Episode 13 · 40:51
Content note: this post discusses the deaths of young children, an invented story about infanticide, and suicide.
In the 2013 horror movie The Conjuring, Bathsheba Sherman is a Satanist who sacrificed her week-old baby, cursed anyone who took her land, and hanged herself in 1863. The movie says it’s based on a true story. And Bathsheba Sherman was a real woman. But none of those things happened to her.
Who she really was
Bathsheba Thayer was born in Burrillville, Rhode Island, in 1812. In her early thirties she married a farmer named Judson Sherman and moved to the Sherman farm, where she lived the rest of her life. That farm was not the farmhouse from the movie. Researchers who have gone through the land and census records agree she never lived or worked there.
She had four children. Three of them died before turning four, which was heartbreakingly common in the 1840s and 1850s. Her son Herbert grew up and had a family of his own. After Judson died in 1881, she remarried. She died on May 25, 1885, of paralysis, most likely a stroke, at age 73. A Baptist minister led her funeral, and her will set aside her property to pay for her grandson’s education.
Where the witch story came from
No record from Bathsheba’s lifetime accuses her of anything. Historian J’aime Rubio found no trace of the witch story before 1973, when the Perron family was living in the farmhouse and searching for an explanation for what they believed was haunting them. According to Andrea Perron’s own book, her mother Carolyn identified Bathsheba first, and then passed the story to paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. The claimed court records about a baby’s death have never been found.
The Salem connection is backwards
The movie says Bathsheba was related to Mary Towne Eastey, who was hanged in the Salem witch trials of 1692. No genealogy supports that. But the bigger problem is the logic. Mary Eastey was innocent, and Massachusetts officially reversed the judgment against her in 1711. Using her as “proof” that a relative was a witch is the same reasoning the Salem witch hunt used.
What the legend cost her
After the movie came out, Bathsheba’s real headstone in Harrisville was vandalized until it couldn’t be repaired. In August 2024, a new one was installed after a crowdfunding effort led by Rubio and the Burrillville Historical and Preservation Society.
What we actually know
She was a farm wife, a mother who lost three children, and a grandmother who planned for her grandson’s future. Everything else, the witchcraft, the baby, the needle, the curse, was added 88 years after she died.
Listen to the full episode above, and if you visit her grave, please be kind.