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Jan. 2, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
58:01
Edition 601 - Andrea Perron - 'The Conjuring' Haunting Case

Andrea Perron whose family lived in a house in Rhode Island, USA that was home to terrifying apparitions and experiences that became the source of her best-selling book trilogy "House of Darkness-House of Light" and the 2013 movie "The Conjuring" ... But Andrea explains her life there brought many positive experiences as well...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Hey, we're on Edition 601 already.
Looking forward to Edition 700 now.
Maybe one of these days we will get to a thousand editions of The Unexplained.
Who would have thought that when I started all of this in 2006?
And I hope that you enjoyed Edition 600 where we did something very different and where I answered some questions.
Maybe we'll do something like that again in the future.
Let's see.
Thank you very much for all of the emails and communications that have come in across the holiday period and into this new year.
Very, very kind of you.
I've heard a lot of your stories.
Too many emails to talk about individually, really, but nice to hear from people that I hear from time to time, like Vicki and Andrea and Rose Writer in Canada, the talented songwriter, singer and person of many, many parts, movie music writer as well.
And so many people who have told me their stories and told me what use the unexplained had been in their lives during 2021.
It's very, very humbling because sometimes you sit here, especially during these last two years where I've been isolated for a lot of the time, you know, and you've no idea who's listening and what they're thinking and who they are and what they're doing.
So I think what I'm saying is it's just nice to know that it's having an impact of its own on people, which was what I always intended at the beginning.
And thank you very much again to my webmaster, Adam, for all the years that he spent with me helping me to get this out to you, because those are the things that I don't understand.
I know about doing interviews, I think.
You know, about broadcasting.
I know nothing about websites and IT and stuff like that.
It is mostly, although I've had to learn a few things, a foreign language to me.
All right.
Special edition, been trying to get the person we're about to speak with on this show for a long time.
This is an extended version of something that you would have heard on my radio show, Andrea Perron.
Now, her story, as documented in a book that she's written, actually a trilogy of books, is one of the most astonishing stories of paranormality that I've ever heard.
As you will hear, it's not entirely a horror story, although elements of it are truly horrific, but elements of it are miraculous if you go along with the narrative.
They simply are.
So Andrea Perrin, just to cut a long story short, moved into a house with her parents and siblings in the early 1970s where a stunning array of phenomena presented themselves, some of them utterly, utterly terrifying.
I've never quite heard.
The scale of those things to this extent, you will hear here.
And they form the basis of the movie, The Conjuring, that you might have seen.
I think it was made, what, eight years ago now, thereabouts, nine years.
So that's how I got to know about this through the movie that was made.
But it is a truly astonishing story that Andrea Perrin has to tell.
And it took quite a bit of effort to get hold of her for the radio shows, so you can now hear this conversation, an extended version of it for my podcast, Edition 601.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
If you want to get in touch with me, you always can at my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me an email from there.
Don't forget, of course, to check in with my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
And it's distinguishable by the fact that you can see the logo for the show on the Facebook page.
I think that's all I've got to say, apart from Happy New Year.
Okay, let's get to the conversation, as introduced on my radio show, an extended version of the conversation with Andrea Perrin.
And it's a story that will intrigue and chill you, I think, in equal measure.
Andrea Perrin is the person we'll be speaking with in the United States.
She's in Georgia at the moment on a phone line.
We're going to talk about what happened to her family when they moved into what, on the face of it, was their dream home.
A place in Rhode Island, USA.
1971 was the year.
A house that had a history almost as long as the United States itself.
Plenty of space for growing children.
Wonderful place for a family to develop.
No peace, expand their horizons, plenty of land, nothing not to like.
Of course, this place needed a little bit of work, but then, you know, what good thing ever required no work?
Andrea Perrin is online to us now.
Andrea, thank you very much for standing by while I said all those words.
How are you?
I'm very well, dear.
Thank you so much, Howard.
I really appreciate joining you on your stellar show.
You and I are both big fans of Art Bell.
And he was a forward momentum in the field of paranormal.
He was indeed.
There was nobody quite like him.
Nobody did it with the authority that he did it.
And I'm coming to this with a news background, so I'm trying to do some of that.
But I think all of those who came after, and I did know Art Bell, at one stage she wanted me to work with him, but all of those who came after are pale reflections, really, Andrea.
Well, that's absolutely true.
I have to agree.
And everyone that does this stands on the shoulders of a giant.
Well, let's remember him at this time of year.
And if you've never heard of him, if any of my UK listeners have never heard of Art Bell, he is the man who essentially created the genre in which I now broadcast.
But that's another story for another time.
Talk to me about you, Andrea, then.
You've written a trilogy of books around the experiences that you had.
House of Darkness, House of Light.
We'll talk about that contrast in the title as we go along here.
