Andrea Perron: Part 1

community as well. Go back and listen to some more episodes with all the wonderful queer people I've had on the show, and spread the word if people are looking for a you know, queer friendly, queer hosted, queer embracing podcast about ghosts. Oh my god, Okay this episode today, you guys, I had so much fun and this is a two parter. Okay this week. Well, first of all, my guest is Andrea Parrin, who famously grew up in the house that went on to inspire the first Conjuring movie,

and so we had a lot to talk about. She's my new friend she's got a great sense of humor, she has a lot to say, and I feel like we have and even scratch the surface. So hopefully I can have her on again in the future. She sounds she sounds down to do it, so UH this will hopefully be the first of many conversations that I'll have with her on this podcast. And in this first week's UH version of our conversation, we talk a lot about bath Sheba Sherman, who I talked to Amy Brune about.

And it's also there's also some some stuff about bath Sheba Sherman and Amy Brune's book as well. And you know, she's the woman that was made out to be this awful, spooky, scary witch in the Conjuring movie, and so you'll hear a lot about that today. And yeah, there's just there's just so much. And as always, I have a little bit extra if you want to hear on Patreon. She tells the story that I first heard in that documentary that came out about Edim Lorraine Warren a couple months back,

I think, not that long ago. What is time? You know? It was at some point there was a documentary that's pretty good. It's on Discovery. Plus, now somebody tells a story about in the house that Andrea parent grew up in. Her mom bit into an orange and blood started gushing out in like a paranormal way. And so I asked Andrea that story, and we talk about that on Patreon.

And I also asked her about like when the Amneyville Horror came out and Edie Lorraine Warren were on TV, and like there was all this talk about, you know, this haunted house case, which came after the original Conjuring case with Ada and Lorraine Warren, and so I was curious what that was like for her to see those two paranormal investigator people, the Warrens on TV. But like, wait, those are the people that were over here investigating my house. Like I don't know, I just I thought it was

an interesting thing to ask her about. So you can hear that on Patreon and that's patreon dot com slash rosdres Fales And as always, I have a little video this week. It's just a fun little game where I tell I guess you could say I do dramatic readings of real encounters or statements about aliens that celebrities have said. And I have you guess which celebrities said that, So it's all fun. Patreon dot com slash roz jes Fales. Okay, let's get into it. Here's Part one with Andrea Parrin

on with the show. I am so good you and I we just met through Patrick Keller. Shout out to Patrick and we we talked on the phone the other day and I had so much fun talking to you. You're you're a blast.

fun and excitement. And then a few years ago I went to Gulf Pour Gulfport, Florida, which is it's near it's south of Saint Pete and they had a great drag bar. So for the time that I spent there, I was I was out and about in town with the queens, you know. And it's and the thing that

I love about it is my readers. A lot of my readers, you know, they have nicknames for me, and one of them is Queen of the Alternate Universe and h and I tell them, you know, but I don't have a crown, except you know, in the back of my mouth and it's gold. But it's just for you know, evening weear. And so every time I go to an event somebody brings me a tiara or a crown, it's they're precious. They're just lovely.

the story first came out, and sometimes better. So you know, I just I look at this as this is my privilege and my pleasure to connect and reconnect with not only my friends and my followers, but to introduce the story to new people. And you know, even if it's just a handful of people that have never heard of it before that you know, aren't you know, I don't know what planet they would be from, but you know, didn't know about the conjuring, didn't know about you know,

the backstory. Then this is my opportunity to tell them. So you know, I'm not bored by it at all. I just you know, I'll mix it up with you. You can ask me anything, Roz. Believe me. I told you the other day on the phone. There is no there's no question off the table, none. I'll answer everything.

in the haunted house paranormal horror movie genre. And then I think that the success of it, which of course has gone on to you know, a series of other films, the third one coming out like very soon, the it has caused people to now be more interested in the Warrens and you and the real story. And that's what I really want to get into today.

we have to include this. You know, this can't just rely predominantly on the case files of the warrants. We need to include some of what's real in this story into the story. And they desperately wanted to do so. Unfortunately, every time they attempted to incorporate elements of the truth into the story, it scared the execs at Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema so much that they told them

to take it out. They actually submitted their screenplace even times, and seven times it was rejected, and they were told to delete anything that came out of my books because you know, even studio execs or fear based carbon units,

they were trying to get a PG. Thirteen rating, which they didn't get anyway, and they were trying not to literally scare people out of the theater, and so based on their reaction, their personal reaction to our true story, they told the screenwriters that they had to take it out.

