Palestra de Andrea Perron (House of Darkness, House of Light) no Tampa Theatre

[Applause] thank you all for coming this evening Wow Wow there's more of you up there than down here I'm going to start this with a heartfelt sentiment I love this movie and the reason that I do is not necessarily because it is fact-filled it is actually a cherry-picking of the files of Ed and Lorraine Warren and the information that my family provided to the producers and what they did was they took our story and Lorraine and Edie story and they created their own third story and the reason that they did that was because it would be virtually impossible to compress ten years into two hours and the other part of that is that Hollywood or as I like to call that Hollyweird doesn't trust you and that's not their fault they're just going on past experience but they thought that if they told the true story that it would literally run you out of the theater and that's why you got a toned-down version called the conjuring when I tell you that the truth is stranger than fiction that's an understatement of the new millennium it took me seven years and three books volume 1 2 & 3 of house of darkness house of light to tell our whole true story and it's not exclusively a horror story it is essentially a love story now this is what the conjuring got right good conquers evil love conquers fear the Perrin family endured an extreme haunting that they all survived that's the impression that the conjuring leaves there are many elements of the film that are what I call the cosmic kisses the things about the movie that the producers the director the cast the crew the set designer could not possibly have known about even though they read the books there were things in the book and in the film that were not in the books Sadie the death of the dog as soon as we moved to the farm I didn't put it in the books because I thought that it was so sad and the way that he died was so terrible that I didn't want to turn my readers away and go on this is just too morose I can't deal with this and still after 40 years I couldn't write about it because it was such a terrible thing that happened right after we moved to the farm there are things in this film if to think back on what you just saw there are things in this film that appeared almost magically appeared I couldn't believe it when I was sitting with Lorraine Warren and my sister Cindy three months before the film opened in July of 2013 and Warner Brothers had graciously invited us out to Hollywood to have a private screening of the film prior to its premiere and when the camera rounded the corner into my bedroom and the young lady that played me in the film was Shanley Caswell person wonderful young lady when they rounded the camera into my room and I saw the folk art drawing of the white cat that exact duplicate of a picture is hanging in my office in my home in Winter Garden Florida it was given to me when I was 13 years old by my mother's friend Fran we were out at a flea market in Foster Rhode Island which is just one town over from where we lived and I saw it and I fell madly in love with it and it was 50 Cent's and my mom didn't have fifty cents to buy it for me and it was the weekend of my birthday and Fran bought it for me that exact picture is hanging in my office nobody involved with the conjuring knew anything about that there are 25,000 different prints of wallpaper available on the open market they chose the exact print that we had in the farmhouse none of them had ever seen a photograph of the inside of the farm in fact the only photographs of our family which are in the film are at the very end when my mom and my dad and my sisters had our pictures taken we took each other's pictures the Easter before we moved to the farm and I sent those out to Hollywood with the promise that they would send the originals back after they reworked them and framed them for the film the wind chimes that Cindy goes running through the house with to hang on the porch identical to the set of wind chimes that we had hanging on our front porch they didn't know that they couldn't possibly have known that however when Eden Lorraine Warren came to our home for the first time it wasn't 1971 it was the night before Halloween in 1973 we had already been there for quite some time we had already gone through some really remarkable and very frightening things the reason that they came to the house was not because my mother sought them out she had no idea who they were when they showed up at our kitchen door at about 7 o'clock in the evening and it was already pitch dark and it was freezing outside and my very gracious mother invited these apparently harmless people into our home the only reason that they knew about us was because a young man two months earlier showed up in our yard in a VW van you know like hippie style remember anybody old enough to remember the old VW vans and and he and his team came from Rhode Island College their groups name the acronym was pyro Piro and he said his name is Keith Johnson and he said he had received a phone call from my mother asking him to come help us my mother never called anyone but someone did and when he walked into the house he had an experience that was so profound and so disturbing that he is the one that set out to contact Eden Lorraine Warren on our behalf and the reason that they waited to come to the house just prior to Halloween was because they were mistakenly thinking that that would be their very