But the remarkable thing about this was that it was made into a movie in 2013, Your Experiences with the Family in the 1970s.
And from what I'm hearing and reading about the movie, unlike most films that are made for Hollywood, things are not exaggerated for effect.
Your story had to be toned down for the movie.
It did.
And in fact, The Conjuring bears no actual resemblance other than the names and likenesses of my family.
They toned it down so much that it was unrecognizable to the real story, which I do not consider to be so much a horror story as a love story with a wicked supernatural twist.
That house that I grew up in has existed longer than the United States.
It was the land was deeded for it in 1680.
And, you know, back when we were colonized by we know who.
And it is from across the pond, dear, from across the pond.
But it was the house as it stands now was completed in 1736, which is 40 years prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
So it has quite a history and much of which we will never know.
But what I do know, and this, believe me, Howard, I tell you this from my heart.
I do know that there is something beyond our mortal existence because otherwise we would not have experienced what we did in that house.
And there were at least a dozen spirits who made their presence known to us repeatedly over the course of the 10 years that we lived there.
My family, my mom and dad bought the house.
My mom found it in June of 1970, and my parents closed on the property at the beginning of December of 1970, but my mother refused to move into the house during the holidays.
And the gentleman who sold it to my parents, Earl Kenyon, was not yet prepared to move out.
So he stayed there for about another month, three weeks or so.
And then the day we moved in, he was moving out simultaneously.
So it was chaos and it was bedlam.
But I will tell you that from I was 12 years old and from the moment that I walked into the door to the parlor, took a hard right into the dining room, greeted Mr. Kenyon as he was packing up his wife's china from the corner cabinet in the dining room.
I spoke with him for a moment, put the box I was carrying down on the table, and then I picked it up and I turned to walk through the foyer into the kitchen to bring the box to my mother.
And there was a man standing there who I found to be rather oddly dressed.
He seemed pleasant enough, and he was just staring at Mr. Kenyon.
And as I walked, and I'm telling you, he looked like flesh and blood to me, like I could have reached out and touched him.
So what did you think when you saw this person, not a member of your family, apparently not connected with Mr. Kenyon's removal?
What did you think?
Well, I didn't know.
I thought perhaps he was a neighbor who had stopped by, a rather oddly dressed neighbor, albeit, clothes really more from the 1800s than the previous century.
However, I said good morning to him, and he looked right through me like he did not see me or hear me.
And then my sister Christine saw him and then Cindy saw him and then Nancy came into the kitchen and leaned over to Cindy and she said, did you see that man standing with Mr. Kenyon?
I did, but he just disappeared.
And that was our introduction to the paranormal.
Nothing of which we knew anything about.
We were just little kids.
Wow.
12 years of age, you experienced this.
Were you scared or were you too surprised to be scared?
Well, I wasn't surprised at all personally because I thought he was a live human being.
It was maybe a neighbor who had stopped by to say goodbye.
You know, I didn't know.
He appeared truly like flesh and blood to me.
And so, but he did not to my other sisters.
And then a couple of hours later, the four of us, my baby sister, April, was still in the kitchen with my mother.
She was too young to help with the moving in process.
She was only five years old.
And so she stayed in the kitchen with mom.
And mom was just trying to set up, you know, all the boxes that went on the moving van when we left Cumberland, Rhode Island were the last ones on were the kitchen so that they could be the first ones off so mom could get us set up and we could have dinner.
It was a very long, arduous day.
And we were in the middle of a swirling ice storm.
But, you know, when you're a good, hardy Yankee, you move when it's moving day.
And, you know, we crawled all the way up there.
And it was really a very dramatic day in terms of everything that transpired, including the fact that just before he left, my sisters, Nancy,
Christine, Cindy, and I was standing in the dining room with Mr. Kenyon, and my father was leaning over to him to say to him, it's clear that you don't want to leave this house.
The house is plenty big enough.
If you want to just stay here with us, you can, which was a very gracious, very generous offer for my father to make.
But we all loved Mr. Kenyon.
We had really gotten to know him over the six months prior to moving in and had visited the farm a number of times.
So did Mr. Kenyon, sorry to jump in here and just to explain to my listener, because we're doing this on a phone line, there is a one-second delay or so between the two of us, but we'll cope with that.
Did Mr. Kenyon indicate to you at all, since you got to know him so well, that there was something different about this house?
Well, that's just the perfect question, and that's exactly where I was going with this.
Just before he left, he asked to speak with my father privately, and he said to him, Roger, for the sake of your family, leave the lights on at night.
And my father did not know how to interpret that statement, nor did Mr. Kenyon want to be perceived as a doddering Old fool.
And so he was very cryptic in his message.
And it wasn't until we had lived there for a while that we understood from other people that lived in the area that Mr. and Mrs. Kenyon, before she passed away, left all the lights on in the house every single night.
