American Hauntings: The True Stories behind Hollywood's Scariest Movies—from The Exorcist to The Conjuring: The True Stories behind Hollywood’s Scariest Movies—from The Exorcist to The Conjuring

by Robert Bartholomew

  Ed and Lorraine Warren entered the picture in October 1973. Their involvement only intensified the belief of Mrs. Perron and her daughters that the house was haunted. For instance, Andrea quoted her mother as saying she believed that the appearance of a swarm of flies in winter was a supernatural occurrence. “Those flies were all sent here on a mission, to observe the new occupants . . . to size us up.” She drew this conclusion in part because no one ever found them breeding! “No one has thousands of flies in the dead of winter. No one. Certainly not in Rhode Island! . . . [T]hey’d attack us and buzz our heads. . . . They’d stare at us! They did not even look like normal flies. Those fat, black little bastards,” Carolyn quipped.71 Her explanation for holding such an absurd belief was Lorraine, who had told her that botflies gravitated to corpses and that their appearance was a warning that spirits were around.72 In reality, fly swarms are a common winter occurrence in Rhode Island homes. The most likely candidate is the pesky cluster fly. According to Environmental Health Services (EHS), a pest control company serving parts of the Rhode Island, “If there was ever a pest that made you feel like you are living in the Amityville Horror it is cluster flies. They invade your home by the hundreds or thousands causing even the most battle tested person to freak out. They are also mistaken for Bottle flies as people think something must have died if I have this many flies.”73 Mrs. Perron remarked that the flies were impossible to get rid of, despite her best efforts. “How many times did we treat this house? How many different ways did we try to kill them? We couldn’t do it!”74 The Perrons tried fly swatters and then mothballs before caving and reluctantly summoning pest controllers to spray the house, but the flies kept swarming. EHS pest experts note that while treatments can provide some relief, eradication is difficult because cluster flies hibernate in cracks, gaps in siding, and unscreened vents. They are attracted to places like windowsills that are in the sun, where they typically swarm. Cluster flies have such a notorious reputation for resisting pest controllers that EHS recommends waving a white flag and simply grabbing a vacuum cleaner and sucking them up whenever they appear.75

  The Warrens’ presence legitimated the girls’ belief that spirits were everywhere in the house—both good and evil. For instance, Lorraine suggested that vague knocking sounds and shaking and rattling in the house were not due to the wind but were “demonic in nature.”76 Another time, when it was revealed that the girls had dabbled with a Ouija board, it prompted a sudden outburst by Lorraine: “Under no circumstances should a Ouija Board be allowed in this house. No Tarot cards. No Ouija Board. Nothing connected with the Dark Arts.” She called it a “very dangerous game” that was “literally inviting disaster.”77 Once, Lorraine abruptly stopped near the parents’ bedroom. She closed her eyes and began to shake. “No one should sleep in this bedroom,” she blurted out. Soon after, as Lorraine stepped inside the laundry room, a disturbed look came over her, and she quickly backed out, complaining of negative energy. “Something awful happened in there. Violent. The poor thing. So young. A girl. Blood. Definitely a female.” Lorraine then lectured Mrs. Perron on the danger posed to her children, whom she said were “highly susceptible to supernatural energy.” After hearing that her children were in grave danger, Carolyn was so upset that she began to tremble uncontrollably.78 There was only one solution: a séance.

  The Séance

  The Warrens arrived for the séance at dusk with the intention of exorcising the house. They brought with them an entourage including a female medium, a parapsychologist from Duke University, a priest, and a camera crew to record the anticipated events. Carolyn told Roger nothing of the planned demonic intervention until less than an hour before the Warrens showed up at their doorstep. Roger was livid, but he let them in. As the “cleansing” ritual began, Carolyn looked “unresponsive,” with “vacant hollow eyes.” Lorraine said, “Someone invited a demon into your house. It might have happened many years ago before you arrived here. Or it might have come in because of mischievous children playing with fire, disguised as a game. . . . [B]ut make no mistake, someone invited this demon.”79 Carolyn began to weep; anguish and fear came over her face. As the séance continued, and seeing his wife in obvious distress, Roger grew more and more angry, unimpressed with what he viewed to be a pagan ritual filled with superstitious mumbo jumbo. Roger found the spectacle difficult to bear as his wife began to shiver, her teeth chattering. Soon Carolyn was letting out piercing screams, with an angry, evil tenor.