best chance to see some type of manifestation in our home they thought that there was a veil there is no veil the spirit world is part of our world our world is part of the spirit world and the only reason that we perceive that there is a veil is because it keeps us relegated and safe in a three-dimensional five sensory realm but that is not the truth of our existence we live in a multi-dimensional multi-sensory universe and our home was a portal very cleverly disguised as a farm house there were over a dozen spirits that we dwelled with and we had to learn to live with the dead the reason that Bathsheba copped all the blame in the conjuring was because the night that Lorraine and Ed walked into our kitchen for the first time she walked over to our big black stove and she placed her hand on the corner and she covered her eyes and she said I sense a malignant presence in this house her name is Bathsheba now - Lorraine's credit she couldn't possibly have known that there was a history with Bathsheba Sherman and our farm although she was not an Arnold and she never lived in the house the story that the local historian told us or told my mother actually was that Bathsheba Sherman was either babysitting or caring for an infant in our home and that that infant died in her care an autopsy was conducted this was in the early 1800s and they found that a needle had been impaled at the base of its skull and the cause of death was listed as convulsions because of the nature of the death there was an inquest conducted our town at the time was not even incorporated so the county seat was the nearest Township Hatchett Rhode Island and there was an inquest and basically it never went any further than that a series of questions interrogatories were posed and for all intents and purposes she talked her way out of it now I don't necessarily think that she did anything to deliberately harm the child and there is no proof or documentation nothing in recorded history that would indicate that Bathsheba Sherman was a witch however the gentleman the historian that told my mother the story of Bathsheba would always hang his head when he'd speak of her he was a very old man when we met him Bathsheba Sherman lived from 1812 to 1885 and he was 10 years old when she died we met him in 1971 he said that she was brutal to her farmhands that she beat them and she starved to them and that she was a bitter very unkind woman who had lived with the accusation of the death of this infant lifelong and according to him the women in town loved her and the men would look at her with rapacious eyes because she was apparently quite beautiful and from that stemmed the folklore the rumor and the innuendo that she was a practicing witch who sacrificed an infant to the devil for eternal youth and beauty now think back on that time this was about a hundred years after the Salem witch trials a little more than a hundred years using the word witch at that time could cost you your life and she was shunned in town she had a very difficult life she had four children three of whom died before the age of four they are all buried beside her in the cemetery in Harrisville Rhode Island and the Riverside Cemetery only one of her children survived her her husband Judson Sherman on to the Sherman farm which as the crow flies is approximately a mile away from the old Arnold estate where we lived there is no proof anywhere that Bathsheba did what she was accused of doing and so in my writing of what I call a collective memoir our family's story and our recollections of living at the farm I try not to absolve her because I'm in no position to do that but at least to give the woman the benefit of the doubt because in the court of public opinion she was tried and convicted in life and in afterlife now when this film came out some maniac some lunatic fringe individual took either a crowbar or a baseball bat to her stone which had been in place in Harrisville since 1885 and i immediately made a youtube video i was furious anybody that sees it will see how angry I was and for all intents and purposes I said this I don't know who you are I don't know who did this but she does and woe be unto you the thing that upset my mother about the conjuring aside from that really ugly skirt which she said she would never have been caught dead wearing she's retained her sense of humor and her sense of style over the years she was upset that the film represented our family as the pagan parents the godless heathens nothing could have been further from the truth we were all baptized and confirmed into the Roman Catholic Church my father was born Catholic raised in parochial school was an altar boy for his entire youth my uncle Eugene served the Pope directly Pope John the 23rd in Rome as brother of the Sacred Heart spoke seven languages one of the kindest most gentle loving wonderful human beings that ever walked this planet my mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father and here is the bitter truth we didn't leave the Catholic Church the Catholic Church turned its back on us our priest was so frightened when he got wind of what was happening in our farmhouse that he gently but firmly asked my father to take our family to worship elsewhere and we never went back to church after that because my father felt abandoned my mother was so angry that she just swore off the religion completely and when my uncle Jean made a trip from Rome he came to the farm and dad really didn't want to talk about what was