The Conjuring House (Old Arnold Estate)

The Old Arnold Estate sits on land deeded in the seventeenth century, on Round Top Road in what is now Burrillville; the house itself dates to about 1736, and eight generations of the Arnold family lived and died on the farm. The family's account, retold in later books and tours, stocks the property with prior calamity — an elderly Mrs. Arnold hanged in the barn at ninety-three, a girl named Prudence Arnold murdered at eleven, two drownings in the creek, four men frozen to death on the land. Those deaths are filed as the house's darker tradition rather than as a verified register; what is certain is that the Perrons bought the farm in December 1970 and sold it in June 1980.

By Andrea Perron's account — she was twelve the October after they moved in, and later wrote a three-volume memoir — the phenomena began the first day and sorted themselves into two registers. There were benign spirits: a presence the youngest daughter, April, treated as a playmate, and household figures the family learned to live around. And there was a hostile one the accounts name Bathsheba — blamed for foul smells, cold spots, levitating beds, and, in the telling that reached the screen, the possession of Carolyn Perron herself. The reports are the family's own, which is both their strength and their limit: a decade of consistent testimony, no controlled test, nothing a skeptical file can weigh.

Ed and Lorraine Warren arrived in October 1973 and conducted, by their methods, an investigation that culminated in a séance in August 1974 — after which Roger Perron reportedly threw them out. It was the Warrens who attached the name Bathsheba to the hostile presence, identifying her with Bathsheba Thayer Sherman, a real woman born in 1812 who lived nearby, married Judson Sherman, was once accused by neighbors in the death of an infant in her care, and died in 1885. Later research, including the documentary Bathsheba: Search for Evil, found she was never charged, was not a witch, and likely never lived at the Arnold Estate at all — a real woman defamed posthumously by the legend that needed her.

The house outlived its own story. The 2013 film made the address the most famous haunted farmhouse in America; the Heinzens bought it in 2019 for roughly $439,000, ran it as a paranormal attraction, and sold it in 2022 for $1.5 million to a buyer who now books overnight investigations at several hundred dollars a head. The lights, one assumes, are still left on — though by now that is less advice than branding.