So the Conjuring screenplay is kind of an interesting amalgamation between the case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren Cherry picking what they felt was safe from my books than the screenwriters Chad and carry kind of conjured up a

whole third story and that's what became the Conjuring. So it bears no actual resemblance to the truth, and the portrayal of my family is inaccurate at times in the extreme, but I don't mean for that to sound critical in any way, because they were trying to do something that was quite literally impossible. They were trying to compress a ten year period into a two hour film, and with the focus being on Ed and Lorraine Warren as one

of their primary cases. And before Ed died, he told Lorraine that he wanted her to move heaven and Earth to get the paren family story told. He was on the record verbatim as saying it was the most intense, most disturbing, most compelling, and most significant of all of the investigations that they ever conducted. So when James wand read my books, He's like, how the hell do I not know about this? You know, he was an officionado of the Warrens. He was like totally into what they

were doing and how they were doing it. And he followed them for well, practically for as long as he was alive, and they, you know, were well into their career when he was a kid, so he naturally gravitated toward them as being pioneers in the paranormal and he just he's like, how do I not know about this? When I first met with him in Hollywood, you know, he asked me, we're sitting at a production meeting and he's like, you know, why was this not out in

the world. And I said, there's a very simple reason. My mother said, no, that's why. And then thirty years later I picked up a pen and started writing our truth, not even knowing if there was going to be anyone out there that was interested in hearing it.

even publicly share them. And so I mean, when this was happening, your family, your parents were not the personalities to say let's go on TV, right or.

brothers kind of like the screenwriters were. Chad and Carrie Hayes were the screenwriters, but the twin brothers that showed up at our house in nineteen seventy three or Keith and Carl Johnson and their team of paranormal investigators from Rhode Island College, and Keith said that my mother called him and asked him to come out out to the house. And my mother never called anybody and asked anyone to

investigate what she didn't even understand herself. Wow. And he said, but I recognize your voice, missus Parrin, And she said, dear, I don't know who called you, but it wasn't me.

And even saying those words now sends a chill up my spine because my mother was already being oppressed by a spirit that you know, they can be very powerful, and my mother was already in transition the spirit in the house that wanted my mother out, that just loathed her and threatened her and wanted her out of that house, figured by my own assumption that if she couldn't get her out, then she would go within. And my mom's

voice was changing. She was wearing vintage clothing, she was using archaic English terminology in her you know, matter of fact, normal day to day speech. And at first we thought it was because she was doing so much research on the house that she was kind of getting it into her head and you know, reading that language so much that she was incorporating it into her normal patterns of speech.

But it was something more than that. And I do believe that the visage of my mother called Keith Johnson, but it wasn't my mother.

like a child came through. And Bethsheba was a very diminutive person. She was a very small framed woman with a high pitched voice, and I have her on several recordings coming through and communicating with us. Well that's how she came through. And once she finally did, we had a very interesting conversation and George asked her at one point what one word she associates with me, and instantly her response was love. And I know why because I've

been her defender. You know, she was made out to be the villainous, you know, to be the offending spirit in the conjuring, and that was based on Missus Warren's interpretation of things, But she was not the one that was haunting and taunting my mother, and in fact was not even born yet when the spirit that was coming

