The Snedeker Poltergeist (Southington)
A Connecticut family moved into a converted funeral home and reported two years of sustained physical and psychological disturbance — the basis for the 2009 film 'The Haunting in Connecticut' and one of the most-investigated late-twentieth-century American paranormal cases.
In 1986, the Snedeker family — Allen and Carmen Snedeker and their four children — moved into a house at 208 Meriden Avenue in Southington, Connecticut. The property had previously operated as the Hallahan Funeral Home, a fact that the family discovered shortly after moving in when their teenage son Philip found mortuary equipment, embalming tools, and a coffin lift still installed in the basement. The Snedekers reported sustained poltergeist and apparition phenomena across the subsequent two years that became the basis for the case’s later treatment in the 1992 book In a Dark Place by Ed and Lorraine Warren with Ray Garton, and the 2009 film The Haunting in Connecticut.
The phenomena documented by the family included object movements, the appearance of dark robed figures observed by multiple family members, unexplained sounds emanating from the former mortuary area, and a sustained pattern of psychological distress experienced principally by Philip, who was being treated for Hodgkin lymphoma at the time of the family’s move into the house. The family’s report distinguishes between the physical poltergeist activity and the perceptual experiences of the children, though the case literature has generally treated both as part of the same phenomenon.
Ed and Lorraine Warren were called to the property and investigated the case over a period of months. The Warrens’ investigation followed their standard methodology — interviews with family members, attempted documentation through photography and audio recording, and the eventual conclusion that the property was occupied by a demonic presence requiring exorcism. The Warrens’ investigation was the subject of subsequent contestation, including allegations by author Ray Garton — who had been hired to write the In a Dark Place book — that the family members had given inconsistent accounts and that the Warrens had pressed for a unified narrative.
The Snedeker case has been discussed in the American paranormal literature alongside the Smurl haunting (1974–89, West Pittston PA) and the Lutz family Amityville case (1975) as part of the Warren-investigated case canon. The historical accuracy of specific phenomena has been contested but the family’s underlying contemporaneous distress and the property’s former funeral home status are not in dispute. The house remains private property; subsequent residents have reported variously continued occasional anomalies and an unremarkable residency, which is consistent with the pattern observed at other ex-Snedeker comparable properties.
The 2009 film The Haunting in Connecticut dramatised the case with substantial fictional additions and is not relied on by serious paranormal investigators as a documentary reference. The most rigorous documentary treatment of the case remains the contemporaneous Warren investigation notes and the family’s own accounts, both of which are preserved in the Warrens’ New England Society for Psychic Research archive.
Documentation
- Snedeker family contemporaneous accounts
- Warren investigation notes (New England Society for Psychic Research archive)
- In a Dark Place (Ed and Lorraine Warren, Ray Garton, 1992)
- Ray Garton’s subsequent disputes regarding the book’s preparation
- Witnesses: 8 (family members, Warren investigators, neighbour observers)
- Location: 208 Meriden Avenue, Southington, Connecticut
- Date range: 1986 — 1988 (Snedeker residency)