What actually happens
A free month of rent and no questions asked
The story starts in 1987, with Sara Campbell taking her son Matt home after another day at a hospital in Connecticut, where he is on an experimental cancer treatment. She and her husband Peter, a recovering alcoholic, want to live closer to the hospital. Sara spots a man hanging a rental sign outside a large house, and he is frustrated and offers the first month free if she takes it right away. The following day Peter brings Matt's brother Billy and the cousins Wendy and Mary, and everyone picks a room. Matt takes the basement, which has a partition wall and a locked door. Once they move in, Matt starts having visions of an old bearded man and of corpses with symbols cut into their skin. Peter then learns that the house used to be a funeral home, and the locked door leads to the mortuary.
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A box of séance photos and a container of eyelids
At the hospital, Matt describes the visions to a fellow cancer patient, Reverend Nicholas Popescu, who advises him to ask the spirit what it is after. Later a burned figure appears in Matt's room and starts to move toward him. When the family gets home, they find Matt without a shirt, and his fingertips are bloody because he has been clawing at the wall. The household starts to fall apart under the strain of his illness and odd behavior. The children find photographs of a young man named Jonah at a séance, with ectoplasm coming out of his mouth, and a container of dried human eyelids. Wendy and Matt learn that the funeral home belonged to Ramsey Aickman, who did psychic research and held séances with Jonah as his medium. At one of them, everyone present was found dead, Aickman included, and Jonah vanished.
Necromancy is the working theory
Nicholas suspects that Aickman practiced necromancy, trying to control the dead and tie them to the house. During one night, Nicholas finds human remains inside and carries them away. Matt wakes up with Aickman's symbols carved into his skin and is taken to the hospital, where he meets Jonah's ghost. Matt and Nicholas then have visions at the same time that show what happened to Jonah. During the séance a demonic presence burned every attendee in a flash of light. Jonah ran and used a dumbwaiter to get out of the basement, but he ended up trapped in the crematory and was burned alive.
The walls come down, with company
Peter and Sara learn that Matt's treatments have done nothing, and then they find out that he has left the hospital. At the house, a message from Nicholas tells the family to get out at once, because Jonah's spirit was the one protecting them. Near the end, Matt takes an axe to the walls of the front room, and dusty corpses that Aickman hid inside them are exposed. He pushes Wendy and the children out of the house, locks himself in, and keeps tearing down walls while more corpses tumble into the room. Jonah appears to take over Matt, who sets the bodies and the room on fire. That is the scene to brace for: bodies falling out of walls, followed by a fire. Investigators later arrive to find the house in flames.
The ending, explained
The fire department arrives, and Sara and Peter frantically try to get inside to save Matt. The spirits are finally free, and they vanish. Everyone outside watches in tears while the emergency crew works to revive Matt, who is dying. As he slips away, he sees himself standing in a graveyard, where Jonah waits and no longer looks burned. Matt seems ready to follow Jonah until he hears his mother's voice. Matt drops back into his body, and Jonah's spirit moves on. A final title card says Matt's cancer disappeared after these events. The house was rebuilt and sold again, and nobody reported another haunting there.
The post-credits ruling
Nobody has confirmed whether there is a scene after the credits.
✓ Spoiled safelyDog status: fine, no dog dies.
Questions people ask at 1am
Is The Haunting in Connecticut scary?
The Haunting in Connecticut is a 4 out of 10 with medium dread. It has plenty of jump scares, a burned figure and a house full of hidden bodies, but it ends gently.
How does The Haunting in Connecticut end?
Matt sets the house and the corpses hidden in its walls on fire, which frees the spirits. The emergency crew revives him, his cancer disappears, and the rebuilt house has no more hauntings.
Does the dog die in The Haunting in Connecticut?
No dog dies in The Haunting in Connecticut. A bird hits a window and is presumed hurt, but it is on screen for only about a second.
Is there a post-credits scene in The Haunting in Connecticut?
Nobody has confirmed whether The Haunting in Connecticut has a scene after the credits.
What happened to Jonah in The Haunting in Connecticut?
Jonah was the medium at Ramsey Aickman's séances. When a demonic presence burned the attendees, he tried to flee through a dumbwaiter, got stuck in the crematory and was cremated alive.
