The Conjuring House: a 1736 farmhouse in Burrillville, Rhode Island is genuinely, paranormally haunted

Why the Perron account is taken seriously

The believers' version deserves to be stated at full strength, because the Perron story is not a flimsy campfire tale. What lifts it above the ordinary run of haunted houses is that the witnesses were sincere, consistent, and unusually enduring.

This was not a family that fled screaming after one bad night. The Perrons stayed nearly a decade, and years later Andrea Perron set the experiences down in careful, unsensational detail across three volumes. There is no sign of a hoax for profit; the account existed long before there was money in it. When ordinary, plainly frightened people describe, over years, things they cannot explain, the testimony carries a weight that an anonymous ghost story never could.

The setting reinforces it. A remote 1736 farmhouse, with its low ceilings, wide plank floors, and long history, is exactly the kind of place where the uncanny feels at home, and many visitors since have come away shaken. To the Perrons and those who believe them, the sheer atmosphere of the house is part of the evidence.

A family that stayed a decade, an account written down without profit in mind, and a house that unsettles nearly everyone who spends a night in it. Waving all of that away as simply nothing does not do the record justice.

That is the case at its best: not a proven ghost, but a sincere, sustained, deeply felt account set in a house that seems built to produce exactly such experiences.

Where the haunting claim breaks down

The trouble is that sincerity is not evidence of the supernatural, and everything the case offers turns out to be the kind of thing that frightened people in an old house reliably produce without any ghost at all.

The Perron reports were never recorded by instruments, never observed under controlled conditions, and were set down in full only decades later, in a memoir and a film shaped for maximum effect. The endorsement most often cited, that of Ed and Lorraine Warren, adds fame rather than proof: the Warrens were showmen and self-styled demonologists, not scientists, and their signature cases have drawn heavy skeptical scrutiny and fraud allegations for decades. The modern "evidence" gathered on ghost tours, EVP, EMF spikes, orbs, cold spots, has mundane explanations and is collected in the worst possible conditions for a real test: at night, by paying guests primed to be scared.

And then there is the "Bathsheba the witch" storyline, which is not merely weak but false. The film and the legend hold that a witch named Bathsheba Sherman sacrificed a child and cursed anyone who took her land. The real Bathsheba Sherman (born Thayer, 1812 to 1885) was a churchgoing local woman who was never tried, charged, or convicted of witchcraft or any crime, who was eulogized and buried in consecrated ground, and who died of a stroke at 72. No contemporary source accuses her of anything. The witch story traces to the Warren and Perron accounts and the movie, not to history.

None of this proves that nothing happened to the Perrons. It shows that the case's strongest material, sincere memory, a famous endorsement, an atmospheric old house, is fully compatible with suggestion and ordinary causes, which is a long way from a proven haunting. And on the one point that can be checked against the record, the witch, the popular story is flatly wrong.

The witch who never was

It is worth pausing on Bathsheba Sherman, because her case is the one place in this story where the historical record delivers a clean answer, and the answer is that a real woman has been defamed.

Genealogists and folklorists who went looking for the wicked witch of the legend found instead an unremarkable 19th-century New Englander. Bathsheba Thayer Sherman was born in 1812, married, raised children, belonged to the Baptist church, and died in 1885 at 72 after a stroke. She was eulogized and buried in consecrated ground, the treatment a community gives a respectable member, not a suspected child-killer. There is no trial in the record, no conviction, no contemporaneous accusation of witchcraft at all. The infanticide, the curse, the pact with the devil: none of it appears before the Warren and Perron accounts and the 2013 film put it there.

This is why the file draws a hard line. Whether the houseis haunted is genuinely unproven, an open question no one can currently settle. Whether Bathsheba Sherman was a baby-killing witch is not open at all: she was not, and saying otherwise is a slander that has attached a real family's name to a horror-movie villain. Reporting the legend honestly means naming it as a debunked defamation, never repeating it as if it might be true.

The house keeps its mystery; Bathsheba Sherman should get back her good name. Confusing the two, treating a fabricated curse as part of the case for a haunting, does a disservice to the history and to the dead.

How a franchise manufactures a haunting

Of all America's haunted houses, this one is among the first people name, and it endures for reasons that are only partly about what the Perrons experienced. A great deal of it is about what has been built on top of them.

It endures because a blockbuster made it familiar. The Conjuring and its sequels grossed billions and put the farmhouse in front of hundreds of millions of viewers, and each retelling smoothed the ambiguities and sharpened the scares. A story you have watched dramatized feels confirmed, and the film's certainty quietly replaces the messiness of the original reports in most people's minds.

It endures because a named villain grips harderthan a vague unease. "Bathsheba the witch" gives the fear a face, a motive, and a curse, which is far more memorable than unexplained noises, and the fact that she is a fabrication does nothing to slow the story down.

And it endures because a haunting is now a business. The house has passed through owners running paid tours and overnight stays, ghost-hunting media, and a foreclosure-and-bidding saga that ended when a Ghost Hunters television star bought it in June 2026. Every ticket sold and every camera crew that visits has an interest in the house staying haunted, which is its own kind of engine: the experiences are packaged, sold, and refreshed, so the belief renews itself regardless of what happened in the 1970s.