Andrea Perron and the Conjuring

In the dead of night, as people sleep, that's when the spirits creep. As the bell tolls three, dark things take power. We like to call it the supernatural hour. Welcome to the supernatural hour.

I'm Castle. Joining me is Granny Scripper- Cinnamon, you provert. And Tim, the hot man with the stones. Oh yeah, what's happening?

Welcome to our hour of supernatural. Hey everybody, welcome to the supernatural hour. I am your real host, Castle. Thank you for the intro by our friend Newman, our other friend Jimmy Darling, and our last guest host a couple of months ago, Mike Findley.

Now on to the show, we'll be listening to Andrea Perrin next. We actually have an interesting episode, and we recently did a survey. The thing that you all hated the most was our guest speakers. So we decided we're going to do exactly what you don't want us to do and have guest speakers on the show.

But we've got some special we're going to do to make it worthwhile because I suspect I know which guest speakers you don't like and those are the boring ones that we've had on. We've had some boring ones. We found the most awesome guest speaker we could possibly find and we're having her interview with us first today. Next to John's office we had on, I'm going to put her at the top of my list over John.

I'd rather interview her. John's office is pretty cool, but I'm really excited for our guest here. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. Since our last episode was actually on the Conjuring, which was the movie versus reality, and we did some research.

We decided to take a step further in our research, and we decided to go to the source. So we've got Andrea Perrin with us, who the Conjuring is actually based on. She was the oldest daughter. She was the flirty daughter.

She's shaking her head at me saying no. We actually had a chance to talk last night before the podcast, and she was not really happy that they made her the flirty daughter because she was not the flirty daughter in real life. So anyway, welcome to the show Andrea. Thank you.

So, I'm going to kind of let you run with it. Now we talked about in the last podcast that the Conjuring, the... Yes, not too late to sneak into the outboard. And there is a loudspeaker talking over our podcast, which is probably why guest interviews are not the favorite here at the thing because there's a lot of background noise.

So the incidents that occurred actually occurred over a ten year period, not the brief time period that the movie laid out. Can you kind of tell us what happened, like how it started and how it progressed? Well, first of all, the film is a good film from what it is. It, of course, was based on the case files of Ed Lorraine Warren.

So it did not represent what actually occurred to our family with our family because Ed Lorraine were out of the picture after, I believe, August of 1974, and we lived there another seven years. So there were many things that happened in the house that they never even knew about. And of course, the whole Conjuring series is based on their series of case files. However, it really barely scratched the surface of our story.

And interestingly enough, the gentleman who wrote the screenplay, Chad and Carrie Hayes, who are twin brothers, wanted to include real elements of the story. They had read my books, blown away, and they tried every way they knew to integrate some of the truth into the story that they were literally conjuring from Jerry picking the Warren files and from going through my books. And every time they tried to correlate and integrate some of the truth in it, Warner Brothers, the brass sent it back and said, take this out. This will scare people right out of the theater.

There's no point in making a movie that no one's going to stay to watch. I would watch it. I know you would have put your brain. Your brain.

So they were trying to appeal to the masses. And of course, what Hollyweird does is make everything method and formula because if it's sold before, it will sell again. And that's unfortunate. But on the other hand, if the Conjuring hadn't been made and hadn't existed, I truly believe that our story would just be languishing in obscurity because there's nothing more important than a feature film to bring a story to light.

It's just such a powerful medium. Yeah, to be honest with you, I never heard of your story until the movie came out. During research, I found out you wrote some books, which I'm not a big fan of reading, but I'm definitely going to check out your books and see what they're like. I want to know more about what actually happened and what a person here from someone who actually lived through it.

Yeah, as you're talking, I'm going to go buy one here. I wish I had some with me. I just came back from a two week tour of Michigan and sold everything I had and didn't have time to restock before I came out here. But I am taking orders.

So as soon as I get back to Florida, which is where I live now, I can fill those orders. I'll have to do that. I will make sure I get an order in with you. So how did the events actually start when you guys moved into the house?

Do they start immediately or was it just kind of a slow progression? No, it was immediate. And interestingly enough, we visited that family. As a family, we visited the farmhouse a number of times before we actually owned it and got to know Mr.

Canyon, who was the owner at the time, very well. And we all loved him and he loved us. It was not something that we anticipated. I checked in with every single member of my family and said, did you ever see anything, hear anything, feel anything at the farm before we actually moved in?

And the answer across my family was no. So the day we moved in, it was January 11, 1971. We had bought the house. My mom found it in June of 1970 and it took about five months to complete the deal and get the deed and the survey and the whole nine yards that had to be done with it.

So they closed on it the first of December and then my mom said I'm not moving my family during the middle of Christmas. So we'll, and Mr. Canyon wasn't ready to move out. So it took us a few weeks to get us all packed up, get through the holidays, and then in January of 1971, we assumed ownership in terms of being on the premises.

The day we moved in, it was a sleet snow, ice, freezing rain, swirling, horrific weather. But you know, when you live in New England, if it's moving day, it's moving day. You just do it. So we got there and my dad threw open the van and handed a large box to me.

