Original subtitles

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

- My mother found the farm for sale in June of 1970.

We lived in a Cape Cod-style house

in Cumberland, Rhode Island.

♪ ♪

But there was something missing.

There was something more that Mom wanted.

She wanted to get us out of the suburbs

and bring us into nature.

But we had no idea what awaited us.

♪ ♪

- "The Conjuring" is being called

the scariest movie of the summer.

- In the 1970s, Andrea Perron and her family

lived in the Rhode Island farmhouse

depicted in the film.

This is one of those movies supposedly

based on a true story.

But is it really?

- Now, the Conjuring House, Rhode Island.

I believe the best way to get to the bottom of something

is to actually investigate.

[eerie music]

Of course, once the movie came out,

people were going as far as, online,

there were chats about maybe the house

should be set on fire, because it was an evil place.

So I wanted to go in and find out

whether anything in the house seemed unusual to me.

- When we moved there, we were hopeful

about the future and so excited.

But what happened in that farmhouse

would haunt our family for the rest of our lives.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

[tense music]

♪ ♪

[exhales]

Talk about being catapulted back 50 years.

50 years.

♪ ♪

- [whispering] Seven dead soldiers.

- Had I not grown up in this house,

I wouldn't believe what happened here.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

From the moment we moved to the farmhouse,

I knew that there was something very different

about this place.

♪ ♪

- The day we moved in was quite a day.

We got Mr. Kenyon loaded up.

He was the owner of the farm.

And as I walked back in the house,

he put his hand on my arm.

And he says, Roger, this is for the sake

of your kids and your wife.

Leave the lights on in this house at night.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

I didn't know what he was talking about,

so I just agreed.

I says, sure, no problem.

No problem.

♪ ♪

- Our first few months in the house

were rather bleak and austere.

My dad had to be away from home a lot.

It took everything that they had financially

to get into this property.

[dramatic music]

And so, he had to go earn a living.

- I was in the jewelry business.

I was traveling about two days a week--

upstate New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts.

♪ ♪

But I had to work all day, and a lot of times,

till late at night.

[radio static]

[radio turns off]

[tense music]

♪ ♪

[door creaks open]

[quiet singing]

- This house was never really quiet.

There was always a sense that there was

something else going on here.

♪ ♪

We are in my bedroom.

This was my room for 10 years.

And this was the gathering place,

and usually, there was at least one

frightened sister in bed with me every night.

[crickets chirping]

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

In the middle of the night, Cindy showed up

at the side of my bed.

She was obviously upset.

And I asked her what was wrong, and she said,

"I can't believe you didn't hear it."

She just looked into my eyes, and she said,

"They're all around my bed.

"They're all saying the same thing at the same time.

"There are seven dead soldiers buried in the wall.

"There are seven dead soldiers buried in the wall.

There are seven dead soldiers buried in the wall."

Over and over and over again.

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

- [whispering] There are seven dead soldiers

buried in the wall.

- My sisters were compelled to come to me

instead of my mother

because it always seemed like something

was weighing heavily on her.

[somber music]

She seemed deeply troubled by something,

but she was not divulging that to us.

[suspenseful music]

♪ ♪

- I had always been interested in the field

of the supernatural, always, since I was a young child.

Back in 1973, I was 18 years old.

I was a member of an organization

at Rhode Island College called PIRO...

- We were kids, you know.

We were high school, college-age kids,

and we were just following our passion.

♪ ♪

PIRO was actually something I wanted to do for a long time.

Ever since I was a little kid,

I believed that there were things that people

just weren't aware of, such as spirits, UFOs,

things like that.

- The main aim of PIRO was to find and document

actual evidence of paranormal activity,

something supernatural.

When we first started out, it was very hard

to find actual cases.

And I wanted to find a way where people would actually

take an interest and contact us,

perhaps people that never heard of us.

So I thought, why not put an ad in the local paper?

I worded it, "Things that are not explained,

"maybe mysterious happenings in your house,

please contact PIRO."

I figured the worst that could happen,

it would just be ignored.

- When we got a response as quickly as we did,

we were all astounded.

Carolyn Perron came to our meeting

and she started telling us her stories

about what was going on at the farm.

And we just felt,

either she's really crazy, or this is real,

and we have to investigate it.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

- This was my parents' room, originally.

I remember it as being so much larger than it is now.

[fans whirring]

[gasps]

[dramatic music]

I woke up one morning, very early,

and I was having this horrendous dream

of seeing this apparition leaning over,

getting closer and closer and closer to my mother.

♪ ♪

And I closed my eyes, thinking,

this is the most horrible dream I've ever had.

Please let this be over.

