The Snedeker House (The Haunting in Connecticut)

In 1986 Carmen Snedeker and her family rented an old house in Southington, a town in central Connecticut, during their son Stephen’s treatment for cancer. The building had once been a funeral parlour, and the family later said they found mortuary equipment in the basement. Over the next two years they reported a mounting series of terrors: apparitions, voices, foul smells, objects moving and, eventually, physical and sexual attacks by an unseen entity.

The family called in Ed and Lorraine Warren, the Monroe-based demonologists, who declared the house infested by demons and claimed that the former undertakers had practised necromancy there. The Warrens said the infestation was eventually ended by an exorcism. In 1992 it became a book, In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting, by horror novelist Ray Garton, commissioned by the Warrens and written with the Snedekers’ cooperation.

Garton has since disowned it. He has said the family’s accounts did not match each other, and that when he raised this, Ed Warren told him to use what worked and make the rest up – “just make it up and make it scary.” He has called the story concocted and said the non-fiction label was not his choice. Investigator Joe Nickell reported that the family’s landlady found the whole story ridiculous and that no tenants before or since had noticed anything unusual; she also pointed out that the family had stayed in the house for more than two years. Carmen Snedeker nevertheless went on to advise the makers of the 2009 film based on her family’s story.

The story gained a second life in 2009 with the Lionsgate film The Haunting in Connecticut, advertised as based on true events, and in later documentary-style television. The house remains a private residence, and its later owners have complained of strangers turning up to photograph it.

The Snedekers claimed to see apparitions, including figures in the basement, to hear voices and footsteps, to smell rot, to witness objects moving, and to suffer physical and sexual assaults by invisible attackers. The Warrens added claims of a demonic infestation and of necromancy by former undertakers. None of this was independently documented.

Throughout the family’s rented house in Southington, especially the basement where the old mortuary equipment was said to have been found. The house is a private home: there is nothing to visit.

The case inspired In a Dark Place (1992), the 2009 film The Haunting in Connecticut, and dramatised episodes of A Haunting and Paranormal Witness. It is now often cited as a cautionary tale about the Warrens’ methods.