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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.

Learn more about this author, Matt St. Amand.
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