The Truth About Smurl Case, Warrens

In a 2008 article that appeared in the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, five years before the first installment of the blockbuster The Conjuring franchise hit theaters, demonologist couple Ed and Lorraine Warren were taken to task. The article examined the founders of the New England Society for Psychic Research, who for decades came to the aid of those plagued by supernatural forces across a purported 10,000-plus cases. But after years building a reputation in the paranormal space, the Times Leader questioned the credibility of the couple, framing its unforgiving takedown of the duo against the local Pennsylvania case of the Smurl family.

The Smurl’s trauma is central to The Conjuring: Last Rites, the final mainline installment in the lucrative series, which has seen four films and offshoot franchises (Annabelle, The Nun) dominate at the box office since 2013. The franchise’s total haul across its films and spinoffs is a combined $2.4 billion against a budget of $263 million, making it the top grossing horror franchise in history, with Last Rites, directed by Michael Chaves, setting records for the franchise.

Absent from all four of the The Conjuring films, however, is the deep skepticism that runs through the Times Leader’s revisiting of the Smurl case. In 1986, the family’s ordeal captivated the region’s attention and drew dozens of national reporters to the area. The Warrens took notice, too. The self-taught demonologist and purported clairvoyant were well-established when they breezed into the Northeastern Pennsylvania area from Connecticut. Soon, they declared the home on Chase Street in West Pittston, Pa. to be occupied by four spirits and a demon. This was bad news for its human occupants, Jack and Janet Smurl along with their four daughters and his parents.

The series of horror films has gone to great lengths to nail the eras of when their central incidents occurred, and to portray real people with care and accuracy in fine performances, particularly from lead actors Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as Ed and Lorraine Warren, respectively. But what audiences see play out on the screen is largely the version the Warrens told, despite that, in the case of Last Rites, their version was dismissed by their peers at the time. The real story likely also involved effects of mental health conditions, misinterpretations of spooky sounds and co-dependency dynamics.

“[The Conjuring films] are the ones where we try to be true to the real-life stories that they’re based on,” longtime franchise producer James Wan said in an interview ahead of the release of The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. That 2021 hit looked at the 1983 case of alleged demonic possession, where, for the first time, a lawyer used a possession defense, telling a judge that a demon jumped from a child to a man and led him to kill his landlord. The swift guilty verdict for Arne Cheyenne Johnson, whose girlfriend had recently been mauled by his victim, speaks to the court and the public’s reaction to that wild legal strategy.

In the case of the Smurl family, the patriarch’s deteriorating mental health was speculated as the culprit for what was happening at the house. The family claimed their house was plagued with blood-curdling screams, foul stenches and other terrors: Jack Smurl and one of his daughters had been tossed around the house, as was the family’s pet German shepherd. The claims escalated to the more sensational, specifically that Jack Smurl had been attacked and sodomized by the household demon. 

According to a Times Ledger article written as the Smurl ordeal was becoming a media sensation, the father of four told a reporter that in 1983, three years before the family’s move to Chase Street, he’d had surgery to remove water from his brain. Paul Kurtz, a Buffalo State philosophy professor who chaired the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in the mid-1980s, said that before the surgery, Jack had some issues around short-term memory loss. A bout with meningitis the father had in his late 20s could have been responsible, the professor claimed, suggesting the root cause of some of the noises he said he heard. Kurtz said the Smurl family ordeal was “a hoax, a charade, a ghost story” and characterized their claims of a haunting as “mishmash.” Of the Warrens, Kurtz did not mince words, denouncing their lack of credentials in the scientific or parapsychological communities.

Many of the elements of the alleged haunting that the family described made it into the lengthy stretch of The Conjuring: Last Rites that shows the family tormented in increasingly gruesome fashion by nefarious entities, which include a creepy old woman, a younger woman and a violent axe-wielding man. The family (and dog) are tossed around on screen, tormented and sexually assaulted by one of the apparitions. Dawn Smurl, in a particularly punishing sequence, is seen vomiting shards of glass and blood; that was exaggerated from the claims, but USA Today reported in an interview with one of Smurl’s daughters that one of the younger sisters “would have episodes of throwing up whenever the Warrens would arrive.”

The film has Lorraine Warren, using her psychic visions, uncovering that the spirits in the house are masking the demonic presence — one that’s tied to the mirror at the beginning of the film that is also seen in the series’ first film. The script has the evil mirror triggering a near miscarriage of Warren’s daughter, Judy; her near-death before childbirth opens the film, and she winds up playing a central role in Last Rites. Judy becomes a vessel for the demon and ultimately helps conclude the Smurl investigation, bringing about the destruction of the demonic mirror that nearly pre-empted her own life. 

Those elements, particularly the demonic mirror, did not play a role in the actual Smurl case. The mirror plot device exists across The Conjuring films, along with fictional subplots and characters, as could be expected from a dramatic Hollywood movie retelling. Judy Warren, whose loving relationship with her parents lends an element of sentiment and family values to the story, told the website Den of Geek in 2020 that she was sent off to live with her grandparents while Ed and Lorraine were conducting their work. “I was terrified there, in their house, so I just didn’t sleep there. I couldn’t sleep in a room by myself,” she said. Now, however, she and her husband, Tony Spera, carry on the Warren legacy, running the New England Society for Psychic Research following the deaths of her parents.

As for the Smurls, the Hollywood ending has them freed from the cursed home after an action-packed conclusion. In reality, they were tired of the reporters swarming their home by August of 1986 and had ordered them to leave without resolution. Yet they decided to make a return to the media limelight as soon as December of that year, along with the Warrens, when the paperback version of their story, The Haunting, was priced at $4.50. And now, among the Last Rites‘ ending cameos, look for the real Judy and husband Tony.