The Conjuring House: A Haunted American Legacy

Chapter 1: Shadows on Round Top Road

Long before Hollywood turned it into a horror icon, the old farmhouse on Round Top Road in Harrisville, Rhode Island, was a place soaked in sorrow and suspicion. Built around 1736 for the Arnold family, its timber frame rose from the wilds of 300 acres—a rugged patchwork of New England farmland. Eight generations of Arnolds lived and died on or near that land, their stories blurring the line between documented tragedy and whispered legend.

The earliest death that can be firmly tied to the property happened in 1901. Jarvis Smith, a Civil War veteran, stumbled into a collapsing shed just 200 feet from the house, passed out during a sudden spring cold snap, and froze to death overnight. That one was real, logged in Burville’s black book of unusual deaths and confirmed by historical records.

But after that, the line between fact and folklore began to blur. Susan Arnold, wife of John T. Arnold, did die by hanging—but not in the house. She hanged herself in her own home nearby in 1866 at age fifty. John A. Arnold, “Johnny” to locals, swallowed a lethal dose of Paris green insecticide in 1911, but again, not at the farmhouse—he died in the nearby village of Tarhill.

Stories merged and mutated. People repeated versions where Mrs. John Arnold supposedly hanged herself in the barn at the age of ninety-three, something no newspaper ever reported. Prudence Arnold, an eleven-year-old girl whose name would haunt the estate’s reputation, was real—and her death was brutal. Her throat was slashed by a rejected suitor in 1849, but that crime happened in Oxbridge, Massachusetts, forty miles away. Still, local storytellers twisted the facts, placing the murder right on Arnold land. Some even said her ghost wandered the orchard.

Skeptics pointed out the truth, but believers clung to what they’d heard: two hangings, a poisoning, a pair of drownings in the nearby creek, four men who supposedly froze to death, and Prudence. Even if the locations didn’t match, the sheer number of tragedies gave the land a reputation that stuck.

But no name loomed larger than Bathsheba Sherman.

Chapter 2: The Legend of Bathsheba

Bathsheba Sherman was born Bathsheba Thayer in 1812. She married Judson Sherman and lived on a farm just half a mile south of the Arnold place. Census records confirm her existence, but everything else—sacrificed infants, satanic worship, a suicide by hanging from an apple tree—has no evidence to back it up.

Her gravestone in Harrisville Cemetery says she died of paralysis on May 25, 1885, likely a stroke at age seventy-three. Yet, decades of rumors and the suspicious infant death in her care turned her into a social outcast. By the time The Conjuring was released in 2013, Bathsheba had been transformed from misunderstood farm wife to full-blown horror movie villain.

Researchers combed through property deeds, death records, and town archives, and found only Jarvis Smith’s death could truly be traced to the land. But folklore doesn’t care about records. One verifiable death, two suicides elsewhere, a murder in a different town, and an unlucky woman caught in a century of suspicion were all folded into a single chilling narrative.

So when the Perron family rolled up that dirt road in the early 1970s, they weren’t just buying a house. They were stepping into a place shaped and twisted by nearly 300 years of fear, myth, and memory. And whatever was waiting inside had already been waiting a very long time.

Chapter 3: The Calm Before the Conjuring

On a cold January morning in 1971, Roger and Carolyn Perron pulled into their new driveway with a rented moving truck and their five daughters—Andrea, Nancy, Christine, Cindy, and April. The house they’d just bought was the kind of place most families only dream of: fourteen rooms, wide plank floors, original fireplaces, hand-carved beams that had survived since the 1700s. Once part of a sprawling 200-acre estate, it had since been reduced to eight and a half acres, but even that felt massive to the Perrons.

It was quiet, old, and beautiful. As Roger collected the keys from the former owner, Mr. Kenyon, the man offered a final remark that didn’t quite land as a joke: “For the sake of your family, leave the lights on at night.”

At first, they thought nothing of it. Maybe just an old man being dramatic. But then the house started to act strangely.

Carolyn would leave her broom leaning against the kitchen wall, only to find it moments later by the fireplace. She’d sweep a room spotless, walk away, and return to find small piles of dirt perfectly arranged on the floor. Roger’s tools disappeared from his workbench in the barn and turned up on the attic stairs. These weren’t one-offs. It kept happening over and over, like someone else was living there—someone invisible but very much present.

