What’s worse, having a child with cancer, or living in a home where you are regularly tormented by demons? How about both, at the same time. In the late 1980’s, that was the reality for the Snedeker family. This is the story of their haunting in Connecticut.
To be a parent of a child with cancer is one of the hardest things in the world. To make matters worse, some families have to commute long distances from their homes to seek treatment at special hospitals. Today there are organizations and programs that help families in these circumstances. But in the 1980’s that was not the case.
Philip, the eldest son of Carmen Snedeker, suffered from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Though the family lived in Northern New York, they found themselves commuting to Connecticut regularly for his treatment. This placed greater strain on a family already struggling with their circumstances.
In 1986, Carmen and her husband Allen decided it was time to do something about it. They found a home for rent at a reasonable price in Southington, Connecticut, near the UCONN hospital. Mr. and Mrs. Snedeker packed up their family, including their four children and two nieces, and left New York behind.
A duplex, the home was perfect. Spacious enough for the entire family, they just had to convert the basement into two bedrooms for the children. They got to work, but what they found would shock them.
The basement still housed mortuary tools including a chain and pulley casket lift and a blood drainage pit. An inquiry into the background of the home, they discovered that it had previously served as a funeral home – Hallahan Funeral Home to be exact.
Despite the home’s creepy history, the Snedeker’s continued their renovation and moved in. Many people believe that the family chose to stay due to financial reasons. Where else would they find a house suited to their family at such a great price.
Philip had one of the basement rooms that used to serve as a casket display room, which was down the hall from the former embalming room. He complained almost immediately of hearing voices and odd sounds. At one point he described seeing shadow figures, and even a man wearing a pin-striped suit, with white hair. The man would skulk and stare at him while he slept. One night he screamed, having seen bodies upon bodies stacked in the wall.
He begged his parents to allow him to stay at the hospital. But they didn’t believe him, instead writing off his claims as nothing more than hallucinations – a result of his cancer treatments.
Philip’s personality began to change. It was little things at first, his interests and tastes. He began to wear leather, and developed an interest in the occult. He began to write poetry – but not the poetry you might expect. No, his poetry involved necrophilia.
On one occasion, Philip scared his younger brother, Bradley. “My brother actually had me lay down on the gurney in the morgue and didn’t tell me what it was,” he later said. “It did freak me out real bad, but I didn’t want to run because of my older brother. You know, I had to look tough around my older brother. It was pretty creepy, it scared me pretty bad.”
Perhaps the biggest change was his new prevalence toward violence. He would attack family members out of nowhere. At one point he broke into the neighbor’s home to steal a gun. His goal? To shoot his step-father, Al.
Things finally came to a head one night when he attacked his cousin, to allegedly rape her. His parents called the police, and Philip was arrested and ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was placed in a treatment facility. When they believed he was doing better, they let him return to his family.
However, while Philip was out of the house, the other children began to hear strange voices and see ghosts. Even Carmen began to notice things. Items around the house had been disappearing, but she had written it off, thinking the kids had moved stuff, or she was mistaken. But it got worse. One day, she had set the table. When she turned back around, the dishes had all been put away.
On one occasion, Carmen , while mopping the floor, saw the water turn blood red right in front of her eyes. Both she and Al reported that their bed began to vibrate inexplicably, feeling like it had a pulse or heartbeat. Visitors to their home were also able to feel it.
Carmen also reported a terrifying experience she had in the shower. The shower curtain inexplicably attacked her, wrapping itself around her and her face so that she was unable to breathe. She couldn’t escape, she was being pressed in upon from all sides. She was ultimately rescued by her niece.
Lightbulbs in the home gave off an unnatural glow. At one point, frustrated with everyone leaving the lights on and their claims of “ghosts,” Al unscrewed all of the lightbulbs. But even that didn’t stop the glow.
They began to notice the pervasive smell of feces and decay.
One night both Carmen and her niece, Tammy, had a terrifying encounter. Carmen reported waking up in the middle of the night to a negative and heavy energy around her. She couldn’t see anything, but what she felt was terrifying. Cold hands reaching under her pajamas, grabbing and pulling at her bra. The entity, “laughed a hideous laugh when it went above her shirt and out the window.” Kelly had the same experience, except she was fully assaulted. She claimed she had been raped by a demon.
Both Carmen and Al began to have encounters in their bedroom at night. They reported feeling an unearthly atmosphere in their bed. This would be accompanied by ambient 1930’s “mood music,” and then an assault, sexually, on either Carmen or Al. This happened on numerous occasions.
