Every Town - Do You Believe The Smurls Family Poltergeist Is Real? Because You Should

Episode Date: January 6, 2024

There’s a decent amount of ghost stories that appear to be nothing more than just a story meant to scare or the creation of an overactive imagination…But every once and a while you come across one, like the story of what happened to the Smurls. So let’s head over to Pennsylvania now and dig into all the details of the Smurls Family Poltergeist. 💥 Watch Episode On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/scarymysteries 🎃 Exclusive Content & Perks: https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries 🎧 Our Other Podcast - Scary Mysteries: https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT 👁 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald 💀 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg 💥 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial 🗣 Business Inquiries: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Shopify. coms bar records. If you love true crime, grab your favorite mug and pour yourself a dose of creepy true crime every single morning with a morning cup of murder. This short daily show is the perfect podcast to incorporate into your morning routine, because in less than 15 minutes, you'll hear about a true crime that took place on a day's date in history. Each day's dark history lesson will kickstart your morning with intriguing tales of murder, abduction, serial killers, cults, and everything. in between. With over 20 million downloads, Morning Cup of Murder has something for every true crime lover. One listener describes the show as a small package with a powerful punch of crime.

Another writes that the show is an absolute delight in the morning. Support yourself a piping hot cup of murder every single morning with Morning Cup of Murder. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. as a dark side. If you have a type of bomb with your family, well, for one, you're lucky, and you also know just how important it is to have those people in your lives.

Whoever they are, your mom, dad, grandparents, sibling, always have your back and provide support and help whenever needed, no questions asked. The Smurl's family from Pennsylvania were exactly like this. They were tight-knit, religious, and took care of one another,

which is why when a natural disaster occurred in 1972, they all decided to move in together under one roof to start life anew. The only problem, though, was something they never could have anticipated. The new house they moved into was possessed by poltergeist. As soon, they were causing terrifying things to happen to all eight people in the Smurl's family, and it almost tore them apart, literally. Hey guys, it's Andrew and thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Everytown. We're covering one of my favorite and generally controversial topics, real-life hauntings.

And there's a decent amount of ghost stories that appear to be nothing more than just a tale meant to scare or the creation of an overactive imagination. But every once in a while you come across one, like the story of what happened in the smurls that makes you pause and wonder. Did this actually happen? And if so, what does that mean in terms of our understanding of the afterlife? Believe in them or not, a story of the Smurals is terrifying. Back in the 80s, it created a media frenzy for the otherwise normal American family. So, let's head over to Pennsylvania now and dig in to all the details of the Smurrell's family poltergeist. Jack and his wife, Janet, were Pennsylvanians born in

raised. Zuming in on the state, and more specifically were from in and around the Wilkes Bar area, which is in the northeastern part of the state. Jack grew up middle class. After school, he spent some time in the Navy before meeting Janet in his hometown in 1967. And both of them had come from families with religious backgrounds. Both were devout Roman Catholics who attended church regularly. So not long after they met was when Jack proposed. About a year later, they then got married. The pair were well liked in their community as they got involved in various church activities and organizations. Perhaps because of that religious background, the Smurals chose to stay close to Jack's parents and get a house close to theirs in Wilkes Bar.

Maybe they just liked the area, or maybe it was a bit of both. It doesn't really matter other than to say that this family was close, respectful to one another and good upstanding citizens. By 1972, the Smurals had brought two lovely daughters into the world, Don and Heather. Jack enjoyed his work as the production manager over at the Topps Chewing Gum facility, back when they still put gum into packs of baseball cards. The position didn't pay a ton. The Smurals were far from rich, but it was enough for them to get by.

After all, they weren't the 10. types to be interested in accumulating material possessions anyway. They had God and each other, that was good enough for them. As a saying goes, and as they would soon find out, the Lord works in mysterious ways. And in the early summer of 72, the Smurl's lives would change forever, and they would never be the same again. That year, Hurricane Agnes swept through the U.S. It started down in the Gulf of Mexico and worked its way north all the way to Keele's.

