The Conjuring House

In 1971 Roger and Carolyn Perron moved with their five daughters into an old farmhouse on a wooded road in Burrillville, near the mill village of Harrisville in northern Rhode Island. The 14-room house, which experts date to around 1736, had been home to generations of local farming families. Over the following decade the Perrons reported a long list of strange events: objects moving, smells, voices, figures in the rooms and, in the most dramatic account, the mother apparently being lifted and thrown to the floor.

Around 1974 the Connecticut paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren visited and held a séance in the house. According to Andrea Perron’s memoir, House of Darkness House of Light, it was the Warrens who suggested that an entity troubling the family was named Bathsheba. From that suggestion grew a legend of a devil-worshipping witch who had killed a baby and cursed the land – and in 2013 James Wan’s film The Conjuring, marketed as “based on a true story,” made that legend world-famous.

The record tells a very different story. The real Bathsheba Sherman, born Bathsheba Thayer in 1812, was a farmer’s wife who married Judson Sherman in 1844, lost three of her four children young, as many families did, and died in May 1885 at 72; a Baptist minister led her funeral. Historians, including J’aime Rubio and Betty Mencucci of the Burrillville Historical Society, have found no accusation of witchcraft or murder against her in her lifetime, and say she lived on a different road. Since the film, her grave in Harrisville has been repeatedly vandalised, and her restored headstone had to be moved to a secret location; in 2023 a fundraiser paid for a new granite stone.

The house itself has become a business. Paranormal investigators Cory and Jenn Heinzen bought it in 2019 for $439,000 and opened it to ghost-hunting guests; in May 2022 Boston developer Jacqueline Nuñez bought it for $1.525 million and continued the tours, overnight stays and events, sometimes with members of the Perron family. The story is now a test case for how a family’s experiences, investigators’ interpretations and Hollywood can turn a real person into a monster.

The Perrons described apparitions, moving and disappearing objects, rapping, foul smells, beds shaking and being touched or struck; Andrea Perron has said she saw her mother levitate and fall in 1974. Later owners and paying guests report footsteps, knocks, flashing lights and an apparition in a doorway.

Accounts centre on the bedrooms, the parlour where the Warrens’ séance was held and the cellar, which the film made notorious. Most guest reports come from overnight stays.

The Conjuring (2013) began the Conjuring Universe, one of the most profitable horror franchises ever made. Andrea Perron’s three-volume memoir House of Darkness House of Light tells the family’s version, and the house has hosted livestreamed séances and TV investigations. The Burrillville Historical Society tells the real Bathsheba Sherman’s story on its cemetery tours.