Close your eyes, if you will, and imagine your childhood home. The sunny kitchen opening onto a sitting room, your whole family laughing, smiling as they eat Dad’s Sunday pancakes. Summer trips to the ice cream shop and rolling down the green hill outside the back door that leads into the forest. The TV flickering as you try to watch The Brady Bunch after homework. Brushing your teeth in the upstairs bathroom with your sisters before bed, the mirror creaking open on its hinge to reveal the dark hallway behind you, steps on the stairs creaking, closer. Working on school projects with Mom, plugging your nose to block out the constant smell of rotting flesh. The temperature dropping 50 degrees in a moment. Your entire family catching sleeping spells so powerful and so frequent you make peace just passing out on the floor. Not being able to take a bath without invisible hands trying to drown you. Those same hands dragging you from your bed in the middle of the night down two flights of stairs into the basement. Hysterical shrieks erupting from that same empty basement. Famous psychics trying to exorcise a murderous spirit out of your mother. And, you know, cake and ice cream on your birthday.
This was the childhood of Andrea Perron, who for ten years lived in what is now considered one America’s most famous haunted homes. If you’re already familiar with Perron, it will be because of The Conjuring. James Wan’s 2013 film followed a family of seven’s fight to survive the vengeful attacks of a spirit named Bathsheba, who haunted their rural home. Wan based the film on the real experiences of the Perron family—father Roger, mother Carolyn, and daughters Andrea, Nancy, Cindy, Christine, and April, who from 1970 to 1980 lived among the dead in The Arnold Estate, a deeply haunted farmhouse built in the Rhode Island sticks in 1736. In Bathsheba: Search for Evil, a new, two-part documentary series from T+E which seeks to separate the film’s fictions from the real haunting, Roger calls The Conjuring “95% wrong” in its depiction of his family’s experiences. Christine’s assessment is less damning, but much spookier: “A lot of what happened in the house was scarier than the movie—because it was true.” Andrea is the most generous, acknowledging that “They did the best they could, trying to compress ten years into two hours.”
After speaking to Andrea Perron at length about her time in that house, it’s clear that The Conjuring grossly misrepresents the Perrons’ experiences, which in many cases were both more surreal and more banal than any film can really capture. But I must say, the compression of ten years into two hours no longer strikes me as a poor representation of the traumatic, hallucinogenic, time-bending effects of living in a state of constant exposure to things that are impossible to comprehend. “We had days that felt like years, and months that just slipped by,” Andrea says. “We never knew if it was 1976, or if it was 1842, or if it was 1780. There was a swirling sense of timelessness to living in that house.” The vast majority of stories about supernatural phenomena are stories of containment. The wrong closet door is opened and a ghost is awoken; the ghost must be put back to sleep. A young woman gets possessed by a demon; the demon must be exorcised. But what if you couldn’t escape or contain them? What if you lived alongside them for ten full years, from 12 to 21, some of the most crucial years in cognitive development, never getting used to them, experiencing shock after incomprehensible shock that not even the most mentally adroit adult could process? When I speak to Andrea Perron, I don’t want to know what happened. I want to know how it felt, and how those ten harrowing years have continued to haunt her family, long after they left the farmhouse.
Realty/Blueflash Photography
Andrea Perron now lives in Florida with her father and a dog—“my darling Peanut Butter Cup,” she calls her. She is equal parts composed and crass (on the subject of Richard Nixon, she remarks that “the son of a bitch should have died in jail”), serious and humorous (an anecdote about accidentally booking a screeching bat into her sister Christine’s hair with a tennis racket has me in stitches). She is an absorbing storyteller with dramatic verve, but it’s her recall of minute details that’s most astounding. “These 50 years hence,” she says, deep into our first conversation, “just talking about it is almost for me like being there again. I’m there right now as I’m telling you those stories.” You might attribute that to the trilogy of books Perron published between 2011 and 2014 about her family’s time in the Arnold Estate. The meticulous, granular degree of historical reconstruction achieved in the House of Darkness, House of Light books was made possible only through years of grueling self-reflection, group interview, comparative analysis between individual accounts, and archival research. But Perron attributes her recall to something else: “childhood trauma,” and adds with a smirk, “the gift that keeps on giving.”
It took 25 years after leaving the house, all the while holding painful memories at bay, for Perron to be able to return to her childhood and ask, what really happened? “I remember as I wrote these stories, revisiting these terrifying experiences over and over and over again, that at some point it felt like self-punishment. It didn’t feel cathartic to me. It felt abusive at times, that I was literally forcing myself to remember things that I had spent decades trying to forget.” And Andrea is the first to admit that among the seven Perrons, she may have had it the easiest, haunting-wise. “I developed a cordial, kind of simpatico relationship with the spirits, where I was not attacked. I was communicated with, but that’s different.” It was her mother and her younger sister Cindy who “took the brunt of it.”
