, because I went back to Chad Hayes and Carey Hayes’s screenplay to check my own memory of the church subplot against the page, and what I found changes how I read the whole third act.
The draft I have staged the church’s refusal as an outright standoff — Ed storming into an archbishop’s office, shouting that the Vatican should be told “no one gives a shit,” a Father Jordon quietly urging him toward vigilantism against explicit church policy. That version reads like institutional villainy. It’s clean, it’s satisfying, and it isn’t what got filmed.
The released film’s version is smaller and, I think, considerably smarter: a priest named Father Gordon, apologetic and specific, explaining that the children aren’t baptized, the family isn’t Catholic, and the approval has to come from Rome — and then, without being pushed into a corner, offering to push it through himself. Nobody in that scene is a villain.
The church isn’t withholding help out of institutional cowardice. It’s moving at the speed institutions move, which is not the speed a family locked in a farmhouse with a possessed mother requires. That’s a more honest indictment than the screenplay’s shouting match, because it never requires a villain. Bureaucracy can be entirely well-intentioned and still move too slowly to matter.
The Conjuring 2013 Ending in the Screenplay Was Completely Different
That draft’s climax diverges from the finished film in a second way worth naming plainly, because it tells you something about what Wan and the Hayes brothers decided this story actually needed. In the screenplay, the endangered child is Andrea, not April. Roger holds a rifle on his possessed wife at point-blank range while she chokes his daughter.
The exorcism resolves through a Latin incantation and physical restraint — four adults pinning Carolyn to a floor until, in the stage direction’s own words, “like someone pulled the plug,” she goes limp. The film ends on Ed handing Lorraine a box of twelve baby chicks. None of that is what was shot. There’s no rifle in the released film. There’s no chicks.
The weapon Carolyn wields in the finished version is a pair of scissors, wrestled away in a scramble rather than staged as an armed standoff between father and mother. And the thing that actually ends the possession isn’t restraint or incantation at all — it’s memory, delivered by the one character in the film whose entire skill set is described, throughout the film, as seeing what’s already there in someone else’s life.
Somewhere in development, somebody looked at a script that resolved its climax through a gun and a father’s impossible choice and decided the more interesting ending was a woman using empathy as a weapon instead. I don’t think that’s a small rewrite. I think it’s the whole film deciding, at the last possible moment, what it actually believes saves people.
What the Conjuring 2013 Ending Explained Gets Wrong About Bathsheba’s Real Name
The screenplay draft gets Bathsheba’s own genealogy wrong in a way the finished film quietly corrected, and it’s worth noting because the correction says something about how seriously the production took its own mythology. In the draft, Lorraine identifies Bathsheba as a direct descendant of Bridget Bishop, the first woman hanged during the Salem trials.
In the released film, the line changes: Bathsheba is instead described as related to Mary Towne Estey, a different real Salem victim entirely, hanged in the same panic but in a separate family. Both women existed. Both were executed on the same manufactured hysteria. Neither one has any documented genealogical connection to a farmhouse in Harrisville, Rhode Island, or to a woman who may not have committed any of the acts attributed to her at all.
The swap from Bishop to Estey doesn’t fix that deeper problem. It’s a lateral move between two women who were both real, both killed, and both being used, three hundred years later, as ancestral scaffolding for a monster neither of them resembles. Getting the specific name right while the entire underlying claim stays invented is the kind of correction that looks like diligence and functions as something closer to its opposite.
How Lorraine Warren Actually Breaks the Possession
What the film believes actually saves people, according to the mechanism it builds and then triggers at the climax, is specific enough to be worth taking seriously rather than treating as vague uplift. The entity doesn’t just possess mothers. It possesses them to kill their children.
Bathsheba’s own infant sacrifice, ninety years and one Walker-family drowning earlier in the property’s history, is the pattern the film keeps repeating with mounting explicitness, each iteration inherited by whichever woman happens to be raising children on that particular acreage. Every mother this land has claimed has been turned into an instrument against the thing she’s supposed to protect.
What Lorraine does in that farmhouse isn’t a countercharm against Bathsheba specifically. It’s a targeted refusal of the entity’s actual mechanism: if the thing works by converting a mother’s love into a weapon against her child, the thing that breaks it has to be love reasserting itself as exactly what it was before the entity got hold of it.
