Original subtitles

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 Mum 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.

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.

SHE SIGHS

Talk about being catapulted back 50 years.

50 years.

Seven dead soldiers.

Had I not grown up in this house,

I wouldn't believe what happened here.

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."

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.

And so, he had to go earn a living.

I was in the jewellery business.

I was travelling 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 CRACKLES

DOOR CREAKS

FOOTSTEPS CREAK

GHOSTLY CHILD SINGS

This house was never really quiet.

There was always a sense that there was

something else going on here.

FLOORBOARDS CREAK

We are in my bedroom.

This was my room for ten years.

And this was the gathering place,

and usually, there was at least one frightened sister

in bed with me every night.

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.

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.

She seemed deeply troubled by something,

but she was not divulging that to us.

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 organisation

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".

This was my parents' room, originally.

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

LOUD GASP

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."

About a half an hour later,

I came downstairs.

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."

And she said to me,

"Best not to tell your sisters about this.

"It would only scare them."

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 sceptical 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.

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.

He's a very pragmatic man.

Everything needs to make sense to my father.

And this didn't.

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 BONGS

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.

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.

We know we have suicide by poison,

suicide by hanging,

suicide by cutting their own throats...

..the murders, the accidental drownings, accidental killings...

..Being burned to death,

found dead, dropped dead,

miscellaneous deaths... VOICES OVERLAPPING

Just on and on, century after century.

Found hanging in the barn by a farm hand.

Throat cut with razor.

Frozen to death on December 17th.

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 rumour that cropped up almost immediately around it

was that she was practising 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.

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.

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 any more.

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.

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.

I tell them,

"Well, why not call upon the name of Jesus

"when you're feeling frightened"?

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 on to her head, begins crying.

I keep my concentration and I tell them,

"Don't be afraid.

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

CHALK SCREECHES

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.

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."

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.

LOUD KNOCKING

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, er, 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."

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.

Eventually, the Warrens convinced -

Carolyn probably didn't need much convincing -

that they should do a seance.

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.

So, they couldn't see that we were standing here

and watching everything that was happening.

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.

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.

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.

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 going to help her."

And he kept pulling and pulling and pulling,

and I says, "That's it! Stop! Or else, I'm going to..."

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

And I-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.

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.

I think a lot of things could've 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,

"Aha! That explains what you saw."

Something like that.

After the seance,

we didn't do much in the house.

We didn't go out.

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 mum said, when we left here,

"We can leave this farm,

"but it will never leave us."