Then Sadie, their family dog, began to change. Usually bold and friendly, she suddenly refused to go near the hallway that led to the cellar. She’d growl at corners no one was standing in, ears pinned back, fur on edge. One night, Roger had to fix the furnace in the dirt-floor basement. As he descended the steps, the air turned ice cold and a putrid smell like rotting meat swept past him. That was no cold draft. Sadie’s nightly refusal to enter the hall became the family’s warning bell—the quiet signal that something down there wasn’t right.

Not long after, the girls started whispering about things they couldn’t explain.

Andrea said she felt the air in her room pressed down on her at night, heavy and thick, like something was hovering just inches above her chest. Toys moved across the floor with no help. Long shadows crept across the upstairs landing, disappearing as soon as someone turned on a light. Every clock in the house stopped at exactly 3:07 in the morning. Carolyn woke up one morning covered in fresh bruises with no memory of bumping into anything.

But despite all of it, no one felt like they were in danger. Not yet. There was something oddly calm about the disturbances in those first weeks. Cindy would feel someone tucking her in at night, and she’d smell a sweet flowery perfume that didn’t belong to anyone in the house. The girls gave the presence a nickname—the caretakers. These spirits didn’t slam doors or throw objects. They moved things softly, opened doors gently, and even gave kisses on the forehead.

Andrea said they felt more like former residents who had simply decided to stay. Carolyn began to believe it, too. She spoke out loud to the spirits, even joking with them when her broom disappeared. One time, she scolded a spirit for leaving muddy footprints on her just-mopped floor. An hour later, they were gone.

For a while, the family let themselves believe this was just how things were now. The spirits weren’t hurting anyone. They were just there. Roger would even joke that at least their ghosts were polite.

That period of strange comfort created an illusion—one that almost made them forget they were dealing with the unknown.

But that peace wouldn’t last.

Chapter 4: The Shift

The house shifted again, and this time it wasn’t gentle. Cindy’s sweet floral scent turned into the stench of rotting flesh. Whispers once soft and curious became sharp, angry murmurs that echoed through the halls. Doors began slamming with force. Andrea’s nighttime pressure now felt like something trying to pin her down. The air turned bitter. The cold more aggressive. The fog from the cellar crept higher up the stairs, thick and choking.

Sadie’s growls grew louder and the family could no longer pretend they weren’t being watched. By early spring of 1972, it was clear that Mr. Kenyon hadn’t been warning them about friendly spirits. Whatever had started out as invisible hands folding blankets and moving tools had now become something far more calculating—something that studied the Perrons, learned their habits, and knew exactly when to strike.

The old Arnold estate had introduced itself with kindness. Now it was ready to show its true face.

Chapter 5: Cindy’s Haunting

Cindy Perron was never the loudest in the room. She wasn’t the type to make things up for attention or drama. So when she pulled her older sister Andrea aside one night in the dead of winter, pale and shaking, Andrea listened.

Cindy said a voice had been whispering to her in the dark—not once, not in passing, but again and again, night after night. The voice was so close it felt like someone was standing right beside her bed. And the message was always the same.

“Seven dead soldiers are buried in the walls.”

The way she said it left no doubt. This wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t her imagination running wild. She was convinced the voice wanted its message heard. That moment changed everything.

Cindy stopped sleeping through the night. She’d lie awake, staring at the walls, afraid that bones might push through the plaster or that she’d wake up face to face with a skull. Roger and Carolyn searched the house top to bottom. They looked behind the walls, tapped on floorboards, even checked the cellar for any signs of hidden remains. Nothing. No hollow panels, no loose bricks, no forgotten crawl spaces.

Years later, skeptics would measure the interior walls and confirm they were only about seven inches thick—far too narrow to hide even one body, let alone seven. Still, the idea burrowed deep into the family’s mind and stayed there.

Local legends had already linked the old Arnold estate to the Revolutionary War. Some swore soldiers once camped on the land or passed through during raids. There was no hard proof, but just enough historical overlap to feed the fear.

Long after the Perrons moved out, new owners claimed the bodies might be buried under a stone retaining wall out back. No one has ever dug anything up, but that didn’t matter. What Cindy heard left no physical trace, but it cracked the family’s sense of safety in a way that could never be repaired.

The fear took hold. Cindy flinched at creaking floors and avoided tight corners where walls met. Andrea often woke to find her little sister curled up beside her, wide-eyed and silent, convinced that someone or something was watching her through the walls. The fear spread to the other girls. The house didn’t just feel haunted anymore. It felt alive.

Paranormal investigators later called Cindy’s confession a sign that the haunting wasn’t random. It was targeted and personal. Skeptics pushed back, arguing that suggestions like these can easily become self-fulfilling. But it didn’t matter which side you were on.