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

[unsettling tone]

♪ ♪

[unsettling tone]

About a half an hour later, I came downstairs.

[unsettling tone]

And there's my mother, sitting frantically,

writing and drawing.

♪ ♪

There were two black holes for her eye sockets.

And she had very thin lips,

with jagged yellow teeth.

When I saw what my mother was drawing,

I said to her, I saw this.

It wasn't a dream.

[chilling music]

♪ ♪

And she said to me,

"Best not to tell your sisters about this.

It would only scare them."

♪ ♪

[suspenseful music]

♪ ♪

- I actually am a real investigator

who has a career as a detective.

Our magazine would look into these things rather seriously.

In other words, we don't just dismiss them,

or laugh at them, hoot them down, debunk them.

No, no, we carefully investigate them,

with a view towards solving something

or getting to the bottom of something.

I was in the house, from cellar to attic.

And I'm looking to try to explain anything that I can.

For example, Carolyn woke up and saw

an apparition of an old woman.

And this is a well-known illusion of the mind

called a waking dream.

And our minds play tricks on us all the time.

But they were feeding each other.

As best I can tell,

Roger was practically never there.

You see, there was no skeptical figure

in the entire household.

We would have to pretty much acknowledge...

that there would be a kind of contagion effect

that one person would influence the others.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

- My mother felt very, very isolated.

She did not want to expose us to any of the incidents

that were happening to her.

She wanted to protect us.

♪ ♪

My father was non-responsive

when it came to stories

of what was happening in the house.

[loud ticking]

He's a very pragmatic man.

Everything needs to make sense to my father,

and this didn't.

[pensive music]

♪ ♪

And my father became very sullen and withdrawn.

We could tell that this was preoccupying his mind.

- Over the months, Carolyn became more into herself.

Was starting to smoke more, drinking coffee,

losing weight.

[clock ticking and chiming]

She claimed that she'd been threatened,

that there were spirits that were doing it.

She claimed that she was interfering

in the lives of the spirits.

♪ ♪

It was not the same Carolyn, no.

♪ ♪

And I would take her away from the house at times,

and we would walk through the woods back here.

And I'd get her to see things a little bit differently.

But when we got back to the house,

it all repeated itself again.

So walking through the woods did not help.

♪ ♪

I wanted to believe her...

but I couldn't.

Just didn't make any damn sense at all.

♪ ♪

- My mother wanted to prove to my father

that this was real.

She felt a distinctly female presence in the house

that did not want her there.

And so she was trying to determine who it might be.

♪ ♪

She would get in the car, and she would go into town,

and she would research all day long.

[suspenseful music]

And what my mother found out was

that eight generations of one extended family lived,

and some died, in this house.

♪ ♪

She also discovered many of the bizarre deaths

that had happened in the town.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

We know we have suicide by poison,

suicide by hanging,

suicide by cutting their own throats,

the murders, the accidental drownings,

accidental killings.

[overlapping voices] Being burned to death,

found dead, dropped dead,

miscellaneous deaths--

just on and on, century after century.

♪ ♪

Found hanging in the barn by a farmhand.

Throat cut with razor.

Frozen to death on December 17.

♪ ♪

My mother was searching archives and records

trying to determine anyone that had

any attachment to that farm.

♪ ♪

Bathsheba Sherman was not part

of the Arnold or Richardson families.

And we knew nothing about her until the town historian

at the time told my mother about the legend

of Bathsheba Sherman.

♪ ♪

And the historian told my mother that Bathsheba

was an evil woman.

And he's also the one that told her

that she suffered great loss in her life,

but that she had grown old and bitter and mean.

Apparently, an infant died in her care.

And when townsfolk accused her of murdering the baby,

the rumor that cropped up almost immediately around it

was that she was practicing witchcraft,

and had sold her soul

and traded the life of this baby

to the devil for eternal youth and beauty.

She remained one of the suspects,

when she probably should have been absolved.

She lived a long and sad life,

and buried three of her four children

before the age of four.

And they're right here beside her.

[somber music]

♪ ♪

- Carolyn wanted to get us to go to the house.

So she wanted to convince us that it was

worth our time and our trouble to go to the house.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

I felt a little nervous about going,

because I didn't know what to expect,

and it was an area of Rhode Island

that I had never been in before--

in the middle of nowhere, as far as I was concerned.

So finding it was the first thing.

♪ ♪

Carolyn was very happy that she wasn't

alone in this anymore.

She told me that it hurt her

that Roger was not believing her,

and that's part of the reason I feel that

she reached out to us-- because she wanted to prove it,

that this was actually happening

and she was not crazy.

- We were introduced to all of the family members.

And then, before it was dark, we were taken to a cemetery--

Harrisville Cemetery.