  With the group holding hands (except for Roger, who had refused), Carolyn let out a “howling, growling” sound, as if she were experiencing “horrific pain.” Suddenly, her chair appeared to lift and move backward, spilling Carolyn hard to the floor. “She hit the floor with such force everyone present could hear the air rushing from her lungs.”80 Andrea suggests that Carolyn’s chair was propelled supernaturally and perhaps even levitated. Given all of the video equipment that was there, why wasn’t this fantastic event captured on film? The chair could have been pushed by Carolyn and—far from levitating—acted in accordance with the laws of physics, until it stopped abruptly and tipped over. This explanation seems more likely than the presence of demonic forces. If Carolyn’s chair had levitated as Andrea claimed, such a dramatic event surely would have converted Roger on the spot. But that did not happen. Roger Perron did not respond like a man who had just witnessed a defiance of natural law. He rushed to his wife’s aid, and as Ed Warren attempted to pull him back, he “whipped around and punched Ed directly in the face, dropping him to the floor.” Seeing Ed’s nose bleeding, Lorraine wiped his face. Roger wanted the demon busters gone and ordered the Warrens and their entourage out of his home. When the ghost “techs,” who had set up ghost detecting equipment throughout the house, went to fetch their equipment from the “haunted” cellar, they discovered that one or two “poltergeists” had managed to smash every one of their devices during the hubbub. Two of the girls, Andrea and Cynthia, had secretly watched the dining-room séance “through a crack in the door,” putting them near the cellar door; Chrissy had, unbelievably, slept through it all; and April was in and out of her room. None of the girls would confess to destroying the devices.81 Conveniently, the photos and film all turned out to be blank and unusable, so there was no verification of the dramatic séance as claimed by the Warrens.82

  After slamming the front door behind the group, Roger blasted his wife. Andrea writes, “He bitterly resented the intrusion, the theatrical farce of a pseudo-intellectual endeavor: ritualistic nonsense.” Roger viewed the spectacle that he had just witnessed as “an artificial make-it-up-as-you-go-affair” resembling a circus sideshow.83 In a promotion for her books at the release of the movie The Conjuring, Andrea Perron lauds the film as highly accurate. However, anyone familiar with the film will realize that the producers took great liberty with what was claimed in the book. In the film, there is no mention of Ed Warren being punched in the nose and Roger ordering the ghost hunters, “Get the hell out of my house!”84 Roger’s assessment of the Warrens may not have been far off the mark. In August 2014, poltergeist investigator Guy Playfair said he had “only met the Warrens briefly and all I remember was him telling me what a lot of money I could make out of the Enfield [England] case, which seemed to be his main interest. I never took either of them seriously for a minute.”85

  Haunted Houses and Faded Memories

  Much of what we know about the Perron “haunting” is based on the recollections of family members, decades after the events were reported. Psychologists Leonard Zusne and Warren Jones observe that when subjects recall events in haunted houses—events that occurred years earlier—the mixing of memory with imagination is the rule, not the exception, as memories are easily distorted. They write, “Dreams are remembered as actual physical events, a dream that comes after a significant event is remembered as having come before it and, therefore, as being prophetic of it, and the story itself gets better and better, in the retelling, with significant but inconvenient details being
omitted and other details added.”86 A classic example is the case of Sir Edmund Hornby, the former chief justice of the Supreme Consular Court of China and Japan. He recounted an incident from 1875 in which a newspaper editor entered his bedroom at 1:20 a.m. and sat on his bed, ignoring his request to leave. The editor insisted on knowing the judgment of a case from the previous day. Fearing an argument might break out and awaken his wife, he relented. He said that the man stated, “This is the last time I shall ever see you anywhere.”87 The following day he learned that the visitor had died of a heart attack the previous day at 1:00 a.m.—twenty minutes before he showed up in Hornby’s bedroom. An inquest uncovered the following note: “The Chief Judge gave judgment this morning in this case to the following effect,” followed by illegible writing. In recalling the story nine years later, Judge Hornby asserted that his memory of the incident was clear and that he was wide awake at the time. A friend of the editor and the judge, after making inquiries, found “that the editor had died at 9 in the morning of the day in question, that no inquest was held on his death, that there was no record of the judgment that figures so prominently in the story, and that Judge Hornby was not married at the time. Thus, what had probably been a vivid dream had turned, in the Judge’s mind, into reality wrought with ghostly implications.”88