“Seven dead soldiers” became part of the Conjuring House legend—passed around by ghost hunters, whispered in documentaries, and repeated across every haunted podcast for decades to come.

Chapter 6: The Box

Not long after that confession, something even more terrifying happened. One afternoon, the girls were playing hide-and-seek in the barn. Cindy picked an old pine box to hide in—a storage chest with no lock and no latch. She lowered the lid gently, certain she could lift it again in seconds. But as soon as it closed, it slammed shut like it had a mind of its own. The hinges locked tight, trapping her in complete darkness.

She pushed, kicked, and screamed until her voice gave out. No one heard a thing. The house that usually groaned and echoed suddenly went silent. Cindy was trapped inside that box for nearly twenty minutes. She thought she’d die in there. Finally, her sister Nancy opened the lid without struggle, without any sign of resistance, and found Cindy soaked in sweat and tears, her fists red from pounding the walls.

Roger tested the chest that evening. He opened and shut it dozens of times. It never stuck once. The wood wasn’t warped. There was no mechanism. There was no logical reason the lid should have jammed.

To the parents, that was no accident. That wasn’t just a game gone wrong. They believed something had deliberately shut Cindy inside and held her there.

The most disturbing part wasn’t even the entrapment. It was the silence. The same house that usually creaked and cracked had gone completely still—as if it were holding its breath.

And that told them one thing: whatever haunted the house wasn’t just present. It was smart. It was playing with them.

That incident changed how the Perron children saw everything. What once felt like harmless pranks from playful spirits now seemed calculated. Doorways became threats. Games turned into traps. Andrea later wrote that the house felt like a cat toying with mice.

Hollywood clearly agreed. The scene became one of the most iconic moments in The Conjuring—the blindfolded hide-and-clap game with clapping hands leading a mother straight into a nightmare in the basement. Though dramatized, that scene captured the essence of what Cindy endured. Andrea has said only about five percent of the movie is accurate, but that particular sequence hit too close to home.

After the barn episode, Cindy’s whispers came back, but now the voice was harsher, the message louder. “Seven dead soldiers.” Over and over.

Carolyn began waking at odd hours to the sharp sound of clapping, like wooden hands slapping together in the hallway. Roger installed a baby monitor in Cindy’s room, hoping to catch something. All they ever heard was static.

Meanwhile, Sadie, the family dog, who had already shown fear near the cellar, started avoiding the barn altogether. Andrea would later describe the house as a portal cleverly disguised as a farmhouse. And at that point, the whole family agreed.

Chapter 7: The Séance

As Cindy fell deeper into fear, the house turned its full attention to her mother.

Carolyn Perron had always been the steady hand in her family—the one who held it all together. But by the end of 1972, something inside the farmhouse was breaking her down in a way no amount of parenting, chores, or sleepless nights ever had.

Strange bruises started appearing all over her arms and legs—marks she couldn’t explain and in places she couldn’t have bumped while asleep. One night, out of nowhere, she felt a sudden sharp sting on her calf like a sewing needle had jabbed her. She looked down and saw blood pushing up through her skin in a perfect circle. The exhaustion weighed on her like lead. It went beyond being tired.

Carolyn started telling Roger she felt watched, especially when she was in the bedroom or down in the cellar folding laundry. The girls were scared of noises, whispers, and shadows. But whatever had its grip on Carolyn felt specific. It didn’t just want to scare her. It wanted something more.

Then came the woman. She always showed up just after 3:00 in the morning—coincidentally, or maybe not, the exact time every clock in the house had stopped working. Carolyn would jolt awake, and there she was—a woman standing by her bed. Her skin was gray, her hair was twisted and knotted, and her eyes were filled with pure hatred. She rarely spoke above a whisper, but the message was always the same: “Get out.”

Sometimes Carolyn would smell the stench of rotting flesh before the woman appeared. Other times, the smell hung in the room even after she vanished.

By winter, Carolyn was on edge. She flinched when Roger touched her, snapped at the girls without realizing it, and barely had the strength to get through the day. Andrea later said her mother looked hunted, like the house had wrapped a leash around her soul.

Roger tried everything. He fixed squeaky boards, left lights on at night, anything to make the house feel normal again. But none of it helped. Carolyn just kept getting worse.

Finally, out of desperation, Roger reached out to Ed and Lorraine Warren, the Connecticut demonologists he’d read about in the paper. Their names were already pinned to the fridge after the hide-and-clap incident.

In February 1973, the Warrens showed up.