And there was the grave of Bathsheba Sherman.

She was the suspected witch.

They thought maybe-- it was Carolyn,

through her research-- thought maybe

this is the woman that's haunting the house.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

The girls wanted to show me

the upstairs section of the house,

the bedrooms where they slept.

♪ ♪

They take me into the main bedroom.

They're telling me how frightened they are.

Right next to me is a window that could not be closed.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

I tell them, well, why not call upon the name of Jesus

when you're feeling frightened?

♪ ♪

[slam]

It was that split second, that window, it slammed shut.

Then, one of the sisters, Nancy,

feels she is slapped on the side of the head,

the left side of the head.

Her head actually goes back, her hair flies up,

and she screams, holds onto her head, begins crying.

[sharp scraping]

I keep my concentration

and I tell them, don't be afraid.

It's more afraid of Jesus than you are afraid.

[shrill squeak]

After this, we did not stay a lot longer.

But at that house, I was convinced

there was an evil spirit out to do some harm

and damage to this family.

[soft dramatic music]

♪ ♪

[tense music

♪ ♪

- Within a week, Carolyn started to say

things were happening at the house,

that she'd noticed an uptick in activity.

♪ ♪

It came to a head when she called me one afternoon,

and she was frantic.

And she started to explain what had happened

the night before.

She had been woken up, and as her eyes became

accustomed to the dark, there was a figure

at the foot of her bed.

And it started chanting,

I'll drive you mad with fiery brooms,

I'll drive you mad with death and gloom,

but it will be too late for you,

because you'll be dead.

[dramatic music]

And I said, Carolyn, when I hang up with you,

I'm calling Ed and Lorraine Warren.

I had told her who they were, and that I would

call them if it was necessary.

I hung up. I called Lorraine Warren.

She answered the phone immediately,

and she said, "Donna, we'll be there in two days."

♪ ♪

Ed and Lorraine Warren, in the 1970s,

were the foremost people in the world stage

of ghost hunting and the paranormal.

- I don't care if you want to call it

a devil or a ghost or a demon.

There's something in this home, which has the intelligence

to inflict physical and psychological harm

upon this family.

- We were very excited that we were going to have our friends

and experts along with us.

So Carolyn and her family will be in good hands.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

[crickets chirping]

[clock ticking]

[knocking on door]

- It was just before Halloween in 1973

when Mr. And Mrs. Warren came to our kitchen door.

And they introduced themselves as paranormal investigators

and researchers.

They told her that PIRO had sent them.

My mother felt comfortable with Mrs. Warren,

but my father didn't want the Warrens

involved with our family.

He was suspicious of them,

and there was no trust there.

- I had nothing against Lorraine Warren,

but I did not trust him.

He sounded like he was talking from both sides of his mouth.

And it just didn't make much sense to me.

Ed Warren was trying to convince me

that the house was haunted.

They looked like they were selling

some kind of protection.

I felt like they were going to hurt us more than

they were going to help us.

As far as I was concerned,

I didn't need them in my house.

And they did not warm up to me.

They warmed up to my wife.

- Mrs. Warren felt absolutely that there was

a spirit in the house that was trying

to take my mother over.

And she walked over to our old black stove in the kitchen,

and she said,

"I sense a malignant presence in this house.

Her name is Bathsheba."

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

That statement stunned my mother.

- Chances are, you have never seen anything

quite like the Monroe, Connecticut, home

of Ed and Lorraine Warren.

On the other hand, you probably have

never run into people who claim

they are real-life ghost hunters.

- Ed and Lorraine Warren were a notorious couple.

They loved to get attention and to make money,

and they were full of tricks.

- Ed, what can you do for me? How can you help me?

- Well, it's our job to go in,

investigate the phenomena taking place,

document it, photograph it, record it,

and then bring it to the proper authorities,

which in most cases happens to be

the religious faith of the family

whose home we're in.

- So they show up at the Perrons'

and they tell Carolyn that they know

Bathsheba had been there, was a presence.

And that--

that persuaded Carolyn that they must really be

sort of magical demonologists after all.

How could she know that, just showing up?

Well, of course, she had already

picked that information up somewhere else.

I just despaired every time

they hit a new family.

You'd just wonder, what's all this about?

Is this about God and love?

And what would Jesus say, you know?

No, it's got nothing to do with Jesus.

It's about medieval kind of demonology of a type

that belongs in the Middle Ages.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

Eventually, the Warrens convinced--

Carolyn probably didn't need much convincing--

that they should do a seance.

♪ ♪

[creaking]

- When the Warrens arrived,

they had a priest, a medium,

cinematographers, an audio specialist,

five or six people.

