by Matt St. Amand

Created on: March 01, 2009   Last Updated: March 02, 2009

Ghost stories work on me. I believe them less and less as I get older, but I'm always willing to hear the next one. I've never had anything like a supernatural experience, though, as a kid attending Catholic school, I used to be terrified I'd step out of the shower one day and find the Virgin Mary hovering above the toilet.

Years ago, a friend told me of a story he'd read about a family living in a home that had formerly been a mortuary. The book on the case, he said, was one of the most terrifying things he'd ever read. Recently, my good buddy,

Pryvett Rawgers, spoke of a Discovery Channel program he'd watched that sounded like the same incident. After doing some Internet research, I found the case was known as A Haunting in Connecticut.

This morning, I watched the Discovery Channel documentary about this case of demonic haunting.

If you're unfamiliar with the case, the details go like this: The eldest son in an upstate New York family of six had cancer and received life-sustaining treatments at a hospital in Connecticut. The long drives to and from the hospital took a toll on him, so the family decided to move closer to the hospital. They looked for homes in the area, but most were too expensive to buy, or, even to rent. Except for one house.

The house that fit their budget was a huge, rambling place only minutes away from the hospital. The price was right, and the place was clean and newly renovated.

As the mother and her husband took a final look around before signing on the dotted line, they made their way down to the basement, which was separated into two areas by a set of double doors. Beyond the double doors, they found a stainless steel table and counter, large knives and small saws and industrial-strength tongs, as well as yards of coiled rubber hosing and a counter-top pump. It didn't take long for them to realize they'd found embalming equipment. They quickly figured out that the house had once been a funeral home and this was the room where the bodies were prepared. There was even an old walk-in freezer where the bodies were stored. Not a dresser, nor a chair, nor even a magazine had been left behind by the previous tenants, but expensive embalming equipment had been. Much was made of the large home's inexpensive price, so it seemed the realtor had some trouble renting the property, and thus had lowered the price of its rent. This may have been due to people in the area knowing its history as a mortuary. But wouldn't that same business mind also get

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