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.