Paranormal Yakker
Interview on paranormal subject
Paranormal Yakker
Pennsylvania’s Amityville Horror
The Smurl Haunting represents one of America's most compelling cases of alleged demonic possession, often referred to as "Pennsylvania's Amityville Horror." In his interview with Stan Mallow paranormal author and researcher Maxim W. Furek delved into the disturbing details of this case which inspired "The Conjuring: Last Rites" and continues to captivate those interested in supernatural phenomena decades after the events occurred.
What makes the Smurl case particularly compelling is the consistency of the manifestations with other documented cases of demonic infestation. And, perhaps most disturbing was Jack Smurl's claim that he had been sexually assaulted by a succubus—a female demon—an unusual admission in cases of this nature that required tremendous courage to disclose publicly.
Further, what truly sets the Smurl case apart from many haunting accounts is the involvement of prominent paranormal investigators and religious authorities. In the interview Maxim talks about all of them and described the roles they played in exorcising evil entities from the Smurl home.
Hi everyone, I'm Stan Mallow. Welcome to Paranormal Yakker. My guest on today's show is prolific paranormal author, researcher, and rock journalist Maxim W Furek. I'll be talking with him about his book, The Smurl Haunting. It's about the true haunting that inspired the movie Conjuring Last Rites. Maxim W Furek, welcome to Paranormal Yakker. Stan, thank you so much. And, you know, I'm just so excited to tell your Canadian and American listeners about my new book. And I'll tell you what, the timing is perfect because the book's only been out for two weeks and already it's starting to resonate. So we're excited and Anxiety Press is excited. My publisher is excited as well. So thank you for this opportunity. Oh, absolutely. My pleasure. The Smurl family's nightmare of demonic possession is called Pennsylvania's Amityville Horror. Your book explores the harrowing events that took place through the eyes of prominent psychics, exorcists, and demonologists, such as Ed and Lorraine Warren and Franciscan Friar, Alphonsus Trabold. What Maxim was there about the Smurl Haunting case that initially drew you into the web of mystery and horror surrounding it and led you to investigating it as thoroughly as you did, which in turn resulted in the writing of the book I am now interview you about. Yeah, well Stan, thanks for the question. And that's the perfect question. I felt, and I write about this in my introduction to the Smurl Haunting, but I felt that there was something that was being channeled through me, some sort of energies manifested inside of me, prompting me to write the book. And I can look back on three specific things, events, things that happened that were part of that. One was the fact that West Pittston, Pennsylvania, it's in Northeastern Pennsylvania, anthracite coal country. And I live in a small little mountain town in Luzerne County called Mocanaqua. I was very, very close to West Pittston. So back in the 1980s, when this was transpiring, I went up there and I would just hang out and watch the frenzy sort of as a researcher. But I mean, tons of people were there. It was like the rubber neckers, the ambulance chasers, the whatever. I mean, that was just like, I mean, some of the worst of the worst, but I was there more or less as a researcher. So that was my beginning. In 1988, after the book "The Haunted" was published, and this was about the West Smurl Haunting, Ed and Lorraine Warren were appearing in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. And what I did was I wrote a letter to the owner of the Victoria Theater asking permission to interview them. So I hung out with Ed and Lorraine Warren on the sidewalks of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. It was July. It was like, I still have memories of that. I took pictures that are in my book, The Smurl Haunting. And I stayed in touch with Ed and Lorraine until they died. And typically I would call Ed up and say, tell me again how you did battle with these demonic entities. How does that work? How did your Christian beliefs fit into this? So that was that. And then just this year, it was in July 11th, 2025, that I went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to see Annabelle, the alleged possessed doll, the demonic doll. And if you believe in the world of demonology, you know then that evil exists and evil can possess people, places, or things. I went there to Gettysburg. I looked into the eyes of Annabelle, this raggedy Ann doll. And I also spoke with Dan Rivera. Now Dan was Annabelle's chief handler. I spoke with Dan Rivera on Friday, July the 11th. Dan and I were going to have an interview on Monday the 14th, so I could go and bring my book to completion, the Smurl Haunting. Dan passed on Sunday, July the 13th, the day before I was supposed to interview him. Now, some people are saying, well, it's just a coincidence that he died