after my mother was long dead. You know, my father believes that it's actually Missus John Arnold, who was found hanging in the barn in seventeen ninety seven at the age of ninety three, who took her own life after her husband passed away. And that was according to the town historian who came and met my parents and told them as much as he knew of the history of the farm. You know, now, the thing is, none of them ever walked up to any of us and said, oh, hello,

my name is You know. There was literally only one self identifying spirit at the farmhouse, and he was a little boy that my sister played with. You know, that was one element that they picked up in the conjuring that was accurate. But you know, they portrayed my family as godless heathens as juxtaposed to the devout Roman Catholic Warrens, when nothing could have been further from the truth. We

were all born and raised Catholic. My father had intended on serving his tour in the navy and then coming back and going into the seminary to become a priest. He was born and raised in the parochial Roman Catholic tradition, had served as an altar boy for you know, the bulk of his youth, and had been very influenced by a couple of priests who he admired greatly, and he

won to follow in their footsteps. And it was only during you know, that period where he was in the navy and met my mother that all bets were off about the priesthood because he fell in love with her, and so you know, bingo, that's where we all come from. But we were not godless, you know, we weren't paran Pagans or godless heathens. You know, although pagan does you know, Pagan is a religion, and you know, more closely akin to what I practice, because you know, I say, if

you want to know God, go to the woods. But I just I look at the you know, that was the thing my mother took the greatest exception to. She thought that the whole possession and exorcism scene in the film, and she watched it on DVD. One night, she walked into the parlor and She's like, Okay, I'm ready to watch it. And I said, well, you know, mom, we were going to watch The Princess Bride. She's like, just

put the movie in. So I mean, yeah, we're going to watch The Princess Bride for like the fiftieth time. And she's like, no, you can quote the script on that. I'm ready to see the movie now.

she does. And woe be unto you for going into that cemetery on sacred ground and using whatever you did to destroy one hundred and fifty year old gravestone. This will haunt you for the rest of your life. And I was, I was just, you know, I really think that's why Bethsheba cares for me, because yes, I did write in the books what you know people said in town about her, what the historian.

and she was apparently quite cruel to her. Farm hands would beat them, would starve them, would you know. I mean when he spoke of her, he would drop his eyes. He wouldn't even look directly at you. It was like it pained him to tell the story of her. She was not an arnold. She never lived at the farmhouse. She was a product of a union between the Fair family and the Taft family, both families of extraordinary means. Both there was a president Taft right from her bloodline,

and the Fairs basically helped build Brown University. Fair Street is probably the most famous street in Providence. And how she hooked up with Judson Sherman, a farmer out in the backwoods of Harrisville, Rhode Island. You know, nobody will

ever know. But she was a young woman when she moved there, probably sixteen or seventeen years old when she married, and you know, and that was considered late back then, because life expectancy was around forty five years old, And so she had a reputation that preceded her when we moved to the farm, and mister mckechen told my mother that at some point she was accused of having taken the life of an infant while at our home at the Arnold estate, and we don't know if she was babysitting,

if she was visiting and she had one of her own children with her, We don't know. And I'd be the first one to say, you know, they are a huge glaring holes in this story. Worry, but you know, piecing it together. He said that she was accused. Upon examining the infant's body, it was found by the doctor that there was a needle that had been impaled at the base of its skull and the cause of death was listed as convulsions. That's what he told my mother,

which absolutely unnerved her, appalled her. But then there was apparently some inquest. The town that we lived in was not even incorporated then, it was just a smattering of villages. So there was an inquest in the town seat of Chapatchet, which is actually now the town seat in Gloucester Leocester, Rhode Island, the town just south of Burrelville, and there was an inquest that involved a judge. There was something

written up in a local paper. My mother found an article about it in archives that were actually stored in western Massachusetts, and she included it in her notebook of historical records, births, deaths, you know, all the different certificates. When she was doing research on the house, and Missus Warren asked for that notebook to make xerox copies of everything in it, and my mother never saw it again. So she was working from memory in terms of telling

