Conjure this!

Even though there's a local-ish connection, I have no recall of the movie The Conjuring whatsoever. It came out in 2013, when I had better things to do, mostly things involving my husband's cancer recurrence. We were doing some conjuring of our own over at Mass General, which may be why this film passed me by entirely.

And since I've never even heard of the movie, I hadn't realized that I had a degree of separation connection with farmhouse that inspired the movie, which is located in Burrillville, Rhode Island.

My college roommate was from Burrillville, a small town in northern Rhode Island that I doubt I would have heard of if I hadn't met Joyce. Her husband, Tom, is from Burrillville, too. Both of them fled the town, which didn't have much going for it, other than a major state hospital. Zambarano Hospital had been a TB sanatorium which segued into a psychiatric institution once TB became less of a thing. Joyce's mother and Tom's mother were both nurses at Zambarano. Tom's father may have worked there as well. Joyce had worked there some summers in high school and college.

Not much else there. Today, Burrillville is mostly a bedroom community for Providence, which is about 30 miles away. (For all I know, it's a bedroom community for Worcester as well, since it's about the same distance as it is from Providence.)

While we were in college, I visited Burrillville many times. It made Worcester look like a hopping metropolis, that's for sure. Both Joyce and I were plenty happy to be in school in Boston.

Joyce and Tom ended up in Dallas, and I'll be visiting them in a couple of weeks. 

Even though I'd never heard of The Conjuring, I can pretty much guarantee that it will be on our convo agenda. 

The Conjuring, and, hence, Burrillville, have been in the news because the haunted Conjuring house (nearly 300 years old) has just sold for $1.525 million, a nifty little amount above the asking price of $1.2M. Apparently, when it comes to paranormal, you need to pay a premium.

The movie was based (loosely) on a book by Andrea Perron, whose family moved into the house in 1971, when she was a girl. From the get go, the family experienced creepy, paranormal events. 

The clocks in house all stop at 3:07 AM. The Perrons' dog mysteriously dies. Andrea's mother wakes up covered in bruises. She and her sister are attacked by a "malevolent spirit."

Mrs. Perron calls in a pair of demonologists, Ed and Lorraine Warren, who quickly find some mighty dark forces. 

...research reveals that the house once belonged to an accused witch named Bathsheba Sherman (a relative of Mary Towne Eastey [one of the hanged Salem witches]), who sacrificed her week-old baby to the devil and killed herself in 1863 at 3:07 in the morning after cursing all who take her land. They find reports of numerous murders and suicides through the years in the houses that were built on the property. (Source: Wikipedia)

Well, okay now. 

In 2019, the house was purchased by Cory and Jennifer Heinzen, "paranormal investigators from Maine", who ran it as a haunted house business. But they found themselves overwhelmed by so many people wanting to experience haunted housery and decided to sell, with hopes that the new owner would continue their business. A bidding war ensued. 

Although she was not the highest bidder - someone supposedly offered $2M - Jacqueline Nuñez, who is from Boston, triumphed. 

“This purchase is personal for me,” Nuñez said in an interview with the Globe. “It’s not a real estate development. It’s around my own beliefs.”

...Nuñez has pledged to continue the paranormal business that the Heinzens started in the farmhouse at 1677 Round Top Road. Guests will be able to continue the nightly paranormal investigations, day tours will resume, and there will be livestreamed events. The Heinzens will remain involved, she said. (Source: Boston Globe)

The house comes with a catch: 

...one of the conditions that the Heinzens set was that the new owner not live in the house year-round, “because the energy is so powerful,” Nuñez told the Globe later. “They put it in there as protection for the buyer.”

But Nuñez - who is a pretty smart cookie: Northwestern undergrad, Northeastern law degree - isn't scared in the least. 

“I’m a deeply spiritual person. It’s a very important part of me,” Nuñez said. “I believe we are conscious beings having a human experience, and that our consciousness continues on, we are here to learn things in lifetime and help our species evolve morally and culturally. ... This house is an opportunity to connect with people who’ve moved on and died, that’s the interactivity here and the engagement with the people who have passed.” (Source: Boston.com)

I'm not a deeply spiritual person in the least. But I'm not discounting this paranormal stuff at all. I'm quite sure that a lot of what goes for paranormal is either explainable by science, or is just a crock o' hooey. But I'm open to the possibility of there being mysterious things, beyond our ken and beyond the current bounds of science, that actually happen to people. They're creepy. And weird. Haunted house creepy, haunted house weird. But real.

For the rest of the year, Nuñez intends to learn the business and the ins and outs of the house and to re-introduce day tours. She wants to have a “really fun” Halloween event, and intends to start doing ghost investigations over shorter time periods. In 2023, she wants to expand the business and find a way for people to engage with the paranormal activity in the home.

Joyce and Tom are planning on coming up to these parts at some point in the next year or so. I'm putting a visit to The Conjuring House on their agenda, and I'm going with!