The real-life story behind 'The Conjuring'

very very scary oh boy a lot of you recognize this from the movie the conjuring the house where a lot of things went bump in the night this was loosely based on a real-life story the family that lived in that home was the parent family and the eldest daughter featured in the movie Andrea is here with us on San Antonio living this morning she is the author of the book house of darkness house of light it's very nice to see you lovely to see you again we were introduced at Black Swan yes delightful thank you so much to Joanne from the Black Swan Inn for bringing us together is it hard for you to watch little clips from the movie like that well no because I've seen it so many times now the week that the film opened between my trip to Hollywood and then to Rhode Island and New York then Atlanta I've seen it so many times that but the first time that I saw it all I did was cry yeah yeah it is so interesting so many people saw this movie and a lot of time we're watching horror movies and we're like oh you know that is a dream of Hollywood that was your life but worse right they really had to tone it down for the film James James Wan the director was shooting for a pg-13 rating he wanted to bring this story to as many people as he could and when he got the R rating I was with him and he hit the roof we had to pull it back down then he said he said to the MPAA what do I have to take out of the film in order to get a pg-13 and they said there's nothing you can remove it's just too scary and they had already toned it down so much that he was shocked but you know it worked out well and dad knows now that it's a hundy BD that all the teenagers are saying is oh boy it's so it's crazy to have seen that movie and then to have met you let's go back to the year you and your family moved into the farmhouse uh walking walking in through the front door how how much time passed before you knew that something was different about this house about five minutes Wow Wow what was the first thing that happened that you in well we bought the house in December of 1970 but my mother refused to move at Christmas imagine that so we moved in the first week of January 1971 in the middle of a snowstorm swirling ice storm and my dad it was a whole caravan and it was chaos of course moving days tend to be but my dad handed me a large box off the back of the truck and said take this to your mother in the kitchen so I went through the parlor door and I had to walk the entire length of the house to get to the kitchen in the pantry and it was more than 110 feet long so I walked into the dining room and I saw an oddly dressed man in the corner of the dining room and I greeted him because I was a polite child I said good morning and he didn't respond to me his focus was entirely on the elder gentleman who was moving out of the house who had sold it to us and uh so I kept going and I walked in the kitchen and said mom who's that other man with mr. Kenyon in the dining room she said there is no other man in the dining room and then Nancy came in Christine came in Cindy came in and the last sister came in and said that man in the dining room just disappeared so immediately you knew that something was up with the house I've got a couple of pictures to share first the house when you guys moved in it looks like a beautiful farmhouse a typical setting of a farm and then we've got a picture of your mother in front of the fireplace there when you moved into this house did your parents have any idea about the history whatsoever no of course we knew it was extensive the house as it is now was completed in 1736 40 years before the beginning of the Revolutionary War so it is truly a colonial home and it and actually it took years to build the house as it is because it started as a Foursquare and then grew as you know families and eight generations of one extended family lived and died in that house and many of them never left when you are in the house and you're sleeping it's bedtime you're with your sisters you guys are all on that top floor and each of you are seeing different you're hearing different things did you immediately talk to each other about what you saw or did you keep it in the first night or two that we were in the house of course you're adjusting to a new environment I thought that the sound that I was hearing was wind in the eaves but that wasn't the case at all and then my darling little sister Cindy crawled into bed with me she's Annie can I sleep with you I said sure I pulled the quilt back and let her in she snuggled up real close and she said I hear voices in my room and they're all talking at once but they're all saying the same thing and I asked her what are they saying and she said there are seven dead soldiers buried in the wall what what about the history of the house what were you able to find out about the house over over the last years of your life I mean I know you didn't know as much while you were there later in life would you find out my mother actually did extensive research my mother is at heart and historian and she did extensive research on the house she found out that mrs. John Arnold hung herself in the barn when she was 93 years old we found out that there were a couple of other hangings in the house as well women that had claimed their own lives Bathsheba Sharman lived in the house she was accused of she was acquitted well actually it never even went to trial she was dismissed from an inquest but she had a child an infant in her care that died and they found that a needle hadn't been impaled at the base of its skull and it had died of convulsions so even though she was exonerated from that at the inquest in the court of public opinion the accusation stuck and she was tried and convicted and lived a miserable life for her entire life she lived to be in her 70s which was old for her time and it never it that black cloud hung over her in life and after death so you got to the point where all these spirits were really making it a very scary place to live and in the movie you saw that the Warrens came into play and they came to the house did that happen in real life yes it did actually they didn't move in with us as was portrayed in the film and there was no exorcism conducted in the house a priest came with them they decided that it was important that my mother was oppressed by a spirit and my mother was changing radically dramatically even though it was gradually over a period of time she began dressing in vintage clothing she started using archaic language like yeoman you know people don't use that word to describe the menfolk in town and we thought it was because she was immersed in the history of the place and we did pay attention to it all of us did because we felt like our mother was slipping away from us and in some respects and I stepped in to the role of you know I was paren to fight at a young age I needed to take care of my sisters and my mom was just immersed in the history of the house and learning everything that she could when the Warrens came it was right around this time in 1973 and they conducted an investigation over period of about a year and a half which culminated in a seance gone horribly wrong and I want to talk a little bit more about that seance when we come back we'll talk about that we'll talk about the changes that happened with your mom and we'll talk about what the book reveals about what happened in