It sounds crazy, right? Walking into a place you suspect is haunted—if you don’t have a lot of experience with it—is one of the scariest things you can do. Hell, sometimes it still scares me and I’ve done thousands of investigations at this point. But it really is true. You might feel afraid of what you see and experience (or even what you sense) in a place, but in almost every instance, the ghosts there aren’t trying to frighten you. They are people trying to communicate the best way they know how, using the limited resources they have.

Over the years, I’ve seen so many instances of spirits who seem scary, who are really just having trouble being heard, and trying their hardest to get through. On Season 1 of Kindred Spirits, we visited a house in Connecticut that had real signs of a menacing presence. The homeowners were seeing looming shadow figures, hearing stomping sounds from the attic, and witnessing things thrown across rooms with no explanation. They felt as though their five-year-old son was being targeted. They had just bought the home and were terrified of what they might have gotten themselves into.

When Adam and I went to investigate, we couldn’t get much through EVP sessions, so we started going through a list of the home’s previous owners and asking if we were speaking to them. The only thing we got was one word: “Ko-tek.” It turns out he was an early owner of the home, who emigrated from Poland and came to America through Ellis Island, but who never learned to speak English. When we brought in a translator, we could finally have a conversation with Mr. Kotek. Because he didn’t speak the same language as the homeowners, he didn’t understand that the mess and disarray in the home were from the new owners’ renovations. Once he realized what was happening to what he still considered his home, and once it was explained to him in a language he could understand, the spirit of Mr. Kotek no longer came off as gruff and mean. The new owners were taking the kind of care of his house that he had taken himself, and he quieted down.

Sometimes, though, they are actually trying to scare you, just for a laugh. That happened in the Randolph County Asylum/Infirmary in Winchester, Indiana, which we investigated in Season 4 of Kindred. It turned out the entity growling on the other side of a locked door, shaking it nearly off its hinges, was a carnival worker and sometimes-patient of the hospital named Harry “Peg” Dunn, a good-natured spirit who was just trying to have some fun and spice up an otherwise quiet afterlife. But that’s another story.

I fully subscribe to the idea that people act in the afterlife the same way they acted in life. If someone was a jerk when he was alive, he’s not necessarily going to stop being a jerk as a ghost. But to me, that’s the vast minority of people. It’s also possible that a person could be doing things that come off as scary, like Mr. Kotek, because that person doesn’t understand what’s happening in his home, or doesn’t like what you’re doing there. I genuinely feel Mr. Kotek was trying to protect his home from what he thought was a threat. More often than not, I think we perceive things we don’t understand as scary because it’s human nature to fear the unknown. It’s easy to assume that a strange noise in your house has bad intent behind it. Unless you were raised in a totally weird home like I was, it’s only natural to have that reaction. Me, I’m like, Let’s go find out what that was.

People ask me all the time how I can hunt ghosts for a living—by which they mean, How the hell are you putting yourself in these spine-chilling situations all the time? Are you insane? What I tell them is exactly the opposite of what they’re expecting to hear. I don’t find ghosts scary. I find them fascinating. They’re people with stories to tell, and I want to hear them. To me, investigating a haunting is the same feeling as catching up with a friend over a glass of wine. We’re just having a conversation. The difference is that when I’m talking to ghosts, the conversation is slightly more one-sided. Sometimes it takes a lot of questions to get an entity to share even a few words. But then again, I’ve been on dates where it was pretty much the same.

This fundamental idea that ghosts are, first and foremost, just trying to be heard, gets more complicated when it comes to places where people have experienced truly terrifying things. I’ve seen cases where ghosts genuinely are trying to scare people, or to hurt them. I’ve also investigated situations where the supernatural presence is a positive force, and the people love having the ghosts around. What’s so interesting to me is that these two totally different experiences can be happening to people in the same family, who live together in the same house.

Believe it or not, that’s the real story behind the home from The Conjuring.

