Exclusive: Carmen Reed on the True Haunting in Connecticut
With the release of The Haunting in Connecticut (review here) on DVD and Blu-ray, Dread Central had a chance to sit and speak with Carmen Reed, the matriarch of the family who dealt with the actual haunting.
If you’re unfamiliar with what really happened, allow us to point you in the direction of our examination of the true story behind the haunting in Connecticut.
“Seeing the film was emotional,” says Reed. “It was almost as if we were going through my son’s cancer again. It really resonated. My other son, who was three at the time, finally got to experience it. I think the really good thing about the movie is that it got everyone in my family talking about our experiences again. It was important for us to talk about our memories and get whatever we could resolved. It’s been an amazing journey.”
There’s no doubt the family’s struggle with the deadly disease was well illustrated, but what of the haunting itself? Eighty percent of what you see in the movie is fictitious.
“I had mixed emotions regarding how far the film deviated from the facts of the case, but you’ve got to keep in mind that if you take symbolism into account, there’s a lot of symbolic things in the film. Such for the exorcism,” Carmen tells us. “I think that when they showed the bodies that were trapped in the wall, it gave a face and a humanity to the spirits that were trapped there. When you hear the terms ‘spirits’ or ‘ghosts’, you forget that they were living beings. They had mothers and fathers and families of their own. Giving these trapped souls some of their humanity back was good. I really liked that. Yes, it did deviate from the events, and I would have loved to have had a blow-by-blow account, but what they did do, I was very pleased with. It’s really hard to get a story like mine on film. So much happened in that house. It’s hard to give it a life to make somebody else understand exactly how emotional and how dramatic that situation was.”
During the documentary on the DVD and Blu-ray, there is a moment when something rather unexpected happens. Coincidence or haunting as usual?
“What entities do is they channel their dark energy. No matter where I go, that entity will always be able to zone in on me,” says Reed. “Whenever I recognize it or start talking about it, it connects with me immediately. Generally I keep my guard up, but once I start talking about it, it more or less gives it permission to come and bug me. Every time I talk about this story … something will happen. Even when I do radio shows. There are several that I do all of the time. Almost inevitably every time I go on as a guest, they’ll experience some type of feedback or static.”
“There are times when I am hesitant about speaking about it,” Reed continues. “If I’m feeling particularly weak or unenergetic, I will avoid discussing it because I have to do some preparations as a means to get ready for this stuff. I have to make sure I’ve got holy water and holy salt and all of that. When we were filming the documentary for the home video release, when I was talking about the crucifixes disappearing in that house, that’s when the crucifix here just flew off of the wall and almost hit me in the back of the head. I felt it graze my hair. At that very point they were getting growling sounds through their wired boom mic, and then the room got very cold. There were three of us in this tiny room with these lighting rigs. It should have been over ninety degrees in there. When we came out of that room, we were all almost shivering.”
We’ll tell you one thing …. Carmen’s really low on our list of people whom we can’t wait to hang out with. In closing, Carmen and I were joking about maybe she shouldn’t bring these things up anymore.
“Hey, at least it gives people something to talk about!” says Carmen with a laugh. Yes, so does going to Hawaii.
The Haunting in Connecticut is available now on DVD and Blu-ray. Order yourself a copy below. Till next time!
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