The Snedeker Haunting | The Funeral Home Case the Warrens Couldn't Explain — Ep. 49

Basement Doorway Warning

Ed Warren stops just inside the basement doorway and looks across the room before saying anything. This is where they were doing it, he says calmly. The space is unfinished, concrete floor, low ceiling, no windows. Along one wall, a long porcelain table is fixed in place, the kind built to be washed down in. Lorraine stands a few steps behind him. She hasn't followed him all the way in. She's already reacting to something. Ed takes a slow step closer to the table, leaning slightly as if trying to get a better look without touching it. Lorraine watches him, then shakes her head. Don't. He pauses and looks back at her. What? This is where it starts, she says. There's a weight to that room that isn't coming from anything you can see. The air feels still but not empty, and whatever had been happening upstairs doesn't feel separate from this space. It feels like it's coming from that room. This wasn't just another part of the house. This was where bodies had been brought down and prepared. And Lorraine wasn't reacting to it like something that had been left in the past. She was reacting to it like it was still there. For the family living above that basement, whatever was happening in that room wasn't separate from the rest of the house. It was part of it. What happened in that house has been told a lot of different ways. Some versions focus on what the family said they experienced. Others focus on how the case was later investigated and how those accounts were written and presented afterwards. But all of it traces back to the same place. A house in Connecticut that had been used as a funeral home before the family moved in. In a period of time where the people living there began describing experiences they said shouldn't have been happening inside that house. But the story doesn't start with any of that. It starts earlier when the family first moved into that house. I'm your host, Robert Barber. In the 1980s, a family in Connecticut moved into a house that had once been used as a funeral home. Not long after, they began describing experiences inside the house that they believed were connected to what the building had been before they arrived. The case drew the attention of Ed and Lorraine Warren and would go on to becoming one of the more widely known haunting stories in the United States, later adapted into a major motion picture. But over time, the details of what happened inside the house have been questioned, challenged, and in some cases contradicted. This is the story of the Snedeker haunting. Let's get into it. When the Snedeker family moved into the house in Southington, Connecticut, it wasn't a casual decision. Their son Philip was undergoing treatment for cancer at the time, and the family needed a place where they could manage that along with everything else that came with it. They needed space, room for him to rest and recover, room for the rest of the family to live around that. And this house gave them more of it than anything else they had found. From the outside, there was nothing about it that stood out. It looked like any other older house in the area. Inside, the layout reflected what the building had been before it was converted. Some of the rooms connected directly into each other without hallways, the way you would expect in a space designed for people to move through in sequence rather than live in. Certain doorways were wider than standard residential doorways, built to allow a body to be carried through without obstruction. The front rooms were larger and more open than the rest of the house, consistent with spaces that would have been used for viewings. The basement was unfinished, with a fixed porcelain table and a floor pitched slightly toward a central drain. It wasn't set up like a storage space or a workshop, it had been designed for preparation. At the time, none of that had been explained to them. They saw the layout, but they didn't know yet what it meant. They chose rooms, moved their things in, and set up the house for day-to-day living. Bedrooms were assigned, furniture was arranged, and the space started to function the way a home is supposed to. Philip moved through the house the same way everyone else did at first. He spent time in some rooms more than others, avoided certain areas without really thinking about why, and followed the same routines as the rest of the family. Nothing about that stood out. At that point, the house was doing exactly what they needed it to do. There was no reason to see it as anything else. They had already been living in the house for a while before anyone said anything about it. It came up in conversation with someone who knew what the building had been before the family moved in. Not just that it was older or that it had changed hands, but what it had been used for. Before they moved in, it hadn't been a residence. It had been a funeral home. Hearing that didn't change anything physically inside the house. The rooms were still the same, and the layout hadn't changed. But it changed what they were looking at. Spaces that hadn't made sense before started to stand out for different reasons. The wider doorways weren't random, they were built that way to move bodies through the house. Rooms that opened directly into each other without a hallway in between weren't unusual anymore. They had been arranged that way for viewing and preparation. What they had been using as ordinary rooms had once been part of a process. The front rooms that felt slightly off in layout would have been used for viewings where families came in to see the body. The flow between those rooms wasn't about comfort, it was about access and movement. The basement stood out the most. That wasn't just extra space. That was where the bodies had been brought down and prepared. The table wasn't something left behind. It was fixed in place. The floor around it was pitched towards the drain so fluids could be washed away. The entire room had been designed for that purpose. Once that was understood, it was hard to look at it any other way. It didn't all click at once. It came together piece by piece, one detail at a time, each one pointing back to the same thing. And once those pieces lined up, the house didn't feel like a place that had been converted into something new. It felt like a place that had been used for something specific, and then left behind. The chain showed up in the basement. By then, Philip already knew the space. He'd been down there enough times that moving through it didn't take any thought, which is why the moment stood out when it happened. He came down the steps like he normally would, reached the bottom, and started into the room. A few steps in, he stopped. Nothing in the room had changed. The layout was the same. The table was where it had been. There was nothing in front of him that should have made him pause. But he didn't take another step. He