me this to put it into the book. But according to the inquest, she was absolved of responsibility and if she did something wrong, then she talked herself, you know, talked her way out of it. But you know that was back at a time when things could, you know, terrible accidents could happen. There was a sewing basket in every room. We don't know if it was an infant or a toddler, if you know, a baby had been laid down in the soft of a yarn, a basket

of yarn, and a terrible accident happened. We don't know. And I just don't think that it's right to accuse someone of murder if you don't have any evidence of that. So the judge said, no, there's you know, basically, there's nothing to see here. This looks like it must have been some kind of an accident. But in the court of public opinion, Bathsheba was tried and convicted and lived

a long and miserable life. And you know, just one hundred or so years earlier, being called a witch in New England, just up the road in Salem would get you killed. That's still a very dangerous word to throw around in some parts of the world. Women die every day on this planet somewhere for being accused to being witch.

baby to do it, was because the women. Some of the women in town were threatened by her, and the men would often gaze upon her with rapacious eyes. So

she was a threat. And you know, had there been any evidence, any proof whatsoever, that Beth sheeba Sherman was a practicing witch and that had done something as hideous and heinous as taking the life of a baby, she would not be buried in hallow ground, hallowed ground in the middle of the Riverside cemetery in Harrisville, Rhode Island, next to her husband, with three tiny little graves right beside hers. Because three of her four children didn't live past the age of four. Wow, and that was not

that unusual. That's not you know, any kind of implication that she killed off her kids as she had at all. You know, common cold could take you out in the eighteen hundreds and prior to that, you know, even today, you know, I mean, let's face it, we're in the midst of a battle with a new coronavirus. You know, it's it's it's shocking to walk through the cemeteries of

New England, the early cemeteries. You are there's not a chance, there's a guarantee that you are going to trip over a tiny little gravestone that doesn't even have a name carved on it because it was considered bad luck to name your baby before it was a year old. God, can you imagine now children and going through that whole process of bringing a new life into the world, only to see the common cold kill it.

of the Witch. And not only does it address what is most likely you know, I can't absolve her because I don't know for sure, but I certainly have given her the benefit of the doubt, and in that chapter of the book. It retraces the entire history of that word in use and the ramifications of such. And I was talking about that near her gravestone. I guess it was about maybe four or five years ago, and one of the young men that was at the lecture was

recording it unbeknownst to me. And when I got back to my home, he called me up and he said, Andrea, you're not going to believe this. He's like, oh my god, wait till you hear this. I said, well, you know, Cody, you know, wait till I hear what. And he sent me an audio clip of a disembodied voice of Beth sheeba Sherman, screaming her name allowed over me as I was as I was lecturing, and no one heard it, but it was recorded on the videotape and it was absolutely her voice.

of have a belief in the supernatural. There's lots of supernatural elements to Catholicism, I feel. So before you guys moved in, did you guys believe in this stuff or have any it Wasians or anything.

homes left in America. And it is absolutely stunningly beautiful.

All the bedrooms are upstairs, the stairwells are very steep and narrow, and if you don't want your kids falling down the stairs in the middle of the night to go to the one and only bathroom on the first floor, you'd better leave some lights on in the house. That's how his mind, his pragmatic Burgo mind, processed what would

otherwise be a rather cryptic comment. And as things were happening in the house, mister Kenyon would stop by pretty regularly, and my mother would question him about strange noises and happenings in the house. And she was being very she was walking on eggshell She was being very delicate with it too, and he would just pat her on the hand and say, swallows in the chimney, My dear, swallows in the chimney.

couldn't even see the nearest neighbor's house. But just traveling on the school bus and getting to know some of the other people that lived in the area, we discovered that there was never ever a time that someone drove past that house in the middle of the night or in the wee hours of the morning, that that house wasn't lit up like a Christmas tree on the dark landscape in the remote woods of Harrisville, Rhode Island. Every single light was on in that house every single night.

in the wings. And the day we moved in, I was the one that saw a full body apparition first. But he appeared as absolutely solid and flesh and blood as any living mortal being to me. And when I walked past him, he was standing in the door to the foyer of the dining room. And I walked in with a box that my dad had handed me off the back of the moving truck, and he said, take this to your mom in the kitchen. Mom had gone

around to the kitchen door. She had my baby sister April with her, and the rest of us were big enough that we could help move things in the house.

