Conjuring Demons: Every Demon and Spirit, Named and Explained

The Conjuring demons are the evil entities at the center of each haunting in The Conjuring Universe, though the films call only some of them demons and treat the rest as vengeful spirits or cursed objects. The franchise runs to four main films and six spin-offs (the full run is on the conjuring movies hub), and each film pairs a case from the Warrens' files with one specific entity.

The most central is Valak, followed by the demon of the Annabelle doll, the witch Bathsheba, the voice that hid Valak in Enfield, La Llorona and the Crooked Man. The later films add a mirror demon, an occultist's curse and a houseful of artifacts that wake up at once. Every case is presented as drawn from the files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, so the entries report what the films and the Warrens claimed, and none of it is offered as proof of the paranormal.

If you want the films in sequence first, the conjuring movies in order page sets out both orders, and the conjuring timeline places each entity in its year. The entries that follow reveal plot, so each is flagged as a spoiler.

Valak is the demon that takes the form of a nun, and it is the most frequent evil in the universe, appearing in The Conjuring 2, The Nun (2018) and The Nun II, with Bonnie Aarons in the role each time. In The Conjuring 2 (2016), directed by James Wan, Lorraine Warren sees a demonic nun during a séance at the Amityville house, along with a vision of Ed being impaled. In Enfield she later learns the demon's name, Valak, and uses it to order the creature back to Hell, which frees Janet Hodgson.

The Nun (2018), directed by Corin Hardy, goes back to 1952 and the Romanian abbey of St. Carta. There Father Burke and Sister Irene learn that Valak works through a gateway in the catacombs, left open by a duke's occult rituals long ago. Irene seals it by spitting the blood of Christ into the demon's face, but Frenchie, the farmhand who guided them, was already marked. The film then cuts to the 1970s and shows that his exorcism is the one Ed describes in his lecture in The Conjuring (2013). Frenchie's real name is Maurice.

The post credit scene of Annabelle: Creation (2017), directed by David F. Sandberg, shows Valak at the same abbey in 1952, a tease for The Nun (2018). The Nun II (2023), directed by Michael Chaves, moves to Tarascon, France, in 1956, where Valak hunts descendants of St. Lucy to claim her relic. Irene turns out to be one, so the demon cannot burn her, and she and Sister Debra banish it with the Words of Institution as the wine becomes the blood of Christ. The full profile is on valak the nun.

The Annabelle demon is an unnamed demon that uses a porcelain doll as its link to the living world, which is why the doll sits locked in a glass case in the Warrens' artifact room. The Conjuring (2013), directed by James Wan, opens in 1968 with the Warrens concluding that the doll is only a tool for a demon, not a haunted object in its own right.

Annabelle (2014), directed by John R. Leonetti, shows how it got there. Two cultists try to summon a demon in 1967 Santa Monica, and Annabelle Higgins dies in the Forms' nursery clutching the doll. The demon then follows Mia Form's family, wanting a soul, and Evelyn gives hers in Mia's place, atoning for the death of her own daughter. Annabelle: Creation (2017) reaches back further. The dollmaker Samuel Mullins and his wife Esther begged to see their daughter Bee again, and something answered. The demon appears to Janice in Bee's shape, possesses her, and she later takes the name Annabelle. Joseph Bishara, who also composed the score for The Conjuring (2013), is credited as the Annabelle Demon.

Annabelle Comes Home (2019), directed by Gary Dauberman, tests the case itself. Daniela Rios opens it, and the doll's demon wakes other cursed items in the room and again needs a soul. Judy Warren and her babysitter Mary Ellen get the doll back inside and lock it. The doll has its own page at annabelle doll.

Bathsheba Sherman is the entity the Warrens blame for the Perron haunting, and she is the clearest example in the saga of a spirit who is not called a demon. The Conjuring (2013) says she once owned the Rhode Island farmhouse, was accused of witchcraft, and is said to have sacrificed her infant before taking her own life and cursing the land. That history comes from the Warrens' research as the film dramatizes it, and no independent record is offered on screen.

