|Wil McMillen|
The Conjuring plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, October 11, through Tuesday, October 13. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
I’m going to tell you something, and you can either choose to believe it or not.
(Deep breath, exhale)
I lived in a real-life haunted house for six months.
From January to June 2013, my family and I were having our house renovated. During that time, we had to live in a rental house that had more than enough weird things happen to bring us to the conclusion that we were living with invisible prankster roommates.
Now, here’s the thing about living in a haunted house: when you’re in it, you deny it. You make up excuses for the things that happen. You rationalize the irrational away.
But then you start telling your friends about the weird things that happened, and, based on their reactions to the cacophony of evidence, you finally realize that, yeah, that house was haunted as hell itself.
The Conjuring is based on the real-life haunting of the Perron family, who were living in an old farmhouse in Harrisville, Rhode Island. Their case was investigated by Ed and Lorraine Warren, two self-professed demonologists and psychic investigators.
Or, to hear other people tell it, they were two deeply terrible con artists.
I’m not going to be the judge and jury about whether Ed and Lorraine Warren deserve to have their story cleaned-up by Hollywood. (That’s been done plenty of times elsewhere.) What I’d like to do instead is look at this version of one of their investigations and see just how close the movie gets to my experience of living in a haunted house.
The way I’m going to do this is a game I like to call “Fact Or Bunk.” If it’s close to something my family experienced, I’ll call it “Fact.” If it’s nowhere close, I’ll call it “Bunk.” I’ll even throw in a third category where I’m not able to classify it. I’ll call this category “Unsolved Mysteries.”
Shall we enter the house? Here, take my hand…
…or stay on the porch, it’s fine.
The First Night
The Conjuring: On the Perrons’ first night in the house, all of the clocks in the house stop at 3:07 a.m. During a game of hide and seek, a cellar is discovered that is boarded up. Their dog won’t stop barking, and they find it dead the next morning. Carolyn wakes up with bruises all over her.
The Rental: Had our first night ended with our dog dead, we certainly would not have stayed in the house. Of course, I must also tell you that during our time in our haunted house, our nine-year-old beagle developed a stomach tumor and died a year later. Can it be blamed on the house? Who’s to say?
No, our first night started out with a bang. Or, rather, not a bang but a bell. A very loud bell. While we were sitting at dinner that first night, the doorbell rang, and when I say it rang, I mean it was eardrum-piercing. It might be the loudest doorbell I’ve ever heard in my life. It was like someone hit it with a sledgehammer. I got up from the table and went to the front door and….
(You know I’m gonna tell you nobody was there, right? Stop getting ahead of me.)
…nobody was there.
So I go sit down, thinking maybe whoever it was had left, and sure enough, the bell blasts off again. I jump up, go to the door, and again, nobody is there.
“Who is it?” my wife yelled
“There’s nobody here.”
“Maybe it’s malfunctioning,” she said, so I hit the doorbell button.
CLICK…CLICK…CLICK….
The doorbell wasn’t even connected.
VERDICT: Bunk. That dead dog should have sent anyone running. Also, a real ghost is gonna start quiet and then get louder. Trust me. You don’t start with a dead dog.
Throwing Objects
The Conjuring: One of the evenings in the house, Carolyn believes she hears the kids up playing late at night. Upon walking into the hallway, she gets a cold feeling, and suddenly all of the family’s pictures come flying off of the wall on the stairwell.
The Rental: I was washing the dishes one day when my wife was at work and the kids were at school. In the living room, our dog started going crazy and barking at nothing. This was, in and of itself, weird because that dog didn’t bark at anything unless someone was throwing table scraps into the trash. Then she would howl like you were hurting her feelings.
Anyway, I went out to the living room to tell her to be quiet. Upon re-entering the kitchen, every single cabinet door was open. All of them.
“Well, maybe I did that, putting stuff away,” I thought and proceeded to close all of them.
I washed a pot and put it back on the stovetop to dry. It was on the back of the stove, with no way for it to do what it did next.
As I’m washing, I could see out of the corner of my eye the pot kind of wiggling, and then it was like someone had hit the handle of the pot the way one would hit the curved part of a spoon with your fist.
It flew end over end and landed on the other side of the room.
That was the last time I stayed in the house all by myself.
VERDICT: Fact. Cause a distraction, do a mild haunting, and then get violent. That scene rings VERY true.
The Cellar
The Conjuring: The cellar is where most of the haunting is focused, where one member of the Perron family will be possessed. (I’m not going to go full spoilers here!) In the cellar is where Lorraine memorably comes face–to–foot with a floating ghost, in what I feel is the best moment in the movie. It’s where a piano plays by itself. It’s where a ball rolls out from behind some stored items. But mostly, it’s the place the possession happens.
The Rental: The washer and dryer were in the basement of the rental. They were on an upper level of the basement, and then there was a lower, sub-basement area. At some point in the first week, I went down to do laundry and the entire sub-basement was underwater. Brown, sludgy water, up to the steps of the main basement. It didn’t smell great.
I called the landlord and said, “Hey, your sub-basement is flooded. Can you have someone come over and check it out?”
The next day I get a call from the landlord. “Yeah, my guy says it’s not flooded.”
I reply, “Yeah, it was. The water was up to the top step.”
“Nope, no flooding. No signs of flooding. Everything is bone dry down there.”
So that was neat.
