Halloween Night at the Conjuring House: A Skeptic's Investigation of Rhode Island's Most Infamous Haunting
“My job has never been to find a ghost — it's to find the truth. And the truth at the Conjuring House is more complicated than any Hollywood film is going to show you.”
— Jason Hawes
There are a handful of locations in the paranormal world that carry so much weight — so much history and legend — that walking through the front door feels like stepping into something bigger than yourself. The Conjuring House in Rhode Island is one of those places. We spent Halloween night inside its walls, and I can tell you this: I didn't go in looking for a ghost story. I went in looking for the truth.
I've been doing this work for a long time. Since the early days of TAPS, my approach has never changed: you walk into a location as a skeptic, you rule out every rational explanation you can find, and only then — if something remains that you genuinely cannot explain — do you start considering that something else might be going on. That philosophy is what I brought with me to Harrisville, Rhode Island on Halloween night, alongside some familiar faces from the paranormal community who share that same commitment to honest investigation.
The Conjuring House — formally the Perron family farmhouse — doesn't need much of an introduction. Most people know it through the Hollywood lens, through the 2013 film that dramatized the Perron family's experiences in the 1970s and the involvement of Ed and Lorraine Warren. But I've always believed that pop culture and legend can do serious damage to an investigation. When a location carries that much mythology, it becomes incredibly easy for people — investigators and witnesses alike — to interpret ambiguous stimuli as confirmation of what they already expect to find. My job is to cut through that noise. Before we ever picked up a piece of equipment, we spent time walking the property, learning its actual structural history, understanding the age of the building, its layout, and the environmental factors at play. Old farmhouses in New England are drafty, they settle, they carry sound in unpredictable ways, and their electrical systems can produce interference that mimics what people sometimes call paranormal activity. I wanted to understand the house before I asked anything of it.
Throughout the night, our team moved through the location systematically — the main living areas, the cellar, the upper floors, the spaces that have historically produced the most reported activity. We used a range of equipment to document environmental baselines: temperature, electromagnetic fields, audio. Any investigator worth their salt knows that a spike on a device means nothing without context. What was the baseline? What changed in the room structurally or environmentally that might account for the reading? Those are the questions I kept asking all night. There were moments during the investigation that gave me pause — sounds we couldn't immediately attribute to the house settling or to activity from team members in other areas, and at least one environmental reading that warranted a second look and further documentation. I won't overstate what we captured, because that's not how I operate. What I will say is that this house has layers, and a single night — even a thorough one — doesn't exhaust them.
What I appreciate about the current stewardship of the Conjuring House is the commitment to preservation and transparency. The ability for people to access live cameras throughout the property year-round speaks to an openness that I respect. Too many so-called haunted locations lean into the theater of it all. What serious investigation requires is access, honesty, and time. We had a productive Halloween night inside one of America's most talked-about paranormal locations, and while the legend surrounding this house is enormous, my focus remained exactly where it always does — on what we could document, what we could rule out, and what remained genuinely unexplained when all was said and done.
The Conjuring House earned its reputation for a reason, and after spending Halloween night inside it, I understand why people keep coming back. I'm not ready to stamp it with any single verdict — this is a location that demands continued, methodical investigation, and I intend to let the evidence lead the way. As always, the goal isn't to find a ghost. The goal is to find the truth.