Not a witch, not a murderer, and didn't even live there.

November 2, 2014 1:28 AM

Bathsheba Sherman is best known as the Satanic witch who murdered her infant and then hanged herself from a tree, thus cursing her property and all its future inhabitants. The true story of a couple haunted by her demonic presence inspired the 2013 movie The Conjuring. Except how true was the story? Historian J'aime Rubio writes up The True Story of Bathsheba Sherman.

"Anyone who speaks badly of this woman, a person who cannot defend herself, should be ashamed of themselves. These fabricated stories are the reason Bathsheba's headstone has been destroyed by vandals who now believe she is an evil entity possessing mothers to kill their children, and terrorizing the house. Most of the blame also should fall on the shoulders of those who blame all these paranormal experiences on Bathsheba in the first place, and any and all who continue to perpetuate the erroneous information that continues to defame and slander Bathsheba's name. She was just a regular person. She never even lived on the property, yet she will forever be tied to the false history of the home in urban legend and folklore that made a lot of money to those telling the story."

posted by Peregrine Pickle (23 comments total)

Okay. As much as I enjoyed The Conjuring, I had no idea she was a real person.
That's interesting.

Historian J'aime Rubio

I also discovered J'amie is a real name, and not one of Chris Lilly's affectations.
posted by Mezentian at 1:17 AM on November 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

I don't know that the "good name" of a person who's been dead 130 years matters much, but interesting research none the less.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 2:19 AM on November 2, 2014

What if a hundred years from now, someone decides to write about you, and makes you out to be an evil spirit possessing people, someone who committed atrocities against your own children...would you like that? I don't think so.

I would feel, from my throne of dark fire, that I had gotten off rather lightly and that I should have done more to accurately record my legacy.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:16 AM on November 2, 2014 [34 favorites]

"Based on a true story" really means "The product of a shitty writer who needs the corroboration of supposed truth to compensate for an absence of craft."
posted by sonascope at 4:24 AM on November 2, 2014 [9 favorites]

These fabricated stories are the reason Bathsheba's headstone has been destroyed by vandals who now believe she is an evil entity possessing mothers to kill their children

Do these people also avoid rural Texas for fear of chainsaw-wielding cannibals?
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:28 AM on November 2, 2014 [5 favorites]

Pope Guilty: "Do these people also avoid rural Texas for fear of chainsaw-wielding cannibals?"

Well, not just for that...
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:37 AM on November 2, 2014 [18 favorites]

Here in Maryland, Burkittsville was stuck replacing their sign for ages because of the tiresome cult of The Blair Witch Project. This was gorgeously amusing to me because the only thing truly notable about Burkittsville, other than its stick-dry Civil War history, was the fact that it was, for a while, the manufacturing center for Deva Lifewear, where they churned out hideous droopwear for hippies to slouch around in.
posted by sonascope at 4:49 AM on November 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

The writer's outrage seemed odd to me too, until I read "I am not saying the home isn't haunted, honestly I don't know". If she is approaching things from a worldview that suggests that it's actually possible that ghosts or evil spirits infest the property in a manner similar to the depiction in the film, maybe her opinions about the inherent credibility of the defamation differ pretty wildly from my own.

But, yes, the tone seems a bit overwrought to me. One might as well loudly complain that Richard III never actually said "A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!" or that the research methods apparently involved in Homer's depiction of the alleged Trojan War are entirely without credibility.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that "based on a true story" is too often a cover for hacks, but this was actually a decent film. Presenting the history in this way makes it harder and less interesting to read than it would be without all the editorialising.
posted by howfar at 5:41 AM on November 2, 2014 [3 favorites]

I think it's important to document the facts behind this sort of thing because there are scads of people who honest-to-Glub do believe in witches and I imagine the ones who saw The Conjuring - with its revanchist anti-female politics of bad mommies as witches - probably viewed it as an endorsement of their worldview by a "true story".
posted by fleetmouse at 5:55 AM on November 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

Absolutely, fleetmouse. What's odd about this blog is that it seems to regard the libel as inherently credible. It doesn't contradict the worldview, it is just outraged that an innocent person was accused of witchcraft, rather than an actual witch. So it doesn't really seem to achieve what I think we would like it to achieve.
posted by howfar at 6:22 AM on November 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

I enjoyed The Conjuring a lot, but I consider it a work of fiction based loosely on the existence of real people and a real place that I guess exists, mostly.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:24 AM on November 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

Here in Maryland, Burkittsville

Y'all should have changed the town's name to Blair.
No way that'll end badly.
posted by Mezentian at 6:55 AM on November 2, 2014

I'm sympathetic to the idea that "based on a true story" is too often a cover for hacks,

Somewhere I have an Amityville book written by "John G Jones".
It is memorable because it has an embossed, black cover, and because there is a chapter in which the writer, John G Jones, writes himself in as a character and says "G'Day, I'm writer John G Jones".