that farmhouse welcome back to San Antonio living this morning we're talking with Andrea Perrin she is the eldest daughter that was featured in the movie the conjuring I'm sure a lot of you watched it it just was released on DVD and on Netflix I saw it just a couple of days ago you wrote a book house of darkness house of light describing your experiences in the home that you lived in for 10 years with your family it's a trilogy with the third book coming out very soon how much more is in the book than we saw in the movie there's no way to describe it actually the film is in grand overview the film does a beautiful job of getting the message out that good overcomes evil and that fear can be vanquished by love in that respect I think it did a beautiful job and I think that it's a very informative film I thought that it was stunning the way that it was filmed I thought Jay one the cast the crew everybody did a fantastic job but it paints the broad strokes the fine lines of history are written and chronicled in the books so for those of you who want to know the story behind this story and you want the facts this is definitely a book that you should read I in the movie there was a scene where your mother was possessed that wasn't real life but there was a seance that happened when the Warrens were in the house with you what happened during that seance it was far more intense than anything that they could have portrayed on film it did not happen in the cellar it happened in the dining room and I knew from that moment I was never one to believe in demons I knew evil existed but and I still don't know exactly what a demon is but I will tell you that they brought a priest in a medium with them to the house of full technical crew that we're trying to film this event and they inadvertently opened a door that they could not close the medium invited the spirits in and with them came something which attacked my mother I don't if she was possessed it was for a brief period of time but I saw it all with my own eyes and what I know is that whatever attacked her was not of this world it spoke through her in a language that does not exist on this planet and it levitated her in the chair that she was in and within a split second when it was done curling her body into a ball you would have expected to hear bones breaking it threw her into the adjacent parlor about 20 feet away in literally a split second you saw this how old are you 15 15 years old documented in the warren files and as well there were several people who saw this all happen what happened in the house after that night did things get worse whatever was allowed in that night subdued the spirits they were very very quiet for a long time afterwards several months and my mother kept wasting away you saw the photograph of her in front of the fireplace I mean she was just so frail my mother moved in there you know a model material woman just strikingly beautiful and she just literally wasted away she lost so much weight she changed inexorably in ways that were shocking and then one night she came out into the parlour and the dining room had been shut down for the night but she heard voices and she turned and she saw an entire family having dinner in the dining room at a table that was not our own a woman was cooking in front of a fireplace that had been sealed shut for more than a hundred years she told her children to go take their seats at that on the benches at the table and two men were sitting on the other side she was there and they were here and one of them looked into the parlour and made eye contact with my mother and then nudged the man beside him and pointed her out and she was the ghost Wow that's when she understood that we were living in a portal cleverly disguised as a farmhouse and that's when she fought her way back to us the book is called house of darkness house of light because although you experience some very crazy and unnerving times you also had the best time of your life in that house yeah tell me about some of the good times there were so many and that's why the title is what it is my mother titled the trilogy and she said well it was both it was both and I often say it's that was the best decade of my life because from the age of 12 when I first saw a full-body apparition I knew there is something beyond our mortal existence I'm still not quite sure what it is but I do know that it exists and therefore the vessel is what becomes ashes to ashes dust to dust our soul in our spirit I truly believe moves on and so I have been able to live a fully liberated life free of fear of death and when you think about how many people fail to live fully because of their fear of death I think that it was a true gift to me and when you're touched by spirit it's a gift that you can never return you can turn your back on it and pretend that it didn't happen or you can embrace it and accept it and garner from it what can give you the freedom to live your life in a victorious way and that's what I've done when you guys left the farm and you moved on with your lives where did the spirits go are they with you I mean are they there well they visit as my mother so aptly put we could leave the farm but the farm will never leave us we found out we thought that it was our great escape we did and half of us did not want to leave it all and I'm in that half however my mother had told my dad she said Roger if we don't sell this place I won't survive another winter here and he believed her and we bought a house in Georgia a beautiful farm in Georgia a new farm the house was like a hill so what could possibly be you know and we got down there and mrs. Warren called I don't even know how she found us but she did a couple of months after we were there and she said Carolyn I want to tell this story book a movie you know offered them a boatload of money and life-changing money and my mother said no Lorraine no and she said you at least need to discuss this with your husband well that night dad came home but mom didn't mention it to him yet she went down to throw a load of laundry in the washing machine and a 200-pound door that was bolted to a wall came over on top of her and dislocated her shoulder and gave her her concussion and when mrs. Warren called back the next morning she said absolutely not Lorraine I don't need to discuss this with my husband please don't contact me again Wow Wow what changed to allow her to have you write the book It was as if a bell went off in my head in August of oh seven and interestingly I didn't even tell my family that I was writing the book because I didn't want to be discouraged I didn't want to hear any reticence about it I knew that the time had come thirty plus years had elapsed and I felt that the world had matured and its consciousness about spirit and that it was time and I was no more than six weeks into it when I got a call from Hollywood the first producer called me from Hollywood and there was no conceivable way they could have known I was writing a book I had told no one well the books are out now there are two the third is in the works it is a trilogy I already downloaded the first two so I'll let you know Andrea Perrin House of Darkness house of light that is the website as well the title of the book house of darkness house of light calm

Channel: News 4 (WOAI) San Antonio

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Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2014