Didn't matter what time of night you passed by the farm.
It was lit up like a Christmas tree on a very dark landscape.
So did you get the impression that they'd experienced any terrors there?
Clearly, Mr. Kenyon was a very nice man and you got to know him very, very well.
From the sounds of what you said, he doesn't sound like a frightened man.
No, I think that keeping the lights on is perhaps how he held activity at bay in the house or at least could see if something was about to happen.
He could see it.
I don't know.
I can't, you know, he's long gone, sadly.
I hope to meet him again on the other side.
But he was a very kind man, and he wanted our family to have that farm.
He told my parents it was the most wonderful place to raise a family.
And he was right about that.
He was, but, you know, there were things that were happening in the house that my mother tried to speak with him about because he would come and visit us very frequently.
It was on the way to the cemetery where his wife was buried, and he went to see her every week.
And so he would stop by at the house.
And one time my mother said, you know, Earl, I hear very strange noises in the parlor at night, and the door to the pantry won't stay closed.
And she said, but I hear sounds around the chimney, around the fireplace.
And he said, swallows in the chimney, my dear.
Swallows in the chimney.
What he was doing, I believe, was rationalizing the strange sounds and the noises and the events of that house.
It had, we didn't know it when we moved in, but it had a reputation preceded our moving into that house.
Ghosts, they weren't on the radar for our family.
My mother and father considered that they were buying one of the last original colonial homes in America.
And so their perspective was from its historic value.
Right.
And Mr. Kenyon had indicated that there was something unusual about this place.
By the sounds of it, your parents, your mom and dad, were not people who'd be put off by anything like that.
By the sounds of it, they would be people who would try and coexist.
Well, no.
Right.
No, actually, it was quite the opposite.
My father didn't believe anything was happening in the house.
It took him quite a while until things began to physically happen to him that he understand that there was indeed something that was dwelling with us in this residence.
My mother dealt with her first physical attack within two weeks of moving into the house.
And when she would tell my father what was happening, excuse me, he questioned her veracity, which was the beginning of the end of their marriage.
And even though they lived together for another 12 years, it was never the same because my mother lost her trust in my father because he lost his trust in her.
So do you believe that that house?
That was tragic.
And here's that one-second delay coming in.
Sorry for that, Andrea.
But do you believe that that house effectively then destroyed what was a happy family?
It destroyed what was a relatively happy marriage.
Not the family.
Very sad.
And yet you took, and we will discuss this as we go along with this, you took a lot of positives out of what happened at that house, and you weren't desperate to get away from it at the end of it, which is very, very surprising.
When we go into the detail of this story, my listener will hear why.
Just one thing to say before we take some commercials here on the radio show, this will also be heard on my podcast on The Unexplained, at theunexplained.tv.
But before we take those commercials, just to ask you this.
There you are living in this place.
You say that whatever it was was making its presence felt at the very beginning.
Now, as young people, if I was 12, and I don't know the ages of your siblings, but they were all younger than you.
I'm afraid I would be impossibly uneasy about it, and I would be like a dog with a bone.
I wouldn't let it go.
What about you?
Well, it was surreal.
It was bizarre.
It was something unlike anything that any of us had ever experienced before.
We did not know what to make of it, honestly.
But I did not ever feel a sense of threat from my initial interaction with what I guess could be called a ghost or a spirit of someone.
He seemed absolutely present and accounted for to me.
And so I think that that was when seeing him is kind of what opened up my third eye and allowed me to see into alternate dimensions.
So do you think we can talk about that further?
We will indeed get into that.
But do you think that another family who perhaps did not have the sensitivity that you had might not have had the same experience there?
I would agree with that.
I think that there was a specific dynamic set up in my family, and bringing in five little girls, ages 12, 10, 9, 8, and 5, brought a certain energy into the house that the spirit activity could tap into with relative ease.
I had a sense of familiarity about the house the first time that we went to Harrisville.
I felt like I knew every square inch of it.
I knew the town that it was in.
And yet we had never been to that town before in my lifetime.
There's a lot going on behind the scenes around this in terms of the family dynamic, in terms of the psychological effects that it had on each and every one of us.
Something that they could never compress or condense into a two-hour film.
Andrea Perrin talking about an experience she had when she was young with her family, her mother and her father, Carolyn and Roger Perrin.
They bought a house that should have been their dream home for a whole variety of reasons.
But unfortunately, it wrecked the marriage effectively and caused all kinds of problems.
But the biggest aspect of this was the haunting.
And when we talk about haunting here, we're talking about something of a completely different magnitude from most of the stories that you've ever heard on this show.
Back to Andrea Perrin now in Georgia.
So, Andrea, you said that whatever it was in the house made its presence felt to you very quickly.
