People love a good scare. But when you look into the actual history of The Haunting of Connecticut, things get messy. Really messy. Most people know the story through the 2009 movie or the various "paranormal investigator" TV shows that have spent decades milking the drama. They see the flickering lights and the dramatic exorcisms and assume it's just another Hollywood campfire story. It isn't. Not exactly.
In 1986, the Snedeker family moved into a former funeral home in Southington, Connecticut. That’s the core of it. They were desperate. Their eldest son, Philip, was battling cancer and needed to be close to the University of Connecticut Health Center. Rent was cheap. The house was big. It seemed like a win until they found the blood drains in the basement.
The Basement Nobody Wanted to Talk About
Imagine moving your kids into a house and finding toe tags and headstone rubbings in the drawers. That actually happened. The Snedekers—Carmen and Al—weren't looking for a ghost story. They were looking for a place to survive a medical crisis.
The basement was a literal mortuary.
According to the Snedekers, the "activity" started almost immediately. We’re talking about the classic hits: foul odors that smelled like rotting meat, sudden temperature drops, and the feeling of being watched. But then it got darker. Carmen Snedeker later claimed that she would find the floor mops dipped in blood. She said the water in her tea would turn red. It sounds like a B-movie, right? Except these people were terrified.
Philip, the son, bore the brunt of it. He started claiming he saw a thin man with long black hair. His personality shifted. He became aggressive. Was it the cancer? Was it the heavy medication? Or was it the house? Doctors at the time attributed much of his behavior to the intense stress of his illness and the side effects of his treatment, but the family was convinced something ancient and nasty lived in those walls.
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Enter the Warrens
You can’t talk about The Haunting of Connecticut without talking about Ed and Lorraine Warren. Love them or hate them, they are the reason this story exists in the public consciousness. They showed up in the late 80s and declared the house "infested" with demons.
The Warrens were polarizing. Ed was a self-taught "demonologist" and Lorraine was a clairvoyant. They claimed that the former morticians who ran the funeral home had engaged in—and there’s no polite way to put this—necrophilia. They argued that these acts had "thinned the veil," allowing demonic entities to tether themselves to the property.
Ray Garton, a professional horror novelist, was hired by the Warrens to write a book about the case. This is where the "factual" part of the story gets a bit shaky. Garton has since gone on record saying that when he pointed out inconsistencies in the family’s stories, Ed Warren told him to "make it up and make it scary."
"You've got some of the story," Garton recalled Ed saying. "Just use what works and make up the rest."
That’s a huge red flag. It forces us to ask: how much of the "haunting" was a family in a high-stress medical crisis being coached by paranormal celebrities?
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The Skeptical Side of the Coin
Not everyone in Southington bought the hype. Neighbors often reported that the only "chaos" they saw was the influx of camera crews. Skeptics like Joe Nickell have pointed out that many of the most dramatic claims—the physical assaults by unseen spirits, the levitating items—only started appearing in the narrative after the Warrens got involved.
There's also the medical reality. Philip was undergoing intense treatment. Hallucinations are a documented side effect of certain medications and extreme physiological stress. If you’re a teenager dying of cancer in a basement where bodies used to be drained of blood, your mind is going to go to some dark places. Honestly, it would be weirder if he didn't have nightmares.
But then you have the other kids. The cousins. They claimed to see things too. They talked about a "man in a suit" who would stand at the end of the hallways. If it was just one person, we could write it off as a medical delusion. When it's four or five people seeing the same shadow, the local legends start to carry more weight.
Why We Are Still Obsessed With This Case
The reason The Haunting of Connecticut remains a cornerstone of American folklore isn't just because of the movie. It’s because it taps into a very specific, very human fear: that our sanctuary, our home, can be corrupted by its past.
Connecticut is old. The soil is soaked in history. From the New London Ledge Lighthouse to the ruins of Dudleytown, the state is a vacuum for these kinds of legends. The Snedeker house (which still stands, though it’s been renovated and the current owners say it’s perfectly quiet) represents the ultimate "what if."
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What if the place you moved into to save your son's life was actually trying to take it?
Actionable Takeaways for Paranormal Enthusiasts
If you're looking to explore the history of this case or other Connecticut legends, you need to separate the Hollywood "jump scares" from the actual records.
- Check the Property Records: Before visiting any "haunted" site, look at the town's land records. In the Snedeker case, the house was indeed a licensed funeral home (Hallahan Funeral Home) for years. Knowing the functional history of a building often explains the "weird" architecture like floor drains or extra-wide doors.
- Read the Ray Garton Interviews: To understand how the Snedeker story was "packaged" for the public, look up Garton's accounts of working with the Warrens. It’s a masterclass in how urban legends are manufactured.
- Visit the New England Society for Psychic Research: This is the organization founded by the Warrens. While they obviously lean into the supernatural, their archives in Monroe, CT, hold the original "evidence" from the case.
- Respect the Current Residents: If you drive by the house in Southington, stay in your car. It is a private residence. The people living there today are not part of the 1986 haunting and deserve their privacy.
- Cross-Reference Medical Context: When researching hauntings involving illness, always look at the historical medical treatments of the era. Understanding the side effects of 1980s oncology treatments provides a much-needed layer of nuance to the Snedeker narrative.
The Snedeker story is a tragedy first and a ghost story second. It's about a family pushed to the brink by disease and debt, who found themselves living in a house with a macabre past. Whether the demons were literal or metaphorical depends entirely on who you ask, but the impact on the family was undeniably real.
To dig deeper, you should look into the "Demon Priest" of Connecticut, Father Robert McKenna, who performed the supposed exorcism on the house. His fringe status within the Catholic Church adds another layer of complexity to the claim that this was an officially sanctioned "cleansing." Seeing the different perspectives from the Church, the skeptics, and the family themselves is the only way to get a full picture of what happened in that basement.