The Smurl Haunting: A Pennsylvania Family's Thirteen Years

You would know the house by how ordinary it looks: a green double-block on a quiet street in West Pittston, Pennsylvania, two families sharing one roof, a driveway, curtains, a lawn. Nothing about it warns you. That is the part the Smurls kept returning to when they finally spoke, that it was a normal home on a normal street and it went wrong slowly.

Jack and Janet Smurl moved into their half of the duplex in 1973 with their daughters, Jack's parents living on the other side. By their account the trouble started small the following year, then escalated across more than a decade: stains that reappeared, a radio that played on its own, scratching in the walls, and a smell they compared to rotting flesh that came and went without a source. Over time the claims grew far darker, including violent physical attacks, sounds like a woman's screaming, and Jack's assertion that a demonic presence sexually assaulted him. The family said the phenomena followed them even on a getaway, which is what convinced them it was not the house alone.

Enter the Warrens

In 1986 the Smurls went public and brought in Ed and Lorraine Warren, the self-styled demonologists later made famous by the Conjuring films. The Warrens declared the home infested by four spirits, one of them a demon, and staged attempts at religious intervention; a priest was involved, and further clergy were sought. The story ran in the Pittston and Wilkes-Barre papers, went national, and produced a 1988 book, "The Haunted," co-written with Robert Curran, and a 1991 television film. For a stretch the block drew sightseers.

What skeptics pointed at

Investigators outside the Warrens' circle offered plainer readings. Some noted that the duplex sat near sources of odor and noise that could account for smells and sounds; others focused on the absence of any physical evidence beyond testimony, and on the Warrens' long record of arriving at demonic conclusions. Paul Kurtz's Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal examined the case and found nothing that required a supernatural cause. The Smurls, for their part, never recanted and gained nothing obvious but scrutiny; Jack Smurl maintained the account until his death.

Where the case sits now

Two honest facts survive together. There is no verified physical evidence that anything paranormal happened in that house, and the Warrens' involvement is a strong reason for caution, given how often their investigations reached the same dramatic verdict. And a family with no clear motive insisted, for years and against their own comfort, that something in their home hunted them. Both of those are true, and neither cancels the other.

A little residue clings to the tidy skeptical version. It explains the smell and the noise; it is quieter about the specific, dated nights the Smurls described in detail, and about why an ordinary couple would trade a private life for a decade of being disbelieved.

Below, readers have filed their own family-haunting stories of this kind and are marking them True, Fake, or Not sure. Weigh the Smurls' account against your own, and rule.