[MUSIC PLAYING] Lots of horror films say
they're based on a true story to get in an extra scare,
but those claims rarely add up to anything more than a
disclaimer on a movie poster. One family, however,
claimed that in the 1970s they lived the tale told
in James Wan's 2013 film The Conjuring. Family members were
thrown out of their beds, kissed by ghosts in
the night, and preyed upon by the spirit of a witch. So today, we're going
to take a deep dive into how the true story
behind The Conjuring is even creepier than the movie. But before we get started,
be sure to subscribe to the Weird History channel. After that, leave us
a comment, and let us know what other
ghoulish topics you would like to hear about. OK, time to conjure up
some spooky history. [MUSIC PLAYING] In 1971, Roger and
Carolyn Perron, along with their five daughters
April, Cindy, Christine, Nancy, and Andrea, moved into
their new house located in Harrisville Rhode Island. And if you've seen
The Conjuring, you already have an idea
of where this is going. But the most curious thing
that happened to them didn't have anything
to do with ghosts. Rather, it was a
piece of advice given to them by their neighbors. "For the sake of your family,
leave the lights on at night." It wasn't long after receiving
that fateful piece of advice that the parents encountered
their first paranormal entity. As with all hauntings
and long-term paranormal experiences, the
terrifying events of the real life conjuring
began as strange occurrences that barely registered
as paranormal activity. Things moved. There were weird noises. It was nothing out of the
ordinary for an old house. According to Cynthia
Perron, there were a lot of small things
happening that no one talked about until it was too late. Unfortunately, the serenity
of a banal haunting wouldn't last for long. After moving into
their dream home, the parents almost
immediately realized that they were
living with what they believed to have been an
entire set of ghost roommates. At the onset of the
haunting, the Perron children felt that most of the entities
had walked their halls were benevolent, if not benign. The children even claimed
that the initial entities occasionally acted
as babysitters. Some nights the ghosts
would even tuck them in and kiss their foreheads. Both Cynthia and
Andrea Perron remember the ghost who tucked them in. They even remember
the way she smelled. According to Cynthia, when
they first moved into the house for the first two months,
there was a ghost woman that came and kissed her
every night on the forehead. At first, she thought it was her
mother, but something was off. As her sister Andrea put it,
mom smelled like ivory soap, and this spirit smelled
like flowers and fruit. After learning to live
with their friendly ghosts, the Perron Family made a
go of it on their new farm. However, it didn't take long
for more malevolent forces to begin creeping into their
little slice of a somewhat spooky heaven. The Perron girls claim that
they were attacked in the barn by unseen entities. And then on one evening,
a series of voices began to speak to them about
the bodies in their walls. Andrea claims that
her sister Cindy climbed into bed
with her one night to tell her about the harrowing
news a disembodied voice had delivered. According to Cindy,
the ghosts told her there are seven dead
soldiers buried in the wall. While the girls were dealing
with something reaching out to them from beyond the grave,
a different series of events began that foreshadowed
the terror to come. They claim that at
5:15 in the morning the smell of rotting flesh
would waft through the house, tossing everyone out
of bed one by one. Andrea claims that
around this time that the girls were visited by
a male ghost that tortured them so badly that she refuses to
give any concrete details. Let's just say there was a very
bad male spirit in the home with five little girls. Given the implication,
you'd think the family would pack up and
leave at that very moment, even if they didn't have
anywhere else to go. But astonishingly, they
decided to stick it out. [MUSIC PLAYING] While the entire Perron Family
had paranormal encounters throughout their time
living in the house, Carolyn Perron, the
matriarch of the family, seems to have been
the most sensitive to the spirits
inhabiting the home. In an interview with
The Providence Journal, she claimed that she
knew something was wrong when a woman in gray
appeared next to her bed moaning "get out, get
out, I'll drive you out with death and gloom." As a not too subtle hint,
maybe they should take it. I would. The woman in the
gray dress could have been the ghost of a woman
named Bathsheba Thayer, who is the witch believed
to have done most of the haunting in this case. That being said,
she could have also been a poltergeist created as
a portent of things to come or one of the many ghosts
who dwell within the home. Ghostbusters notwithstanding,
this isn't exactly a science. Andrea Perron, the
eldest daughter, later said, whoever
the spirit was, she perceived herself to
be mistress of the house, and she resented the
competition my mother posed for that position. Again, you'd think the
whole death and gloom thing would send the family running. But like a good horror film,
the answer would be no. [MUSIC PLAYING] The Perrons allege that
Bathsheba Thayer's attacks began as harmless
poltergeist activity. They were pinched,
poked, and prodded by a seemingly invisible force. But then things escalated. The Perrons believed Thayer
wanted them to leave. Pretty obvious. Remember the "get
out, get out" thing? They also think Thayer
tried to get what she wanted by torturing Carolyn. When physically assaulting
Carolyn didn't work, the Perrons claimed that
Thayer inhabited Carolyn's body to better horrify them. That sounds like an
effective strategy. Possessing Carolyn
gave Thayer the power to cause the mother and her
family intense bodily harm, and it left Carolyn feeling
weak and emotionally drained. One of the strangest
parts of this story isn't the gray witch that
haunted the family or the broom ghost that was known to
sweep up the kitchen whenever no one was around. It's how the story came to the
attention of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the paranormal
investigators who helped turn the Amityville
