The Conjuring House

A farmhouse outside Burrillville, Rhode Island, where the Perron family said they lived with apparitions and physical attacks from 1970 or 1971. Ed and Lorraine Warren's investigation of it became the basis for the film The Conjuring.

Kenny Biddle, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2019, sums up the story: Roger and Carolyn Perron and their five daughters moved into the farmhouse on the edge of Burrillville in January 1971. NBC News gives 1970 as the year daughter Andrea Perron began living there. Soon after the move, the family reported apparitions and blows from unseen hands.

Andrea Perron wrote a trilogy of books about the family's experiences, NBC News reported. Biddle notes that in those books the apparition seen most often was a woman whose neck was broken, later popularly identified as Bathsheba Sherman, which he says is wrong. The Valley Breeze reported in 2023 that J'aime Rubio, a writer who investigates history, found no record that anyone accused Sherman of witchcraft or spoke ill of her. Rubio described her as an ordinary woman.

NBC News reported that an investigation of the house by Ed and Lorraine Warren became the source for the film The Conjuring. Wikipedia says screenwriters the Hayes brothers retold the story from the Warrens' side and spoke to Lorraine Warren by phone many times to check details. NRI NOW reported in 2022 that Norma Sutcliffe, who paid $169,500 for the house in 1987, has disputed the paranormal claims, and that a Boston developer bought it that year for $1.52 million.