There is no denying that the Perron family—the one whose experiences formed the basis for The Conjuring—went through an extended haunting in an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Harrisville, Rhode Island. Roger and Carolyn Perron, and their daughters Andrea, Nancy, Christine, Cindy, and April, felt the presence of the supernatural as part of their daily lives for almost ten years, the entire time they lived in that house, from 1970 to 1980.

That family lived with a lot of different ghosts in a very haunted, not always safe, house. It was investigated five times by paranormal experts Ed and Lorraine Warren (who also famously worked with the house from The Amityville Horror and the haunted doll from Annabelle). When they first arrived to investigate, Andrea Perron said, “They waited until the day before Halloween. Mrs. Warren said they thought the veil would be thinner and they’d have the best chance of seeing a manifestation. My mother looked at her and snickered, and said, ‘Then every day is Halloween in this house.’”

The Conjuring, though it’s loosely based on Andrea Perron’s memoirs and Lorraine Warren’s own recollections, doesn’t really capture what that family went through. In real life, there was no devil-worshipping spirit possessing the women who lived in the home so they’d murder their kids, no haunted jewelry box, no ghost named Rory hiding in the crawl space. There wasn’t even a crawl space in the actual house. We’ll get more into the truth as we go, but it’s important that you erase everything you think you learned about the Perrons from The Conjuring if we’re going to talk about the family’s actual experiences.

Andrea has been a friend for a long time, and she’s always said that the movie was nothing like what happened to them in the house, because—get this—what happened to them in the house was “a lot scarier.” Scarier than unseen forces dragging adolescent girls around by their hair.

Take a second to let that sink in.

Carolyn Perron, the mother, has refused to come back to the house since she left in 1980, and the family’s youngest daughter, April, passed away in 2017. Roger and the four living sisters came back to the house for the first time as a group for an episode on Season 4 of Kindred, and the family talked a lot about their memories of that period, and the experiences they had in the home. They were all in agreement that terrible, traumatic things had happened to them there. But they were also in agreement that they had a lot of happy supernatural experiences during that time as well.

Carolyn and the second youngest daughter, Cindy, got the worst of the abuse from the ghosts in that house. In Andrea’s recollection, her mother was injured at least five times, including being impaled through the hip with a garden stake; stabbed with an invisible needle in the leg; and cut across the neck with a hand scythe thrown at her in the barn. Cindy almost drowned when she was held underwater in the bathtub by something unseen, and was nearly suffocated when she was trapped inside an old wooden box that wouldn’t open, even though it didn’t have a lock on it. The same thing happened to Christine in an antique trunk. The girls would get cornered inside closets with no way to get out. They would hear voices all the time, or suddenly go cold, only to turn around and see something otherworldly standing there.

But at the same time all those harrowing things were happening, the family was also having positive experiences with presences in the house, too. That’s the part of the story that, in their view, was overlooked by both the movie and by the accounts from the Warrens themselves. Many of their brushes with entities in the home—especially Andrea’s, Nancy’s, and Roger’s experiences—were happy ones. “I had plenty of interaction with spirits in that house, but it was always peaceful,” Andrea said. “I felt protected.” She thinks that’s because she kept journals of what she was witnessing there, and was committing those accounts to memory. (I think it’s a pretty solid theory. Remember Peg Dunn? Chip Coffey’s reading of that situation was that Peg was being a prankster so that he’d be remembered and talked about after he’d passed away.)

“When we first moved in, my mother would walk through that house every single night and kiss all of us good night,” Andrea said. “We all remember a woman who used to come through the house and do the same thing.” She explained that all the girls felt a similar sensation, and that they all assumed it was their mother coming back in after they were asleep for one final check. “Cindy’s the one who said, ‘That wasn’t Mom, because Mom always smells like Ivory Soap and that lady smells like flowers and fruit.’”

The family also talked about Oliver Richardson, whom they believed was the son of the eighteenth-century family that built the house. Oliver died young, and his spirit played with April when the other sisters were at school. April had kept his existence from the Warrens, Andrea said, because she was fearful if she disclosed his presence, they would somehow force him to leave the house, and she loved him. (We couldn’t verify Oliver’s existence in our research, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. One of the hardest parts of this work is finding records on children from centuries past. Their births and deaths were severely underreported because before modern medicine, their mortality rates were so high.)