I was the biggest, I was 12. So he gave me the biggest box and said, take this to your mom in the kitchen. I walked into the parlor door because it was the closest door and it was freezing out. So I just wanted to get in the house as fast as possible.

And when I did, I walked into the parlor and took a hard right into the dining room and Mr. Canyon was there packing up the last of his things from the corner hutch, the cabinet that's built in. And I said good morning to him and then I noticed that there was another man in the room that was standing in the corner near the foyer that I had to walk through to get into the kitchen. And he looked perfectly solid and perfectly alive to me.

And as I walked past him, I said good morning, sir, and he didn't respond to me. He looked right through me like I was invisible to him, which I thought was kind of odd, but I just kept going. And I walked into the kitchen and I'm like, mom, who's that man with Mr. Canyon?

And she said, but there's nobody with Mr. Canyon. Honey, his son's on the way. He's not here yet.

So it was chaos, moving day. It's nuts. And we had a lot of entourage of trucks and cars and people and helping. So I just kind of let it go and put the box down on the table.

And then my sister, Christine, walked in with her box and she said, mom, who's that man with Mr. Canyon? I never saw him before. And she said, there's nobody with Mr.

Canyon. And then Cindy walked in and she's like, did you see that man with Mr. Canyon? He's dressed funny while he was dressed with hand made clothes from the 1800s.

And I remember thinking that too. Does everybody out here dress like this? Because really? And then Nancy walked in and she said, she leaned over to Cindy and she said, did you see that man with Mr.

Canyon? I did, but he just disappeared. I found that fascinating because we actually found a photo of the house from 1970 and showed it to our team medium. And in one of the windows she said she saw a man standing there.

So I'm wondering if she saw the same man that you did. We also showed her a photo of the house from 1855 and she looked at it and just the way she was staring at it, I'm like, there's obviously something in there. And that picture from 100 years ago or 100 years before, she said she saw at least seven spirits standing on the property. So I mean, your property there had been haunted for quite some time before you actually knew Ben.

Well, you know, the land was deeded in 1680. The house completed as it is now. It was started in the 1600s and then they built on and built on as I guess their family grew because there are windows, there are outside windows on the inside of the house. Oh, really?

Yeah, between the bedrooms. So, and you can see how the house had been built on to over the years. So I think you got some Sarah Winchester stuff going on there. Really?

So, yeah, it was a very interesting way to grow up. But what I found most interesting about the day that we moved in was that that spirit came back later on and four of us were in the dining room with Mr. Canyon and my father came in and that spirit was standing no more than three feet away from him and neither he or Mr. Canyon saw it but we the children did and something told us not to say anything.

You know, we don't. It's just, you know, it's something that's shocking to you and you are with somebody that the adults around you don't see. It's probably best to just keep that quiet for a little while and we did. We didn't even tell my mother what was happening in that house until five months after we lived in.

Oh, wow. I don't know if it was the first or the second night that we were living in the house but my sisters started coming and crawling in bed with me and all our bedrooms were on the top floor and there were doors between the rooms. We left all the doors open because that helped with what little heat there was in the house. I mean, this is a clapboard house with no insulation in the middle of January in Rhode Island.

It was recent. So at first I thought my sisters were going to be crawling into bed with me just for the body heat but my sister Cindy, it must have been like the second or third night that we were there and she came in and she said, I'm scared Annie. I'm hearing voices and my room, well, she shared a room with Chris and Christine has a tendency to talk in her sleep. So I thought it was her and she said no, Chris's sound asleep.

She said it's not Chris and I keep hearing voices. I said, what is it saying? The boy saying and she said no, voices, lots of them and they're all around my bed and they keep saying to me over and over and over again, together there are seven dead soldiers buried in the loop. That's interesting because that's the exact same number of spirits that our mediums had to tell the picture was seven.

And our family had seven members and it took me seven years to write the story. What's going on with the significance of the numbers? I don't use that. If you need, we can still take you from there.

I know I'm kind of leaky today. I've got this terrible cold so I know I sound like Kathleen Turner. I've got cough drops here. I've got cold too.

In fact, maybe we'll send a let's send the end to go get some tissues. That's OK. Yeah, that's a good thing to add to the podcast. So why we're saying the end to that?

So what happened after that? What happened at that point? Well, in January, the first year that we were there, what got really crazy was the first incident, the first major incident other than Cindy hearing voices and just odd noises in the house that we didn't know. Well, thank you so much, sweetheart.

Excuse me just a second. Oh, you're OK. I caught whatever this is in Michigan. I blame Michigan for this.

I went from 90 degrees in Florida to 30 degrees in Michigan. I find it's easier with anything just to blame Tim. OK. It usually works.

I mean, I do have cold so. Tim either has a cold or is there a second puberty? Yeah, we can't make those jokes anymore. That's right.

So my mom went out to the barn one morning after we had gone off to school and the barn was very large and very dark. And she walked out there because she and my dad had promised us if we got the farm. And that was up in the air for a while. We didn't really know if we could pull it together because it was, you know, for those days it was expensive.

I mean, now you can't buy a really nice car for what we bought a house, a barn and a barn for. We had 200 acres of land and we got it for $70,000. Oh, wow. But in 1970 that was a lot of money.