And as children, you accommodated it all.
Now, the way that the movie, The Conjuring, makes it look, phenomena of various kinds took a little while to unfold.
And you're saying that maybe it happened a little bit quicker than that.
Yes, it did, and with much more regularity.
However, there were things about the film, I mean, we could talk for the next two hours about just the discrepancies between the true story and the film that is supposedly based on a true story, which is actually one in a series of films that are predominantly based on the case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the paranormal researchers.
And they conducted an investigation at the farmhouse, not at my mother's behest.
She did not know who they were when they came to the door.
And that began in 1973.
Right.
So the Warrens, who were very, very famous in this field, Ed and Lorraine, got involved in this.
What was happening that piqued their interest?
Well, we still to this day don't understand how it happened.
But a young group of paranormal investigators from a local college came to meet my family.
My father was leaving on a business trip.
My mother was home and did not know who they were.
I did not know.
She assumed they were friends of mine from school, but they pulled up in a van and introduced themselves as paranormal investigators and said that my mother had called them.
Now, my mother was in a state at that time of what Lorraine Warren described as oppression, where she was being put upon by a spirit in the house that did not want her there or that was making her life as miserable as possible.
How was it doing that?
And in a variety of ways, including some physical altercations and a couple of very seriously life-threatening situations that happened.
I mean, oh my God, Howard, I literally could talk to you for like the next six hours.
When you talk about seriously life-threatening encounters or instances that happened, you know, I know it's scary, but we're after midnight in the United Kingdom.
I think we can take it.
What sort of things happened?
The worst thing that happened was that Mr. and Mrs. Warren determined that it was imperative that a seance occur in the house so that it could be determined who the culprit was and so that this offending spirit could be expelled.
And she was absolutely hateful to my mother and approached her several different times and threatened her and told her to get out of the house.
Sorry, let's just clarify that who said that?
Mrs. Warren said that.
No, my mother's experiences were informed what Mrs. Warren learned about the house.
But then, of course, she immediately intuited the name Bathsheba, which is a rather obscure name even for her own time when she lived in the 1800s, but then blamed everything on her.
But I don't believe that she believed that everything was to be blamed on Bathsheba Sherman, who did not even live at that house.
That was never her home.
She lived in an adjacent farm about a mile away.
And so they decided that they needed to do a seance.
And things went so horribly wrong so fast that it almost cost my mother her life.
So when people look at the conjuring and they see, you know, Lily Taylor with a sheet over her head and this, you know, horrific image coming down and hovering over her to possess her, that is not what happened.
What happened was so much worse.
Okay.
And, you know, I mean, we can describe it in words.
It's one thing to talk about it here all of these years later, but it's another thing to go through it.
It must have been horrendous.
Well, I witnessed all of it, and I was 15 years old at the time when it happened.
It is impaled in my memory.
And every time I describe what happened to my mother that night, it is though I am thrown back in time and I am standing in that front foyer looking through the doorway and watching what occurred.
And what occurred was right at the beginning of the seance that my mother was really struggling the night that the Warrens showed up with an entire entourage with cinematographers, a priest, a medium, an audio specialist.
A number of people came to the house.
My father was furious.
He did not want them there, and he did not want any kind of a seance to occur in that house.
Now, that's interesting.
So you're saying, let's make it clear, that in your belief and your mother and father's belief, clearly, the Warrens interposed themselves into your life and brought an aspect to this that you didn't want?
Well, my mother trusted Lorraine Warren, and she was very forthcoming with her about the experiences that she had.
My father did not trust either one of them, and he thought that they would exploit our family.
Some would say they did.
I don't think that they did it deliberately.
I think that they were just so engrossed in the subject matter, both of them admitting that they had never experienced anything like this before.
And I think we have to be fair to them.
And I think the movie is that, you know, if it was me and I was an investigator coming into something like this from the outside, you know, never heard a story like that in my life, possibly unique in the world, you're going to want to get to know every inch, every detail, every aspect of it.
Yes, very well put.
And they really, I think they really tried to help our family.
They were just, Mrs. Warren admitted to me, 40 years hence, after the last time I saw her or anybody in my family did, we were out in Hollywood for a special screening of the film prior to its premiere.
And she and I had a chance to talk at length.
And she admitted to me at that time that she and her husband were in over their heads the moment they crossed the threshold of that farmhouse.
They just didn't know it.
She admitted that mistakes were made.
She expressed her regret.
And she told me, under no circumstances am I ever to purchase that home or live in that house again, that the house is calling me back.
And, you know, I can't argue that point with her.
You know, God rest her soul.
I can't, I couldn't at the time argue that point with her during that conversation because I knew she was correct about that.
The farmhouse is the only place that has ever felt like home to me on this entire planet from my duration on it.
Every place else feels temporary.