Canada. At the time, it was the costliest hurricane ever to hit the states, creating $2.1 billion in damages and killing 128 people. Agnes severely flooded the Saskahana and Lackawanna River, causing major damage to the Wilkes-Barre-Skrant metropolitan area. In both Pennsylvania and New Jersey combined, about 43,594 structures were either destroyed or significantly damaged, including the Smurles' home and Jack's parents, John and Mary's house. With no other option but to relocate, both families moved north to the town of West Pittston and Luzerne County, which was around just 20 minutes away. On Chase Street, typical suburban road line with modest homes, they found a nice little duplex that they paid $18,000 for, which in today's dollars would be about $150K.

And from the naked eye, there was nothing that stood out about this property, certainly no glaring red flags. The house had originally been built in 1896, and it suited the smurls as well. As Jack's parents would go on to live in the right half, while Jack, Janet, and their two daughters moved into the left half. They spent some money on renovations, mainly focusing on getting new bathrooms in. And even though they had lost their two houses in Agnes, at this point, all was pretty much. pretty right in the Smurles' world. Well, at least for a little while. But soon some very strange things started to happen that made the family start to question their sanity. Now, if you've ever spent any time reading up or hearing about stories that revolve around hauntings or poltergeist,

and since you're listening to this, I assume you have. You may have noticed that typically, these entities are ghosts or whatever you want to call them. Don't just come out swinging and doing terrible things to people right out of the gate. While the most terrible things that happen are what you may remember most, in general, if there's a malevolent spirit, it starts out acting friendly or playful even. They do just enough to get your attention, but not enough to scare you away. So items being misplaced are common.

Doors opening and closing on their own, lights flickering, you know the basics. If the entity were to show itself at a major way too soon, say, throw a TV across a room, for example, most people would immediately get out of whatever home they were in and never come back. The entities seem to understand this, and so poltergeist generally work on gaining trust in order to become a part of a person or family's lives. It's a slow rollout, so they get accepted, and before you know it, the people experiencing very strange things start to almost consider it just a normal part of their day. By 19th, In 174 for the Smurals, this is exactly what happened.

One day when Jack was putting together a piece of furniture, the screwdriver he was using just disappeared. One second he had it, it was literally just using it, and the next it was gone. Of course, if this happened to you, you'd find it strange, but you wouldn't immediately think it was an otherworldly being messing with you. You'd just think you had a lapse of memory.

Maybe put it in the pocket of a coat and hung that up somewhere. Maybe it fell and rolled into a heating grate and lost forever. You don't really know, but in your head, of course, there's a rational explanation, and that's what Jack thought. The other family members were then losing items, too. Clothing was a big thing. Janet's favorite shirt was all of a sudden nowhere to be found, but again, she assumed she just misplaced it. Toilets in the house then started flushing on their own. Well, it must be a plumbing issue.

Bureau drawers were found to oh. when the smurls were sure they had closed them. The doors in the home creaked open and shut at all hours of the night. Lights flickered on and off, so it was weird, but the house was old. They also had remodeled the bathroom, so maybe something happened during that that was causing the toilet issues. And so that's how things went for about a year or so until it started to become harder and harder to rationalize everything.

At some point, with so many odd occurrences that only intensified and got to be able to weird as time went on. You have to question the possibility that perhaps something you never even considered is the thing causing problems. Those toilets and the plumbing in general were becoming a real issue for the smurls. Even though they had completely remodeled a bathroom with a new sink, bathtub, and wood molding leaking pipes were a constant. They happened all throughout the house, too, not just in the newly renoed parts. A professional came in to fix the leaks in one spot and then another place would leak. Fix that, and then another leak would pop up somewhere else. Bring in a new guy because the first one maybe did shoddy work, but the same thing kept happening.

No matter how many times they re-soddered, the leaks continued. And then one day some woodwork in the bathroom looked as though it had been clawed by some sort of animal. The Smurls had a German shepherd, but he had never done anything like this to the furniture, and plus These claw marks were close to the ceiling in a place the dog couldn't reach even if it tried. So what happened there? Did a wild animal get in and scratch the place up? Not long after that, the new sink and new bathtub were also all scratched up, and pretty severely too. The smurls were experiencing things that were far from normal and looking for explanations. That's when old as daughter Don mentioned something she'd been scared to talk about out of fear of ridicule.

