The Conjuring House

The Conjuring House

The Conjuring House land precedes its colonial records by thousands of years while it was occupied by the Nipmuc and other local tribes prior to Roger Williams purchasing the land as part of the establishment of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Having been expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for espousing freedom of religious worship and separation of church and state, Roger Williams established Providence Plantations in 1636 in Narragansett RI. In 1639 Glocester, now Burrillville RI, became part of Providence Plantations including this estate deeded to the Richardson Family. The land was deeded in 1680 and was surveyed by John Smith, one of the original Virginia colonists.

Roger Williams believed that the best way to preserve the land was to deed large parcels to those who chose to follow him and his teachings. He did so to protect it from a rather overt encroachment from Connecticut and Massachusetts. The original estate deeded to the Richardsons was more than a thousand acres. It was subsequently sold off in parcels to families in the area, some who are still there hundreds of years later.

Because women had no rights to property at this time in history, their estate transferred through marriage from the first colonists, the Richardson family, to the Arnold family. From the Arnold Family it transferred to the Butterworths and then to the Kenyons before being purchased by the Perrons in the 1970s. In 1980, the Schwartz family purchased the property and sold it to Norma Sutcliffe in 1987. Cory and Jen Heinzen purchased the property in 2019 from Norma Sutcliffe and launched the business to allow investigations and day tours. In May of 2022, Jacqueline Nuñez purchased the property and is continuing and growing the business.

The house as it now stands was completed in 1736, forty years before the signing of The Declaration of Independence. This magnificent homestead has survived countless storms, King Philips War, The Revolutionary War, The Civil War, and the unbridled growth of the Industrial Age in America. The house is a testament to the need to preserve history. Eight generations of one extended family had lived and died in it and apparently some of them never left or visit it with some frequency. History has a story to tell. We will never know all of it, some of which has been lost to the annuls of time, but one thing is certain. There are few places like it which remain intact, and it deserves reverence for the National treasure that it is.

The Perron Family

The mystery of life, death, and the afterlife is something we might not ever comprehend fully in this realm, but it is the fascination, the curiosity about it that keeps us guessing and searching for answers to our most esoteric questions about human existence.

 

In June of 1970, my mother, Carolyn Perron discovered the farm quite by accident though, as we looked back in retrospect, it seems to bear that our family was called to that place in the country -- Harrisville, RI.  My parents bought the place in December of 1970, and we lived there until June 1980. We experienced continual paranormal encounters beginning from the day we moved in until the day the family moved to Georgia. Having graduated from Burrillville High School in 1976, I left the home I loved, attending Chatham College in Pittsburgh, PA. In 1980 my mother informed me that the sale of the farm was pending. I was heartbroken by the news. Despite the trials, it was “home,” and I loved it. Though we abandoned our place in the country, it never left us.

 

In 2007, I began writing the manuscript which became the trilogy “House of Darkness: House of Light,” and I relocated to Georgia to be with my family to write our story. This task proved to be quite an excursion, spawning several nightmares while we exhumed our memories of the dead. Often painful, it has also been a healing process, as each of us revisited a past impacting our present, clearly mapping the future of a family. Many have spoken and written about fragments of our story. Now is the time to tell the whole truth about what happened in the farmhouse, alive with death. We spent a very illuminating decade living among the spirits. It is a tale worth telling because it is true.

 

As it turns out, you can go home again. Thanks to Cory and Jennifer Heinzen and now Jacqueline Nunez, we have been afforded access to the place that will always be my home in heart.”

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- Andrea Perron