of natural causes. Other people are saying, wait a second, you know we're talking about the possibility of demonic energies. And you have to go and at least consider that, that there was something demonic of Annabelle that manifested that somehow impacted on Dan Rivera. So that's what we're looking at. I'm not sure every time people interview me, I say, I think it was a coincidence. But Stan, even when I spoke to Dan Rivera about what happened in New Orleans, Dan said that that was a coincidence. So I don't know, but people I'm talking to in the paranormal realm say, there's no such thing as coincidence. When you look at A, B, C, D and E, and look how they cluster together, there has to be something, there's something that maybe we don't understand, but I don't know. Who were the family members residing in the Smurl home when a demonic presence made itself known and what evil deeds did it perpetuate on them? Jack and Janet Smurl were a very devout Catholic family from West Pittston. They had three daughters, and the demonic possession, the things that happened at the Smurl Haunting, are not unusual. I mean, you've heard about these before in Amityville and Hinsdale House and the Wells House, all of the haunted houses, the houses that we believe have been possessed by, or infested by demonic entities, manifest the same things like things levitating. You know, their dog, the Smurl's dog, Simon, was levitated and thrown against the wall. They experienced horrible smells like rotten eggs. They heard grunting sounds like pigs. They saw profanities etched into the mirror. One thing that was extremely unusual about the Smurl Haunting was that Jack Smurl claimed that he had been raped by a female demon, a succubus. In cases of demonic possession, this is unusual. But then again too, for somebody to actually admit that this happened, for a male to admit that this happened, I mean, takes a lot of courage to be able to put that out there. So there were a lot of things that happened, and it happened over a long period of time, and it didn't just happen there at the house, because, as I said earlier, demonic energies can possess people, places, and things. When the Smurls went on a camping expedition, they also experienced demonic activities. So we believe that those energies followed them outside of West Pittston to the campsite. How did the Smurl household members react to the frightening events they were experiencing from an obviously demonic, malevolent spirit or entity? They did it the same way when I was in Gettysburg to see the Annabelle Doll. The folks I talked to there talk about the power of God, and they all say that although the power of Satan is great, the power of God is greater. So the Scmurls had a deep faith, and I believe they believed that their faith would get them through. They were very consistent churchgoers. They had a strong support system there, and they invited priests over to spend the night and to bless the house. And to do an exorcism. Well, they had to get the permission to do that, but that's what they did. So they were pretty much connected with their church, and they had the faith to keep up the strength and to give them the resilience to deal with this horrible thing. And let me say this too. They weren't just dealing with demonic forces. They were also dealing with human forces, the media, and people that were saying it was a hoax, it was a scam. They're just doing this for attention or for money because they were mentally ill. So they had to deal with that as well. What role did Ed and Lorraine Warren, who you personally met, as you mentioned, have in the investigation of the Smurl Haunting? It was Janet Smurl who was really becoming frustrated with this ongoing terrorism, this demonic possession, demonic infestation. So she was able to reach out to Ed and Lorraine Warren. They lived in Monroe, Connecticut, wasn't very far from Northeastern Pennsylvania. And they came down with a nurse who was a psychic. And I believe there was a photographer there and they stayed there, they stayed in the house, I believe on four different occasions, but Ed believed that there was a demonic force as he goes, something like, I don't care what you call it, whether you call it a devil or a beast or whatever, a ghost, there's something here. And so they tried, Ed was an exorcist in his own right, but he could not get the job done. So he brought in another priest, the Father McKenna. And Father McKenna, this is interesting, if you're at all into the Catholicism, Father McKenna was a rogue priest. Now, it was Pope John the 23rd that initiated the thing called Vatican II. And Vatican II was supposed to modernize the Catholic Church and it's sort of like a kumbaya moment where you would embrace all the other religions and communism and Marxism and everybody. He wanted to have one happy family, one happy world. He said that the churches could say mass in languages other than Latin. So that was his means of modernizing the church. But there were a lot of traditional Catholics that pushed