The Conjuring House may be famous for demons and ghosts, but its latest nightmare is unfolding in court—and it could happen to any homeowner, according to mortgage expert Kelly McGinnis.
The infamous Rhode Island property at the center of the Conjuring franchise is embroiled in a legal battle after a public land record stated its $1.22 million mortgage had been paid in full—even though it hadn’t. The lender is now asking a court to undo its own filing after acknowledging the mortgage was mistakenly discharged.
During a February 2026 hearing, the bank told the judge it did not know who currently held the loan after it had been sold, while the property owner’s attorney said no party would provide a payoff amount. The case remains pending.
The dispute has since expanded to include competing ownership claims involving Ghost Hunters star Jason Hawes and paranormal company Summit & Stone.
Renewed attention has also followed comedian Matt Rife and paranormal creator Elton Castee’s announcement that they purchased Ed and Lorraine Warren’s former Occult Museum.
While the Conjuring House is an extraordinary property, McGinnis says the legal issue at the heart of the case can affect any homeowner: an official public record that appears correct but isn’t.
“A Rhode Island town hall has a record saying a $1.22 million mortgage was paid off. It was never paid. The bank is in court trying to undo its own filing, and it told the judge it does not know who holds the loan now,” McGinnis says. “Most people assume a county record is right because it is official. Records get recorded, not verified. A wrong one surfaces years later when a family tries to sell, refinance, or settle an estate, and by then it is a lawsuit instead of a correction.”
McGinnis says homeowners often assume that if a mortgage satisfaction appears in official land records, it must be accurate.
In reality, recording offices generally accept documents for filing without verifying the underlying information. When errors go unnoticed, they can create years of uncertainty over who owns a property or who is owed money—often surfacing only when someone tries to sell, refinance, or transfer the home.
Background on Kelly McGinnis
Kelly McGinnis has spent over 20 years inside the rooms where decisions get made before anyone else knows they are being made. She led a $20 billion acquisition at Thermo Fisher Scientific, ran a $15 billion global platform across twenty countries, and built high-performing teams at General Electric and venture-backed Uptake Technologies. She learned, from the inside, exactly how powerful institutions work — who they serve, how information moves through them, and what it costs the people it does not reach.
Systems work exactly as they are designed. Most people discover this too late — in the middle of a decision that has already been made for them, inside a process built to serve everyone in the room except them. She watched how information moved, who controlled it, and how people ended up holding consequences they never saw coming.
She started with an entrepreneurship degree from Babson and built a career across General Electric and Thermo Fisher Scientific — managing thousands of people across twenty countries. Two decades of studying how power actually works, who it serves, and what it costs the people it does not.
The moment of clarity came not in a boardroom but in her own kitchen. After years of leading billion-dollar deals, she bought a house in Boston and could not trace her own escrow statement. Not because she lacked intelligence. Because the document was never designed to be decoded by her.
Every day someone walks into the largest financial decision of her life without an advocate. On one side of the closing table: a lender, a broker, a real estate agent, a title company — every one of them paid on commission, every one of them incentivized to close. On the other side: a homeowner with a stack of documents she has never seen, a three-business-day window to review them, and no independent intelligence telling her whether what she is being asked to sign is actually in her interest. Now she is an expert on Real Estate morgages and why laws protecting house or townhouse buyers should be passed.