So I brought the box in through the parlor door, took a hard rite and there was mister Kenyon packing some of his belongings on the dining room table, and I stopped for a moment and greeted him, and then I turned around and there was this man standing in the corner of the room, and I noticed that he was dressed rather oddly, but he appeared absolutely solid to me. Was wearing he was wearing it looked like handmade pants and a linen shirt and kind of a handmade vest,

and he had his arms crossed. He had one leg up against the wall and he was leaning against the wall, and his head was kind of cocked a little sideways with a quirky grin on his face, and he was completely transfixed on mister Kenyon and watching him. And as I walked past him, I said, good morning, sir, and he looked right through me like I was an invisible ghost. And you know, I didn't want to press it. I

didn't know who he was. So I walked into the kitchen and I said, Mom, who's that man with mister Kenyon? And she said, there's nobody with mister Kenyon. His son's on the way, but he's not here yet, so I'm sure. I just presumed it was a neighbor who had stopped by to say goodbye. And I walked out the kitchen door and walked back around to the moving van. In the interim, my sister Christine walked in and she saw him and walked into the kitchen and said, Mom, who's

the man with mister Kenyon? And She's like, I don't know what you're talking about. As far as I know, there's nobody with mister Kenyon. And I can't go look because I'm on backing boxes so we can have dinner tonight. And so Chris walked out the kitchen door and then Cindy comes in the kitchen and with her box and she says, Mom, who's that And my mother's like, I don't know. Maybe I don't know. And then Nancy, Nancy, I mean, it was mayhem, it's chaos. It's moving day,

for God's sake. Yeah, and you know, So then Nancy walks in the kitchen and she leans over to Cindy and she says, Sin, did you see that man with mister Kenyon? I did. Buddy just disappeared. And that was our introduce, our introduction to the paranormal world.

We may never know. You know, it's not like, you know, they lived in the days of Facebook and Instagram and you knew what they had for dinner every day, and you know everybody that they were related to or ever slept with, or you know. I mean, it's like there's no record of this. You know, there's birth and death certificates and not much else.

One of the most fascinating things, and I'm jumping years ahead now, but one of the most fascinating things that ever happened in that house was when my mother looked into the dining room and saw an entire family having dinner at our table, a woman cooking over a fireplace that had been closed up solid for more than one hundred years when we moved into that house, and there

were two men sitting at the table. They had Pewter Stein's in front of them, so it would be you know, indicative of the seventeen hundreds because pewter was outlawed for use and you know, for eating or drinking from because of the lead content in the eighteen hundreds. And they were sitting there and one of them looked into the parlor and saw my mother standing on the hearthstone, and he nudged the man behind him and pointed her out.

And she was the ghost, right, So she was looking into the past as they were simultaneously peering into the future, which would certainly lead one to think that dimensions can intermingle.

And I asked her one time, you know, the age old question, what was the scariest thing that ever happened to you? I didn't put it quite that way, but I wanted her to divulge more. And she said, the thing that frightened her most about living at the farm was you never knew what was coming next. Yeah, there was nothing predictable. The unexpected was expected, and anything could happen at any time. When Missus Warren first came to the house, you know those the guys Keith and Carl Johnson.

Keith Johnson saw out the Warrens at a seminar at the University of Rhode Island in September of nineteen seventy three, and he's the one that informed them of our family's predicament. And then they waited until the night before Halloween in seventy three to show up at our door. And when my mother opened the kitchen door, she had absolutely no idea who these people were. She was on Halloween the night before.

is Bethsheba. Now, to her credit, she knew nothing, nothing about the history of the house, so that she plucked that name out of thin air speaks volumes. But then she blamed her for everything that was nefarious that ever happened in the house, as though she was, you know, the lone culprit, and and as though the other spirits had nothing to do with it. And it was I believe that the spirit that was, you know, that just ran my mother ragged clearly obviously had a broken neck.