The moment Lorraine stepped into the kitchen, she said she could feel something dark attached to Carolyn, like a hook buried deep inside her energy. She blamed it on Bathsheba Sherman, the 19th-century farm wife whispered about in town legends. According to Lorraine, Bathsheba wasn’t just haunting the house. She was trying to take Carolyn completely.

At first, the Warrens tried gentle methods—prayers, holy water, blessed candles. But the house didn’t calm down. Carolyn started hearing voices chanting inside the walls. Her bruises got darker, deep purples and greens. She was barely eating, barely sleeping, and her weight kept dropping.

Lorraine began to panic. She believed they were running out of time, so she suggested a séance to confront the thing head-on. Roger was reluctant. He knew séances were usually reserved for priests. But Carolyn looked like she was fading right in front of him, so he gave in.

Most sources say it happened in October 1973. Andrea doesn’t remember the exact date—just that rain was beating against the windows and the wind was pushing its way into the cellar like a warning.

That night, the Perrons, the Warrens, two of their assistants, and a few observers gathered around a small card table in the dirt-floor basement. Andrea had been told to stay upstairs, but curiosity won. She crept down the back stairwell and peered through a crack in the door.

Lorraine opened the séance with the Lord’s Prayer, rosary beads wrapped around her fingers. Then she called out to any spirit tied to the land.

That was when everything exploded.

Carolyn’s head snapped back, her eyes rolled white, and a thick, guttural language came out of her mouth—something no one could understand. Then her chair lifted off the ground. Andrea swears it rose at least a foot before flipping backwards and throwing her mother like a ragdoll across the basement. Carolyn slammed into the stone wall and slumped over. The sound she made wasn’t human. Andrea later said it was like an animal caught in a trap.

Roger lost it. He shoved everyone aside, ran to his wife, and screamed at the Warrens to get out. Blood was dripping from Carolyn’s head, and her pulse was unsteady.

Lorraine would later say she felt something during that séance—something ancient, something older than the house or even the land—but she couldn’t name it.

Ed started reciting the St. Michael prayer. Roger cut him off. He wanted no more rituals. The basement fell apart into chaos—children crying, candles overturned, and that same awful smell of decay creeping back up the stairs.

Later on, critics would tear the séance apart. They said it was reckless. Even the Warrens admitted they never performed true exorcisms, only assisted with them. Lorraine clarified that this wasn’t meant to be a banishment. It was just supposed to be controlled contact.

But to Carolyn, nothing about that night felt controlled. She spent the next two days in bed with a fever, her throat raw, shaking. She didn’t remember any of the words she had spoken, just the sickening feeling of something forcing its way through her.

Afterward, Andrea said the whole house felt different. The floorboards no longer creaked. They thudded. Dishes rattled without moving. And the cellar developed a low hum that never stopped.

Roger became more withdrawn. He blamed himself for letting strangers stir up something they didn’t understand.

The family never held another séance. The Warrens left soon after and things were tense. But the damage had been done. That basement séance became one of the most infamous stories tied to the house—one that cemented the Perron haunting in American legend.

Chapter 8: The Haunting That Never Let Go

For the next two years, the hauntings didn’t stop. They came in waves, but nothing ever reached the same violent peak as that October night.

By 1974, Roger and Carolyn had made up their minds. Their children’s mental health meant more than the property. They started planning a move to Georgia. They wouldn’t sell the farmhouse until 1980, but by then they were already long gone in spirit.

To this day, Carolyn doesn’t speak publicly about what happened. She leaves that to Andrea, who documented it all in her House of Darkness, House of Light memoirs. Andrea believes only about five percent of The Conjuring film got things right. But the part where her mother is thrown across the basement, that part, she says, was all too real.

Over the years, skeptics have returned with tape measures, EMF meters, and radar scanners. They found no hidden passageways, no odd land shifts, no medical reason for Carolyn’s wounds.

The Perrons thought they could leave the house behind, but the house had other plans.

Leaving the farmhouse in 1980 should have been the end of it. But the Perrons quickly realized the nightmare hadn’t stayed behind in Harrisville. It had followed them.

In their new home in Georgia, strange things kept happening. Dishes would shift on clean countertops. Bedrooms would turn cold without warning. And sometimes the sisters woke up from the exact same dream—a dark figure standing silently over them. Andrea said she could feel something watching her everywhere she went.

Doors they’d shut would open again on their own. Cold spots moved through their homes like ghosts with nowhere else to go. The fear was no longer tied to that old farmhouse. It had become part of them.

Then came the moment that truly shook them.

