The Real Story Behind The Conjuring

I watched The Conjuring Movie and saw that it was based on a true story that happened in Harrisville Rhode Island, so I decided to go check out the old farm house.

'The Conjuring' IS based on a 'true story'

The real Perron family lived in the farmhouse for approximately ten years. Located in the small country town of Harrisville, Rhode Island, Roger Perron and his wife Carolyn purchased the home in the winter of 1970.

The most haunting spirit in the movie is that of suspected witch Bathsheba Sherman. Born Bathsheba Thayer in Rhode Island in 1812, she married fellow Rhode Islander Judson Sherman (one year her senior) in Thompson, Connecticut on March 10, 1844.

There is no hard evidence to support that Bathsheba Sherman was really a witch, only legend and local folklore. Having lived on a neighboring farm in the 1800s, suspicion grew when an infant mysteriously died in her care. When the baby was examined, it was determined that the mortal wound was caused by a large sewing needle that had been impaled at the base of the child's skull.

Bathsheba Sherman died as an old woman on May 25, 1885, roughly four years after her husband Judson Sherman's death in 1881. Bathsheba lived to see her son Herbert, a farmer like his father, marry his fiancée Anna in 1881. The grave site of Bathsheba Sherman is located in the historic cemetery across the street from the fire station and rotary in downtown Harrisville, Rhode Island (near the start of Sherman Farm Road).

The family's connection to the spirit of Bathsheba Sherman came at the suggestion of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. The mother, Carolyn Perron, told Ed and Lorraine about an incident that had happened a few years earlier. She said that she had been lying on the sofa and all of the sudden felt a piercing type of pain in her calf and then the muscle began to spasm. Upon examination, she noticed a puddle of blood at the point of impact. She checked for bees or anything else that could have caused the puncture in her leg but found nothing. In her daughter's book, Andrea Perron describes the wound as a "perfectly concentric circle" ... "as if a large sewing needle had impaled her skin."

"Eight generations of one extended family lived and died in that house prior to our arrival," says Andrea Perron, adding, "Some of them never left." The Black Book of Burrillville, the town's former public records book, reveals that over the course of its existence the property had been host to two suicides by hanging, one suicide by poison, the rape and murder of eleven-year-old Prudence Arnold by a farmhand, two drownings, and the passing of four men who froze to death, in addition to other tragic losses of life.

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