And Bathsheba died from a stroke in eighteen eighty five. So she did not hang from a tree. There was no exorcism in our house. There was a seance that was rather foisted upon my parents at my father's great objection in August of seventy four, but I think maybe the fifth time that they had come to conduct their investigation, and my father wanted absolutely no part of them. He didn't trust them. He thought that, you know, all of this was bs that that they were just going to

exploit our family. And he didn't understand my mother having faith in them and spelling her guts about what happened at the house. I mean, he was still, you know, trying to deal with it himself. He was just coming out of complete and utter denial of it when they showed up, so, needless to say, he was highly skeptical.

But they showed up one night with a priest and a medium, and they had cinematographers and they had an audio specialist, and I mean they showed up with a whole entourage, and I thought my father's head was just going to blow off. He did not want them there. And missus Warren said, your wife is oppressed, and if we do not intervene on her behalf, then she's going to end up in full blown possession and you're going to lose her. And you know, he just basically said

you know, I don't believe in ghosts. And she just looked at him with venom in her eyes, and she said to him, if you love your wife, you'll let us do this. Well, thank god she wasn't a man, because had she been, he would have cold cocked her and her husband ed and the priest had to remove him from the room and take him into the bedroom and kind of talk him off a ledge. And meanwhile they took my mother and they put her at the table.

And all the four of the five of us of the children, were home that night, and we were all told to go upstairs and close our doors and be quiet. Well, you know, you think we stayed up there. You know, I came down with my sister Sindy, and we snuck into the front foyer, and somebody had pushed the door closed to the dining room, but it was still open a crack about an inch ech and a half, and all the lights were turned off. Nobody could see us.

And what I saw, what I saw happen not only solidified my faith in God as I prayed for my mother's life, but it also taught me that there is pure, unadulterated evil in the world. And it is with that knowledge that I deliberately choose to live in the light. Evil doesn't it doesn't, dare my mother. My mother was attacked, and some would say possessed, and perhaps if she was,

technically it was for a very brief time. But my mother was attacked at that table because a medium who obviously didn't know what she was doing, threw open wide the doors to the nether world and conjured the spirits and invited everything in to an already supremely haunted house. So to determine who the actual culprit was, that is spiritual malpractice, and whatever it was that came into my mother spoke in a language that does not exist on

this planet and likely never did. My mother was screaming and writhing in pain. Her body wadded up into a ball on the seat in the chair in which she was seated, I mean literally ros to the extent that

you would expect to hear or her bones breaking. And she threw her head back and howled like a banshee, and then her chair levitated, and in a fraction of a second she was tossed in the chair from the middle of our dining room a good twenty feet away into the middle of our parlor, and when her head struck the floor, everyone who witnessed that was quite certain that they had just watched her die.

look forward to that. And as always, if you want to hear a little bit more, go to patreon dot com slash Rosdreds Falise and hear her tell the story of her mom and the Orange incident and also what it was like for her to see Adam Lorraine Warren on TV and the Amnieville horror came out and all that stuff, because you know Amnieville horror that was a huge craze in the seventies. You know that that was a big deal. I don't know. I think it's I think it's a fun thing to ask, but her answer

may surprise you anyway. As always, please rate the show five stars on Apple Podcasts, and if you have a ghost story, you could leave it in a review, or you could just say something nice or not say anything at all. You could also put a ghost story in the Facebook group ghosted by ros dress Falas or send me an email at ghosted by Roz at gmail dot com. If you want to be on a listener episode, put

in the subject line of the email listener episode. I'm also on Cameo rozjezz Velaz, Instagram, Rose Hernandez, and uh yeah, tell your friends about the show. I love you all, both living and dead. But if I didn't ask you to haunt me, don't haunt me. Okay, bye.