Not generic uplift, not a soundtrack swell standing in for meaning. A specific afternoon, a specific photograph, a specific sentence Carolyn had said out loud in an earlier, quieter scene about what that day had meant to her. Lorraine isn’t casting a spell. She’s reminding a woman of the actual content of her own life, loudly enough to be heard over whatever’s currently occupying it.
Vera Farmiga’s choices in that scene are worth isolating from Ed’s, because the film gives the two Warrens almost opposite tools and Farmiga plays hers with a restraint that could easily have been overplayed into something showier. She delivers the memory the way you’d remind someone of something true and slightly painful — flat, close, pitched below the wind and the shattering glass around her instead of raised to compete with it.
It plays less like a performance and more like a private, urgent fact she needs Carolyn to hear before it’s too late to land. Ed’s Latin is performance in the technical sense — formal language, formal gesture, a rite with centuries of precedent behind every syllable. Lorraine’s line has no precedent behind it at all. It only works because it’s true, and because she’s the one person in the room who was actually paying enough attention, three scenes earlier, to have it available when it mattered.
What the Conjuring 2013 Ending Explained Really Means
I’ll admit this is the part of the film I find myself least able to dismiss, and it complicates the position I usually hold about this franchise. I’ve written elsewhere on this site about the Warren apparatus as a machine for converting real grief into inventory — a cabinet of trophies standing in for people who never got a say in how their worst days would be marketed. That critique still holds.
But the specific mechanism the film chooses for its climax is not cynical. It’s the one true thing sitting inside a film otherwise built out of borrowed trauma and rearranged history: that a person mid-collapse is more reachable through the specific, concrete evidence of what they’ve loved than through any generalized appeal to faith, God, or an institution’s authority. Ed’s Latin does something in this scene. Lorraine’s photograph does more. The film knows the difference, even if the franchise built on top of it mostly forgets.
It’s also worth admitting where this cuts against something I argued in my review of this film. I called the exorcism sequence the film’s genuine failure — the moment Wan gives Bathsheba a face, a motivation, a history, and in doing so systematizes what the first ninety minutes had been wise enough to leave undefined. I stand by that as a visual and structural critique.
The sequence does flatten the ambiguity the rest of the film had earned through implication alone. But visual failure and emotional failure are separate measurements, and the Conjuring (2013) ending explained on its own terms, judged specifically as a resolution to what this family has been put through, earns something the imagery around it doesn’t. The mythology gets worse the moment Bathsheba becomes visible and nameable. The people trying to save Carolyn get more honest at exactly the same moment. Both things are true about the same eleven minutes of footage.
There’s a small exchange in the immediate aftermath worth noting for how deliberately unglamorous it is, given everything that’s just happened. Ed and Lorraine, both bloodied, both wrecked, trade a couple of lines that amount to nothing more than each insisting the other one is the reason it worked — “you did good,” “no, you did” — before Ed asks, almost offhand, if she still feels like quitting.
It’s the kind of exchange most horror films would cut for pacing, and its presence here is the clearest evidence in the entire climax that the film understands its own emotional center correctly, even if its mythology doesn’t earn the same clarity. The partnership, not the ritual, is what the scene actually wants you to walk away believing in.
Which brings me back to the Vatican, and to why that closing exchange is the angriest joke in the movie whether or not the film intends it that way. “The Vatican approved the exorcism. Heh. Nice timing.” Ed says it almost fondly, a rueful little laugh at bureaucratic irony. I don’t hear fondness in it.
I hear the entire structure of institutional authority arriving exactly one crisis too late to have mattered, and being narrated as a charming footnote instead of what it actually is: proof that the system built to handle exactly this situation could not move at the speed the situation required, and that the people who needed help got it only because two individuals were willing to act without the institution’s cover.
That’s not a small detail to play for a laugh. It’s the same shape as a source once telling me, on a story that never made print, that the truth doesn’t matter if nobody’s willing to publish it in time to matter — and it’s the same shape as the priest in that Texas town, doing what he could within limits he was honest about, because waiting for the resources that should have existed wasn’t a decision he had the luxury of making for the people already in his office.
Is The Conjuring (2013) Ending Based on a True Story?
The real story underneath all of this, and I’ve written the fuller account of the Perron family haunting elsewhere on this site, complicates the ending’s comfort even further. Andrea Perron, the eldest daughter and the family’s own historian, has said publicly and repeatedly that the film is “about 95% fiction and 5% truth.”