It is based on a true story.

I no longer take them seriously. At all.
posted by Mezentian at 6:59 AM on November 2, 2014

Any sense that the blogger's outrage is misplaced or over-wrought disappeared when he mentioned the gravestone desecrations. Some people really are that stupid.

Personally, I like the way the movie American Hustle announced its mix of nonfiction with storytelling:

Some of these things actually happened...
posted by localroger at 7:07 AM on November 2, 2014

I don't share her outrage and I'm not sure I would call her a historian and I'm skeptical of the idea that haunting exists, but I do think it's sort of profoundly weird to pick a random unremarkable woman and rewrite every detail of her life to make her into a horrible monster. Why pick her? Is it just that Bathsheba is a spooky old-timey name? On one level, I couldn't care less if someone maligns me 100 years after everyone who ever met me has died, but on another level it sort of does seem like a creepy, shitty thing to do.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:43 AM on November 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

"rewrite every detail of her life to make her into a horrible monster." So all historical fiction should be condemned because feelz? I think Rubio's chief complaint is that Hollywood has failed to option her historical writings.
posted by Ideefixe at 9:42 AM on November 2, 2014

Most historical fiction either creates totally fictitious characters and puts them in real situations or centers on real figures and tries to stick at least somewhat to the facts of their lives. I guess that you could argue that, say, Sleepy Hollow does the same thing that this movie did, but I think it's different when it's about famous historical figures and when the distortions are obvious.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:03 AM on November 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

I also find this author's anger is sort of weird in this context. I think there's a really awesome deep vein of rich sociological and historical interest here; yes, it totally sucks that people are vandalizing the grave site and that a woman's history has been rewritten to reflect our fears about bad motherhood (or whatever it has been rewritten to reflect). But just yelling, "DON'T DO THAT! STICK TO THE FACTS!" misses the point: why do these things happen? Why do we feel the need to believe in ghosts? How did the original story change over time, and why? What are we culturally processing when we invent stories about Satanic motherhood? The writer, I think, ascribes malice to a natural human and cultural process of narrative evolution that's been happening with lots and lots of dead people, some of which we remember by name and some of which we don't, for the entirety of human history.

I applaud the writer for getting the real story out there, but I really don't understand how they managed to overlook these critical aspects. It's not like folklore revisions of history just happen in a void, or because someone felt like slandering a person dead for more than a century.
posted by WidgetAlley at 10:13 AM on November 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

Television, Toil and Trouble: The Witches Of TV
posted by homunculus at 10:23 AM on November 2, 2014

My dad is an amateur historian and historical cemetery restorer and protector who lives in Harrisville, a part of Burrillville. I'll ask him if he knows anything about this story.
posted by Biblio at 11:37 AM on November 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

I agree that the subject of this post is fascinating, but the tone of this article is odd. The author starts by promising "THE ACTUAL TRUE FACTS ABOUT BATHSHEBA" but focuses on her own emotional reactions ("Does that sound like a mean or wicked person to you? A grandmother who wanted her grandchild to have the best education and inherit her money?").

There's a much drier analysis here: http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/conjuring.php
It does mention that Bathsheba was tried for the murder of an infant with a sewing needle but found innocent (I wish they had sited a source there).

Nitpicking, but Rubio mentions slander a few times and at one point says the movie's depiction of Bathsheba "constitutes slander". In most of the US, you can't slander the dead (interestingly, this takes place in Rhode Island, one of the few states where you can bring a suit for slandering the dead... but only within three months of the death).
posted by entropyiswinning at 11:42 AM on November 2, 2014 [2 favorites]

"Based on a true story" really means "The product of a shitty writer who needs the corroboration of supposed truth to compensate for an absence of craft."

Andrew Leman of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society was working on the props for The Call of Cthulhu, and the was looking at NYT headlines to do a mock page describing the earthquake that starts the story off, and he turned to the date used in the story, and the headline said Earthquake Rocks New England" or some such. Leman claims that his first reaction was shock and creeping dread and his second was that they could advertise the film as "based on a true story....."
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:07 PM on November 2, 2014 [6 favorites]

Discounting the fact that you can't slander the dead, there is a distinction between public and non-public persons, recognizing that it's a quite different thing to make up a story about some politician or movie star than it is to make up a story about some random person. In that sense the law is recognizing a common sense reality, which is that you can't stop people from making up fantasies about the people who lead and inspire them, and things like that are part of the cost of being a public figure, but making up stories about your third grade math teacher and spreading them around as if they are true is just shitty.

Unlike the people who will get obituaries in People magazine and biographies at the library, most of us won't leave much of a legacy once we and the people who knew us are all gone. To take such an ordinary person and crap up what little legacy they do leave, to the point where strangers who would never otherwise have known of her descrate her grave, is just shitty.
posted by localroger at 1:40 PM on November 2, 2014 [2 favorites]