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Neighborhood children lined Chase Street in West Pittston in 1986 to check out the Smurl home. The Smurl family claimed a demon haunted the house, and even caused bodily injury to the family.

TIMES LEADER FILE PHOTO

Janet, John Sr. and Jack Smurl stand in front of their residence on Chase Street in West Pittston, a house they claimed was haunted by a demon in 1985 and 1986.

TIMES LEADER FILE PHOTO

Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” was the No. 1 song in America in August 1986.
Tina Turner’s star was unveiled in Hollywood, too.
And Jack and Janet Smurl, then of West Pittston, told the world a demon was haunting their Chase Street home for nearly 18 months.
The Smurl family, Jack and Janet and their four daughters, lived on one side of the double-block home at 330 Chase St., while Jack’s parents, John and Mary, occupied the other side.
The Smurls claimed that their 75-pound German shepherd was slammed into a wall by the demon; that it had bitten Jack’s ear and shaken the couple’s mattress. They even said the spirit threw one of their daughters down a flight of stairs.
But it didn’t stop there.
The family said they heard blood-curdling screams at all hours of the night, pig grunts and smelled a horrible stench.
Jack said the demon once dragged him on his knees while he said the rosary and tried to beat him into submission and that he had been sexually assaulted by the demon on several occasions.
“Demon is in that home”
The family called in Edward Warren, the director of the New England Society for Psychic Research, and his wife, Lorraine, to investigate in January 1986.
According to Warren and his team of investigators, there was a very powerful demon in the home, which had gotten progressively stronger through the years.
“The Smurls are truly a family coming under a visual attack,” Warren said. “The ghost, devil, demon – or whatever you call it – is in that home.”
After months of investigation, Warren claimed he had audiotapes of knocking, rapping and dark shadows that belonged to the demon.
“We’re dealing with an intelligence here,” he said in an article that appeared in The Times Leader in August 1986. “It’s powerful, intangible and very dangerous.”
Warren, who seemed to be the only person who believed the Smurls at the time, said the first night he was at the home he used the name of Jesus Christ and a crucifix, holy water and holy oil.
“I did not have to wait moments when the very thing I felt was a drop in temperature of at least 30-some degrees,” Warren said. “Then, a dark mass formed about three feet in front of me. There was a sound in back of me, I could hear rattling around.”
Warren said items on the bureau began jumping around and falling off, and the mattress on the bed in the Smurls’ bedroom was jumping up and down, too. Warren said he then commanded whatever was in the home to leave in the name of Jesus Christ.
“…There’s something in this home, which has the intelligence to inflict physical and psychological harm upon this family,” Warren said.
A chorus of Smurl doubters
Paul Kurtz, a philosophy professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, said the Warrens weren’t objective, independent, or impartial investigators when they were called to the Smurl home.
“They have no credentials in the scientific or parapsychological communities,” Kurtz said in an August 28, 1986 Times Leader article, adding that the whole Smurl family ordeal was “a hoax, a charade, a ghost story.”
Kurtz later called the Smurls’ claims “mishmash.”
“There is no explanation for the Smurl house, but I wouldn’t simply assume it is a haunting,” Kurtz said. “It seems to us that a great-to-do has been made about it, and we wonder if it is like the Amityville horror hoax, which was based on imagination rather than on actual haunting,” he said.
Stephen Kaplan, director of the Parapsychology Institute of America in New York City, said at the time that the case was a hoax, too.
In October 1986, George Joseph Kresge Jr., a mentalist, also known as “The Amazing Kreskin,” showed up in the Wyoming Valley to nullify the Smurls’ claims.
He demonstrated several ways things can shake and go bump in the night without the help of the supernatural. He told news reporters and bystanders to think about the most violent thought they could, and a table then leaned to one side and crashed to the floor, taking a glass of water with it.
Kresge said he wanted to demonstrate that things appear to move by themselves without the help of the supernatural, although he wouldn’t disclose how he toppled the table or performed a similar trick with a block of wood.
Kresge, who was in the area to publicize his appearances at the Genetti Dinner Playhouse in Hazleton, said he had investigated and researched more than 200 stories similar to the Smurls’ and those incidents almost always involved young teenagers.
Nearing the end of August 1986, Kurtz called for a group of scientists to offer free psychiatric and psychological help to the Smurls. But the Smurls felt they needed no help.
“We think it’s important that Mr. Smurl and others in the Smurl family, submit themselves to psychiatric and psychological examinations,” Kurtz said.
“People often look at demonology to explain many tensions that they experience as individuals and within their families and they should consult mental health professionals that are not looking at them as sick or bad, but will help to alleviate their sufferings,” said Dr. Robert Gordon, a psychologist from Allentown in a August 1986, Times Leader article.
“The question has been raised as to whether or not Mr. Smurl is delusional or is suffering from hallucinations or brain impairment,” Kurtz said.
The article said that Jack Smurl told a reporter he did have surgery to remove water from his brain in 1983. Before the surgery, Jack said he had been experiencing short-term memory loss and that the problem probably stemmed from meningitis he suffered when he was in his late 20s.
Smurl said that at least 30 people, including neighbors and other family, have experienced the same strange occurrences at the home, and that his family didn’t need the help.
In February 1988, a woman named Debra Owens moved into the Smurls’ home after they sold it and moved to Wilkes-Barre. She told a Times Leader reporter that she never encountered anything supernatural while living at the home. And a man who lived in the other side of the double-block home said nothing unusual ever happened there either.