happening there he was having a lot of trouble accepting it himself so instead what happened was uncle gene talked to my mother and about six weeks later a large black car pulled into our yard and a priest stepped out of it and he asked to come into the home and to walk the house and he did and when he was done making the tour of the home and he stopped in every room and we could tell that he was very prayerful and deep in thought and he walked up to my mother and he said I'm so sorry mrs. Perrin this house cannot be cleansed she wept she knew that he was our last hope there was no exorcism in our house there was a seance that went so very badly wrong that it almost cost my mother her life and four of her five children witnessed what happened that night it's no surprise that the Warren files did not contain the true account of what actually did happen because when my mother was infested with something so evil that it literally twisted her body into a ball in the seat where she sat and a language and a voice started coming out of her body that does not exist on this earth and her chair was levitated and she was in a split second thrown from the middle of our dining room into the middle of our parlor everyone in that house heard her skull hit the floor and everyone in our house thought that we had just watched my mother die when my father tried to race to her side Ed Warren grabbed his arm to stop him and my father turned around and punched his lights out and took a man twice his size to the floor then he told the Warrens to pack up everything that they brought into our home that night including the medium and the priest and the technical crew that was filming and the audio people and told them to get the hell out and never come back now considering that the series of films that began with the conjuring conjuring too soon to be conjuring three are to edify the Warrens it's no surprise that that part of the truth was not told but Lorraine remembered and we talked at length about it when I visited her in Hollywood at the private screening that we attended she also said that during the exorcism scene she got very upset she said to me it would never have done that it would never have done that and the part of the film that is actually true is when he says no I would not conduct an exorcism I am trained through the church to assist and he was so devout and so respectful of his teachers that he would never have attempted to do something like that there was no blood and gore the way that they showed it but there was love intense love in our family and that is what lifted us up people ask all the time why did you stay there for 10 years well there are a hundred different answers to that first of all my family my parents invested virtually everything that they had into that 200 acre colonial farmhouse we moved into that house never for a moment expecting it wasn't even on the radar the whole notion of ghosts and spirits it was never a subject that had ever been broached in our family nothing had ever been discussed about it we visited the house a number of times before we actually moved in and had gotten to know mr. Kenyon the owner very well and none of us had had any type of supernatural paranormal activity or experience that any of us can remember but the day that we moved in my father opened the back of the truck and he handed me a box much like you saw and said take this to your mother in the kitchen I walked in the closest door that I could to get warm because it was snowing and sleet and freezing rain and it was so cold and I walked in the parlor door took a hard right heading toward the dining room through the front hall and into the kitchen but when I walked into the dining room mr.

Kenyon was standing there and he was packing the last of his belongings out of the china hutch he was moving out as we were moving in and I said good morning to him I loved that man dearly and he loved us and I saw that there was another man standing in the corner of the room with him and the first thing I thought was wow that's an odd way to dress I was only 12 years old and I thought I remember thinking does everybody out here dress this way he was dressed in clothes that were handmade from the 1800s he appeared absolutely solid to me to the extent that as I passed him I said good morning sir and he did not respond he was instead fixated on mr. Kenyon had his arms crossed kind of leg up on the wall and a quirky smile on his face as if he was there to say goodbye ten years later the day that we moved out he was there again but that day I walked into the kitchen and I said mom who's the man with mr. Kenyon she said there's nobody was mr.

Kenyon on his sons on the way he's not here yet April was in the kitchen with mom she was a wee bit of a thing and really not big enough or strong enough to carry boxes from a truck so she helped unpack in the kitchen meanwhile Christine walked in with her own box and said mom who's that man with mr. Kenyon again the answer his sons on the way it's not here yet it was chaos there were a lot of people coming and going from the home so it got dismissed and then Cindy walked in and she's like there's a man that's dressed funny with mr. Kenyon and then Nancy walked in right behind him and said there was a man with mr.

Kenyon buddy just disappeared and that was the moment that the Perrin family went from being a normal family to a paranormal family about an hour later my father was standing in the dining room speaking with mr.