against this. They thought this was anarchy and they hated, they detested Pope John the 23rd. Father McKenna was one of them. He refused to abide by Vatican II. He was called a rogue priest. He started up his own church and practiced Catholicism and the mass the way they did it before Vatican II. So that was his claim of fame. But he went there to the Smurl House three times, tried to do exorcisms to cleanse the house and was not able to do that. It didn't work for Father McKenna. Another key player in the Smurl family haunting was Franciscan Friar Alphonsus Trabold, who I mentioned earlier. What was his contribution to the events that transpired? He is the creme de la creme. He's the man that got it done. He's the lone ranger that came in there on his horse. And pretty interesting because the church is sort of like in a bind. First of all, they don't want to be embarrassed by zealots, by people that are mentally ill, that are needy, that are just looking for attention. So they try to distance themselves for things like the Smurl Haunting because they don't know what it's all about. And typically, these stories are about people that are mentally ill. There's maybe 2% of the cases of demonology that are actually true cases of possession. So the church has to look at these things to make sure that these individuals are not schizophrenic or have any kind of a Tourette syndrome or manic depressive episodes or whatever. They have to make sure that these are legitimate cases of demonic possession. So the church, every church diocese has a priest who is who was skilled in the right of exorcism. But in Northeastern Pennsylvania, nobody was skillful enough to go and cleanse the house. So the bishop had permission to get someone from outside. So he was able to get a Father Alphonsus Trabold from a New York state to come down. And Father Trabold, the first time, he thought that maybe it was some sort of subsidence. Now Northeastern Pennsylvania is just like, it has all kinds of coal mines running under the streets. So it's just, it's pretty wild. And every now and then there was a subsidence, there was a sinkhole. And Father Trabold thought that maybe this was the case. But he came back a second time, a third time, and a fourth time. And he believed that there was something demonic there. And he finally was able to go and cleanse the house. And by that time, the Smurls had left, but just an amazing story Stan that took place in my backyard, Northeastern Pennsylvania. I mean, who would have thought that? In what ways, Maxim, is the Smurl Haunting similar to the Amityville Horror, and have you found any similarities with other haunted possessed homes you've investigated and wrote about? Frst of all, as I said earlier, that when you look at the symptoms, the sounds, the smells, the things, I mean, those are pretty much consistent. They're uniform across the board, from house to house, I would say. Like I said, the sexual attack, the rape by the succubus, it was unique to the Smurl Haunting. But with the other houses like Amityville, Hinsdale, they were just horrible things that happened. In many of these cases, again, it's not just the families dealing with demonic entities, but also dealing with a public that says, no, this can't be, you have to be doing this for financial compensation. And this always comes into play. It doesn't matter who's saying it. With Amityville, I wanna say this, the Amityville Horror has never gone away from us. It's in our collective consciousness. I don't care who you are. I mean, we can't still believe that a 23-year-old son would take a rifle and shoot his father, his mother, his two sisters and his two brothers. It's incomprehensible. He said that the devil made him do it. He said that he was possessed, that a Butch Defeo, the 23-year-old. They tried to prove that it wasn't demonic possession during the trial, but that he was a personality disorder. He had a disorder that where he had no empathy for individuals and he had a need for immediate gratification. And that's what defined him. But the other thing too that defined Annityville that is starting to define the Smurl Haunting with a book and a made-for-TV motion picture, and then my book and the Conjuring Last Rites. I mean, a lot of us are circling the wagons. And it's not that I wrote the book to make money. I didn't. I mean, us authors are like starving artists. I mean, I'm just telling you, we don't make a whole lot. And I'm not, I write for the love of the literary world. But with the Amityville House, there have been so many books written about Amityville, including George and Kathy Lutz, who moved in after the killing, the Defeo family killing, and claimed that after, they lived there for 28 days. But the lawyer for George Lutz claimed that over a couple of bottles of wine, they put together this concoction that the Amityville was actually a hoax and they just made up this thing. I'm gonna say this. The Amityville Horror is a cash cow. I don't care how you approach it, you're gonna make money because there's people