Okay, I'm living here for now and living there for now, but the farmhouse is my home.
That's interesting, isn't it, Andrew?
Because the way that the movie portrays it, all kinds of horrendous things happen.
There is one scene where a whole series of portraits going down the stairs are swept dramatically off the wall.
If that was something that actually happened and you document in your books.
So how could you feel so comfortable?
How could you feel that place was so important?
I don't know.
And that's the most honest answer that I can give you is that I don't know.
But I do know, what I do know is that pure unadulterated evil exists in the world.
And I don't know what form it takes.
I don't know if demons exist.
I have never seen a demon.
But what I have seen was my mother levitated in a chair that weighed a minimum of 20 pounds.
I saw something attack her from the netherworld when the medium began conjuring the spirits, which is where the name of the film came from.
And within moments, all the candles on the table were just blown out instantly.
And it was a matter of just a few seconds before my mother dropped her head and then she raised it up and she no longer looked like herself.
And she began to growl and make these guttural sounds that were just bone-chilling.
And then she started to draw her body up into the captain's chair she was sitting in to the extent that you would expect to hear her bones snapping into a ball and then threw her head back and screamed, writhing in agony.
It was horrific.
And then the chair in which she sat was levitated about probably 18 inches off the floor, perhaps a little higher.
And in a flash, in a split second, she and the chair were thrown from the middle of the dining room into the middle of our parlor floor.
Everyone present in that house that night heard my mother's skull strike that hardwood floor.
And everyone thought that they had just watched her die, including me.
It was, you know, talk about childhood trauma.
I dare anybody to tell me that it doesn't have a permanent effect because it does.
What was the medium conducting this seance?
And listen, I can't believe that the Warrens, you, or anybody else would sanction a seance in those circumstances when you didn't know quite what you'd be dealing with because you'd be trying to connect with it.
But what did the medium tell you was making these terrible things happen?
Well, she didn't really say anything because as soon as it all began, she collapsed unconscious on the table.
And the priest that was there was hovering in the corner of the china cabinet, just quaking, literally quaking in fear.
My father tried to rush to my mother's side.
My father would not participate in the seance.
He wanted no part of it.
And it took the priest over an hour with Ed Warren to convince him that this was for my mother's benefit, which it clearly was not.
And Mr. Warren tried to stop my dad from going to my mother's side.
And my father turned around and cold cocked him.
I mean, just punched him right in the face and took him down to his knees and went to my mother's side and expelled the Warrens and their entire group of people out of the house.
And when that happened, did the connection with whatever was being summoned, was being appealed to and brought forward, was that cut?
Was it like cutting off a telephone call?
I don't know if it left or if it stayed behind in that house, but I don't think that spirit is relegated to Time or space, and that whatever it was spoke in a language that does not exist on this planet, or if it did, it's an ancient language.
It was ancient and it was evil, and it wanted to make its presence known to everyone in that house.
It had all the power that it could ever need to take my mother's life.
It did not choose to kill her.
It chose instead to let the Warrens know that it exists.
And whatever it was clearly wanted you out, gone.
Wanted my mother gone.
But what attacked my mother the night of the Seance was not the spirit that was haunting and taunting her.
It was not a man or a woman.
It was something else.
I don't know what it was.
Why do you know?
A lot of people in the field would say it was a demon.
I don't know that.
Why do you think your mother was the focus?
I think that she posed some kind of a threat to the spirit who was the original mistress of the house going back centuries.
I think that it was most likely, although we can never confirm it, it was most likely Mrs. John Arnold because the spirit that appeared to her in the form of an apparition was an entity that clearly, distinctly had a broken neck.
And her head looked like a desiccated hornet's nest with wild sprigs of hair and cobwebs and two hollow, vacant eyes and thin, thin lips and jagged teeth and was really a really difficult thing to see.
And I did see her once, and I'll never forget what she looks like.
My sister Christine saw her, my sister Cindy saw her, and my mother saw her twice.
Now, this house, we should have talked about this.
That's my fault before now, but there's so much, as you say, we could do ours on this.
But there is a huge history to this house, given its age.
That's understandable.
But apparently, what, seven dead soldiers buried in the wall and a string of suicides hangings in that house or near that house?
Well, that's in the folklore.
We cannot verify all of that through the historical records, although there is a fascinating book called The Black Book of Boroughville that does designate certain suicides at the farm.
However, those historically are in dispute because there's no backup information on them.
However, that day, if you think suicide is found upon now, imagine 250 years ago.
Mrs. John Arnold did hang herself in the barn.
She was 93 years old.
It was 1797.
So the house was already many decades old when this happened.
And perhaps she was the original mistress of the house.
But the spirit that approached my mother clearly had a broken neck.
And she spoke in a way with a usage of English that was already archaic in Bathsheba Sherman's time.