Roger shared his experience with a woman in the house—not the same one, they believe, who would tuck the girls in at night—and his emotional connection with her. He described her as a gentle spirit who would greet him every day by touching him on the back. That’s an experience I can personally validate, because when I was investigating the house for the show, I felt the exact same thing. There was a moment when I felt a hand caress my back, like the comforting touch of a mother. Normally, I hate being touched by ghosts. I hate being touched by any stranger, especially one I can’t see. This instance was the one and only time when I thought, This is actually pleasant.

Of all the sisters, Cindy wanted to come back the least. She had a really hard time being in that home, even with her family, the cast and crew of the show, and the current homeowners all there together. But on the other hand, when the Perrons sold the house, Nancy was so reluctant to leave that she offered to stay and be the caretaker for the new owners. That’s how much she loved that place.

During the séance that happened the final time the Warrens investigated the home, Carolyn Perron was thrown across a room while sitting in a chair and knocked unconscious. Still, even she has a somewhat positive view of those years. Carolyn was the one who titled Andrea’s books. “She just crossed her arms and said ‘House of Darkness House of Light. It was both,’” Andrea said.

“I feel very much at home there and very comfortable in that environment,” she explained. “It’s the only place on earth that has ever felt like my permanent place. Everything else feels temporary. The farm is home.”

So what really happened there? Honestly, I don’t know.

The sisters say that they did sense those same spirits when they visited the home with us, and that they were making contact with them, even while Adam and I were there investigating and not finding much ourselves. If you look closely at the episode, you can see a moment where Cindy is shaking her head and mouthing the word “no,” which she said was in response to someone unseen ordering her to go into the cellar, and then into the library. The day after she was at the house, Cindy returned to her home in Georgia. She reported feeling physically ill and found a huge bruise on the back of her leg she had no recollection of getting. Andrea believes Cindy’s physical symptoms were retaliation for not doing what the ghosts had wanted her to do. Cindy has sworn to never go back to the house.

I don’t have a good explanation for why the spirits that interacted so strongly with that family didn’t appear for us, or for the home’s new owners. Andrea said she got the sense that the ghosts were unsettled by all of the change and commotion in the house and didn’t feel comfortable revealing themselves. My hope is that, over time, each new visit and investigation will reveal new information.

One thing I can tell you is that I personally had a hard time being in that space. Even though Adam and I didn’t find any evidence of the spirits that the Perrons described, I’m still not convinced the house is completely safe. There’s something in the farmhouse that has an affinity toward children, and it’s not necessarily a nice affinity. We weren’t able to confirm who was there, but we were able to gather that whoever they are, they made themselves known more to children than adults and we don’t know why. Luckily, since it’s practically in my backyard, the farmhouse is one of those places I’ll definitely return to and keep trying to find out.

What we do know for sure is that Bathsheba Sherman, who has been maligned for decades as a devil worshipper who did unspeakable things to her own child, had nothing to do with that home. In the movie, she was an evil spirit who perpetuated a legacy of murder in the women who lived in the home after she did. In reality, she didn’t even live in that house, and she definitely didn’t murder anyone. There’s no evidence or historical record to indicate she was anything but an ordinary woman who lived a normal life on a nearby homestead. That legend is a product of the investigations of the home by Ed and Lorraine Warren.

I want to be clear, though, that I respect and admire the Warrens very much. The work they’ve done and the strides they made in making the paranormal more mainstream helped to pave the path that I’m walking today. But the research I’ve done, and the information I’ve seen from the Harrisville Historical Society, have led me to believe they were wrong about Bathsheba. That poor woman has been blamed for nearly fifty years for things she had nothing to do with. She’s been dead for centuries. She can’t defend herself.