stayed where he was, trying to understand why he had stopped. He hadn't seen anything. There was nothing in front of him to react to. But being in that room wasn't the same as it had been the last time he was there, and he stood there longer than he meant to, trying to figure out what had changed. But there wasn't anything he could identify. But it wasn't the same. After a moment, he turned and went back upstairs without finishing what he had come down to do. After that, he stopped going down unless he had a reason to. And when he did, he didn't stay long. The rest of the family noticed it before they understood why. It wasn't just that he avoided the basement, it was how quickly he moved through it, and how deliberately he kept his distance from that part of the house. When he tried to explain it, he didn't describe anything he had seen or heard. What he described was the sense that being in that room wasn't neutral, that something about it felt active, like the space itself was reacting to him being there. The first time something actually happened, it wasn't subtle. Philip was in the basement again, standing near the table, when he heard something move behind him. It wasn't the house settling, it was a single distinct shift, like something had been dragged a short distance across the floor. He turned immediately, expecting to see what had caused it, but nothing in the room had changed. The table was where it had been, the floor was clear, and there was nothing behind him that should have made that sound. His attention went to the floor drain, the lowest point in the concrete, where everything from the table would have gone, because that was where the sound came from. When he looked, it was clear. There was nothing there. He stayed longer than he had the last time, moving through the room more slowly now, checking the space from different angles and trying to find anything that could explain what he had heard. There was nothing he could point to. When he went back upstairs, he didn't describe it as the house making noise. He described it as something in the room moving. After that, it wasn't limited to just the basement. An item that had been left on a table earlier in the day, something ordinary, not something anyone would have thought twice about, was later found in a different room. No one had moved it. The family had been in the house the entire time, and when they checked with each other and went back through what they had done, no one could account for how it had gotten there. After that, they started paying attention in a different way. When something was set down, they made a point of noticing where it was left, and when they came back to it, they checked again. And when it happened again, more than one of them saw it. That's when it stopped being treated as a mistake. They didn't treat the house the same way anymore. If something was left in a room, someone would come back and check it, sometimes calling someone else in before touching it to make sure it hadn't already been moved. It slowed everything down, and rooms that felt normal when they first moved in started to feel uncertain. Not because something was happening constantly, but because it didn't have to. The possibility that something could change when no one was looking was enough. Philip stopped going into the basement unless someone else was nearby. And even then he didn't stay long. The rest of the family adjusted in smaller ways. Lights were left on, doors weren't closed all the way, and people called out to each other more often, keeping track of where everyone was. But it didn't stay limited to sounds or things being moved. According to the family, Phillips' experiences in the basement became more direct. He described encounters that weren't just noises or objects out of place, but moments where something in that space seemed to react to him, where he wasn't just in the room, but part of whatever was happening there. Those experiences changed the situation. At that point, it wasn't just something strange happening in the house. It was something happening to someone. By the time Ed and Lorraine Warren were called, what had been happening in the house had already been going on for a while. They didn't arrive for a single visit and leave it at that. They returned to the house, and each time they were there, they kept going back to the basement because that was where the activity was happening most often. During one of those visits, something in the room shifted while they were present. Not somewhere else in the house, but in the same spot they were standing in. They both reacted to it. That moment didn't stay contained to that visit. When they went down into the basement together, they slowed at the bottom of the stairs instead of stepping straight into the room. Ed stepped down first and stopped just inside the doorway. He didn't go all the way in. He stood there, looking across it before saying anything. This is where they were doing it, he said. The space was unfinished with a concrete floor, low ceiling and no windows. Along one wall, a long porcelain table was fixed in place, the kind built to be washed down. The floor beneath it was pitched slightly toward a drain. Everything about the room pointed to what it had been used for. Lorraine stood a few steps behind him and hadn't followed him all the way in. She was already reacting to something. Ed took a slow step forward, moving closer to the table and leaning slightly as if trying to get a better look without touching it. Lorraine shook her head. Don't. He stopped and looked back at her. What? She didn't move. This is where it starts, she said. For a moment, neither of them moved. Ed was focused on what was in front of him, how the room was built, what it had been used for, the physical reality of it. Lorraine wasn't looking at it that way. She was reacting to something tied to that space that wasn't limited to what he could see. After a moment, Ed didn't take another step. He backed away from the table and returned to where Lorraine was standing. They didn't go any farther into the room. They stood there together, looking into the same space, but responding to it in completely different ways. When they came back upstairs, they weren't working from what they had been told anymore. They'd both been in that room. They'd both reacted to it, and they hadn't reacted the same way. That difference shaped how they understood what was happening in the house. They didn't treat it like something isolated. They tied it to the space itself and what had been done there before the family ever moved in. From that point on, the case wasn't just a series of incidents the family was trying to make sense of. It had been given a framework. They didn't treat it like something that would resolve on its own. They treated it like something that had already taken hold inside the house. They spent time in the basement and in the rooms where the family said the activity had been happening, asking