She came to her bedside at dawn one morning, the first year that we lived there, and said to her, 'twas mistress once afore ye came, and mistress here will be anon.
We'll drive ye out with fiery broom, will drive ye mad with death and gloom.
It was a virtual incantation, and it went on for stanza after stanza after stanza.
And the only reason that we know it was because when things got very bad at the house and my father didn't know quite what to do and questioned whether or not my mother was losing her mind, he took her to a psychiatrist.
And my father was a trained hypnotist.
So he hypnotized my mother and the psychiatrist asked the questions.
And she relived during that session everything that she had been through in that house.
It exhausted her to the point where she needed to be physically helped out to the car when the session was over.
And that is how we know what the incantation contained.
Why was your father, I'm sorry to jump in here, but I think it's important.
Why was your father taking your mother to a psychiatrist instead of getting you all the hell out of there?
Well, that would take the whole length of time to, oh my God, okay, how can I put this into a, you know, a sound bite here?
It's so difficult.
Well, first of all, in 1971, the housing market was collapsing in the United States.
The banking system was under onslaught.
There was the cartel was formed in the Middle East and the price of heating oil and gasoline went through the roof.
You couldn't buy gasoline for your car every other day.
So effectively, you were a prisoner.
It would have bankrupted our family.
Economic prisoners in that place.
Bankrupt did our family.
Yep.
Totally understand it.
Okay, so you were there.
And in the midst of it all, you were happy.
I was.
Well, all of us were most of the time.
I mean, this is House of Darkness, House of Light.
And my mother is the one that titled my trilogy of books.
Even my mother that went through a living hell in that house will openly admit to anyone to this day that it was the most enlightening decade of her entire life, that she learned everything that she needed to know about life and death and the afterlife from living at that farm and learned that you must live true to yourself in good faith.
Or, you know, God knows if you will be abandoned and left earthbound until your issues in life are resolved.
And so those were some of the lessons that all of us took from that experience, you know, to live well and true And don't leave unfinished business because it might keep you from passing on properly.
But I give thanks for the existence of spirit, Howard.
I do.
If, you know, spirit existed, but we were, no human being was ever able to peek into that realm to get that rare glimpse of the place from where we come and where we will eventually return.
I consider that incredibly enlightening and a gift from the universe.
Well, you know, I do too, but what a price to pay for it.
Andrea Perrin is here.
The story that eventually became a movie, the conjuring that was a reflection of events that are detailed in the trilogy of books that Andrea Perrin, who lived there with her mother and father and siblings, told in her books, House of Darkness, House of Light.
Andrea Perrin in Georgia.
We haven't got a whole lot of time.
So let's talk about this now.
Your mother was the center of so many things.
Your father took her to a psychiatrist in the end.
There were reasons why you couldn't just hightail it out of that place because you were economically trapped there.
I think a lot of people will relate to that.
But we also have to say that not everything that happened in that place was bad.
You know, even your mother, you were given insights into a tableau of events that were happening around you as if you'd entered into a portal into different times.
I have always described my childhood home as a portal cleverly disguised as a farmhouse.
It's magical.
It's an absolutely magical, energetic piece of property, unlike anything that I've ever experienced anywhere else on Earth.
So this is much, much, much more than a horror story.
I think it would be a good idea for my listener just for you to describe some of the things that you saw there that allowed you to peer back into previous generations.
Yes.
Well, we saw one of the things that I saw that was most fascinating was an image of a woman who was a mirror image reflection of me as an older woman as I appear now.
Exact same facial structure, same features, same everything.
And it was the first time that I had to seriously consider the concept of reincarnation.
I was 17 years old when that happened.
Everyone in my family saw her, but I was the only one who saw her face.
And it really shook me to my core because I felt that perhaps I had lived in that house before.
And she seemed very kindly.
I did not feel threatened.
My sister Cindy felt threatened because she was being surrounded by voices at night in her room saying in a monotone, there are seven dead soldiers buried in the wall.
There are seven dead soldiers buried in the wall.
And they would get so loud that she would literally bury her head under her pillow.
And then when she couldn't handle it anymore, she would come running into my room and sleep with me.
And that persisted for the entire 10 years that we lived there.
There have been some anomalies detected down by the stone wall at the bottom of the property, the backyard that is all contained with very large granite boulders.
And when you consider that that farm existed through the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Doar Rebellion, the King Phillips War, and countless other border skirmishes which occurred between the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
the colony of Rhode Island, and the colony of Connecticut, I don't think that it's implausible that seven soldiers may have been killed on that property and then their bodies buried to keep them hidden.
I think it's more probable than implausible.
However, that was just some of what happened at the house.
It was a smorgasbord of every kind of paranormal story you've ever heard.
Well, I'm getting this altogether.