It was 2012 and The Conjuring was in production in North Carolina. Andrea and two of her sisters were visiting the set, casually chatting with the crew when a massive gust of wind tore through out of nowhere. Lighting rigs came crashing down, halting filming. The weather had been calm—no breeze, no warning.

And right then, hundreds of miles away in Georgia, Carolyn Perron, who hadn’t traveled, fell in her kitchen and broke her hip. Andrea later said the timing was too perfect to ignore. And when Carolyn heard what happened on set, she didn’t hesitate. She simply whispered, “Bathsheba does not want to be exposed.”

To them, it wasn’t just an eerie coincidence. It was a warning.

Parapsychologist Dr. Barry Taff once described this kind of lingering fear as a post-traumatic haunting, where the trauma itself sticks to you like the smell of smoke after a fire. He believes extreme experiences can leave lasting marks on the nervous system, attracting new phenomena the way magnets draw metal.

Andrea agrees. In interviews and podcasts as recent as 2024, she said the spirits didn’t just haunt the house—they latched on because they lived with them too long. She says the activity now is quieter, more like flickering lights than full-on terror. But the presence never really left.

In 2022, when the Harrisville farmhouse sold for $1.5 million, Andrea wasn’t surprised that the story wasn’t over. Guests who now pay for overnight investigations still report hearing phantom clapping, cold drafts in the cellar, and whispers that seem to come from nowhere.

Whether it’s a spirit that attached itself or trauma that rewired them forever, one thing is certain—the haunting never ended. It just moved with them, refusing to let go.

Chapter 9: The Fate of the House

Norma Sutcliffe and her husband Jerry Helfrich thought they were buying peace when they moved into the old farmhouse in 1987. The Perrons were long gone, and to Norma, the so-called hauntings were nothing more than exaggerated local gossip. For over twenty years, things stayed calm.

But in 2013, everything changed. The Conjuring hit theaters and suddenly their home wasn’t just a house—it was a horror icon. The road outside was filled with cars at all hours. People knocked on the door in the middle of the night. Strangers wandered the property with flashlights and cameras, hoping to catch a glimpse of something spooky.

Norma did hear odd creaks and the lights would flicker from time to time, but her biggest fear wasn’t ghosts. It was trespassers.

In 2015, she filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros., accusing the studio of using her home’s likeness without permission and triggering what she called a “Conjuring-instigated siege.” Eventually, Norma and Jerry had had enough.

In 2019, they sold the house to Cory and Jennifer Heinzen, paranormal investigators from Maine. Unlike the Sutcliffes, the Heinzens leaned into the chaos. They turned the house into a full-blown ghost tourism destination. Visitors could book daytime tours, spend the night, or watch hours of live-streamed footage.

People paid hundreds to sit in dark rooms lit by candles, waiting for the sound of a door clicking shut or the sight of a shadow gliding down the hallway. In The Sleepless Unrest, a documentary filmed in 2021, the house was described as having a heaviness that never lifts.

Then in May 2022, the Heinzens sold the house to Boston developer Jacqueline Nunes for about $1.5 million, roughly triple what they had paid. She promised to keep the tours going, and the eerie business thrived for two more seasons.

But in November 2024, things came crashing down. The Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training issued a stop-work order after discovering the operation had no workers’ compensation insurance since May. Just days later, the Burville Town Council voted unanimously not to renew the house’s entertainment license. They pointed to the insurance lapse, fire safety concerns, and ongoing complaints from neighbors about noise and trespassing.

With the license revoked, all tours and overnight stays were shut down. By December, the doors were closed to the public for the first time in five years.

Some locals breathed a sigh of relief. Others missed the excitement and the tourism dollars. Online, the legend only grew. People still post videos of phantom claps in the barn, and debates continue about whether it was red tape or something supernatural that finally silenced the house.

Nunes says she hopes to reopen once everything is in order, but as of mid-2025, the house remains private and its future remains a mystery. The house may be empty, but its story still echoes far beyond those walls.

Epilogue: Wounds That Never Healed

The Conjuring House is more than a haunted farmhouse—it’s a place where myth and memory, trauma and legend, have collided for centuries. Its story is a testament to how deeply wounds can run, how stories can shape communities, and how some mysteries refuse to let go.

Families were shattered. Ghost hunters swarmed. Hollywood turned it into a blockbuster. But behind the myth was something far more disturbing—something real, something sadder, and more human than anyone imagined.

This isn’t just about ghosts. It’s about wounds that never healed and something that never let go.

And as long as people whisper about what happened on Round Top Road, the haunting will never truly end.