'The Conjuring' - More Real Than It Seems

Fear is a natural part of life. It is our safety mechanism, our minds warning us of potential dangers. Over more than a century some have capitalized and utilized this fear, and materialized it in the form of cinema. Most are fiction, and created using the writer's own knowledge. And there are some movies that have been based on real events. But more than not there is one movie that is strangely more realistic than it would seem.

The Conjuring tells the story of the Perron family, a family plagued by a multitude of spirits. After this movie first aired many were praising it for its incredibly realistic portrayal of the haunting of an innocent family. However, while most believe this movie to be false it is, scary enough, rooted into a true experience shared by both Ed and Lorraine Warren.

This movie, in my opinion, was a very bold movie, but also something that was very interesting to watch. I say bold because whenever we, humans, are challenged by something outside of our reality or beliefs we go through a process of either intense denial or rationalization trying to deny or explain the occurrence. More times than not it ends up being that they spend most of their lives trying to understand. In the movie they named the spirit, Bathsheba, who took possession of the mother. In fact, there actually was a real person named Bathsheba Sherman, who had been a rumored Satanist that had been involved in the death of a neighbor’s child.

At the time, when the baby was examined, it was.discovered that the fatal wound was caused by a large-sized sewing needle that was impaled at the base of the child's skull. The public was unconvinced that she was not a witch, even after the the trial declared her not guilty due to insufficient evidence. In the beginning, the Perron family stated that the events all started out in a very small manner. Carolyn Perron would notice that the broom would occasionally go missing, or even seemed to maven its own from place to place. She would find small piles of dirt randomly placed in their kitchen. She would even hear a scraping sound against the tea kettle when no one was there. At that time Ed and Lorraine Warren were titled “ghost-hunters” and were believed to have had a connection to the supernatural. They were indeed asked to come help the Perron family when the occurrences began to get more violent. This was likely when Bathsheba surfaced.

The strange happenings in the movie were not just storytelling; they were witnessed. Andrea Perron, the daughter stated, and I quote, “I thought I was going to pass out. My mother began to speak a language not of this world in a voice not her own. Her chair levitated, and she was thrown across the room.” Now, while all this information is believed to have truly occurred, there was one main difference in the movie versus the real story. The Warrens never actually performed an exorcism. Lorraine actually insisted that she and her husband shouldn’t and wouldn’t attempt one due to the fact that they must be performed by Catholic priests. Especially since back then, when possession and demons were "all the rage," the only ones able to were priests with strict permission from the Vatican.

What do you think? Do you believe that this really happened, or is this just another historical hoax?

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