Ed Warren, who died last Wednesday at his Monroe, Conn., home at 79, was a self-described and self-trained demonologist whose tangles with the supernatural took him from “The Amityville Horror” to the Loch Ness monster.

A ghost hunter from his earliest days, when he spotted a “ghost globule” in the closet of the haunted Bridgeport house where he grew up, Warren claimed to have investigated thousands of hauntings. He was accompanied by his wife, Lorraine, a psychic who could see auras and claimed to communicate with the ghosts they encountered.

The Warrens never charged a fee for their work, which sometimes included summoning the services of exorcists. The work could be hazardous.

“He was injured with slash marks on the chest and burns on his arms,” Warren’s son-in-law and protégé as a demonologist, Antonio Spera, said in an interview. “He was once thrown down the stairs and often slapped in the face, always by unseen forces.”

Warren and his wife wrote nine books about their experiences and served as consultants on various films, including “The Amityville Horror” (1979) and its 2005 remake, as well as several TV movies. They also were popular on the university lecture circuit.

Ghosts sometimes followed in their wake. It was shortly after giving one such lecture to West Point upperclassmen on haunted houses in 1972 that reports started coming in from the military academy of an apparition of an 1830s cavalryman wielding a musket and drifting in and out of the masonry walls of a room in the 47th Division barracks.

Warren was brought up in Bridgeport, Conn., in a tough part of town he said was known as the Bloody Bucket. His father, a state policeman, tried to make rational explanations for the ghostly phenomena young Ed saw and heard nightly, but Ed became convinced the family’s home was haunted.

After serving in the Navy during World War II, Warren attended art school and married his high school sweetheart, Lorraine. The two lived a care-free proto-hippie lifestyle, tooling around the back roads of New England in a jalopy and selling paintings to get by. Warren began making paintings of houses that were reputedly haunted and sometimes traded the paintings to the homes’ owners in return for access. Lorraine, whose psychic ability had lain dormant since she saw nuns’ auras in grade school, now became aware that she had special powers.

The couple became identified as professional demonologists in the 1970s and began speaking at universities. A year after the couple’s 1972 investigation at West Point, the Hartford Courant reported on the case of a haunted house outside Hartford where there were, Mrs.Warren said, “very bad emanations” from a breezeway between the house and the garage. Whatever it was, it slammed doors and apparently killed the family dog.

In 1975, the family of George Lee Lutz moved into the Amityville, Long Island, a home that had been the site of six brutal murders the year before. The Lutzes said they were driven out of the house by ghostly phenomena just 28 days after moving in. Subsequent investigations and court cases purported to show that the entire episode was a fraud, but Warren, who said he and his wife were two of just nine investigators allowed inside, insisted the house was haunted.

“All the stories about Amityville boil down to one thing: there was a very frightened, sincere couple with three children and some very strange things going on,” Warren wrote in “Ghost Hunters: True Stories From the World’s Most Famous Demonologists” (1989).

Claiming to be devout Catholics, the Warrens invoked images that will be recognizable to viewers of films like “The Exorcist” and to those familiar with the imagery of the New Testament apocalypse. But at times the publicity turned a bit maudlin, as in an appearance on a Halloween-themed episode of “CBS This Morning” in 1994, when Warren told the host, Harry Smith, that a Raggedy Ann doll he was holding up to the camera was the most dangerous object he had ever encountered.

“Its not the doll, Harry,” Warren said. “It’s what surrounds the doll and what’s in the doll. It’s the vibrations that were put into it through many evil things that were done with it — seances, occult practices, and so forth. But this doll here was responsible for the death of a young man, we believe; also the near death of a Catholic priest and a homicide detective — so that the doll is just the opposite of what, say, you would find in a church, something holy, something blessed. This is the unblessed of evil.”

In addition to encounters with ghosts and devils, the couple claimed to have had brushes with vampires, werewolves, and even Bigfoot.

When they weren’t tracking down poltergeists and the rest of what they called “the hierarchy of the inhuman,” the Warrens led tours of Scotland and England, which were also fertile ground for ghost hunting. The Warrens also were founders of the New England Society for Psychic Research.

About five years ago, Warren awoke at 2 a.m.and suffered a stroke while letting the family cat indoors. He never regained the power of speech.

Edward Warren

Born September 7, 1926, in Bridgeport, Conn.; died August 23 at his home in Monroe, Conn.; married May 22, 1945, in Bridgeport to Lorraine Moran, who survives him; also survived by his daughter, Judy Spera, two grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.