What makes her frightening is how she works. She does not show up as a monster so much as a pressure inside the house: clocks stopping at the same hour, bruises on Carolyn Perron, a boarded up cellar. Then she moves into Carolyn herself and aims her at her own daughters. The climax is an exorcism with Carolyn tied to a chair, and it is Lorraine Warren, not a prayer, who turns it by recalling a happy family memory to her. Ed can then finish the rite.

The film never gives Bathsheba a rank, a true name or a power beyond the curse, so she reads as a haunting rather than an opponent. A music box from the house goes home with the Warrens afterward.

Bill Wilkins (sometimes misspelled Bill Watkins) is the gruff old man's voice that comes out of Janet Hodgson in The Conjuring 2, and the film's late twist is that he is a disguise for Valak. He is credited to Bob Adrian. After Janet plays with a Ouija board in the Enfield council house, she sleepwalks and begins talking as a man who says he died in that very house.

The disguise works because it gives the family and the press a ghost they can understand. Anita Gregory then produces footage of Janet faking some of the disturbances, the case is publicly discredited, and the Warrens walk away. Only afterward does Lorraine see that the old man is a mask for the nun, a stronger demon that has been hiding from her and dulling her gifts.

It could be argued that this is the cleverest rule in the series: a demon that profits from being doubted. A skeptic's explanation, a child faking, does half of its work for it. Bill Wilkins is the only entity on this list whose whole job is to be mistaken for something smaller.

La Llorona is a weeping spirit of Mexican folklore, played by Marisol Ramirez, and The Curse of La Llorona (2019), directed by Michael Chaves, drops her into the Conjuring universe without ever calling her a demon. The prologue is set in 17th century Mexico, where a grieving mother drowns her sons and becomes a restless ghost. The main story then lands in Los Angeles in 1973.

Her hunting ground is water and children. Anna Tate-Garcia, a caseworker, takes Patricia Alvarez's boys out of her home, and they are later found drowned. Patricia tells Anna that La Llorona did it and will come for Anna's children, Chris and Sam, next. A pale woman starts appearing to them, and her touch injures Chris. Anna asks Father Perez, who knows the doll from Annabelle (2014), and he points her to Rafael Olvera, a former priest turned folk healer. It turns out Patricia had prayed for the spirit to take Anna's children instead of her sons.

The pool attack and the pulled necklace lead to the strangest beat: Chris shows her the necklace and she becomes human for a moment and holds him as her own child. She is finished by a cross Rafael carved from a tree by the river where the boys died. A closing look at a puddle suggests she may not be fully gone. Her profile is at la llorona.

The Crooked Man is a haunted toy that Ed Warren adds to the Warrens' collection of cursed objects at the end of The Conjuring 2, placed next to the Annabelle doll. The scene is brief, and it exists to set up the later spin-off films about the Nun and the Crooked Man, so the entity has the least on screen of any in this list.

The placement still tells you something. The Crooked Man sits in the same room as a doll that houses a demon, and it could be argued that this makes the collection a catalog of dangerous things, not of ghost stories. The profile at crooked man conjuring collects what the films have said about him.

The mirror demon of The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025), directed by Michael Chaves, is the series' most personal threat, because it is built around Ed and Lorraine's daughter. It commands three other spirits and singles out Judy Warren. Its vessel is an antique mirror, first seen in the Warrens' care in 1964, the year Judy is born in grave danger.

Twenty two years later, in 1986, the mirror arrives as a gift in the Smurl home in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. The spirits there grow violent with every family member, and the demon drives Father Gordon, a priest trying to help, to his death. Judy, now an adult, digs into the case herself, which is exactly where the demon wants her. It takes hold of her and turns her on the Smurls.

Lorraine pulls Judy back, repeating what she did at Judy's birth, and the Warrens pray together to break the mirror's power. The Smurls then live undisturbed, and the mirror goes to the Warrens' museum. Compared with Valak, this demon has no named past, and I would say that is a deliberate choice: the film wants a face for the family's fear, not a lore entry.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021), directed by Michael Chaves, pairs a demon that possesses people on a dare with a living occultist who is behind the curse. In 1981 in Brookfield, Connecticut, the Warrens attend the exorcism of eight-year-old David Glatzel. Arne Johnson challenges the demon and tells it to take him instead, so the spirit moves into Arne while Ed collapses with a heart attack.