There is no documented account, in Andrea Perron’s own three-volume record of her family’s nine years in that house, of an unauthorized exorcism performed by Ed Warren at the climax of their ordeal. Bathsheba Sherman, the film’s antagonist, was a real woman who died of a stroke in her seventies with no trial, no accusation of witchcraft, and no documented connection to the Perron property at all.
The identification was Lorraine Warren’s own interpretation, built from local folklore Carolyn Perron had relayed to her, and it calcified into fact because Lorraine’s word carried institutional weight by the time it reached the page. The exorcism climax the film stages as its emotional and spiritual resolution, the sequence this piece has just spent several sections arguing is the one genuinely earned idea in the entire picture, appears to be almost entirely invented.
It’s grafted onto a woman who never consented to being cast as a Satanist, in service of a resolution the real family never experienced. The craft of that ending is real. The people it borrowed its authority from never got a vote.
And then the film closes on Judy Warren, the couple’s actual daughter, locked in a dark room with a doll that isn’t supposed to be dangerous, while whatever escaped the Perron farmhouse quietly relocates to the one place in the film explicitly built to contain things like it. Earlier in the film, Ed gives a tour of that room to a Bible-study group with a line that plays as a throwaway at the time and reads as a thesis statement in hindsight.
Everything in the room is either haunted, cursed, or has been used in some kind of ritualistic practice, and nothing in it is a toy — not even the toy monkey. It’s a good scare when it pays off on Judy, competently staged, and it’s also the moment the film stops being about the Perrons at all and starts being about inventory.
Not the farmhouse. Not Carolyn, restored to her family, weeping with relief in a scene the film is entirely sincere about. The last image is a locked room full of trophies, a line about how nothing in it is a toy delivered as a warning nobody in that room is prepared to actually heed, and the promise, offered as a hook rather than a warning, that there will be more.
I keep returning to that priest, the one thing in this piece that isn’t borrowed from a script or a case file. He never once tried to make his authority look bigger than it was. He knew exactly where his help stopped and told you plainly when a case had gone past what he could offer.
The Conjuring (2013) ending explained at its best gestures at that same honesty — a man acting without official sanction because the people in front of him couldn’t wait for the paperwork, a woman reaching someone through the specific, undramatic evidence of what she’d actually loved rather than through incantation. That’s a true thing, staged inside a film that borrowed the rest of its authority from a woman who never asked to be Bathsheba Sherman.
Both of those facts are sitting in the same eleven minutes of film, refusing to cancel each other out. For the craft decisions across the rest of the film, the site’s Conjuring (2013) review and hidden details breakdown cover that ground. I don’t think the movie earns the museum it ends on. I think it earns the photograph.
The Conjuring (2013) Ending Explained: Frequently Asked Questions
The Conjuring (2013) Ending Explained in One Paragraph
Carolyn Perron, possessed by Bathsheba Sherman’s spirit, takes two daughters back to the farmhouse. Ed Warren performs an exorcism without a priest or Vatican approval, which arrives only afterward. April is found buried under the kitchen. Lorraine breaks the possession by reminding Carolyn of a specific family memory — a beach photograph — restoring her sense of who she actually is, rather than through ritual alone.
Did the Real Ed Warren Perform an Exorcism at the Perron House?
There’s no documentation of it in Andrea Perron’s own three-volume account of her family’s nine years in the house. Andrea has said publicly the film is “about 95% fiction and 5% truth.” The exorcism climax appears to be a dramatic invention built for the film rather than a documented event from the actual Perron case.
How Is The Conjuring (2013) Ending Different From the Screenplay?
The screenplay draft stages a very different climax: Roger holds a rifle on Carolyn while she strangles Andrea, the exorcism resolves through Latin and physical restraint, and the film closes on Ed gifting Lorraine twelve baby chicks. None of that was filmed. The released version replaces the gun with a memory Lorraine uses to reach Carolyn directly.
Was Bathsheba Sherman a Real Witch?
No. The real Bathsheba Sherman died of a stroke in her seventies with no trial, no witchcraft accusation, and no documented connection to the Perron farmhouse. The “witch” identification came from Lorraine Warren’s own interpretation of local folklore Carolyn Perron relayed to her during the investigation.