But she was willing to be brave and put herself on the line in order to say what perhaps everyone else was afraid to. And maybe they were dealing with some sort of poltergeist. Her reason behind this, above all the weird things happening, was because for some time at night, she'd been seeing tall apparitions that looked like people floating around her bedroom. Something like this would have sounded crazy at any other time, but everyone in the house who was hearing, seeing, and even smelling terrible symptoms, had to at least entertain the thought.

A few years into the new house at this point, and there was a new addition of the family. Twin Shannon and Karen had been born. The family was growing frustrated and fatigued by the increasing phenomena. Jack and Janet now had to worry about their two new additions in protecting them. Who knows what they were potentially experiencing themselves, unable to tell their parents or even protect themselves in any way. For months, foul and unusual smells plagued the home too.

Constant odor of something musty or rotting or burning permeated the rooms, but no source could be found. Once Dawn told her story, her grandmother Mary came forward with her tale about how one day recently, while Jack was out at work, she heard Jack and Janet arguing over on the other side of the house. She knew Mary was the only person home, so she went over. to check, and sure enough, there was no Jack, and Janet was just quietly doing laundry. Mary would also go on to talk about how on certain nights in her living room, she would see a black figure move across the room. At this point, every sound or trick of light stood out to everyone who was on edge. The family would hear faint voices and footsteps coming from places in the

home where nobody was. The final tipping point for Jack came one night when he was trying to relax and watched some baseball. While he was enjoying the Phillies play Cincinnati, his TV inexplicably burst into flames before it shot across the room as if thrown by some unseen force. And now the Smurles' nice little duplex on Chase Street that on the surface it seemed so normal

and brought everyone together under one roof had something inside it with very bad intentions. Even though reluctantly, at this point with no other place to turn, they did would seem like the most necessary. natural thing for them, and reached out to their church asking for some sort of help. From there, they were directed to ask the diocese of Scranton for assistance, but they refused. Simply put, sometimes it's bad PR for a church to get involved in these types of situations. If they do,

it's often done quietly, but in this case, while the family petitioned several times for the church to step in, they were refused. As if on cue and knowing the Smurls were trying to get rid of it. This entity stepped up its game. On separate occasions, every single family member, including the dog, were harmed in some way physically. They had been slapped, scratched, and bitten. One night when Jack was sleeping, he woke up to a creepy old lady standing over him with red eyes and a rotted out mouth touching him. He grabbed his rosary beads and began to pray. That's when he was violently dragged out of his bed. And Janet, in a later interview, would go on to say, I know what people must think that we're crazy, but eight people live in this house.

Eight people have experienced this. Eight people are not crazy. At this point, you might be asking, well, why didn't they just move out and be done with this? Clearly, this entity is angry you moved in, maybe even pissed off by the changes you made with what they considered to be their house. So, just get up and go. Well, it wasn't that easy. For one, the Smurls were struggling a bit financially. Remember, they had lost all their belongings in the hurricane and those needed to be replaced. They bought a new house and made renovation, so it wasn't that easy. On top of that, they said that this spirit was no longer attached to the house.

It was now attached to the family itself. In an effort to get away for some time and find a little moment of peace, Jack and Janet had packed up the family in a camper to go out and spend the family. some time in the woods for a long weekend. While out there, they claimed to have seen a dark and hazy entity while also reporting that they heard loud banging noises coming from the top of their camper. Now, whatever this force was, it shook the entire vehicle violently. The smurls were desperate, eventually got word through some of their church friends about a couple that might be able to help them out. It was Ed and Lorraine Warren, who had been slowly gaining attention for their work

and ridding other people of dangerous spirits. Ed was a demonologist, and Lorraine a clairvoyant. Both of them were Roman Catholics, so they aligned there, and they had founded the New England Society for Psychic Research back in 1952. Their main purpose was to investigate paranormal activity. In some cases they found were false, but others were anything but. The Smurrow family poltergeist was one of those. A preliminary check inside the home led the warrants to believe there was in fact something to the stories that the family was telling.

