The Perron Family Haunting at the Old Arnold Estate, the Conjuring House

The farmhouse at 1677 Round Top Road stands in Harrisville, a village in Burrillville, Rhode Island. The Massachusetts border is a few hundred feet away. Rhode Island Monthly dates the house to 1736. Eight generations of Arnolds lived there. Hence its name, the Old Arnold Estate.

January 1971. Roger and Carolyn Perron moved in with their five daughters, Andrea, Nancy, Christine, Cindy and April. They stayed nearly a decade. Almost everything known about those years comes from the family itself, above all from Andrea Perron, speaking decades later.

A family friend, Mr. Kenyon, stood in the parlor with another man. She said hello to both. The man did not respond. She asked her mother who he was. Carolyn's answer: there was no man with Mr. Kenyon.

"We all experienced encounters with spirits," Andrea later said. "Some were unpleasant, some were lovely, cordial and communicative." Beds were lifted at 5:15 most mornings; the house stunk of rotting flesh. The family heard children crying or wailing. A broom seemed to move from place to place on its own; April befriended a child spirit who said his name was Oliver Richardson.

Carolyn, the family says, was the target. One account describes a very tall woman in an old gray dress, her head hanging to the side. Andrea believes the presence was most likely Mrs. Arnold, "certainly powerful enough to claim her life if it wanted to."

A family friend, Keith Johnson, contacted Ed and Lorraine Warren of the New England Society for Psychic Research. Andrea dates their arrival to the night before Halloween in 1973. "I knew the house was haunted; all I had to do was walk in it," Lorraine said.

In 1973 came the séance. Andrea and Cindy watched in secret. "My mother began to speak a language not of this world in a voice not her own," Andrea said. "Her chair levitated and she was thrown across the room." Roger believed his wife was possessed for a few minutes. Andrea insists she was attacked. Roger threw the Warrens out. The family stayed. They could not afford to leave.

Nothing official was recorded at the time. No police. No scientists. No clergy. No photograph or recording of the phenomena is known. Recordings of Carolyn, Andrea has said, very often came back blank.

In 2019 Kenny Biddle of Skeptical Inquirer went to the archives. The tragic deaths tied to the house had happened elsewhere. Bathsheba Sherman, villain of later tellings, lived on Collins Taft Road and died in 1885 of a sudden attack of paralysis. No record shows any accusation against her. Biddle also noted that, by Andrea's own book, Carolyn told the Warrens about Bathsheba before Lorraine's psychic identification. He calls it hot reading. Norma Sutcliffe, owner for 32 years, ran a daycare there with no reported incidents.

Andrea told the story in three volumes of House of Darkness, House of Light. In 2013 it became The Conjuring. She says only 5% of the film is true. Fans besieged the house, and Sutcliffe and Gerald Helfrich sued Warner Bros. Later owners opened the farmhouse to the public. Its sales and foreclosure still make headlines.