And so anyway, they said if we got the farm that they would get us some horses. And we were thrilled about that. We were so excited. So one morning my mom went out to the barn and she opened the side door and it was very dark.

And she turned on the one exposed light bulb that was in there. And she started looking around and she didn't see anything unusual. But then a few minutes later she started to hear a whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh sound. And she looked up thinking, oh my God, when we were moving stuff out, did a bird get trapped in here?

You know, an owl or something? Because it sounded like wings. And when she looked up she saw a hand side, which is, you know, the curve. Were you bale hay?

You just cut the hay? Yes, yeah. Like that. Only it was a handheld and it was round.

And it was spinning at a remarkable rate of speed. She saw it spinning up above one of the beams, the tallest beam in the barn. It was over 40 feet above her head. And it was spinning at a remarkable rate of speed.

She said she couldn't even identify what it was that was spinning. And then all of a sudden in a split second it just crashed down onto her neck. That's terrifying. Yeah.

And the only thing that saved her was my father's flight jacket. She had a heavy leather like a bomber jacket. And she had on a turtleneck and a couple of other shirts. And so she had layers.

But it sliced the leather across the side of her neck and ruined the jacket. But it could have killed her. And it hit her so hard that it knocked her to the floor. And she didn't know what to make of that.

I mean, my mom was not hardwired for anything paranormal. The only concept of ghosts that we ever had was from going to church. The father, the son, and the holy ghost. And that was it.

I mean, yeah, we watched our shadows in the afternoon. You know, and watched where it was this teeth fallout and stuff like that. You know, it was like that was not paranormal. That was just camp.

But yeah, we were not prepared in any way. And neither was she. And when she came back in the house, I remember when we came home from school that day. She seemed despondent.

And she was just sitting on the sofa and had kind of this glazed look in her eyes. Like she was processing something and she was just deep in thought. And I remember asking, is everything OK? You know, we all did.

And she said, yeah, yeah, she kind of shushed us away and sent us off to do whatever we were going to do. But she was thinking, you know, what could have possibly caused that? What could have? I don't like a big day or anything like that.

No, and it was an enclosed barn. You know, there was nothing. I mean, and why was a hand-sigh out like 10 feet on an exposed beam? How did it even get there?

So she was kind of lost in thought about that. And she didn't. It was there was the cognitive dissonance. She didn't connect what was happening in the house and the noises and the stuff.

And then the incident in the barn, she didn't connect it right away. And then in May of the first year that we were there, we had an incident in the house with her that scared the bit Jesus out of her. You know, when you have five little girls and you think that your house is on fire, I can't imagine anything more terrifying for a parent. But she had closed off the fireplace with a screen in front of it.

And her room, mom and dad's room was just off the parlor. They kind of backed up to the dining room. There were two doors that I guess at one time there had been a wall between and they took it down and made it a room instead of two smaller pantries. So that was the room that they chose for their bedroom.

And she went in there and all of a sudden she heard a pop like a pop in a crackling noise. And she thought, you know, maybe it was just something a piece of wood or, you know, embers that were popping in the fireplace. But she sat up in bed and looked out at the fireplace. And it was jib, bang to the ashes and it was dead for the night.

And then it popped again and she turned and she looked at her dresser. And there was what looked like a wall of fire and sparklers just coming off the top of her dresser and shooting sparks all over the room. She had lace curtains and a lace coverlet on the bed so she panicked, you know, because she's seeing fire flying around the room and had no idea what could have possibly caused that. So you had something like that I would have liked to have seen in the movie, you know.

Yeah, well you will because I've got a three movie deal for the real story because apparently Hollywood is not as afraid as I thought they were and I've written the screenplays. Oh cool. It will be coming. I'm excited.

What's in the books will be on screen. That's really cool. But she, it lasted only a few more seconds and then it was gone. And she went over to the dresser and there was no sign of anything having happened there.

You know, scorching, no, you know, nothing. And so she finally calmed down enough to be able to go to sleep. And then she had another incident a few weeks later and my father was home and laying in bed right beside her. And they always left their bedroom door open in case, you know, one of us needed them.

And I don't know how they could have even heard us, but they always left the room open accessible to us. And it was 5.15 in the morning. And I'll tell you in a minute why I know that. And she was laying in bed and she had her eyes closed.

Dad was sound asleep beside her. And she thought she felt a presence in the room and she thought it was one of us. So she reached her arm out without even opening her eyes and said, what is it honey? And there was no response.

She opened her eyes. And here's a full body apparition of a woman dressed in clothes from the 1800s or 1700s. And her neck was broken and her head was hanging off the side of her shoulders. Her head looked like what my mother described as a desiccated hornet's nest.

It had sprigs of wild hair coming off the crown and hollow, vacant eyes, two holes where her nostrils would have been and thin pale lips and jagged yellow teeth. And it started leaning over. This apparition started coming around the side of her bed and leaning down into her and was standing in her one of her dressers. Was literally standing in the space that half that dresser would take up.

So it was right on the side of her, right beside her. And as it started to lean over, she panicked. And she thought she started screaming. But she didn't actually make a sound.

