What would you do if strange noises in your home escalated to violent, invisible attacks? For the Smurl family, this wasn’t a horror movie plot—it was a four-year nightmare that became the true story source for The Conjuring: Last Rites. Long before Hollywood, the ordinary family’s claims of a demonic presence in their West Pittston, Pennsylvania, home made national headlines. So what is the Smurl haunting, and what really happened on Chase Street? (Father Gordon Conjuring Real)
What Disturbing Events Did the Smurl Family Claim to Experience?
The nightmare on Chase Street didn’t begin with a bang. Starting around 1974, the Smurls experienced what seemed like low-level poltergeist activity. Mysterious stains appeared on carpets, unplugged radios blared to life, and foul odors would suddenly fill a room before vanishing. For years, the family dismissed these unsettling events as quirks of an old house.
By the mid-1980s, the phenomena grew undeniably more aggressive. The family claimed to hear loud knocking and scratching sounds from within the walls, a chilling detail from many Jack and Janet Smurl interviews from the era. Objects would reportedly fly across rooms, a black, shadowy figure was seen by multiple family members, and the activity became physical. Both Jack and Janet reported being shoved or tripped by an unseen force.
This escalation culminated in claims of terrifying personal attacks. Janet Smurl alleged she was levitated and violently thrown from her bed, while both she and Jack reported physical and sexual assaults by an invisible entity. With little concrete physical evidence of the Smurl haunting to show skeptical police, the desperate family realized they were facing something far beyond a simple ghost.
Why Did Ed & Lorraine Warren’s Involvement Spark a National Debate?
When paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren arrived in 1986, their diagnosis dramatically raised the stakes. The Ed and Lorraine Warren Smurl investigation concluded this was no mere ghost. Instead, they claimed a powerful demon had infested the home—an entity that was intelligent, malevolent, and specifically targeting the family. This shifted the problem from a simple haunting to a case of demonic oppression.
This demonic diagnosis led the family to seek help from the Catholic Church, which added a layer of institutional legitimacy to their claims. After its own investigation, the Diocese of Scranton sanctioned two official exorcisms of the Smurl family. However, the Smurls reported that the rites failed and only seemed to make the entity angrier, escalating the violent encounters.
As the Smurls’ story hit national news, it ignited fierce Smurl haunting skepticism and debunking. Critics pointed out the convenient lack of physical evidence and the fact that no neighbors ever witnessed the extreme events. When the family’s ordeal led to a book deal and the 1991 movie The Haunted, many argued the motivation was fame or financial gain, dismissing the case as group hysteria.
What Is the Smurl Haunting’s Legacy Today?
After the family moved, the reported paranormal activity eventually faded. The Smurl haunting remains one of the most polarizing cases in American paranormal history. Was it a genuine demonic infestation, as the Warrens claimed, or a complex hoax fueled by hysteria and financial motivation? Lacking definitive proof, the story leaves behind a chilling legacy of unanswered questions, cementing its place as a compelling true story behind horror films like The Conjuring: Last Rites.