There is a farmhouse in Rhode Island that cannot pay its mortgage. It has stood for 330 years, survived revolutions, sheltered eight generations of families, and spawned a horror franchise worth over two billion dollars. Now it waits in legal limbo while strangers decide its fate.
The address—1677 Round Top Road, Harrisville—has become shorthand for American haunting. The Conjuring turned it into a household name. But the real story resists the clean narrative of a two-hour film. It sprawls across centuries, accumulates tragedy like sediment, and refuses any tidy resolution.
A House That Holds Its History
The farmhouse was built in 1693. Town records from the surrounding land speak of suicides, hangings, drownings. A child poisoned. A woman frozen in snow. The property collected these moments the way old wood collects smoke—invisibly, permanently.
In January 1971, the Perron family arrived. Roger and Carolyn with their five daughters. Andrea, the eldest, was twelve. April, the youngest, only five. They wanted space. A fresh start. The asking price was low.
In old houses, the bargains come with conditions.
The activity began almost immediately, according to family accounts. Doors swinging open in empty rooms. Footsteps where no one walked. The smell of rotting flesh with no source. Carolyn woke to unexplained bruises, as if gripped during sleep. The daughters described apparitions in period dress, faces materializing in corners, a presence that watched them through the dark hours.
They lived with this for nine years. From 1971 until 1980. Nearly a decade of nightly terror before they finally left.
The Witch Who Never Lived There
The Conjuring gave the haunting a villain: Bathsheba Sherman. According to the film's mythology, she practiced witchcraft in the nineteenth century, sacrificed an infant to Satan, and hanged herself when discovered. Her malevolent spirit cursed the land.
The story has one problem. Bathsheba Sherman never lived at the Perron farmhouse. She resided on a different property entirely, some distance away.
Historical researchers have found no evidence she practiced any witchcraft, killed any child, or made any demonic bargain. Born in 1812, she lived a difficult but ordinary life as a farmer's wife. She died in her eighties—not by hanging, but of natural causes.
Hollywood required a monster. History provided only a name.
The Perron daughters, now in their sixties and seventies, still maintain their experiences were real. Andrea has written three books detailing what she says happened within those walls. Whatever the source—paranormal activity, psychological phenomena, or the weight of belief itself—the trauma was genuine. A family lived in fear for nearly a decade. That suffering needs no supernatural explanation to matter.
Two Billion Dollars Built on Suffering
The Conjuring franchise has grossed over two billion dollars worldwide. Spin-offs and sequels multiplied. An entire cinematic universe rose from one family's reported terror.
In 2022, Jacqueline Nuñez purchased the farmhouse for 1.5 million dollars—more than ten times what comparable properties in the area typically command. She operated it as a tourist attraction, charging visitors for overnight stays and paranormal investigations. The dead, apparently, are good for business.
Then the complications arrived. Neighbors complained about traffic on narrow roads, noise disturbing the quiet. In 2024, the Burrillville Town Council declined to renew the property's entertainment license.
Without the license, income stopped. Without income, the mortgage couldn't be paid. A house that had survived three centuries began sliding toward foreclosure.
Halloween Morning, and the Auction That Never Was
The foreclosure auction was scheduled for 11 AM on Halloween 2025. The timing felt less like coincidence than cosmic irony.
But the gavel never fell. On October 8th, weeks before the scheduled sale, someone purchased the underlying mortgage through a shell company called Summit and Stone LLC—a corporation formed just one month earlier. Behind it: YouTuber Elton Castee, a content creator known for exploring allegedly haunted locations.
Purchasing a mortgage differs from owning property. Castee now controls the debt. He decides whether to foreclose, renegotiate, or simply wait. The house exists in legal limbo—caught between its current occupant, who cannot pay, and its new debt holder, who has not revealed his intentions.
Nuñez remains in the farmhouse. She cannot operate it as a business. She cannot settle what she owes. But for now, she cannot be evicted either. The house that allegedly traps spirits now finds itself trapped.
What We Project Onto Empty Rooms
The Perrons told a story of fear. Hollywood sold a story of evil. Tourists bought a story of thrills. Each version drifts further from whatever actually happened in those rooms.
If you drive down Round Top Road today, you'd pass the farmhouse without a second glance. White paint. Dark shutters. A roof repaired many times over. Nothing announces what supposedly lives inside. That ordinariness might be the most unsettling detail—horror residing in the gap between what we see and what we imagine.
Bathsheba Sherman, whoever she truly was, rests in Rhode Island soil. The Perron daughters have scattered across the country. The tourists wait for gates to reopen. And the house—as it has for over three centuries—simply endures.
Some places refuse to release their stories. Some debts, written in memory and fear and collective imagination, can never be foreclosed. They only accumulate.
The lights go off. The doors close. And somewhere in the dark, the story continues without us.