She was screaming her head and started backing up away from this apparition that was leaning over as if to kiss her. That chapter is called Kiss of Death. She blessed her heart. She was so terrified.

And she couldn't wake my father up. She just couldn't. She tried everything she knew. My father is a light sleeper.

There was no reason for him not to wake up. He had, we believe, been placed in some type of suspended state of animation. He just was. She thought he was dead and she thought she was dead.

I say it's interesting to say that because in a lot of these types of hauntings, that's the common occurrence where one person experiences something and the other person is almost in a kind of a paranormal coma, if you will. They're just kind of completely out of it until the incense happens. Yes, certain spirits like that. They try to make one person think they're crazy.

They show themselves to, mainly just one person to focus on. Kind of isolate another one and kind of classify it. Yeah, it was my mother perceived it to be malicious intent. I wouldn't say so with the way you described it.

I would say this. Especially with your dad in that paranormal coma. Yeah. Well, my mom, I mean, she punched him.

She grabbed, he had long black hair at the time and kind of left over from hippie time. She took her hands and wrapped them into his hair and twisted. I mean, like literally pulling hair out of his head to try to wake him up and shook him violently. Nothing.

She thought he was dead and she thought she was going to be the next victim and all she could think about was what's going to happen to my children. And as she's trying to wake him, she turned toward him and when she did, the quilt fell off and his back looked like it had been serrated with nails just all the way down his back. It was welts and like just bloody welts. Like fingernails had been just scored down his skin.

This was all within the first year. This was the fifth month that we were there. And you guys went there for 10 years after this. Yeah.

And there's a reason for that too and I'll explore it. Okay. So when you do this, you know, I help people clear stuff out of their homes like it's one of the things we do. And if I personally saw something like that, I would abandon the house almost immediately and like get the hell out of there.

Well, it was kind of, it was complicated. You know, I don't think you're even old enough to remember. I wanted 82 so that's all happened before I was born. Yeah.

But you know, if you think, oh, eight in the banking crisis was bad, you have no idea what this country went through between 1970 and 1974. It was hellacious. That makes sense. You know, my parents scroummed every dime that they could get to buy this magnificent piece of property and it would have financially crippled our family to have abandoned it.

They would have lost everything. And with five little children, there are considerations. Yeah, that's completely understandable. You know, and my father didn't believe what was happening.

He didn't understand and he didn't believe and he was, you know, it took him 40 years to admit that he was afraid. He didn't even want to believe what he was being told. So anyway, she, when she turned and she saw what had happened to him, she just gasped. And when she turned back, the apparition was gone.

I saw the whole thing happen. And I can't explain how I did, but I was in a bout of sleep paralysis up in my bedroom over the parlor. And I could, as though I was a fly on the wall in her bedroom, I could see the spirit. I could see my mother.

I could hear my mother telepathically screaming, but her mouth wasn't moving. And I couldn't move. And I couldn't go help. And that was- Have you ever experienced like astro-projections?

I like something that you've been able to do? Yes. I mean, it might have been something like that where you're, you know, spiritually there, but not physically there. I mean, at that point, there's really nothing.

You can't do it. I can't do it with her. I heard her scream. And that's what welcomed me.

But then when I did, I couldn't move. And all I remember was just laying in bed and not being able to move my limbs and feeling the tickle of tears trickling down the side because I was flat. So I could feel it trickling down the sides of my eyes. And then it subsided and it passed.

And I guess I fell back to sleep, but my mom got up as soon as the apparition passed. And she ran to her desk and got some drawing paper in a pencil and started sketching what she had seen and writing down what she had seen. And I came downstairs a few minutes later when I was actually able to get up. And I walked over to her and I looked down and I saw what she was drawing.

And I just, I had picked up, my throat was raw, almost like I had been screaming too. And I picked up her cup of coffee to take a sip of it to soothe my throat. And I dropped the cup when I saw what my mother was drawing. Because up to that point, I thought I had just had a nightmare.

And then I realized it was real. My father screamed at the top of his lungs when he got up and realized that his back felt like it was on fire. And my mom rushed in there and then took him into the bathroom. And while she was trying to hold the cabinet door open to show him what his back looked like, all the scars just completely disappeared and all the pain went away just like that.

And you know, he's like, I must have to wait for sure. No, it wasn't a rash that the house has wanted. A rash doesn't just instantly disappear in front of your eyes. And doesn't feel like fire on your back.

But he was in a state, he was king of denial at that point. It was in June about a month later that my sisters kept coming to me and coming to me. And we met all these different things that were happening to them in the house and things they were seeing and hearing. And we kept it to ourselves because my mother, you know, obviously dad didn't want to hear it.

And mom wasn't sharing what was happening to her with her five little kids. Of course she wouldn't because she knew it just intrinsically it would terrify us. And let's go ahead and pause this and announce what's really long and obnoxious. That was a complete weird notch.

It's like a 15 minute. His announcement is as long as your story here and you actually have something to tell. You didn't. That's okay.

I'm here. But anyway, I came down to get my mom. Cindy had come back and crawled in bed with me again and she started telling me about the seven dead soldiers buried in the wall. And when you consider that house had been around completed as it is now since 1736.