In a TV interview, Carmen admitted that once, while running away from the home, her niece was hideously abused the entire way. When asked why they didn’t leave, Carmen explained that she didn’t think it would make a difference. “Everywhere we went, it followed us.”
One night, while in bed, Carmen finally saw the ghosts haunting her. One had long black hair with black eyes and the other had long white hair and white eyes. That was the final straw. They called Ed and Lorraine Warren.
Ed and Lorraine Warren were American paranormal investigators and authors associated with prominent cases of alleged hauntings, such as Annabelle, Amityville, and the Conjuring. Edward was a self-taught and self-professed demonologist, author, and lecturer. Lorraine was clairvoyant and a light trance medium.
Together with their team, they spent 9 weeks in the Snedeker home, looking to get the “full demonic experience.” During that time, they experienced all that the Snedeker’s reported. Team members were slapped, beaten, pushed, slammed into the floor, and more.
Ed and Lorraine, looking for a full picture, conducted research into the history of the home. They discovered that one of the morticians that worked in the home when it was a funeral parlor practiced necromancy and had “infused the home with a deep evil.” Not only that, but he had participated in and had been found guilty of necrophilia.
They declared the house to be “infested with demons,” and rated the entity within to be 9 on a scale of 1-10. The house needed to have an exorcism.
After the house was cleansed, the Snedeker family moved out.
The Snedeker family’s story was made popular by the movie The Haunting in Connecticut, and has come under much scrutiny over the years. Some details never added up.
First, the claim that they never knew the home had been a funeral home has been openly disputed. The owner of the home has said that the Snedeker’s were fully aware of the house’s history before they ever moved in.
Another claim states that there was a sign engraved “Hallahan Funeral Home” inside the entrance when they initially viewed the property. According to the Snedeker’s the sign had been covered with plywood and was thus concealed from their view.
The owner of the home went on to say that the Snedeker’s invented the whole story. In a newspaper interview he said, “It’s a fraud. It’s a joke. It’s a hoax. It’s Halloween.”
He went on to say that the height of the paranormal activity started when the family was getting behind on their rent, and they moved out just before eviction proceedings were complete. A neighbor even called them out on the television show, Sally Jessy Raphael, “They never had a problem until they got behind in the rent.
Another neighbor, Catherine, claimed that the family “had this planned from right when they moved in.” Sandy, an upstairs neighbor also refuted their claims. She said she had never seen nor heard anything supernatural in the building.
Sandy had also been an employee of the real estate agency the family had used to find the home. She confirmed that they “were totally made aware that […] this was a funeral home.” She also corroborated the claims that the Snedeker family had been falling behind on their rent.
In an interview, Sandy also claimed the problem started when Carmen told her she was having nightmares. She suggested she take some sleeping pills, but Carmen wouldn’t. Instead she said, “No, it is my father coming to hawunt me. I am calling the Warrens.”
In one interview Carmen claimed leaving the home wouldn’t make a difference, because it would follow them wherever they went. In another she said she was “unaware” of what was happening, stating, “it was the kids being tormented.”
Another neighbor, Joan, described seeing the family outside the house in the middle of the night on more than one occasion, claiming they could not go back inside. However, they always came across as perfectly happy, never seemed to be afraid, “they were always out there laughing and joking.”
Author Ray Garton was commissioned by the Warrens to document the Snedeker’s experiences in his book “In A Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting.” During his process, he too had problems with the family’s stories. “The family involved, which was going through some serious problems like alcoholism and drug addiction, could not keep their story straight,” he said in an interview in 2009.
“I became very frustrated; it’s hard writing a non-fiction book when all the people involved are telling you different stories.” When he went to Ed Warren with the problem, Ed apparently said, “Oh, they’re crazy… All the people who come to us are crazy. You think sane people would come to us?” Then he added, “Just use what works and make the rest up… Just make it up and make it scary.”
Garton did what he was told, “I used what I could, made up the rest, and tried to make it as scary as I could.”
Speaking of Ed Warren, during an appearance on, Sally Jesse Raphael, Ed would only confirm that “Father A.” had performed the exorcism on the house. “Father A. that’s the name I give you. I don’t have to give you anything.”
However the Archdiocese of Hartford reported no officially sanctioned exorcism rite had taken place there and they could not substantiate the Warren’s claims.
Though the exorcism cannot be confirmed, priests have come forward admitting to having been to the home. One even said he “felt a strange pressure upon entering the house.”
What do you think? Was the home haunted? Or were the Snedeker’s making it up due to financial stress?
If you liked this story, be sure to check out the story of the Haunted Tallman Family Bunkbeds.
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