The Devil's Rocking Chair

A rocking chair tied to a claimed possession case told in The Devil in Connecticut, a book, bought by Zak Bagans in 2019 and shown at his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. A Glatzel brother has called the possession story phony.

The Devil's Rocking Chair is an exhibit at Zak Bagans' The Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. The museum's website lists it among its objects and calls it the real chair behind the film The Conjuring 3. Kenny Biddle wrote in Skeptical Inquirer in 2019 that Bagans had bought it from Carl Glatzel Jr. earlier that year. According to Wikipedia, the exhibit was briefly shut on 27 May 2019 after a visitor fainted, and it reopened on 7 June.

Biddle wrote that Carl Glatzel Jr.'s younger brother, then 11, was at the centre of the possession case told in that book, and that the boy began to behave very strangely.

The case is tied to a real killing. On 16 February 1981, People magazine reported that year, Arne Cheyenne Johnson, 19, who worked as a tree surgeon, stabbed Alan Bono, his 40-year-old landlord, several times in the chest with a pocket knife in Brookfield, Connecticut, while Debbie Glatzel, his fiancée, looked on. Bono died about an hour later. People noted that it was the first recorded homicide in the town's 193 years. People's headline asked whether demonic possession would decide the trial. The University of Virginia law library records that the novel defence put forward by Johnson's lawyer, Minnella, was barred, and that press interest in the trial then faded.

The family has disputed the story. In 2006, when the Warrens' book about the case came out again, another Glatzel brother went to court for damages, the law library says. He called the occult account a phony story, told for money and fame at the family's expense.