Walk the house through three centuries

Before there is a house there is only the tract. The land is surveyed by the colonist John Smith and deeded to the Richardson family, in what is then the northwest wilderness of Glocester — woodland, stone, and running water at the far edge of the Providence Plantations.

It is parceled out of a much larger colonial grant, and accounts of its original size vary from a few hundred acres to well over a thousand before later divisions. Nothing stands on it yet. The road that will one day carry the property's name has not been cut.

The house goes up around a central chimney, in the plain, heavy-framed manner of an early Rhode Island farmstead — built to hold heat through a New England winter and to be worked in, not admired. Early records know it as the Dexter Richardson House.

It sits at the heart of a working farm of roughly two hundred acres: fields, stone walls laid by hand, outbuildings, and a family burial ground among the trees. The oldest part of the structure you can walk through today is this one. Not a reconstruction, not a set — the original frame, still standing.

Seventy years into the farm's life, the town beneath it changes name. Rhode Island sets the northwest corner of Glocester off as its own town, Burrillville, and the mill village of Harrisville grows up a few miles from the farm gate.

The address changes. The farm does not. The same family works the same fields, and the house keeps doing what it was built to do.

Through the nineteenth century the property passes down within one extended family, long enough that the neighbors stop using the builder's name for it. It becomes, and stays, the Old Arnold Estate.

Eight generations live and die on this land across those decades. They farm it, bury their dead in the plot among the trees, and add rooms as families grow. This is the layered, ordinary, deeply human history that visitors say they feel in the house before anyone mentions anything else — a century and a half of people who were simply at home here.

No name is attached to this house more often than Bathsheba Sherman's, and almost nothing attached to it is true. She was born to Ephraim Thayer and Hannah Taft, married Judson Sherman, and moved to the Sherman farm — not this one — where she lived out her life. She died on May 25, 1885, of what her record calls sudden paralysis, most likely a stroke, and she is buried in Harrisville.

There is no document in existence naming her a witch, and none connecting her to the death of a child. The legend was assembled long after she was in the ground, and it was fastened onto this house later still. We tell it the honest way: Bathsheba Sherman was a real woman with a real life, and the story the world knows about her is not hers.

In 1901 a man named Jarvis Smith is found dead in a rickety shed on this property, having frozen after drinking. His is the one death the records place on this land, and he is rarely mentioned in the retellings.

Two more are misplaced onto the house constantly. Edwin Arnold died of exposure in 1903, found about a mile and a half down the road leaning against a stone wall. His son John A. Arnold died in 1911 at his own home near Tarkiln, several miles southeast. Later versions of the story quietly move both deaths indoors. The record keeps them outside, where they happened.

The working farm does what nearly every working farm in New England did. Acreage is sold off in parcels, the fields go back to woods and stone wall, and the house passes out of the Arnold family — to the Butterworths, then to the Kenyons.

It keeps the Arnold name in local speech long after the last Arnold has gone. By mid-century it is simply an old farmhouse on a quiet road: large, cold in winter, cheap by the standards of a young family looking for room.

Roger and Carolyn Perron move in during the coldest part of the winter with their five daughters — Andrea, Nancy, Christine, Cindy, and April. They have bought a two-hundred-and-thirty-five-year-old farmhouse with more rooms than they can heat, and they intend to make it home.

By the family's account the first oddities begin almost at once, and they are small: things moved, sounds in rooms nobody is in, the sense of not being alone in the cellar. Nine more years of it are ahead of them, and everything the world will eventually know about this house begins in this January.

Ed and Lorraine Warren, by then the best-known paranormal investigators in New England, come out to Round Top Road and return more than once across the decade. Their involvement is what eventually carries the family's story out of Burrillville.

The night everything turns is a séance held in the house, with Carolyn at the center of it. Andrea Perron's account describes her mother speaking in a voice not her own and her chair leaving the floor. Roger ends it — he throws the Warrens out of his house, afraid of what the investigation is doing to his wife. The family stays. The investigators do not come back on those terms again.

After nearly ten years the family moves out. What they leave behind is the most detailed body of first-hand accounts any family has given about this property: a decade of experiences across every floor, the cellar, and the grounds, recorded by seven people who were living an ordinary family life around them.

The house goes quiet again and sits, for a while, as what it had been for most of its life — an old farm building on a back road in Rhode Island that almost nobody outside the town had heard of.

Norma Sutcliffe and Gerald Helfrich buy the farmhouse in 1987 and live in it for thirty-two years. She runs a daycare inside the house for twenty of them and cooking workshops out of it for eight more, and reports no trouble of any kind. None of the children, none of the guests.

This belongs in the timeline as squarely as anything else in it. The honest history of this house includes three decades in which the people living here experienced nothing they could not explain, and said so.

The eldest Perron daughter publishes House of Darkness House of Light, the first full first-hand telling of the family's decade in the house, and follows it with two further volumes. It is long, specific, and written by someone who was ten years old when it started.

Until this point the story had traveled by word of mouth and investigator's notes. Now it exists as testimony with names, rooms, and dates attached — and that is what a film studio eventually reads.

Warner Bros. releases James Wan's film in the summer of 2013. It takes more than three hundred million dollars worldwide, launches one of the most successful horror franchises ever made, and gives a 1736 Rhode Island farmhouse a name it never had before.

The house in the film is not this house — it was shot elsewhere. But the address is public within weeks, and the attention that follows is not welcome at the time: the owners are dealing with strangers on the property at night, and they go to court over it without success. For a few years the most famous haunted house in America is a private home whose owners want to be left alone.

Cory and Jennifer Heinzen buy the property on June 21, 2019, for about four hundred thirty-nine thousand dollars — and do the thing no previous owner had done. They open it.

For the first time in the building's two hundred and eighty-three years, people who are not family, guests, or trespassers can walk through the rooms the Perrons described, stay the night, and investigate the place themselves. Everything the house is now begins with that decision.

In the spring of 2022 the farmhouse sells again, for just over one and a half million dollars — extraordinary money for an eighteenth-century farm building on eight acres in rural Burrillville, and a measure of what the house had become in the three years since it opened.

The investigations, the overnights, and the daytime history tours continue through the change, as they have through every change of hands since 1680.

The house is still here, on the same ground, holding the same frame that went up in 1736. It has outlasted the farm it was built to serve, the town line it was drawn inside, eight generations of one family, the decade that made it famous, and every owner who has held the deed.

It is kept open through the season for public ghost hunts, private overnight investigations, and guided daytime history tours. Dates are announced on Facebook first. Whatever you believe about the rest of it, the building is real, the land is real, and you can stand in it.