I'm getting this mental image, Andrea, of a sort of vortex, almost like the grooves and tracks on an old LP record.
All of it seemed to be centered on this property for some reason.
And I guess if you're looking at it now from your perspective as an older person looking back on it all, I guess trying to make sense of that and how that property was such a nexus, such a center point for all of those things, trying to make sense of that's very hard.
Well, it is, and it took our family decades to process what had happened to us.
We rarely spoke about it with anyone outside our very close-knit circle of family and friends.
My mother and father divorced in 1983.
Amends have been made.
You know, when we lost my baby sister April in 2017, very suddenly and tragically, it brought my parents together.
It was a divorce that was filled with consternation.
And I write about it very openly in the third volume because I consider that it was fallout from living at the farmhouse.
It fractured our family.
My sister Nancy refused to leave the farm.
She went to the new owners.
She was their babysitter.
They were the abutting landowners in Massachusetts who bought it.
And she said, I'll just stay on indefinitely as the caretaker because they had no intention of moving into the house.
And it's never a good idea to leave a house vacant.
And so my sister, Nancy, lived there long after the rest of the family departed in 1980.
And we never lived together under one roof again.
So it, you know, that was part of the darkness of it.
But the light is the illumination of a complicated universe filled with possibilities.
You know, philosophically, psychologically, physically, morally, spiritually, we were impacted in every conceivable way and all differently.
All had a different reaction to living at the farm.
I have a sister that, you know, there's an incident that happened at the farm that I wrote about in my books.
We don't dare mention in front of her because she will fall to pieces 50 years later.
What's the incident?
It was a horrific thing that happened.
Somebody who was involved with the investigation snuck onto the property and murdered my sister's pet rabbits to scare our family away so that he could have free reign of the house to do his devil worshiping.
And he admitted it to Mrs. Warren about 15 years ago.
To this day, he denies it.
I no longer have anything to do with him or anybody in his circle.
But it was a horrific thing.
It was the first time I ever heard my mother say the words, fear the living, not the dead.
Human hands committed this atrocity.
So, Andrea, I think it's important that we say this.
And we said this at the beginning, that people in that area understood the significance of this place.
And obviously, it was a beacon.
It was attracting people who were interested for all the wrong reasons, genuine researchers and maybe some people who weren't, that made you leave in 1918?
Was there a kicker event that finally made even your father realize we've got to get out?
Yes.
But interesting that you should use that phrase, because that's how I opened volume one of House of Darkness, House of Light.
It was a cosmic confluence of events which occurred that catapulted our family to that farmhouse.
And 10 years later, that basically my mother had to ask the spirits to release us from that house.
She told my father that she would not survive another winter in the house, that they had to sell it.
The economy had stabilized.
And even though they didn't get a fraction of what it was really worth, it was, they still made a little bit of a profit on it, enough to start over in Georgia, which is where the bulk of my family now lives around Atlanta.
But I will tell you this.
I truly in my heart believe that there are a hundred answers to why we stayed and why we left when we did.
But in hindsight, in retrospective examination of that period of our lives together as a family, I truly believe, I have faith, that we were supposed to stay for the length of time that we did.
We were supposed to live into our destiny as a family, and then we were supposed to learn our lessons and share them with the world.
Which you're absolutely doing.
I mean, I don't think there can be many, if any, other people in this world who've had an experience rather like the one that you've had, Andrea.
And the one thing that strikes me as plain as a pike staff, if that's the way to put it, you are seeing all the positives from this thing.
You're seeing the good that came from this.
And you're also feeling the benefit of being able to access what may lie beyond this life.
And, you know, that may give you hope and may give others like me hope that there is more beyond this.
But there's another aspect to it all before we leave the house behind, if it's okay with you.
It seems to me that some kind of battle cosmically was being played out there.
Because there was your mother being attacked.
There were you having experiences, all of you from time to time peering into the lives of generations behind and possibly generations to come, who knows.
So there were all kinds of things going on there, but it almost seems like there were forces pulling you in two directions, forces wanting to keep you there, show you things, and forces wanting to eject you.
Yeah.
Well, I think that that is the nature of the universe, that we live in a perpetual state of constant conflict in duality where good and evil and darkness and light exist and are in some type of a perpetual struggle.
I also believe that good conquers evil and love conquers fear, because if it didn't, none of us would be here anymore.
So that's the uplifting aspect of it.
But I also believe philosophically, this is not a matter of faith or hope or belief or wishful thinking.
This is what I know.
And so with confidence, I can say that we are not alone in the universe in terms of the extraterrestrial contact that I've had during my life.
And I know for a fact that there is something beyond our mortal existence.
I don't know why I was chosen.
I don't understand the vast majority of this.
I just know that I'm supposed to be a messenger and that the message is a profound one, significant for all of humanity.