I really don’t know where that information came from, or how any of it happened. But the result of that misinformation was decades of what I believe is historical inaccuracy unintentionally presented as fact, both in the Warrens’ work and (in a highly dramatized version) in The Conjuring, and it has had repercussions in real life. Bathsheba’s gravestone in Harrisville has been stolen and defaced so many times that the Harrisville Historical Society had to permanently remove it from her burial site. And the house, of course, has become the target of so much tourist traffic—often unfriendly—that a former owner sued Warner Bros. Granted, that same person has gone on a personal crusade to disprove the home’s haunted history, even after she spent years on the public record talking about those ghosts. She went as far as to invite Ghost Hunters in for an episode in Season 2 of that show. Did I mention she showed up screaming at us while we were filming our Kindred Spirits episode? Because she definitely did that, too.

The point of all this is that what happened with Bathsheba is a teachable moment. This is the ultimate example of why good research is so important, and why you have to do your homework and get your history right. The seventies and eighties saw a rash of people like the Warrens (such as Hans Holzer and Sylvia Browne), who were widely renowned for their new perspectives on the paranormal, but who had strictly defined ideas of what “the paranormal” was. I think that, with their unique perspective on the investigation, Ed and Lorraine were looking for someone to take the blame, and provide a clear explanation for what was happening.

To me, it was a sign of the times more than a purposeful spreading of misinformation. I grew up reading authors like the Warrens when I was a kid, and I took all of them at their word. It wasn’t until later when I thought, Wait a minute, maybe we shouldn’t just run with these ideas. Today, we’re in a space where people are a little more skeptical about the paranormal. They’re not dismissing it entirely, but they’re not ready to embrace these ideas of sending things into the light, or the idea of demons and angels, as the only possible solution. Now, we have these amazing archives of newspapers and historical records online, and even more extensive resources at historical societies. We can go in and correct that kind of misinformation.

That’s honestly what I love so much about ghost hunting. It’s so interesting to me to actually find the history. We uncovered so much that we didn’t have time to include it all in the show. For example, we looked into the seven dead soldiers so often mentioned in the house’s lore, but couldn’t find any evidence of them. We couldn’t even find a record of any military activity in the area at all, not so much as an encampment. We did find that a man died of exposure in a snowstorm just outside the house, while his family was waiting inside for him, and evidence of a man who wandered drunk into the barn and died. There was a huge number of suicides in the area, more than any other case I’ve ever researched, but there was no discoverable evidence of the woman who was rumored to have hung herself in the barn, who many people suspect is the bent-neck lady depicted on the wall in the basement. There are rumors and whispers of a lot more deaths in and around that house, but there’s no evidence of them. At that point, you’re playing a game of telephone that goes back two hundred years. Eventually, the trail leads nowhere.

An Uninvited Guest

For an episode of Ghost Hunters, we had gone to Essex County Prison in New Jersey to investigate. The abandoned prison was built in 1837 and closed in 1970, so there was a long span of time in which to build up negative energy in that space—especially since it had a gallows on site for prisoners sentenced to death by hanging.

By the time we visited, the building was in severe disrepair, and there were numerous reports of shadow figures, disembodied footsteps, and the jangling of unseen keys. At that time on the show, we had an uneven number of investigators, so sometimes one of us wouldn’t have a partner for an investigation.

During my downtime, I had a brilliant idea: The cameraman could come investigate with me! I’d appear “alone” on camera, but you wouldn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that I wasn’t actually alone, because someone was there to film me.

We headed down to the tunnels beneath the prison. I knew the complex had become a haven for homeless drug addicts, but the buildings we were investigating that night had been checked by security, who made certain there was no one inside them.

When we went down into the tunnels, it didn’t really occur to me that we were out of bounds of that security clearance.

Eventually, I noticed what appeared to be a grate in the ceiling of the tunnel, that looked like it could be moved. And lucky me, there was a steel barrel nearby that I could stand on to get up there and see inside. Just then, I heard a noise above. My curiosity was piqued. Could it be an animal? Or maybe…a ghost?

What I didn’t see coming was that I was going to jump on top of that barrel, lift the grate, poke my head through and come directly face to face with a man.

A man who was very surprised to see me.

A man whose face told me that I was an unwelcome guest. And that I was leaving. Now.

I jumped (fell) down, and walked (ran) out of the tunnels. Clearly, security hadn’t gotten to that building.