Ed and Lorraine Warren’s Darkest Case? From The Conjuring Files: The Haunting in Connecticut

 But what if the house you moved into wasn’t just haunted—what if it had once been a funeral home, filled with bodies, grief, and whispers of the dead?

That was the reality for the Snedeker family. Their story became the inspiration for The Haunting in Connecticut (2009), but the real events were darker, stranger, and far more disturbing than what made it onto the screen.

A Family in Desperation

In 1986, Carmen and Al Snedeker were struggling. Their teenage son, Philip, was battling Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and the family needed to relocate closer to the University of Connecticut Hospital for his treatments. Money was tight, stress was heavy, and when they found a large rental home in Southington, Connecticut, at an affordable price, it felt like a miracle.

But that miracle came with a secret.

When they began moving in, they discovered the basement wasn’t just any basement. It had metal tables, drainage pipes in the floor, embalming tools, and a strange lingering smell.

Their new home had once been a funeral parlour.

The Haunting Begins

At first, the disturbances were subtle: cold spots, misplaced objects, whispers at night. But soon, the experiences escalated into something nightmarish.

And then there was Phillip, their eldest son, who was going through treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But while in the house, he began seeing a young man with long, black hair that reached his hips. And it wasn’t just visions—Phillip’s entire personality started changing.

He became volatile, angry. He lashed out at his siblings. At one point, he even assaulted his cousin Tammy. The family had him hospitalised, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. After being discharged, Phillip went to live with relatives… and just like that—the visions and voices? Gone.

Which makes you wonder: was it the illness, or the house?

Other children also saw shadowy figures crawling along the walls.

While Carmen, the mother, reported visions of hundreds of spirits drifting silently through the house like mourners at an eternal funeral.

Desperate and terrified, the family turned to—you guessed it—Ed and Lorraine Warren.

Enter the Warrens

Lorraine, a clairvoyant, said the home was infested—not just haunted. These weren’t simple ghosts; they were violent, manipulative entities feeding off the family’s fear.

Ed claimed that morticians who once worked in the funeral home had practised necromancy and dark rituals, essentially turning the building into a gateway for demonic forces.

The Warrens brought priests to the house. An exorcism was performed. Eventually, the Snedekers claimed the activity subsided enough for them to move on with their lives.

Cue the movie deal.

But… was it really that simple? Or were there problems with the Warrens’ story?

Controversies Surrounding The Warrens

The Snedeker family’s story caught national attention. In the 1990s, it was adapted into a TV documentary, A Haunting in Connecticut, and later into a feature film.

But controversy followed. Sceptics argued that the family may have exaggerated their experiences for financial gain, or that stress and illness played a role in what they perceived. Critics of the Warrens accused them of embellishing details to fuel media attention.

There was even an incident where Ed Warren claimed he warned a famous Egyptologist, Professor Walter Bryan Emery, about not disturbing an Egyptian artefact. Emery laughed, picked it up anyway, and immediately fell into a coma. Never to wake up.

The only issue?

This was all a lie.

Emery had been in poor health for years before his death. He never collapsed from touching a statue, and he definitely didn’t fall into a coma from some ancient curse. Historical records—including the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology—show that by the late 1960s, Emery was already undergoing major surgeries, constantly in pain, and still somehow directing fieldwork in Egypt until 1971, when he passed away.

And this wasn’t even a one-off slip-up for the Warrens. They had a knack for embellishing—taking kernels of truth and spinning them into horror blockbusters before Hollywood even got involved.

In the Snedeker case, the family’s trauma could have been real—but was the haunting as dramatic as the Warrens made it out to be? 

And if they stretched the truth about Egyptian curses, how much of their other stories can we actually trust? .

Closing Thoughts

So what do we have here?

• A haunted funeral home in Connecticut, dramatised into a movie.
  
  

• A dead Egyptologist whose tragic health issues were turned into a ghost story.
  
  

• A family whose ghost stories ballooned decades later into a Hollywood blockbuster.
  
  

And threading through all of it? Ed and Lorraine Warren. Sometimes portrayed as heroic demonologists. Sometimes exposed as masterful storytellers with a talent for self-promotion.

Were the Warrens fearless defenders against the supernatural—or savvy opportunists who built an empire on fear?

In the end, maybe the scariest part isn’t the ghosts or demons… but how easily we humans believe in them. And how a good story, told often enough, can become a legend. That’s the real haunting.