that are gonna buy your books. So if you wanna say that you were part of a hoax, or you wanna say that your sister was the demon that possessed Butch Defeo, or whatever you wanna say, there's gonna be people that will key on that and focus in on your book and buy it. So the fact that this guy said that it was a hoax and he did it over a couple bottles of wine doesn't move my meter a click. I think it's just another person trying to cash in. So that's what I think. Annabelle was a doll believed to be possessed by an evil spirit. Annabelle was a doll believed to be possessed by an evil spirit. Paranormal investigator, Dan Rivera, who you spoke about, was handler of the Paranormal investigator, Dan Rivera, who you spoke about, Paranormal investigator, Dan Rivera, who you spoke about, was handler of the was handler of the doll and took it on the Devil's Run tour. doll and took it on the devil's run tour. You were one of the last persons to speak with Dan before he died. You were one of the last persons to speak with Dan before he died, You were one of the last persons to speak with Dan before he died. As you previously mentioned, what Maxim was the devil's run and what did Dan as you previously mentioned. As you previously mentioned, what Maxim was the devil's run and what did Dan What, Maxim, was the Devil's Run, As you previously mentioned, what Maxim was the devil's run and what did Dan and what did Dan tell you when you spoke with him? First of all, the Devil's on the Run tour was when Tony Spira, and that's Ed and Lorraine's son-in-law, he married Judy, their daughter. But when Dan Spira decided to take Annabelle on tour in 2025, so he took Annabelle to San Antonio, to West Virginia, to New Orleans, to Gettysburg, went up and down the southern part of the United States. Lorraine did not want them to take Annabelle out of the Warren Occult Museum in Monroe, Connecticut. She wanted it to stay there, but Tony Spira decided to take it on the road. Now, when Annabelle went to New Orleans over those three days, Stan, three things happened, three significant things. One, there was a plantation fire, the same day she was there. Two, there was a jailbreak. 10 convicts escaped. It was an inside job. Irregardless, they escaped from the jail in New Orleans. And then three, Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen, her house, there was a fire in her house. Three things that happened when Annabelle was in New Orleans. I asked Dan Rivera specifically,"What did you think about what happened in New Orleans?" Did Annabelle cause this? Dan Rivera told me, "No, I think it was a coincidence." That's what he said. Now, after Dan's passing, the conversation is, what was it? Was it a coincidence or was it something else? And there's a war going on. There's two camps. One camp is saying,"Let's not talk about this."Let's not talk about Dan's death."Let's let his family mourn in peace." And then there's another group of people that are saying, "Wait a second."We gotta talk about this"because this could be something"putting people in danger." It's possible, and again, we need to at least consider the possibility that Annabelle is possessed with demonic energies and that Dan Rivera may have been a victim of these demonic energies. So again, if we're into the paranormal, if we're gonna discuss the parameters of the paranormal, then at least we have to take a look at those possibilities, and that's one of them. In my book, I had interviewed the psychic Vincent sisters, and they told me that they believed that his death was caused by demonic forces coming from Annabelle. And they're not the only ones, so there's other individuals that are concerned, and they're very, very upset that Tony Spera decided to take Annabelle on the run. Let me conclude this portion with that. When I was in Gettysburg over those three days, there were, according to the local paper, 1,240 people that attended those three days of seeing Annabelle, 1,240 people times $40 a head. Each person paid $40 to have the pleasure of going into this cavern and seeing this Annabelle doll that's in a five-foot wooden cage with a glass door with the Lord's Prayer affixed to the back with three crucifixes representing the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, and stand infused with holy water and holy oil. So they said that at all times there was a priest there, Father Bob, that was watching over Annabelle and giving it blessings to make sure that everything was legit. Well, I'll tell you this, when I was in Gettysburg, Father Bob was not there. He was out of country. They told me he was in South America, so I don't know. They're saying one thing, and then actually the reality is something else, but 1,240 people times 40. Get out your abacus, so let me know what that is. And that was only Gettysburg, so they made that kind of money in Gettysburg, San Antonio, New Orleans, West Virginia, yada, yada, yada. It's a moneymaker. That's why Tony Spera took Annabelle out, not for educational purposes, not to allow people like me the privilege of seeing Annabelle, but to make a couple of bucks. So that's what that is. One of the many fascinating chapters in The Smurl Haunting talks about Pope John Paul II and his exorcism college. What, Maxim, can you tell me about that college? Yeah, that's like crazy. I mean, when I first heard about this, I just shook my head. But here's the thing. I operate in the universal rule of 90, like with the paranormal. 