That was 40 years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. So that house went through the Revolutionary War. It went through the Civil War. It was owned at the time by Quakers who were abolitionists.

It was used as part of the Underground Railroad to get people up to Canada and out of slavery. You know, I mean, there was just an incredible, incredible history on this house. So anyway, she, excuse me, Cindy came into my room and she's like, they're getting louder and louder. It doesn't matter what I do.

They won't go away. Why are they coming to me? Well, the reason they were coming to Cindy was when she was two months old, she died and had to be brought back. She was born with a birth defect that it was a himangioma on her face and all the blood vessels were feeding into her face and it was just growing.

It was like the size of a softball and they had to stop the bleeding and they had to do what they could to stop that. And they lost her on the table during the surgery. It was like a six or seven hour surgery. And she had to be revived as an infant.

Well, she crossed over and they knew it. And so they were coming to her in droves because they knew she could hear them. We still don't know if there were seven soldiers buried in the wall there because the people who bought the house from us subsequently sealed that wall off completely where they were telling her they were. You'd literally have to tear it down to get into the area where they said they were.

Well, she came into my room and she's telling me this and I'm like, you know what, I can't handle this anymore. I'm a kid myself. No, I just need to tell mom. And so I went downstairs and mom was sitting out on the front porch and I said, I really need to talk to you.

And when I told her what was happening in the house, she just fell apart. I mean, it was I could see the blood drain out of her face and we didn't know anything that was happening to her other than that one incident where I saw the apparition and she had said, it's best not to say anything to your sisters about this. So that was something that mom and I had shared that nobody else knew about. But I told her everything that they had told me and what they had seen in the little girl in the middle room and the little boy and the you know this and that and the voices and the sound of an old archaic horn and you know all different sounds that we were hearing in the house and she said, go get your sisters but don't bring April down.

The baby, leave her upstairs, just go get your other sisters and bring them to the kitchen. And we just poured our hearts out. We just spilled our guts and told her everything that we had seen. I mean, my sister Nancy had seen a dead horse in the barn.

You know, he's perfectly alive, her vision of him, but you know obviously had passed. But sometime in the history and you know, we were seeing cats, we were seeing dogs. Our animals were freaking out all the time. The cats were fuzzing up and hissing and going to the highest point that they could.

I guess were the best, best vantage point. Our dog wouldn't go anywhere near the cellar door at all. Would go outside and walk all the way around the house to come in the kitchen door rather than go through that front door. So there was something but to say that we were ignorant about supernatural anything is the understatement of the new millennium.

We knew nothing about what was going on and neither did my mom. So it was very disturbing to her. And then she told my father it didn't go well. And we learned, the five of us learned, just keep our mouth shut.

Because if he didn't believe my mother, knowing she would have swallowed her own tongue before she would have lied to her husband or her children or anyone. If he didn't know her well enough by then to know that she was telling him the truth, then shame on him. But being a child and having the man of the family question your veracity, we felt such a sense of abandonment that's like we were on our own. We couldn't share anything.

We couldn't tell anything. You know, we could tell mom but even when she told dad, forget he just shut her right down. Well, things continued to happen. But then in 1973, in August of 1973, a whole banload of teenagers showed up at our house.

And my dad was just getting, he was on the road a lot. He had his own business and he had clients from Quebec to Florida to Ohio. So he was on the road a lot and he missed a lot of things that were happening in the house. And when he came home from one of those long extended trips, the last thing he wanted to do was hear about this.

I imagine that having all of my important in the house that it would be hard to want to accept that, realizing that believing it would require possibly picking up and going. And like you said with the economy the way it was, it was probably easier for him to be in denial than to want to hear him be faced with it. Yeah, and he admits that now. But unfortunately, it was the beginning of the severing of my parents' relationship because you know, once trust has been breached, it's really hard to rebuild that.

And so we had teenagers show up and he was leaving on a trip and my mother said, you know, Roger, who is this? You know, go handle it. He's like you handle it. I'm leaving.

So he got in his car and he laughed and out comes Keith and Carl Johnson and their entourage of investigators from Rhode Island College. And he came up to the porch, Keith's dead and he said, I'm looking for Carolyn. Carolyn called me and my mother's like, who are you? And he identified himself and she said, I never called anybody.

I haven't talked about this with anybody. So you exactly where you were at, heard your mom's name and everything and just showed up randomly. That's someone called him and he recognized her voice. So it was a powerful spirit, I think, that threw.

There was definitely someone there looking out for him. I'm getting the children right now. So it's awesome. Go quick.

Let's pause again for the obnoxious announcement. So that announcer's got a lot of enthusiasm in his. He does. He's a great verbose.

Yes, he is. So anyway, they came and my mom didn't have a good feeling about Keith's brother Carl and it turned out that he was a Satanist and Keith was affectionately known as a Jesus freak. They twin brothers but they have polar opposite approaches to paranormal and they had grown up in a haunted house themselves. They were students with their own paranormal team at Rhode Island College.

So was it the Satanist brother that recognized your mom's voice or was it the other one? No, it was Keith that did and a very devout Christian, I mean, really showed up with a Bible in his hands. It looked like it was so funny because my little sister Nancy, who was the flirt, by the way, she was the flirt. I mean, I was the bookworm.