But it wasn't just what they found, but also the demeanor the entire family gave. The Smurals were terrified and lost at what to do. All eight members were scared, and these were honest folks by all accounts, and so why would they all just conjure up some fantastical story like this? So in 1986, the warrants, along with psychic, Rosemary Frew, essentially lived in the house on Chase Street for eight months in order to properly investigate the family's claims. By the end, they declared that the home was haunted by three minor spirits and a powerful evil demon.

Ed said, There's something in this home which has the intelligence to inflict physical and psychological harm upon this family. The only way I've seen anyone get rid of something like this is through exorcism. There is a powerful, intangible, invisible force here. Why the family was targeted exactly was unclear, but it was believed that likely these spirits were dormant and were only awakened by the move-in of the smurals.

Lorraine believes the energy brought about by the four daughters going through puberty was something the forces clung onto to gain power. The Warrens tried to bring the spirits and demon to the forefront, once and for all, so they could expel them, but when they failed, they sought the expertise of father Robert McKenna, who was a Vatican-mandated exorcist. By this time, the media had gotten word, with various outlets camping close to the Smurl's property to try and catch their story, although the family hated that attention. nosy neighbors would cruise up and down past their house, and people even attempted to break in on a few occasions to try and experience the spirits themselves. It was chaos, and Father McKenna would go on to perform two exorcisms inside the home, dousing it with holy water and condemning the spirits to leave, but this only enraged them even more, and things continue to go downhill for the smurals. With the media frenzy ramping up, the Scranton Diocese decided to finally get involved and sent a priest to their own to investigate.

He spent several nights there but claimed to have experienced nothing. Of this, Janet Smurl explained that the demon hid whenever religious figures were around. Hence why Father McKenna and the Warrens and this priest were unable to bring it out. With this info coming out, the media outlets were now questioning more than sighting. with the smurals which hurt them tremendously. They had never asked for any of this. They didn't want the press. Their lives were being tortured by these demons,

and now the once respected community members were becoming pariahs, a side show, so to speak, who had been labeled as liars among their peers. Father McKenna would come in and perform a third exorcism, and it appeared to have calmed things down for a few months for the family. But the criticism from experts and others, was relentless.

Many claimed that the smurals had drummed up the story in an attempt to make money off it, although it's unclear if they ever actually did. Their story would be told in various books and a movie called The Haunted, which was made in 1991 about the experience, but none were written by the smurals themselves. Although they perhaps got paid something on the side to share their story, it's unknown. Eventually the smurals couldn't take the negative attention anymore, moved from Chase Street in 1987. They say the activity followed them to their new house until a church

sanctioned exorcism was performed, at which point the Smurals were finally freed of whatever this entity was. The people that moved into Chase Street after them never reported experiencing anything paranormal, although I guess they wouldn't have if the entity stuck with the smurals. John, Jack's father, passed away in 1990, and his mother Mary died in 1995. and Jack would go on to pass away in 2017 after complications from diabetes. As a side note, Ed and Lorraine Warren never charged families that they were investigating, although they did themselves make money off their experiences in various ways. But what about that angle with the Smurrells?

Without having been there and looking in from the outside, everyone's going to have their opinion about whether or not the Smurl's haunting actually happened. If money and fame were the ultimate motive, well, they didn't really do a good job of exploiting the insane tale they completely fabricated in order to get there. If this were one big lie, they did the hard work of getting the attention they needed, but right when they could have struck gold, they just walked away. They told reporters to leave them alone, rather than drumming up more press, and while they may have gotten paid on the side in a sort of consulting job,

so people could write their books and scripts, they certainly could have made more. So other than fame and fortune, what's the reason to make this up? It's hard to come up with a reason, so maybe it's possible that all this was real. Across every single culture and religion, you'll find stories about spirits, demons, and possession. So is it more likely that they're all just made up, or do they come from some form of truth? an experience that perhaps a family had that is unexplained, yet did in fact happen. So that's it for this week's episode of Everytown.

I hope you guys enjoyed it. Go check out this episode in video form. We'll run our YouTube channel if you'd like. It's called Scary Mysteries. And for more podcasts from us, check out the Scary Mysteries podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. Remember to come back next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories. Because you never know, maybe your town will be next.