4. The Ghost of Bathsheba Thayer Threatened the Family With Doom and Gloom
Carolyn, the family’s matriarch, was the one who seemed to experience the worst aspects of the haunting at the Rhode Island farmhouse. Shortly after the family moved there, she claimed that she was visited at night by a woman in gray whose head was hanging at her side. The woman told her to leave, or she would be driven out with doom and gloom. After consulting with the demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, she became convinced that the woman haunting her was the ghost of Bathsheba Thayer.
Bathsheba Thayer lived in the farmhouse in the 19th century and had four children, three of whom died. She was accused of sacrificing an infant to Satan by stabbing it in the back of the neck with a knitting needle, though the evidence could not be held up in court. When Carolyn received a mysterious stab wound in her leg that seemed to be similar to the one that killed the infant, Lorraine Warren suggested that Bathsheba had taken her knitting needles to the grave and was using them in hauntings.
Andrea Perron said in an interview, “Whoever the spirit was, she perceived herself to be mistress of the house and she resented the competition my mother posed for that position.”