  There is no concrete evidence that there were ever ghosts, poltergeists, or demons in the Perron home, only a one-time Catholic family given to occultish beliefs—beliefs that shaped their perception of everyday events and conditions well known by psychologists: lucid and waking dreams, sleep paralysis, fantasy-proneness, and imaginary companions. In addition, there was another powerful force at work, a force long studied by social psychologists: the power of the group and the spread of emotional contagion from person to person by suggestion. Within this context, it was not long before Mrs. Perron and her daughters were viewing their world within a supernatural framework. The appearance of the Warrens reinforced their beliefs about the haunting. They were well-known outsiders and experts who were seemingly finding spirits behind every door. Within this atmosphere of fear, common events became reinterpreted as paranormal, including something as simple as answering the telephone. For instance, on occasion, the phone would ring and only static could be heard. “More frequently there would be an unnerving noise, a crackling rather convoluted sound, as if someone was calling from far beyond the realm of possibility; from long ago and far away.” Andrea suggests that instead of technical issues with the line or the phone, it was likely some type of otherworldly force trying to communicate.89

  Another factor adding to the cauldron of excitement and fear was the likelihood of pranking by one or more of the girls. Certainly, the reaction by Carolyn Perron was not typical of a Rhode Island housewife during the 1970s. When most people see fly swarms in winter, they do not assume that the flies are a portent of evil forces that are going to haunt your house. When most people learn that their child is playing with an imaginary companion, they do not believe that the “companion” is actually a spirit. Many people who experience paralysis in bed while seeing terrifying visions would consult a psychiatrist; Mrs. Perron did not. In fact, if a psychiatrist or psychologist had been consulted, he or she might have been able to explain the occurrences as natural events, events that are fairly common within the general population.

  It remained for the Warrens to plant the idea of potential possession. Although The Conjuring exaggerates the case and suggests that a possessed Carolyn Perron was freed of her “demon” after a wild exorcism, it is apparent that Mrs. Perron was simply caught up in suggestion and role-playing. Moreover, the Perrons would continue to be plagued by nine spirits, or rather their belief in such entities, for several years to come.90 The series of extraordinary events at the Perron farmhouse begs the question of why a family tormented by spirits for a decade would remain for so long. Several times, family members felt that their lives were being threatened by an array of supernatural forces that terrified them. In the trailer for the movie, an announcer says chillingly, “What happened to the family was so disturbing that they refused to speak of it—until now.”91 If these events were so frightening, why remain in the house for even one night? The Perrons stayed for ten years! Andrea said that she was petrified during the séance because she thought her mother had died. She was traumatized. Her books detail hundreds of incidents with apparent supernatural forces in what was an emotional roller coaster for Mrs. Perron and her daughters. They remained in the house for six more years following the séance. In a recent interview, Andrea said that even though her family realized that the property was haunted, they would have lost a significant sum of money by selling, as the early seventies were marked by an economic downturn.92 It is difficult to believe, given the sheer volume of terrifying encounters reported by the family, that they would have risked their lives and mental well-being by remaining in a house that posed so many constant threats. The obvious answer is that these events have been exaggerated over time. One cannot understate the constant, unrelenting stress and fear that the girls faced on a daily—even hourly—basis. For instance, Andrea Perron told a TV interviewer, “We packed like wolves . . . we became a pack. We travelled in numbers. We used the bathroom in multiples of three or more because there was an evil male presence in that house . . . [and] you couldn’t use that bathroom without feeling that you were being watched.”93 Christine even complained of feeling like someone or some thing was watching her “all of the time.” “When I look there’s no one there but I know someone is in the room with me. It creeps me out,” she said.94 Yet the feeling of being watched is very common. While paranoia is a key symptom of a variety of mental disorders, it also occurs in everyday life. Professor Colin Clifford of Sydney University believes that everyone is “hard-wired to believe others are staring at us.” He notes, “A direct gaze can signal dominance or a threat, and if you perceive something as a threat, you would not want to miss it. So simply assuming another person is looking at you may be the safest strategy.”95