Haunting into a household name. Most accounts of the subject
claim that the family reached out to the Warrens. But According to Andrea
Perron, a family friend went to see the Warrens
while they were giving a talk in Putnam, Connecticut. Cynthia Perron backs up this
claim, saying in an interview that a family friend named
Barbara went to the Warrens lecture and then told the
family about the couple. [MUSIC PLAYING] After Carolyn allegedly
became possessed with the spirit of
Thayer, the Perrons got in touch with Ed
and Lorraine Warren. The couple came to investigate,
and Lorraine Warren claimed that she sensed a
dark presence in the house from moment one. According to the Perrons,
the Warrens cleansed the home and conducted a
seance with Carolyn in the family's basement. Unfortunately,
the seance did not go as planned and made
things much worse. The Warrens visited the
Perron Family intermittently over the course of
the next decade, but they were never
able to fix anything. Lorraine never
publicly discussed what happened during
the seance, but she does claim what happened in
the basement disturbed her to the core. Andrea Perron corroborates
Lorraine's story. She claims that she
snuck into the basement to see the seance
firsthand and was never able to look at her
mother the same way again. According to Andrea,
her mother began to speak a language not of
this world in a voice not of her own. Her chair levitated, and she
was thrown across the room. So eight-year-old spoiler alert. If you saw The Conjuring
movie, then you probably remember a series of escalating
games of hide and clap, where one person is blindfolded while
the rest of the girls playing run off to hide. In these scenes, the
mother is consistently taunted by a pair of
ghostly clapping hands belonging to Bathsheba Thayer. The hide and clap
scenes are super spooky, but it turns out that the real
story is much more harrowing. Cynthia Perron claims that
one day while the girls were playing hide and seek on the
farm, she hid in a pine box without any kind of lock,
latch, or ventilation. After no one came
to find her, Cynthia decided to find a
new hiding place. She later told an interviewer
that when she tried to get out, the box wouldn't open. She started to panic and
began pushing at the lid. She kicked and screamed,
but no one heard her. Luckily, 20 minutes
later, her sister Nancy came along and simply
opened the box for her. Paranormal or crappy old box? We'll let you decide. [MUSIC PLAYING] According to the
Perron Family, they're still being haunted
by Bathsheba Thayer. During the filming
of The Conjuring, the entire family was
invited to the set. Initially, they were all going
to go, but at the last minute Carolyn got cold feet
and changed her mind. She claimed that she didn't
want to make the trip, but it's also not
hard to imagine there was some trepidation on
her part to dig up the past. Andrea Perron claims
that while the family was being interviewed, a rogue
wind swept them over, knocking down cameras,
lights, and anything that surrounded them. Meteorology
notwithstanding, they all agreed it was Bathsheba's curse. When they returned to
their hotels that evening, the kids learn their mother
had fallen and broken her hip at the exact time that
the eerie wind swept over them. When the family made it to
their mother's hospital room, they claim that she sat up
and said Bathsheba's curse-- she does not want to be exposed. According to Andrea
Perron, everyone who has lived in the
house that we know of has experienced the haunting. Some have left screaming
and running for their lives. She claims the man they sold
it to started a restoration project but left
screaming without his car, without his tools, and
without his clothing. However, According to the
current owner, Norma Sutcliffe, the house isn't as haunted
as you might have heard. Sutcliffe only claims
to have seen and heard people talking in other rooms,
footsteps when no one is home, and a strange blue light
shooting around a room. Yeah, Norma. That's still not normal. Get out. After The Conjuring
was released, Sutcliffe became so unhappy with
all the attention surrounding her home, she attempted to
disprove the Perron Family's story. [MUSIC PLAYING] The demonic antagonist
of The Conjuring is a witch named Bathsheba
Thayer, born Bathsheba Sherman. The Perron Family
claims the spirit of this woman haunted
them for nearly a decade, possessed their mother,
and even followed them onto the set of a film. But was there really a
witch, or is she just the victim of bad press? The film posits that Thayer
sacrificed her baby to Satan before hanging herself
in order to become a malevolent spirit within
the Rhode Island farmhouse. However, it turns out
that Bathsheba was just a normal woman who was
married and had four children. Three of them did
die at a young age, but this was the 19th century. So it wasn't that unusual. In 1885, Bathsheba
passed away from a stroke and was buried next to her first
husband and three children. Finally, one of the
biggest questions most people have about the
haunting of the Perron Family is why would you just not leave? I have that question. It's a reasonable question. According to them,
the answer is money. It's simply wasn't financially
possible for the family to leave. The haunting was happening
during the end of the Nixon administration all the
way through the Carter administration. The economy was terrible. And no matter how
good your friends are, no one has a room to house five
teenage girls and their mother and father. Aside from that,
Andrea Perron notes that the property value
on their 200-acre farm was devaluing by the
day, and the family would have been destitute if
they had just walked away. In 1980, the Perron Family was
finally able to sell the house. And as soon as the
paperwork was signed, they made a beeline for
Georgia and never looked back. As to whether this is
a convincing reason to stay in a house with ghosts
that take control of your body and abuse your
daughters, well, like with every other
aspect of this story, you'll just have to decide
what you believe for yourself. So what do you think? Do you believe in hauntings? Let us know in the
comments below. And while you're at it, check
out some of these other videos from our Weird History. [MUSIC PLAYING]
