'Ghost Adventures: Curse of the Harrisville Farmhouse': The true story of Old Arnold Estate, popularly known as 'The Conjuring' house
While James Wan's 'The Conjuring' gave horror buffs a pretty legit fright in a long time, it really was nothing compared to the actual story of the Harrisville Farmhouse, the place that inspired it all. Originally deemed as The Old Arnold Estate, it was located in Harrisville, Rhode Island.
The home inside was built in 1736 and sat on 200 acres, featured ten bedrooms and a barn — the perfect place for a family with five young girls to grow up in. Only it wasn't.
Paranormal investigator Zak Bagans and his team are trying to decode the mysteries of the infamous, mysterious and absolutely terrifying home in this year's Halloween special for their Travel Channel show, 'Ghost Adventures'. While they do that, here's the real story of the home that is rumored to be haunted to this day.
Keep the lights on at night!
The story began in late 1970 when Roger and Carolyn Perron along with their five daughters moved into the Harrisville home. The house had been pretty much a great bargain and the family couldn't wait to start their life together at their new nest. Oddly though, their previous owner warned the family of something strange — "For the sake of your family, leave the lights on at night!"
Strange things started happening almost the same night. The girls would see a boy around the house just wandering about. He'd move their toys. Sometimes, the mother would find brooms being moved about and often, a pile of dirt scraped to the middle of the kitchen floor. There's also the story of a ghost named Manny, an old man with a lopsided smile, who would look at the girls as they played. The adults did not believe the kids until things got much weirder.
Beds would levitate off the floor, doors slams and open on their own and furniture move around on its own accord. Carolyn is also said to have been pinched and slapped.
The grisly past of the Old Arnold Estate
When things started getting pretty uncomfortable, the family decided to dig up the home's past. What they found was macabre — out of the eight generations that lived in the house from the same family, too many had met with deadly fates. A family matriarch had hanged herself on the property, there had been many suicides, a girl had been raped and murdered while children had drowned in the nearby creek. But, of all the unpleasant and unseen residents of the house, there was one angry spirit that was the worst of all. She is portrayed as a witch named Bathsheba in the films.
Bathsheba Sherman
Bathsheba Thayer was a real woman that did live in the Perron home with her husband and four kids. Legend said she had married John Sherman in the 1800s and that's how she came to live at the Estate. The couple's first child was found dead, its head impaled — and Bathsheba had been charged with murder. It is rumored that it was a Satanic sacrifice. Two of her other children also died young as well. She, too, hanged herself from a tree behind the house. However, there is no proof that she was indeed a witch or that she had killed her kids as a sacrifice.
It wasn't until paranormal legends Ed and Lorraine Warren decided to help out the Perrons that things began to look up for the family. The Warrens are said to have seen Carolyn speak to them in foreign tongues and be thrown around by unseen forces. They lived there for a decade, even though they wanted to leave, because of financial issues, until finally leaving in 1980.
Sill haunted, new owners say
Cory and Jennifer Heinzen bought the farmhouse in June 2019 and say they have seen doors opening, footsteps and knocks in the home — seemingly with no one around. They've even seen flashing lights in rooms that have no lights to begin with. However, things are not as bad as they were with the Perrons.
The couple told the Sun Journal, “I don’t have the feeling of anything evil, [but] it’s very busy,” he said. “You can tell there’s a lot of things going on in the house.”
'Ghost Adventures: Curse of the Harrisville Farmhouse’ premiers Thursday, Oct 31, 9pm/ 8c and Friday, Nov 1, 1am/12c, exclusively on Travel Channel.