  A Never-Ending Story

  The drama of the Perron family versus the spirit world continues even today. During filming of The Conjuring in 2012, the Perron sisters visited the set. Andrea says that while they were giving an interview to promote the movie, “a bizarre wind” suddenly kicked up and knocked over much of the set and the cameras. It was obvious to Andrea what had just happened: it was Bathsheba’s curse. This event is telling, for it shows just how easily the Perrons were prone to redefining mundane events in a supernatural light. At about the same time the interview was taking place, Mrs. Perron (who did not make the trip) fell and broke her hip. She too concluded that the fall was a result of Bathsheba’s spirit.96

  When we ponder what really happened at the “haunted” Perron farmhouse for over a decade, one cannot help recalling the words of Shakespeare: “Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!” To Mrs. Perron and her daughters, hidden meanings were everywhere. A vague noise became a restless spirit; a gust of wind was a supernatural force; a swarm of flies was a sure sign that spirits were about. When most people have terrifying visions of their house burning down or of a strange entity hovering above them, they seek the opinion of a professional such as a psychologist or psychiatrist. Not Carolyn Perron. She assumed these events were caused by spirits, yet they could not have been as terrifying as described in the book, because the family remained in the house for over a decade. Most claims by the girls were accepted as gospel by Mrs. Perron, despite a lack of witnesses or corroborating evidence. It is also evident that some pranking was going on, with the suspicion falling on Cindy. One can hardly blame the daughters for thinking that the house was inhabited by spirits, given their isolation, the influence of their mother, and their propensity to experience a variety of psychological phenomena within a supernatural framework: small-group dynamics, waking dreams, sleep paralysis, fantasy-proneness, and imaginary companions.

  Carolyn Perron and her daughters g
rew up in an enchanted world inhabited by an array of paranormal entities. Ultimately, these “encounters” were appealing because they offered them a glimpse of immortality: proof of an afterlife. Each encounter was an affirmation of this reality, a reality that was both terrifying and reassuring. The books that purport to document their many interactions with the supernatural, House of Darkness House of Light, read like gospels. At the end of volume 2, Andrea writes that “the Perron family intermingled with immortality and each was transformed by the experience. They would emerge from the engagement profoundly changed and spiritually stirred, shaken and awakened by personal encounters they will never forget. . . . When they emerged it was with a realization. There is no death. There is only transformation.”97 Viewing the world through a spiritual prism may explain why they looked at the mundane and ordinary and saw the extraordinary and fantastic. Time and again family members had the opportunity to consider natural explanations for an array of predominantly mundane events, and instead they chose the supernatural hypothesis. Belief is a powerful force—and the intense desire to believe is an even stronger one.

  The events as described in Andrea Perron’s books must have been exaggerated. How could anyone stay in a house with a supposedly “haunted” fridge routinely scattering its contents on the kitchen floor; levitating beds that left Cindy terrified, bruised and battered; an animated broomstick that swept the floor by itself; and so many other strange visions and creepy happenings? Andrea even claims that one of the two phones in the house would routinely lift off the cradle and float in midair.98 Why was none of this activity caught on film? How could any responsible parents allow their daughters to stay in such a dangerous house, and how could the girls—repeatedly frightened—remain for over ten years?