And that, you know, we want to live in our little three-dimensional five-sensory realm, which is basically a chick living on the inside of an egg.
But when we muster the energy to peck our way out of it is when we understand how convoluted and magical and mystical and otherworldly the world really is.
Andrew, I've loved talking with you.
It's been a great gift to me in this period between Christmas and the new year.
So I'm very grateful to you for having this conversation with me.
You mentioned extraterrestrials, and I know that you've had other experiences.
Time being time for radio shows and podcasts and those sorts of things means essentially that we can't talk about those things now.
But I would love to speak with you again.
I find you a very easy person to speak with.
So, I don't know if you'd want to do some more at some point, but I would love to speak with you again.
I will be your guest at your request anytime you like.
Well, this is good.
And, you know, you are, you know, you have a great way of putting all of this across.
And boy, there is a lot to put across.
Now, look, we've got to complete the story of the house.
When you left, two things really to ask that tie this up.
When you left, did you feel that you took anything with you?
You know, people who do paranormal investigations, that kind of thing, some of them feel that they take away presences with them.
So that's question number one.
And question number two, and sadly we only have minutes to answer it.
The building itself, the house itself today in 2022, are those things still happening as far as you know?
So two questions, I'm afraid, and very little time.
Well, the answer to the second question is yes.
The house is still very active.
I return to it frequently.
Whenever I arrive, it gets more active because they know that I am there.
Did anything leave the house with us?
My mother said, we can leave this farmhouse, but it will never leave us.
That is not only true of the memory of living there for that duration of time, but it is also true of the spirits, some of whom came to truly cherish and love us and that we cared for as well.
And those relationships persist to this day, and time and space are absolutely irrelevant when it comes to being in touch with spirit.
I know that your parents parted because of all of this in 1983, as you said.
But beyond that, looked at a totality of the family.
How did you all get on in life?
How's it been?
It's been a very interesting life.
I can only speak for myself.
My sisters have, you know, lived normal lives.
They, you know, got married, had children, have grandchildren.
You know, my mother and my father have, my mom's 82.
My dad is 86.
I'm so grateful to still have both of them.
And, you know, we've done fine.
They really enjoy their anonymity.
I am the only one in the family that gets stopped and asked for my autograph occasionally, just from time to time.
But as an author, I am able to, unless I'm out at a paranormal conference, of course, everybody knows who I am.
You know, I come and go through this world, you know, relatively anonymous.
And it's been a, what's been joyful to me is writing these books and spreading this message because it is, it's, let me put it to you this way.
There was a time at that farmhouse where two men sitting at our dining room table, having dinner with their family centuries before we were actually living there, were witnessed by my mother.
And one of them nudged the other and pointed her out as she stood on the hearthstone in the parlor.
And she was the ghost.
They were peering into the future as she was peering into the past.
That's the message.
That's the core and the heart of it.
A fascinating story.
We've coped with the phone line and the digital delay.
We've had a, well, from my point of view, what an enlightening conversation and uplifting in so many ways, which I wasn't expecting.
Andrea Perrin, thank you so much.
The trilogy of books is called, Isn't It House of Darkness, House of Light, available everywhere.
Will you be writing any more about this or is that it?
Well, I've written five books, actually.
I've written a piece with George R. Lopez called In a Flicker, which is all about Jack the Ripper from an entirely different inflection point and perspective.
And I've also written a book which has not been released publicly.
I'm only selling it privately right now called A Wonder to Behold because of what it contains.
I'm a little reluctant to put it out into the world, but I will do that in the next month or so.
However, I will be writing, yes, I'm working on my next book as we speak.
Yes, I am.
And my website is down for repair and update.
So anybody can find me on Facebook.
I'm everywhere omnipresent.
Just Google my name.
Andrea Perrin, thank you very much, Eli.
I'm going to be in all kinds of trouble if I don't go now, but thank you.
I know that we will talk again.
Happy 2022.
Happy 2022.
All the best, my dear.
Well, there's another one of those stories that I just have to sit down, have a cup of coffee, and a great big long think, because many of the things Andrea Perrin said there about the nature of how we're here and why we're here and what it's all about are things that have been ticking over in my brain for years.
You know, I don't want to think that this is all there is.
I never have, ever since I was a kid.
I think there probably is more to all of it than we see.
In fact, I would go as far as saying I'm pretty sure that there is more to all of it than we see.
I just don't entirely know how it all works.
Let's put it that way.
And maybe none of us is meant to know.
Maybe we're given tastes of it.
Maybe we're given a chance to see some of it just to explain to us or help us to know that there is something else.
But what the something else is, is going to be a mystery that we'll have to wait to find out.
What do you think about that?
Anyway, more great guests in the pipeline as we go through 2022 here on The Unexplained.
And until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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