Lorraine suggested that I take my sisters and go upstairs.

But we didn't stay.

Cindy and I snuck back down the stairway.

The candles were lit on the table.

There was a big old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape.

This door was open only about that much,

and the lights were off, except for candles.

[dramatic music]

So they couldn't see that we were

standing here and watching everything that was happening.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

- I walked up the front porch,

walked in the front door.

I walked into the dining room,

and there was a whole bunch of people.

I saw Lorraine and her husband,

and I said, what's going on here?

And my wife said, we're going to have a seance.

And I says, not in this house, my dear.

Ed was at the table. Lorraine was standing up.

My wife was sitting down.

And I did not go into that room.

I stood right at the doorway,

and I says, no, no, I don't like this at all.

My wife says, "Please, you don't have to partake in this.

You can stay in the living room there."

So I allowed them to go ahead and start this thing.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

- Within a matter of seconds, moments...

my mother's head dropped to her chest

and began to scream in pain.

- And that's when she started to speak in a language

that I didn't understand.

[unintelligible muttering]

I didn't know what to think.

I didn't know what to think.

And then, within seconds,

her body, the whole-- her whole body was--

her--her knees were up in her chin.

She was half-sitting on the chair,

and her arms were like something like this.

It was like as if something was pulling her arms together.

And then, all of a sudden, the chair left the floor

and started moving towards me.

And I looked at that.

I couldn't believe my eyes.

And all of a sudden, the chair came in here and flew at me

and landed right in front of me, right at my feet,

and her head hit the floor.

[chilling music]

♪ ♪

Then, I looked over, and I saw two of my daughters

seeing this whole thing, and it really bothered me.

I didn't want the kids to look at their mother like this.

- When her head hit the floor, it was as though--

we all thought we had just seen her die.

♪ ♪

- And I held her hands,

I held her head, I held everything.

And--oh, my God,

Mr. Warren decided he was going to come in here.

He grabbed me by the back of my shirt,

and he's pulling on my shirt.

He said, "Roger, get up, get up, get up.

I'll take care of this."

And I said, no, no, no, no.

I'm gonna help her.

And he kept pulling and pulling and pulling,

and I says, that's it! Stop!

Or else, I'm gonna--

and I got up, and I hit him right in the mouth.

And I'm so sorry I did that.

♪ ♪

- My father started screaming at all of them,

telling them never, ever to step foot

on this property again.

- She was out cold.

- We all gathered around her.

And when she opened her eyes and looked at us...

I think it was the most relief I've ever felt in my life.

♪ ♪

[crickets chirping]

- Thank you very much.

- Enjoy. - Thank you.

I think about the events in the Harrisville farmhouse

pretty much every day.

It did make quite an impact in my life.

We thought it was a fascinating case,

and we were also genuinely concerned

about Carolyn Perron and her family.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

I think a lot of things could have been handled better.

I wish a seance had not been conducted.

♪ ♪

We had talked to Lorraine and Ed

about what Carolyn believed--

that there was a witch named Bathsheba in the house.

And when Lorraine told Carolyn about Bathsheba,

that very much gained the trust

and confidence of herself.

♪ ♪

It was just one of those nights

where things all came together,

came to a head,

and Carolyn was very much a victim in that.

♪ ♪

- So because my name is Nickell,

I have used the famous American wooden nickel

as my business card.

And my father was a talented amateur magician,

and he delighted in the fact that I became

a professional magician.

So it works something like this.

It looks solid,

but it's actually made of rubber.

If I take it like this and just squeeze it...

No, it's gone. It's over here.

I think that magicians are especially inclined

to see the world in terms of illusions.

That's their business, you see.

And I've found that my work in the paranormal

is the same kind of challenge.

That is, that whatever we're looking for,

a ghost or a flying saucer,

if we can understand that that may just be

a little trick of the mind or a little coincidence

of some kind,

the magician may be able to say, a-ha,

that explains what you saw.

Something like that.

[soft atmospheric music]

♪ ♪

[crows cawing]

♪ ♪

- After the seance,

we didn't do much in the house.

We didn't go out.

[somber music]

♪ ♪

She went into a slight depression.

- She went into a deep depression.

She disappeared.

This house fractured my parents' relationship.

Nothing was the same.

Everything had changed.

♪ ♪

- After that night, I spent more time

at home with my family.

♪ ♪

We have many, many, many experiences with the--

with the spirits.

Not long after the seance, I became

entirely integrated with the spirits,

just like my family.

- We lived in a house among the dead.

And we all got used to living together.

- And we all existed in the house with the spirits.

♪ ♪

- My mom said when we left here,

"We can leave this farm, but it will never leave us."

♪ ♪