Months later Arne stabs his landlord to death. The film shows the Warrens arguing that he was possessed, which it presents as a first in an American murder trial, and that is the Warrens' claim as the film stages it. A witch's totem in the Glatzel house leads them to a similar killing in Danvers, Massachusetts, and then to Isla, the daughter of a former priest named Kastner. Isla has used dark magic and killed her father, and she curses Ed and Arne.

Lorraine breaks the curse on Ed by reminding him of their love, and he destroys the altar. Isla is killed by the force she called up. Arne is still convicted of manslaughter and serves five years, and a cup from the altar joins the Warrens' artifact room.

Black Shuck, the Ferryman and the Bride are the Warrens' lesser captives, and Annabelle Comes Home (2019), directed by Gary Dauberman, is the only film that lets them loose together. The trigger is Daniela Rios, who sneaks into the locked artifacts room and lifts Annabelle out of her blessed glass case. That frees the doll's demon and rouses the other objects around her, including a haunted board game.

Each one attacks in its own style. Black Shuck goes after Bob, the boy who likes Mary Ellen. The Bride gets inside Daniela, and Judy Warren answers by playing recorded footage of Ed performing an exorcism on the Bride, which loosens its grip for a while. Meanwhile a phone call warns the girls that Annabelle will not rest without a soul.

These entities arrive without histories, and the film never says who or what stands behind any of them. They work as a sampler of what the Warrens keep under lock, and the night ends only when the girls put the doll back and lock the case. The artifact room replica was built on a soundstage and blessed on November 7, 2018, according to TheWrap.

The Conjuring demons want something specific each time, and in my opinion what ties them together is that they all go through grief. The Annabelle demon wants a soul, and it finds its way in through the Mullinses begging to see Bee, through Evelyn's guilt over her daughter and through Daniela's guilt over her father. La Llorona wants children, and Patricia's prayer that the spirit take Anna's children in place of her sons gives it an invitation. Arne offers himself to the demon on a dare, and Bathsheba works on Carolyn until she turns on her own daughters.

Valak is the exception, because it wants a gateway and then a relic, which is closer to an institutional goal. Even so, in The Nun (2018) the abbey is full of nuns who are not real, and Sister Irene prays alone without knowing it.

The answer in each film is also personal. Lorraine breaks Bathsheba's hold with a happy memory, breaks the curse on Ed with their love, and saves Judy twice. It could be argued that the saga is less about demons than about what a family will do for one another.

Ranked by threat, Valak comes first, and in my opinion the gap to second place is wide. This ranking is mine, based on how far each entity gets before it is stopped.

1. Valak. It survives three films and several decades (1952, 1956 and 1977 in the story), and it takes a named command, the blood of Christ or the Words of Institution to stop it. In The Conjuring 2 it also blocks Lorraine's gifts, which no other demon manages.
2. The Annabelle demon. It is patient, and it works through grief, as Evelyn, the Mullinses and Daniela show. The doll never stops being dangerous, which is why it stays locked in the case.
3. The mirror demon of Last Rites. It commands three other spirits and kills Father Gordon, but its story is the least developed.
4. Bathsheba. She turns Carolyn against her children, yet a happy family memory is enough for Lorraine to reach Carolyn and let Ed drive her out.
5. La Llorona. She haunts Chris and Sam at home and tries to drown Anna and Sam in the pool, yet a cross from the right tree destroys her.
6. The Crooked Man. He has too little on screen to rank higher.

So, who is more powerful, Valak or Bathsheba? In my opinion it is Valak, because the Warrens drive Bathsheba out with one exorcism and a happy memory, while Valak outlasts the Warrens' own methods until Lorraine learns its name. For what comes next, conjuring first communion is dated for September 10, 2027, according to TheWrap.