The Smurl haunting

Jack and Janet Smurl said demons tormented their family in a duplex in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. They went public in 1986 and drew in Ed and Lorraine Warren. A critic, Kurtz, called the affair a hoax.

UPI reported in 1986 that Jack and Janet Smurl, their four daughters, and Jack's parents, who lived in the duplex's second unit, had gone public that week. They said demons had made their lives a misery for 18 months, and that a priest had twice tried to clear the house and failed. Wikipedia says the couple placed the demon in the home from 1974 to 1989.

The Morbid podcast says the Smurls described ghosts in the halls, a tormented family dog, attacks on the children and sexual assaults on the adults. A Times Leader story started weeks of coverage that drew reporters from across Pennsylvania and neighbouring states and brought in the demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren.

In the Times Leader on 28 August 1986, Kurtz said the investigators had no standing among scientists or parapsychologists, and dismissed the whole affair as a hoax and a ghost story. Wikipedia says the demonologists encouraged the family to blame demons, while clergy, psychologists and skeptics offered simpler explanations.

The family listed the house for sale in the middle of 1987 and moved to the Wilkes-Barre area, UPI reported in 1988. The same report said a book about them, The Haunted, was due out that March. People said in 2025 that the film The Conjuring: Last Rites was based on the Smurls' story.