Also, the sub-basement was filled with old National Geographic magazines, tools, equipment. The usual detritus of a sub-basement used as a storage area.
Also, there was this cabinet:
On the front of the cabinet was a purple Post-It note that said “This stays with the house.”
With a note like that, of course you’re going to open the door to see exactly WHAT would have to “stay with the house.”
So, naturally, I did, and inside the cabinet was a flag that had been wrapped in the traditional triangle in a presentation box, kind of like what you’d see presented to a family after a soldier’s funeral.
And that’s when I got the chills and took off.
I didn’t go back there except to take a picture of it, just before we left, to prove “Yeah that creepy thing existed.”
VERDICT: Unsolved Mystery. None of us got possessed down there, but that cabinet was creepy. That basement had bad vibes. I didn’t like being down there. I learned to get my laundry done VERY quickly.
So yes, cellars, basements…they’re made to contain the evil. That’s where you have cabinets that say “This stays with the house,” for the things that are cursing it. They’re underground like a grave.
Stay out.
That stuff will follow you upstairs.
Which leads me to the next part of the movie…
The Woman In The Wardrobe
The Conjuring: The kids play a game of hide–and–seek by hiding and then being forced to clap when it’s commanded by the blindfolded seeker. Carolyn plays with her daughter and is brought to a wardrobe by the ghost clapping. Later in the film, one of the daughters watches the doors open by themselves and, as she approaches, is jumped at by a woman hiding on top of the wardrobe. This woman also hides behind the door of the daughter’s room one night and then slams the door shut, holding the daughters in the room until the Perrons can break in to help her.
The Rental: From the first night staying in the house, we had a bad feeling that someone was watching the kids.
At the time, my son was six and my daughter was three. They had a room down the hallway from us, and even on the first night, there was a feeling they were being seen by someone. The windows in their room were frosted, but we both went out and walked around the house to make sure nobody could see in.
Still the feeling persisted.
One night while I was washing dishes, my wife came out and said, “Well, that was weird.”
I turned, “What was?”
She replied, “Well, (daughter) was not being quiet in her room, so I took her to ours and put her in our bed. After a while she got really quiet so I went in to check on her, and she had the blankets pulled up to her face and asked me, ‘Who’s the lady over there? She looks mad!’
“And I looked where she was pointing and told her ‘There’s nobody there.’
“And then (daughter) says ‘Hey, where’d she go? Oh! Wait no, there she is!’ and pointed at the closet. And then, just when she did that, the door to the closet swung open all by itself. I took her out of there. She’s on the couch now. That’s weird, right?”
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s really weird.
And that’s when I told her about the cabinet in the basement.
VERDICT: Fact. I shrugged this one off at the time as just being weird. It’s the one that freaks me out the most now.
Physical Assault
The Conjuring: Late in the film, one of the daughters is attacked and dragged around the living room by her hair by an unseen force. She’s only released when Lorraine cuts her hair with scissors.
The Rental: In the last couple of weeks of our rental, my daughter was playing in the room that had been made in the former attic area. It was a carpeted area upstairs and to get to it, you had to go up a very steep set of carpeted stairs.
My wife called my daughter down. As my daughter was coming down the steps, my wife was walking down the hallway towards the stairway where my daughter was coming down. Just as my wife reached the door of the stairway, I heard my wife gasp, and I looked up just in time to see her catching my daughter who was flying out away from the steps.
Later, my wife would say, “That was bizarre…she wasn’t falling down the steps. She was flying out from them. Almost like she was pushed.”
Because our lease was coming up, the landlord had rented the house to someone else. We didn’t leave any notes for them. We never even saw them move in.
I sometimes wonder what their experience was in that house.
We got shifted into a long-stay hotel until our house was ready to move back into, but the actual oppression we all felt when we lived in that house was gone.
VERDICT: Hella true.
Concluding Thoughts
Is the story told by The Conjuring true, like it says?
Perhaps. But probably not. Not exactly the way it’s presented. It’s an extremely intense film. The jump scares come fast and furious. The movie is a lot of good popcorn fun. But the actual experience of living in a haunted house, for us, was a lot of low-intensity dread along with a lot of denial of what you’re witnessing.
When you’re living it, you make excuses for everything you see, and it’s not until later, when you’re actually out of the place and put all of the puzzle pieces together, that you develop your narrative of “Oh no, actually that was a haunted house.”
The scares don’t come fast and furious.
You can go two weeks with nothing happening and then something weird will occur and you’ll think to yourself,“Well…that was strange,” and you kind of shrug it off.
Did we ever consider calling an exorcist or paranormal investigator to come into our house? Our own Ed and Lorraine Warren?
No. The thought never even crossed our mind. While we were in it, we were skeptical enough to talk ourselves out of what we were witnessing.
You don’t believe until you suddenly believe.
And I think a lot of people are that way. I think people witness paranormal stuff all the time and just shrug it off as weird.
The paranormal doesn’t have to be a jump scare.
It can be a plate falling off a table without anyone being near it.
It can be a clock stopping with a full battery in it.
They’re small things that can be explained away with a shrug of “Well, the table wasn’t level,” or “Something just malfunctioned.”
Perhaps those things are 90% true. Maybe the table wasn’t level. Maybe the clock went on the fritz.
But maybe…just maybe…
…maybe just this one time…you weren’t alone.
FINAL VERDICT:
Unsolved Mystery
Edited by Finn Odum