'Haunting' dramatizes 1980s Southington case

'Haunting' dramatizes 1980s Southington case
March 23, 2009
By Joe Meyers
Connecticut Post

The Haunting in Connecticut" was filmed entirely in Canada last year, but there is still a local angle to this tale of demons and possession.

John Zaffis of Stratford, who investigated the case upon which the movie is based -- along with his famous aunt and uncle, Ed and Lorraine Warren -- served as technical adviser to the film starring Virginia Madsen that opens Friday.

Zaffis has been so busy with his own work -- including a speaking engagement that will take him to Gettysburg, Pa., on Friday, the movie's opening day -- that he hasn't been able to see an advance screening.

"It's killing me," he said in an interview last week. "I really want to see it."

The names have all been changed in the movie drawn from the Southington case investigated by the Warrens and Zaffis in the summer of 1988, after Carmen Snedeker sought their help for supernatural disturbances affecting her son.

It turned out that Carmen, her husband, Al, and their three children had moved into a former funeral home.

For Zaffis, this was a scary introduction to the field of paranormal research. It was the first case Zaffis worked on in which he had an encounter "with a full formed demon."

"It was absolutely horrifying. I haven't seen anything else to that degree since then," the researcher added.

The Southington case has already inspired a book by Ray Garton and a documentary on The Discovery Channel that was called "A Haunting in Connecticut."

Warren died in 2006 and his widow, Lorraine, was not involved with the film.

Zaffis assumes the movie will take some liberties with the facts of the case. "You know how Hollywood is," he said. "I basically gave them information on my experience in the house ... the nine-and-a-half weeks of investigation."

Even the two-hour documentary on The Discovery Channel shifted things around a bit for storytelling purposes. "Instead of coming down the stairs, it came up from the basement,"

Zaffis said of the sequence in the TV show involving the demon.

The case was a turning point for Zaffis.

"I made the decision not to work anymore because it scared the crap out of me," he recalled, adding that eventually he decided the only way to get a handle on his personal anxiety was to keep "looking for answers."

"What causes energy to do these things? Where the heck does a spirit or soul go?" he said of two of the biggest questions faced by anyone researching the paranormal.

"There is just so much we don't know. I've been doing it for 36 years and I still have so many questions," he said.

The public is even more interested in the subject of ghosts and the paranormal now than it was in the 1980s. The
FICTION Lionsgate films releases a fictionalized telling of the haunting this week.
Discovery Channel and other cable channels continue to produce specials and series such as "Ghost Hunters" devoted to the supernatural. "People are more eager to talk about their experiences when they see someone talking about it on television," Zaffis said.

"I do a lot of campus and library lectures," he said. "In the past couple of years the popularity of the subject has taken off. People are interested in it and they're talking about it. I've never been so busy."

In years past, interest in Zaffis as a lecturer would spike in the weeks leading up to Halloween.

"Now it's like October all year round," he said with a chuckle.

Staff writer Aaron Leo contributed to this story.

"A Haunting in Connecticut" opens nationally on Friday. John Zaffis maintains a Web site at www.johnzaffis.co