She was the flirt. She comes running into the house and she's like, Mom, Jesus Christ is here because Keith had long hair and a tunic and he was carrying a Bible and she's like, Oh, looks just like Jesus. He looks just like Jesus. And my mother, you know, at first she wouldn't even allow Carl in the house.

I mean, the vibe that she got from him was like, forget about it. But she did talk to Keith and she didn't really have a lot to tell him. But she did let him take a tour of the house and he had a very, very compelling incident that happened there with my sisters. And then also I took him down into the cellar to show him the cellar and he really picked up on what was happening down there.

Well, he's the one that went to seek out the warrants and apparently they were lecturing at the University of Rhode Island and he went and approached them and told them that he knew of a family that had a predicament and told us, I told them who we were, where we were located. And it wasn't until the night before Halloween of that year, 1973 that they actually showed up at the house but my mother had no idea who they were when they came to the door. She was just a polite woman who looked like perfectly harmless people into the kitchen because she figured they were probably lost. And then they identified themselves and told her who had told them about our situation.

And years later, Lorraine told me she said the reason that they had known for weeks about what our situation was but she said that we didn't come till Halloween because we thought that's when the veil would be thinnest and there was a better chance of us seeing a manifestation. And when she said that to my mom, my mom said, well then every day must be Halloween because there is no veil in this house. There's no veil here. And they too had some very compelling interesting things that occurred there but every time they tried to take photographs in the house they all came out blank.

Whenever they tried to make audio tapes, everything came out white noise. The spirits just didn't want them there and they didn't want anything to do with them. So that's like the one part of the movie that's truly gonna kill you. It's actually true.

Yeah. There are elements of the film that are true. You know, it's just a few little things but it does give it that authentic feel and those were things that were pulled out of my books because they did jerry-peck. And I'm glad that they did.

You know, so at least some part of it was authentic but you know, my mom had her issues with the movie too because she said she didn't watch it until a year after it came out on DVJ. And she said her biggest issue, I thought the thing she would have the problem with was the exorcism because there was no exorcism in our house and my mother was not possessed. My mother was possibly being oppressed by his spirit that didn't want her there but my mom was not possessed. My mother was attacked.

That's interesting to say that because in our last episode we talked about that and that's not quite how that works, how it's portrayed in the movie as far as what happened to your mom. Yeah, we were search for death. She was an actual human that lived. There's no way that she could have possessed your mom because human spirits don't do that.

No matter how negatively hard they're still human, they don't have a capability of possessing another person to walk. Right. And that's what we were dealing with, you know, earthbound souls. At least that was my impression as I look back on it in retrospect.

But with the Warrens, they were devout Roman Catholics and everything was about demonology and everything was about exorcism and everything was about unholy entities. And so that kind of muddied the waters and convoluted things even further. And to Mrs. Warren's credit, she did walk into that house blind knowing nothing about the history and she walked over to our black stove and she covered her eyes and put one hand on the stove and she said, I sense a malignant presence in this house.

Her name is Bathsheba. There is no way she could have known that Bathsheba Sherman had any attachment to that house. And even though Bathsheba Sherman was not an Arnold, she was not a member of the family. She did not live in the house.

She had some attachment to it because the historian told my mother after we moved in and she met but he was in his 90s. And Mr. McKeechurn, and he told her that there was a woman that had lived from 1812 to 1885 and she was Bathsheba Sherman and he knew her when he was a child. She died when he was 10.

And he said she had a terrible reputation in town. He didn't get into a whole lot of detail at first but he did tell my mother that an infant died in her care in our house and that there was an inquest in Chippachet which was the town seat at the time. And that the judge, just for lack of evidence, had to. I didn't ever go to trial but in the court of public opinion she was tried and convicted and very dangerous words were being thrown around about her.

She was accused as being a witch and having sold her soul to the devil for eternal youth and beauty. That was a woman who had died 100 years before up in Salem just to stone throw away from us with the use of that word. It was a very dangerous thing. I did my best in the books.

I can't absolve her. Because I don't know what exactly happened. But I could certainly give her the benefit of the doubt and I was her defender. And she's come through to me on numerous occasions in spirit box sessions and in a lot of different ways and she must have come through to me as a child in some way because the first time I heard her voice through a spirit box I recognized it from my childhood.

But I didn't remember knowing her in the house. I just remember 45 years later hearing a voice that I recognized. And when my parapartner George Lopez asked her, first she used my voice. She threw my voice.

Which also made me think maybe she was the one that threw my mother's voice and drew the brothers to the house, the Johns and brothers. But that's your speculation on my part. I have no way of knowing. But she went George asked her what word he associates with me.

She said love. And it came through that spirit box as clear as how we're sitting talking to each other now. And I think it's because I defended her honor when I wrote the books. I said, you know, there's no proof anywhere that she was German was a practicing witch.

That she did anything to harm that baby. If a baby died in her care and she claimed that it was accidental. You know, I think that that's plausible. I mean, when you think about everybody made their clothes by hand.