specific questions about when things started, where they happened, and who experienced them. They brought in religious elements as part of how they approached cases like this, focusing on the space itself and on the family living in it. But whatever they did there didn't bring in a clear end. What they gave the family wasn't a resolution. It was a way of understanding what they were dealing with, in the idea that it wasn't confined to one room and it wasn't likely to stop on its own. That didn't bring it to an end. It gave it an explanation. They stayed involved for a period of time after that, returning to the house and continuing to work with the family. How long they were involved isn't clearly laid out. The accounts describe what happened, but they don't give a consistent timeline for when those events took place or how long the warrants were part of it. The family continued living in the house after that, still in the same place where everything had been happening until they eventually made a decision to leave. The house remained a private residence after they moved out. Other families did live there. There haven't been any consistent reports from later occupants of anything like what the Snedeker family described. And the version of the story that people still point to comes from that time when the Snedeker family was living there and when the Warrens were involved. When you step back from the story and look at what's actually documented, the picture starts to shift. Most of what's described inside the house comes from the people who were living there at the time. Their experiences are known through interviews, retellings, and later through a published account. That published version is what most people recognize. The book In a Dark Place, written by Ray Garten, is the source that shaped how this case has been presented publicly. But it isn't a direct record of events as they happened. It's a narrative built from multiple accounts, and even Garten later said the details he was given didn't line up cleanly. According to him, the family's descriptions weren't always consistent, and parts of the story were shaped into something that could be told as a complete account. That changes how you have to look at this case. I mean, you're not dealing with a single consistent record. You're dealing with a version of events that was assembled after the fact. The timeline is another issue. There isn't a clear record of when specific incidents happened, how long they continued, or exactly how long the Warrens were involved. What exists are individual descriptions, but not a complete sequence that connects everything from beginning to end. The house continued to be lived in after the family left, but there haven't been any consistent reports from later occupants of anything like what was described during that period. And then there's the version most people know today. The film The Haunting in Connecticut takes the core story and builds on it, adding elements that weren't part of the original accounts and reshaping others into something more dramatic. So instead of one clear version of what happened, you have multiple versions of the same story. You have what the family said they experienced, how those experiences were written and presented later, and how the story has been adapted and retold since then. Those versions don't fully line up. And once they start to separate, it becomes harder to tell where the experience ends and the story begins. There's a point in stories like this where the details stop being the most important part. It's not just what happened in that house, it's what happens to a place once something like that gets attached to it. Because once a story takes hold, it doesn't stay contained to the people who experienced it. It gets told again, it gets written down, it gets shaped, and over time it starts to take on a life of its own. In this case, you have a family describing something they say they live through, investigators who gave it a framework, and a version of the story that most people know because it was turned into something bigger. And those versions don't line up cleanly because they all point back to the same place. And somewhere in all of that is something else that doesn't get talked about as much. A house that's still there, a basement where bodies were once brought in and Prepared for burial. And a set of experiences described by the people who live there that don't line up the same way every time they're told. Most of what makes stories like this unsettling isn't just what people say they experience, it's what those experiences point to. Because the idea isn't just that something was happening in that house. It's that whatever was there didn't stay in the past. And that runs straight into something most people don't like to think about. What happens after we die? Because if something is still there, whatever form that takes, obviously it didn't start that way. It would have had to have been a person, someone with a life, routines, relationships. Someone not that different from anyone listening to this. But the moment it's described as still being there, it stops being seen that way. It becomes something else. So you're left with a case where the details don't fully line up. The timeline isn't clear, and the version most people know has been shaped after the fact. But the core of it doesn't go away. A family said they experienced something inside that house. Investigators came in and treated it as real. And the story that came out of it is still being told. The question isn't whether the story is clean, it's what you think is still there once you strip everything else away. This has been State of the Unknown. The Snedeker case doesn't end with a single agreed-upon version of what happened. The family moved out, the house remained, and the events that define the case were never documented in a way that fully lines up from beginning to end. What remains are accounts, some consistent, some not, in a version of the story that was shaped after the fact and shared far beyond the people who lived through it. If you've been enjoying the show, leaving a rating or review in your podcast app really does help more people find it. On Spotify, it's just a tap of the stars. On Apple Podcasts, you can even leave a short written review. I read them and I appreciate everyone. And if you're listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment on the episode. I always love to hear what people think was actually going on in the case. And if you want to make sure you hear the next story when it drops, just hit follow in your podcast app so the next episode shows up automatically. If there's a case you think I should cover, you can message me directly at State of the Unknown Podcast on Instagram, Facebook, threads, and even TikTok. Until next time, stay curious. Because sometimes the hardest part isn't deciding what you believe. It's realizing you may not have enough to decide it all.