30% will believe, 30% do not believe, and 30% could care less. With demonic, whether or not evil exists, whether or not the devil exists. You know, again, there's, I think, 30% believe and maybe a bunch of people don't. I don't care. Pope John Paul II believed that evil existed. He, what he did was he resurrected the right of exorcism that had been written 400 years earlier. So he rewrote this because he believed that evil exists. He believed that we have to go and do things to go and deal with demonic possession and evil. And he convened this college of exorcism where there were priests from something like, I believe it was 130 different countries that, or no, 30 different countries, 130 some priests from 30 different countries that came there to learn this medieval right of exorcism. So that's what Pope John Paul II did. And just an interesting, individual who believed this, and he isn't the only one. I mean, the mantra seems to be that the power of devil, the power of the devil is tremendous, but the power of God is even stronger. So that seems to be the mantra that they all say. Your book and the movie Conjuring Last Rites, both explore the Smurl Haunting. Since one complements the other, anyone who wants to have a full picture of the Smurl Haunting, will definitely benefit by reading your book as well as watching the film. To what Maxim do you attribute the fascination of the public with the Smurl Haunting? It's not just the Smul Haunting, but I think it's demonology in itself. To actually consider that there may be a demonic world out there that could impact on you or I under the right circumstances. And what we're talking about is this. I mean, how would that happen? Well, some people believe that a person becomes infested or possessed by demonic forces through numerous things. For example, you could have a curse put on you. Now, I live in Pennsylvania, and I'm not very far from Lancaster, where you have white witches and you have hex signs and you have maybe one farmer putting a hex on his, known as neighbor's cow, things like that. So, you have that. We have a lot of history and stories about that. Having someone put a curse on you is one way. Opening up the doors to the demonic, inviting the demons in is another way. And that might be through, and now again, this, some people will argue this point, but I believe it's true, but through Ouija boards, seances, fortune tellers, things like that, that would open up that door. And it's problematic because in this day and age in 2025, you have a lot of people, a lot of youth looking for demons, going ghost hunting in these abandoned mental asylums and prisons, looking for entity spirits. Well, some of those spirits may be demons looking to possess vulnerable souls, buyer beware, watch out what you're doing. So that's the other way. And then I think with the Smurls, I believe that because they were devout Catholics, because they were professed Christians, I believe that they had a target on their back. I believe that demons would much rather take down a person who has devoted their life to the Lord, to do God's work. I mean, I think that the devil delights in being able to go and possess or infest or harass those people. And I think that the Smurls fit into that category. They were victimized because of their beliefs. Should viewers of Paranormal Yakker want to buy The Smurl Haunting and learn of other books you've authored, how, Maxim, can they do that? I would hope that your listeners would, at the very least, check out my website. It's www.MaximFurek.com. That's www.MaximFurek.com. It's a wonderful website. And you could just see my books and see what they are and read about them and read what I've done and where I'm gonna be. But Stan, I wanna say this. I'm just like so fortunate to be a paranormal author. And all I wanna do is make a contribution to the genre. I wanna go and do it by writing and research and do it as an academic and not as a zealot, not as a crazy person that's looking for attention, but as a serious student of the craft. That's what I try to do. That's what I attempt to do. And I think with the Smurl Haunting, I think people that get the book are gonna be pleased because it delves into the right of exorcism. It delves into the realm of the demonic and all of that. And it compares the Smurl Haunting with a number of other haunted houses or houses that were possessed. So I think the book is rich and just a good read and well researched. And I'm really proud of it. I think it's probably one of my best books. Maxim W Furek, I thank you for being my guest on Paranormal Yakker. It has been great yakking with you.