There were no sewing machines really in that time. And there were baskets of knitting and yarn and needles and stuff like, you know, in homes. And I mean, who's to say it wasn't a toddler? We don't know.

All we know is what Mr. McKeechurn told us. None of the spirits ever walked up to us and said, hello, my name is. That's just not how that energy works.

And it sure was. It would explain a whole lot more. You know, and part of me thinks that it's these mysteries that keep us searching and keep us curious and fascinated and learning ever more about our existence. You know, for me, there are two important questions in life.

And both of them have been answered for me. And so I speak my truth about it. And the first question is, is there something beyond our mortal existence? And the answer for me is yes.

There is. I've seen it. And the second one, which I think is the most important question, is, are we alone in the universe? And I know that the answer is no.

We are not alone in the universe. I think we agree with you on both of those points. You know, I say I base it only on my own personal experience, what I consider to be, you know, just a fundamental ability to see inter-dimensionally. And that developed at the farmhouse.

That developed the day we moved in. And I saw that full-body apparition. And ever since that moment, I have been able to see auras, see spirit, see extraterrestrials, see elementals, see, you know, I mean, I can up turn us off. So anyway, you know, it got more convoluted and it got more complicated from there.

And the warrants came five or six times over the course of a year and a half. And all hell broke loose the night that they showed up with an entourage of cinematographers and audiographers and a priest and a medium. And my father's like, get out. No, there's nothing like this is going on in this house.

Absolutely not. And Lorraine, she's a bodacious woman. I gotta tell ya, I mean, she looked at my father and she said, if you love your wife, you'll let us do this. My father had to be removed from the room.

Ed had to take him out of the room. I don't think I have ever seen my father that angry. That's right. It was pretty bold.

Yeah. It was, yep. And so it took him about an hour to convince him, the priest, and Ed, that this was something that would benefit the family. But what happened that night is so much worse than anything you saw in the Conjuring, that you're incomparable.

It's like comparing apples and onions. They both taste delicious. It was awful. It was the worst experience of my life and I was just a witness to it.

Was this where the levitation happened? Mm-hmm. And my mother was something, the medium committed what I consider spiritual malpractice. She threw open wide the doors to the netherworld and conjured the spirits and invited everyone in so that she could determine who the culprit was.

So they basically conducted a seance? They conducted a seance. Which is something we strong as just people don't do. Horribly wrong that it almost cost my mom her life.

So what happened exactly? Well, they had the candles and they're this and that my father's like, and I don't know part of this, no part of this. And Ed had to convince him to, you know, at least sit at the table. And dad doesn't even remember being at the table.

He said he was in the other room. This wasn't even there, but he was there. And I think he just had a dissociative thing about it. You know, with his memory, you know, we watched it happen.

I know what I remember and what I saw. And she was doing her thing with her little packet of dust and you know her candles and all the stuff. Her kuchamaw that she brought with her. And all of a sudden, like, oh, shit, all the lights went out.

All the candles just blew out. And then the table, which was 300 pounds or more, began to lift up the floor. And then as if the pounding fist of God came down in the middle of the table, it was slammed down onto the floor. There's still four imprints in those wood floors where the legs hit it.

And then my mom kind of collapsed into herself. She was the weakest link at the table. She was the one that was struggling, having an issue. And whatever it was came into her and it spoke a language that does not exist on this earth.

And it was howling and screaming. And it sounded like a banshee. It was horrific. My sister Cindy, I'm holding her in my arms.

And she's starting to pass out and becoming deadweight. And I'm trying to look through a crack like three inches wide into the room so I can see what's happening. And now it's dark. And all of a sudden I see my mother.

She was in one of the two captains chairs. They were like 30, 40 pounds of piece solid rock maple. And all of a sudden the chair starts lifting and lifting and lifting. And she's, her body is rolling up into a ball to the extent that you expect to hear bones snapping.

And in a split second, she was tossed 20 feet from the middle of our dining room into the middle of our parlor in the chair. And when her head hit the floor. We were all pretty sure that she was dead. Everybody in the house thought she had been killed.

Well my father went to run to her side and Ed made a terrible mistake in judgment and grabbed his arm to stop him from going to her. And my father turned around and cold cocked him and broke his nose and took a man twice his size right to the floor. And then went to my mother's side. And then in language I would never use on your podcast or in public.

Tim's probably used it on the podcast. My father exercised them from the house. It was, talk about negative energy swirling. I don't know if my description does it justice.

It was ugly. It was horrible. It was loud. Mrs.

Warren told her cinematographers to go downstairs into the cellar and get their camera equipment because they had set it up prior to the seance thinking that since that was such an active part of the house by my mother's own account that they might pick something up during it. Their state of the art, you know, huge cameras back in the 70s. They were in thousands of pieces all over the floor. And as though something had picked them up and slammed them against the granite walls with the force of a hundred men.

And they came upstairs, both of them sobbing. I mean, I can't even imagine the financial loss to them. But they were terrified out of their minds and sobbing. And they ran out of the house and didn't come back in.

