But if you want to know the true story, here it is:
In 1986, Carmen and Al Snedeker moved to the small town of Southington, Connecticut, with the purpose of being closer to the hospital at which their oldest son was being treated for Hodgkin's Lymphoma. The family was down on their luck and decided to rent what seemed to be the perfect house. It was large enough for their family, which included three children and a cousin and the rent was affordable for them.
While they were moving in, Al made a very startling discovery; in the basement their were embalming tables and equipment. It turned out the house used to be a funeral home. The basement, which was split into several rooms was big enough to be the two boys' bedroom.
Not longer after they moved in, Carmen says she started experiencing strange phenomena like items disappearing and the children saying they have seen things and also hearing voices and sounds of hundreds of birds taking flight. Her oldest, who was in the middle of radiation treatment, began to show huge personality shifts. becoming angry and withdrawn. He began writing poetry with the obsession of death and corpses themes. During one extreme episode, he attacked and tried to rape his cousin. His family had him arrested and taken for an evaluation, where he was pronounced schizophrenic. At that, he was removed from the house and would not return until he was better.
Other strange events that were reported by the family included the brutal and repeated rape of both Carmen and her niece, as well as acts of sodomy being performed on her husband by unseen entities. Even more incidents also include mop water turning blood red and the scents of rotting flesh and decay throughout the house. She was also scared of apparitions she saw, including one with black hair and black eyes and the other with white hair and eyes wearing a pinstriped tuxedo.
It was to these events Carmen decided to contact paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren.
Along with John Zaffis and a few other investigators, the Warrens moved into the house for several weeks until they experienced everything the Snedekers claimed. During their time in the house, they claim to have seen first-hand the damage the "demons" could inflict. Many members were being slapped and beaten, pushed, and slammed to the floor. Investigation into the histroy of the house said that one of the undertakers of the funeral home was found guilty of necrophilia. It got so bad that the Warrens considered doing a full-scale exorcism of the property. After that, the Warrens judged the property "cleared".
With the evil banished from the house, that should have been the end. But it wasn't.
The Controversy?
Like another Warren investigation, the infamous Lutz house in Amityvillle, there have been very many claims by the people who lived there, both before and after the Snedeker family, that there have never been any "evil entities" in the house. In fact, the family's cliam to have no knowledge that the house was once a funeral home. Perhaps the most considerable evidence that the whole event was a hoax came from horror novelist Ray Garton, who wrote the book In a Dark Place with the Warrens and the Snedekers. According to Garton, it was hard to write the "true" story because none of the people involved could keep their stories straight. It seemed everyone was denying the statements of everyone else. When he went to Ed Warren with the problem, Garton wrote in a post dated April 27, 1999:
" He told me not to worry, the family was 'crazy'. I was shocked. He said, ' All the people who come to us are crazy. You think sane people would come to us?' He knew I'd written a lot of horror novels prior to that, so he told me to just make the story up using whatever ideas I could put into the book, and make it scary."
Furthermore, others who have lives in the house during, and prior to, the same time have similar stories to tell. They say therewere a few odd experiences, but nothing compared to what the Snedekers claimed.
Whether this is true or not, it does make a great story. The house surely seem like it would be a place for a haunting, and whatever did go on in the house, the effects of it are being felt now by the current owners, but not in the supernatural form.
The Snedekrs lives in the house for two years after the exorcism and then moved to Tennessee. The children are now grown with their own children and Carmen is now a "spiritual advisor".
No one knows for certain if anything actually happened in the house, but it is doubtless that the story will become as famous as The Amityville Horror, and much for the same reason.
Photos from the movie:
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