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 rid of the macabre equipment from the basement? More realistically, wouldn't that equipment have been sold in an estate sale? Specialized equipment like that is expensive. No one would simply abandon it, but abandon nothing else in the house.
The parents made two decisions with their newfound information: they would hide the house's history from their children, and they decided that the basement area would make a great bedroom for their sick son and his younger brother. Surely a dank basement in an old house in Connecticut would be the perfect healing environment for a child with cancer.
This early point in the documentary reminded me of a friend's comment: "There would be no horror movies without stupid people."
Before moving in to the rental property, the mother stopped by one day with her eldest son after one of his treatments. She was going to do some tidying and wanted him to have a chance to see the place and acclimate himself. As it turned out, the boy got a real welcome from the house - a voice emanating from the basement called him by name. Duly freaked-out, he ran to find his mother. She was in the kitchen dealing with her own problems. As she mopped the kitchen floor, the mop water turned to a red, blood-like substance on the linoleum. The more she mopped, the more the mess spread. The realtor was on hand to help clean this up, and luckily the women sopped up the last of the red mess just as the frightened boy came running in.
Untroubled by the mysterious manifestation of blood on the kitchen floor, or the house calling her son by name, the mother reassured the boy that the family would be very happy in their new home.
So, with the hick, backward hospitals of New York unsuitable to treat their son's cancer, the family moved to rural Connecticut where there stood a top flight cancer hospital amid the snow-covered pastures. The former mortuary quickly turned into home.
Since the family was so large, the mother bought large quantities of food in bulk, storing it in the large, walk-in freezer in the basement - the one that, presumably, had housed dead bodies in the past. A legion of national surgeons general could assure me that, with a proper cleaning, there would be nothing wrong in storing one's food in a freezer that had once dead bodies, but the only voice that really matters - the one in my head, connected to the intelligence agency in my gut - would be screaming, "Are you kidding me?"
And so the requisite aspects of a haunting unfolded - apparitions appearing to the children, voices calling the eldest son's name, figures seen moving around behind the double doors in the basement in the middle of the night, the youngest daughter going to the basement one night and flicking the lights off and on, even though the light sockets contained no light bulbs (it being ever-so-logical that the family neglected to put any lights in the dark, eerie basement where they forced their sons to bunk). Even the mother had a supernatural experience beyond the blood-mopping: after setting the table, she turned to answer the phone and when she turned back to the table, the dishes were gone. If only the entity in the house could do that after each meal, rather than before.
Even so, the mother didn't believe her children's reports of odd happenings. And the hardworking, salt-of-the-earth father was even more ardent in his refusal to believe his children. I mean, after all, weren't they successfully raising a houseful of liars? The good news, though, was by that time the eldest son's cancer had gone into remission. He was saved. There was no longer any reason to remain in the odd home where the children were becoming increasingly creeped-out. Really, how many times could the father dismiss a bloodcurdling cry in the night, seeming to emanate from the walls, as "the house settling"? Many, many, many times. In fact, a crazy number of times. Actually, as often and with as much intensity as his children reported being frightened by strange happenings and visitations by frightening, ominous beings. The parents had endless energy for dismissing their children's concerns and fears; like Japanese ping-pong champs volleying back platitudes to assuage the children: "There, there, Suzy, that floating severed head above your bed? That's just the wind. You go back to bed now, and no more of this foolishness!"
Following one too many haunting occurrences, the family sought to have the house exorcised. How far the pendulum swings! Unfortunately, by that time, the eldest son had confronted the demonic voice in the house that summoned him nightly. And the proprietor of the demonic voice filled the boy's head with innumerable ideas of horrible acts to perpetrate upon his family. The boy didn't act on any of these preternatural suggestions, but he recorded them in a journal that would later be found, and would cement in his parents' minds his seamless insanity.
Also at that time, the eldest son took to dressing in dark clothing and became morose around the family. Truly strange, unnatural and unusual behavior for an adolescent boy!
Events in the house escalated in a way that was painfully predictable and oddly boring, culminating with the discovery of the eldest son's incriminating journal and his hospitalization in a mental ward. Much as his parents believed that would be the end of their children's frightening experiences in the house, things only got worse.
Paranormal investigators were called in and more predictable, banal acts of haunting and demonstrations of the demonic took place. It was assembly line terror by that point. Finally, finally, finally the local branch of the Catholic Church agreed to do an exorcism. Which brought one of the most comic aspects of this improbable story - the priest's method of dealing with overt manifestations of evil: to ignore them. It seemed that method had worked so well in the Church's efforts to combat the problem of pedophilia among its priestly ranks, that it enlisted this method when dealing directly with the devil.
The exorcism was performed, during which a few books were knocked from a bookshelf - which everyone conspicuously ignored - and the house was finally freed from its demonic occupant.
It was more than a little amazing how much time and effort and expense the family put into ridding a house they were only renting of demonic possession. I could see the realtor - there was no "landlord" in this story - contacting the mother, saying, "You appear to be several months behind in the rent." To which the mother would respond, "Oh well, we've put a thousand dollars in holy water into the house. Not to mention, a few thousand more in demonologists, psychics and ectoplasm collection. These folks don't work cheap! So, we just took that out of the rent. Hope that's OK!"
Once the home was finally rid of the diabolical presence, the family moved out of the house - such was their tremendous faith in the success of the exorcism. Or, maybe they were a clan of supernatural house flippers, moving from possessed-former-mortuary to possessed-former-mortuary, exorcising the evil and selling the houses at a profit. All of which might make some sort of twisted sense if not for the fact that they were only renting the original house. So, it would seem, once the eldest child beat cancer - and kudos for that! - the parents simply chose to remain in a house where their children felt utterly unsafe, gripped in an unbreakable beartrap of fear. Well, isn't that why we have therapists?
Clearly A Haunting in Connecticut is not only a lie, a myth, a fantasy, it's a poorly conceived story, with more red flags than a . . . than something with a ton of red flags. As a person who is inclined to take such stories on-board and to then be freaked out when alone in my own house, I found this story laughable, implausible and frankly, quite dull. The supposed family members who endured these bogus events were all interviewed in silhouette in the documentary, presumably in case their former demonic housemate watched The Discovery Channel, and recognized them talking about him. If nothing else, the actor who played the demon had an awesome beard.