True case

The family moved into their dream farmhouse. It started with a smell

23 June 2026 · 5 min read

The family moved into their dream farmhouse. It started with a smell

In January 1971 the Perron family moved into an old farmhouse in Rhode Island. The first things that happened were easy to explain away. A broom out of place. A smell that came and went. It was only the beginning.

In January 1971 a family of seven moved into an old farmhouse in Rhode Island. Roger and Carolyn Perron had found their dream home in the country, a white colonial farmhouse from the seventeen hundreds with land all around it.

The first things that happened were nothing to speak of. A broom standing in the wrong place. A door that had drifted open. A smell that came and went, like something rotten, and then was gone.

Easy to explain away. Old houses creak, draw and smell. The family thought no more of it. That is where it began.

In the years that followed it grew harder to wave away. Furniture that had been moved. Cold spots in rooms that should have been warm. Figures glimpsed and gone. Carolyn, the mother of the house, is said to have suffered the worst of it.

Eventually Ed and Lorraine Warren were called in, two of America's most famous ghost investigators. Their visit made the case notorious, and decades later it became the basis for the horror film The Conjuring.

And here it is worth pausing. The film ties the haunting to Bathsheba Sherman, a woman cast as a witch and a child killer. Historians who have examined the matter find no support for it. Bathsheba never lived in the Perron farmhouse, and the accusations against her seem to have grown up long afterward.

The Perron family themselves have said the film is not their story. The daughter Andrea wrote three books about the years in the house, and her version is in some ways quieter than Hollywood's. And in some ways more unsettling, precisely because it does not try to explain everything.

The pattern is familiar. An ordinary family, an ordinary house, and something that starts small.

In Atchison, Kansas, stands the Sallie House, where later residents reported unexplained scratch marks and a presence they attributed to the spirit of a young girl. Here too the story behind it lacks hard proof. But the house still stands, and the story with it.

This is how the best ghost stories work. They do not begin with a scream. They begin with a smell, a broom, a door that was not open this morning.

Both houses can be visited, if you dare. And if you want to see which houses in your own part of the world carry similar stories, open the map and look.

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