“Unsuccessful” exorcisms
A Catholic priest from Connecticut was asked by the Smurls to perform an exorcism in their home in 1986. That priest, who was never identified, said he performed three “unsuccessful” exorcisms.
Janet Smurl said the demons avoided the exorcisms by traveling back and forth between the double-block home. And that the demons even follow the family when they leave. One time, she said, when the family was leaving in the camper, there were banging noises on the roof as they drove away, and the trailer started to shake.
Janet Smurl said because of the failed exorcisms and media and religious attention, the demons had begun making terrible animal noises.
The Diocese of Scranton said on Aug. 20 that it decided the family was telling the truth.
“But we don’t know what’s causing the disturbances,” said the Rev. Gerald Mullally, chancellor for the diocese at the time. “We are taking their claims very seriously.”
The Rev. Alphonsus Trabold, a theology professor at St. Bonaventure University in New York, was called in by the Diocese of Scranton to look into the Smurls’ claims, and that there might be another less demonic explanation.
In an Aug. 23, 1986 article, Trabold said he didn’t plan on visiting the Smurl home, but would make a determination on whether the story was true or a matter of hallucination.
“It may be caused by any number of things,” said the Rev. Neil J. Van Loon, secretary to Bishop James C. Timlin at the time. Van Loon said the bishop declined to comment on the matter, but would make a final decision as to whether the Diocese of Scranton would perform an exorcism on the house.
The home was blessed by several local parish priests, who said they saw no activity that proved harmful while on the property.
On Oct. 2, 1986, a priest from the diocese spent two nights at the Smurl home. He later said nothing unusual happened during his stay there.
Story becomes book, movie
On Aug. 25, 1986, the Smurls told news reporters to “get out” of their home. They were tired of the constant bombardment of reporters and TV cameras. They thought by telling their story, they could get some help; but that only backfired when 80 to 90 reporters would show up on any given day, Janet Smurl said. She added that she had once received 150 phone messages for interviews.
A few months later in December, the Smurls were back in the limelight again.
The paperback version of their story, titled “The Haunted,” was being sold for $4.50 just in time for Christmas; $16.95 for the hardcover.
The 260-page book was written by Scrantonian-Tribune staff writer Robert Curran, and was published by St. Martin’s Press in New York City.
Reports said the book was headed for the best-sellers list, and a television movie adaptation wasn’t out of the question.
But, reviewers slammed the book, citing mostly that Curran didn’t tell both sides of the story.
“Scranton newspaper writer Robert Curran forsakes the principles of his trade to give readers a one-sided account of what did or didn’t occur over several years in Jack and Janet Smurl’s former home on Chase Street in West Pittston,” said Times Leader staff writer Joseph Marusak in a December article.
Mary Beth Gehrman, a national author who reviewed the book, said the book wouldn’t even make a good fiction read since it was so poorly written.
“Whether or not the Smurls are truly convinced that they were being haunted…is a matter for speculation,” Gehrman said. “But it is hard to conceive of a supposedly sophisticated objective and (as far as I know, at least until now) credible reporter like Curran taking their story seriously given the complete lack of any empirical or physical evidence to support it.”
In April 1991, “The Haunted” made it to the small screen as a movie made for TV, starring Jeffrey DeMunn as Jack Smurl and Sally Kirkland as Janet Smurl.
The two-hour movie was directed by Robert Mandel, and was released nationally by FOX.
Kirkland, who was once nominated for an Academy Award for the film “Anna,” said in a Times Leader interview that she was excited to play the part of Janet Smurl for one reason and one reason only.
“I’ve never played a mother,” Kirkland said in the May 1991 interview. “I’ve never played a housewife. I generally get cast as a difficult woman. For all those reasons, I was very excited about ‘The Haunted.’ Most good actors want to do a stretch.”
Kirkland researched the story of the Smurls for some time before beginning the movie, and found the story to be interesting.
“It was easy to believe what happened in West Pittston. ‘The Haunted’ is going to make it very personal for (the audiences),” Kirkland said. “This is not a ‘boo’ story. I’m not interested in ghost stories. I’m interested in true stories that happen to women who could be me.”
Reporters from the New York Post, Cable News Network, CBS News and crews from Philadelphia and New York covered the Smurls’ story, and The National Enquirer published an “exclusive” article in September 1986.
Smurls: “Prayers answered”
The Rev. Joseph Adonizio, pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish in West Pittston at the time, said in an Oct. 28, 1986, article that “Prayers have chased the foul smells and violent demons from the West Pittston home.”
“(The Smurls) felt that after their intense prayers in the church and through the prayers of the congregation, things are back to normal,” Adonizio said.
The Smurls said in published reports that their problems seemed to have been solved, but only time could tell.
“We believe the elimination of our problem can only be credited to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Michael the Archangel, to the Sacred Heart of Jesus who have answered our prayers, and the prayers of the thousands of others through the rosary,” the Smurls said.
And in an October 1987 article, Janet Smurl said some of the problems were still going on, but nothing they couldn’t handle.
“We want peace and quiet,” Smurl said, adding that the family still heard knocking and saw shadows.
Smurl said the family got together with a group and recited the rosary on week nights, and religious items could be found throughout the home.
The Smurls lived in West Pittston for a short time, and eventually moved to Wilkes-Barre. It is unknown if the family is still living in the area.