Cindy, who today is a wide-eyed and wise, utterly sincere person, was among her sisters the most frequent victim of the home’s malevolence—being dragged out of bed and down the stairs by an unseen hand, waking up to broken-necked apparition whispering “come to me, little girl,” and a drowning attempt so violent that Andrea didn’t put it in the book. “Cindy doesn’t take baths anymore,” Andrea says solemnly. “She takes showers. She was only 14 years old when that happened, and it traumatized her so badly that it’s not even something that we can talk about.” That broken-necked spirit was without competition the most malignant entity in the Arnold Estate, and it made Carolyn its adversary for ten long years. The resilient Perron matriarch withstood the most brutal, and the most personalized abuse in the house, gruesome attacks that had a distinctly sadistic emotional undercurrent. Often she would appear to Carolyn at dawn, stopping the clock dead at 5:15, and terrorize her with sights like a hand with the skin flayed off. However hard Carolyn tried to wake her husband, he would not. “I think,” Andrea ventures, “that because when Cindy was two months old she had to go through a major surgery, and they lost her briefly on the table, and because when my mother was younger she too had a near-death experience where she left her body, that that marked them. I think that they took the brunt of it because they had been to the other side and they were recognized as such. They had literally transformed into spirit ever so briefly.”
Despite all this, Andrea’s relationship to the house today is oddly warm, even effusively positive. She calls it “the only home I’ve ever known.” But she doesn’t blame Cindy and Christine from staying away. This is one of the saddest, most profound legacies of the Arnold haunting on the Perron family. Though the process of Andrea’s research period for the books brought the family together, and streamlined their various experiences into one cohesive account, the first few years of the house saw wedges driven between them all. “Cindy calls it the bubble,” Andrea says. That is, the spirits’ ability to isolate members of the family from one another by subjecting them to horrors that could never be corroborated, so they were often left disputed, or simply unsaid. Roger’s frequent absence from the home while traveling for work (he owned a jewelry manufacturing business), combined with a rational, masculine disbelief of the unseen and unexplainable encouraged a culture of secrecy among the girls. “For the first few years, it was terrible. No one was honest about the hauntings that affected us all,” Andrea says.
The haunting also accelerated a division that the turbulent ‘70s had already opened up between Roger and Carolyn. Andrea remembers the arguments that would break out each night, when on the family’s little RCA TV, the “news would run a blue background and list in white the names of all the servicemen that had been killed in Vietnam that day.” Her mother would sit there and cry, and her father “would try to argue with her that this was a war of necessity, that the communists were not going to be allowed to take over the world.” Carolyn, who “was as anti-Nixon as a human being gets,” would usually respond by telling Roger to “get the fuck out of my face.” “It was a turbulent time for the country,” Andrea remarks, “and it was a turbulent time for our family.” So they kept divisive topics off the table, and the Perron girls, who were as young as five when they first moved in, learned to accept the unbelievable as readily as the believable.
The spirits seized on that splinter, flocking to negative energy like moths to flame. While Carolyn’s sanity was worn to the bone by visits from the broken-necked spirit, Roger was experiencing visits of his own. When Roger was alone, he would feel hands at the small of his back, and hear sweet nothings whispered on the wind. Ghost hunters who have visited the house over the years all tend to insist that this entity is the spirit of a former resident named Bathsheba. That claim was first and most famously made by Ed and Lorraine Warren, the superstar paranormal investigators whose (deeply flawed, if you ask the Perrons) account of the Arnold Estate haunting was used as The Conjuring’s primary source material. The Perron girls never fully bought this theory, and after much research and discussion, they’ve begun to disagree. “The spirit that was coming after my mother clearly had a broken neck. Bathsheba died in 1885 of a stroke. But Mrs. John Arnold did hang herself in the barn in 1797. She was 93 years old, and it was right after her husband had died,” Andrea says. She believes Mrs. Arnold wanted to take Carolyn’s place at the head of the household. “I always found it interesting that the same spirit that was attacking her was embracing him, and at the same time that their marriage was slowly but surely crumbling.”
Half a century removed from the great trauma that marked their childhood, the Perron girls are still divided about the house, with Cindy and Christine vowing never to go back, and Andrea and Nancy still with a fondness in their hearts. But the family unit remains as close as it ever was in every other way. “Living at the farm,” Andrea reflects, “brought us all closer. The most important lesson that we learned was to live fearlessly. Not recklessly, but fearlessly, because there’s no reason to fear death. We know that life goes on.”
Bathsheba: Search For Evil originally premiered on October 11, but is scheduled to re-air on Saturday, October 30 at 3 p.m. ET and Saturday, October 31 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on T+E.