The woman who was doing the audio, the big reel to reel audio, she grabbed the box, turned it off, grabbed the box, ran out the door, the priest was standing in the corner of the dining room as literally as white as a ghost, you know, like Casper time. Shaking from head to toe, absolutely terrified and the medium had collapsed on the table unconscious. Meanwhile, Ed and Lorraine, Ed's on the floor with bloody nose. Lorraine's by my mother's side and my father went to my mother and he just looked at her and he said, get out now.

It was awful. He put up the explitants in there as well, just use her imagination. He was in the Navy. He knew all the words.

But, you know, we never heard my father talk like that, like ever. So that was a shock to us too. That they allowed that to go forward with four of the five children in that house. All I can say is shame on them.

You know, but I don't think that the Warrens were trying to exploit us. I think they thought they had our best interest at heart. They were just over their heads from the moment they stepped over the threshold, which is why Ed, on his deathbed, asked Lorraine to do whatever she had to do to get the parent family story told while she was still here because he, in numerous places, described it as the most intense, compelling, disturbing and significant of all of the investigations they ever conducted over more than 40 years as paranormal investigators. You mentioned the three-part movie that you were working on.

Is she involved in that? No. Just all you and your family? No, it's me.

I was approached by the head of the producers Guild of America a couple of years ago. And you know, just a friend of a friend. He just kind of came into our lives. And he read the books and he's like, this is the most epic story I have ever read in my life.

I will do anything and everything in my power to help you tell it. Start writing me a screenplay. And so we're about halfway through that process right now and converting it to what it needs to be for actors. I mean, the whole thing is I wrote it.

Of course, the producers will read it and the director will read it and everybody will read it. That's a principle on the project so that they've got my vision of what I see this being. I know Castle and I look nothing like, but we're willing to play the parts of the Coen Brothers. No.

It can't be the satanic one. It's the period. It's the period. It's the period.

So let me ask you, so after that whole horrific incident, did the activity calm down or did it just kind of increase it for the long term after that? That was in August of 1974 when that happened. In October of 1974, we had an incident in the house that was actually what brought my mother back to us because it suddenly made sense to her. And she was wasting away.

She wasn't eating. She was trying to live on coffee and cigarettes. She just wasn't mom. No, it was horrible to watch her just gradually shrink away.

And one night she got up and I had made beef stew for my sisters. I became like the third parent. You know, my dad wasn't around and she needed help. She had slept, I guess, most of that day and into the night.

So where did I leave on? I think we're talking about murdering the house. We can't murder the announcer. It's frowned upon.

In all 50 states, I'd leave. Yeah, I think I'm going to pass on to some. I think you're saying you're being the third parent for a minute. Yes, I was.

And my mom got up with about 10, 30, quarter of 11 and I was doing my homework. I was 15, 16 at the time. I turned 16. And she asked me what I made for the girls for dinner.

I told her beef stew. And she said I'm hungry. And I was like, oh, yay. And microwaves hadn't been invented yet.

So she asked me if I would warm up some stew for her. And I was thrilled to do that. My mom was, you know, she was waft like. I wanted to feed her.

And interestingly, I'm still at that point with my mother. And it's like, mom, eat, for God's sake, eat. But anyway, I went through the, I was in the parlor. I went through the dining room, through the front floor, into the kitchen and into the pantry to warm up some stew for her.

And she had asked me to make a short pot of coffee for her. And I'm like, it's like a night bomb. And she's like, no, no, no. It's the nectar of the gods.

It's just making some coffee. And so I was gone for probably 10 or 15 minutes. And in the interim, she had grabbed a large log to throw one more on the fire, because even in October it's cold and Rhode Island. So when she put the log on the fire, she was placing the screen back in front of it.

She heard laughter behind her. And she turned around and what had been a moment before, a completely shut down, darkened dining room, was filled with light and a family. And the woman was stirring a pot of stew over the raging fireplace. That fireplace had been sealed shut more than 100 years before we moved to the house.

It was part of the center chimney. And it had some structural issues, so they closed it. But she was standing there and she had kids running around and there were two men sitting at the table side by side. And they had putter signs in front of them, which is indicative of the 1700s, because putter was outlawed in the 1800s in terms of food, you know, plates and drinking glasses and stuff because of the lead.

And they figured out it was hurting people. So but she said there were two putter signs in front of them and the men were drinking. And the mother told the boys her kids to go sit down and she said none of the furniture was ours. It was all handmade.

There were, it was an oak table and it had benches on both sides. And she said there were candles and oil lamps that let the room and the whole family was engaged with each other and lapping and enjoying having dinner together. And she's just standing there on the hearthstone in the parlor like, oh my God. And one of the men turned and looked into the parlor and made eye contact with her.

And she just looked at him and he looked at her and then he nudged the man beside him and pointed her out and she was the ghost. Wow. Wow. And she said, pfft, epiphany.

She got it. She said we lived in a portal cleverly disguised as our farmhouse. And at the same time she was looking into the past. They were looking into the future.

Oh wow. That's crazy. And she sent to her then and her bergal pragmatic mind. It finally made sense to her.

And she slowly but surely came back to us. And we were there for years and years more and there were a lot of other incidences. But we had made peace with them and acknowledged them and accepted them. And they were.

So did they get better? They were better? Throughout the years? So, okay.