Disturbing History - The Amityville Horror

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

On November 13, 1974, Ronald "Butch" DeFeo Junior took a .35 caliber Marlin rifle and murdered his entire family as they slept in their beds at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. His father, mother, two sisters, and two brothers — six people ranging in age from 9 to 43 — were all found face down, shot at close range, in what remains one of the most chilling mass murders in Long Island history. No one in the house appeared to wake up. No neighbor called the police. DeFeo confessed within 48 hours and was convicted on all six counts of second-degree murder, receiving six consecutive sentences of 25 years to life.Thirteen months later, George and Kathy Lutz purchased the house at a steep discount, moved in with Kathy's three children from a previous marriage, and claimed that over the next 28 days they experienced escalating paranormal phenomena that drove them to flee in the middle of the night.Their account included a priest who heard a disembodied voice command him to "get out" during a house blessing, swarms of flies in the dead of winter, green slime oozing from the walls, 5-year-old Missy's invisible friend Jodie — described as a pig with glowing red eyes — and George's disturbing physical and psychological transformation into someone who increasingly resembled DeFeo himself.The Lutzes' story became Jay Anson's 1977 bestseller "The Amityville Horror: A True Story," which sold over 10 million copies and spawned the 1979 film starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder. Ed and Lorraine Warren investigated the house and produced the famous "Ghost Boy" infrared photograph, launching their careers as America's most recognized paranormal investigators.But the cracks in the story were significant. DeFeo's defense attorney William Weber told the Associated Press the haunting was fabricated "over many bottles of wine" as a mutual profit scheme. Weather records showed no snow on the ground when the Lutzes claimed to find cloven hoof prints. Police logs contained no calls from the house during the 28 days. The front door the Lutzes said was ripped from its hinges showed no damage. And the Cromarty family, who purchased the home after the Lutzes, lived there for a full decade without a single paranormal incident. A federal judge reviewing the case described the Lutzes' claims as largely unsupported by the facts.This episode traces the full arc of the Amityville story from the DeFeo family's violent dysfunction to the murders, the trial, the Lutzes' 28 days, the book and film phenomenon, the skeptics' case, the Warrens' investigation, DeFeo's ever-changing confessions from prison, and the cultural aftershock that reshaped how Americans think about haunted houses, property disclosure law, and the paranormal investigation industry. It examines all three prevailing theories — genuine haunting, deliberate hoax, and the psychological middle ground of real distress amplified into commercial mythology — and never loses sight of the six real people whose murders started it all.Ronald DeFeo Junior died in prison on March 12, 2021, at the age of 69. George Lutz died on May 8, 2006.Kathy Lutz died on August 17, 2004. None of them ever recanted their version of events. The house still stands, its address changed and its famous eye-shaped windows replaced, but its history impossible to erase.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

In every corner of the United Kingdom and in every shadowed place across the world, there are stories the daylight can't explain. Whispers of figures that vanish into thin air, footsteps that follow when you're alone, and encounters with the paranormal that leave the living forever changed. On the Haunted UK podcast, we journey into these mysteries, exploring chilling accounts of hauntings, terrifying paranormal events and real stories,

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The Haunted UK podcast. Available now on all major podcast platforms. Ever wonder how dark the world can really get? Well, we dive into the twisted, the terrifying, and the true stories behind some of the world's most chilling crimes. Hi, I'm Ben. And I'm Nicole. Together we host Wicked and Grim,

a true crime podcast that unpacks real-life horrors one case at a time. With deep research, dark storytelling, and the occasional drink to take the edge of, off. We're here to explore the wicked and reveal the grim. We are wicked and grim. Follow and listen on your favorite podcast platform. Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact.

This is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to be.

to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. Close your eyes for a second.

And imagine this. It's 3.15 in the morning. The kind of dead still darkness where even the air feels heavy. You're lying in bed, your bed, in your house. But something's wrong. something you can't quite name. Your eyes snap open, and you don't know why.

There's no sound, no creak of a floorboard, no wind rattling the shutters. Just silence. The kind of silence that feels like it's pressing down on your chest. And then you feel it. Something is watching you. Not from outside the window. Not from the hallway. From inside the room.

From the corner where the shadows pool a little too thick, a little too dark. You want to turn your head. Every instinct in your body is screaming at you to look, but some deeper, older part of your brain, that ancient animal part that kept your ancestors alive on the savannah is telling you, don't, don't look, because whatever's standing in that corner, it wants you to see it. Now imagine that feeling doesn't go away when the sun comes up.

Imagine it follows you from room to room. Imagine it seeps into the walls of your home like a stain you can't scream, scrub out. Imagine it starts changing you. Your thoughts, your moods, the way you look at the people you love. Imagine 28 days of that. 28 days of creeping, suffocating dread in a house that won't let you go. That's what George and Kathy Lutz said happened to them. And whether you believe every word of their story, or you think the whole thing was the most elaborate hoax in American history, what happened before they moved in? That part is 100% real. because before the Lutz family ever set foot inside 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York,

six people were murdered there, shot in their beds, in the middle of the night, by someone they trusted, and that is where our story begins. Let's set the scene first, because the house itself is practically a character in this story. 112 Ocean Avenue sits in Amityville, a quiet village on the south shore of Long Island, New York. It's in the town of Babylon, Suffolk County, the kind of place where people mow their lawns on Saturday mornings and wave to their neighbors on the way to church. It's suburban. It's safe.

It's the last place on earth you'd expect to become synonymous with pure unfiltered horror. The house was built in 1924. It's a large Dutch colonial revival. And if you've ever seen a picture of it, you know exactly what I'm talking about. That distinctive gambrel roof with the two quothes, quarter-round windows on the top floor that look for all the world, like a pair of eyes

staring out at the street. Those windows became iconic. They're the reason the house is instantly recognizable, even decades later. Even after the subsequent owners changed them to square windows in an attempt to shake the stigma, people still know. It sits on a generous lot, right on the water. It's got a boathouse, a detached garage, an in-ground swimming pool, five bedrooms, three and a half baths, a full basement, and a finished attic. By any measure it was, and still is, a beautiful home, the kind of place of family dreams about owning. But by 1974, 112 Ocean Avenue belonged to the Defeo family. And the Defeos were not the picture-perfect suburban family they appeared to be from the outside. Ronald Defeo Sr. was a large,

imposing man who worked as a service manager at a Buick dealership in Brooklyn. a dealership owned by his father-in-law, Peter Defeo. By most accounts, the elder Ronald was a hard man. He had a temper. He was controlling. And he wasn't shy about using his fists, particularly on his eldest son. His wife Louise was described by people who knew her as a kind but quiet woman. Some said she was beaten down by the marriage. Others said she did her best to keep the peace in a household that was anything but peaceful.

Either way, she was the emotional center of her. the family, the one who held things together, even when things were falling apart. Together they had five children. Dawn, the eldest daughter, was 18 in 1974. She was said to be headstrong, independent, and had a complicated relationship with her older brother. Then there was Allison, 13, and the two younger boys, Mark, who was 12, and John Matthew, the baby of the family at just nine years old. And then there was Ronald Joseph DeFey O'Feyer. Jr. Butch, as everyone called him, was 23 years old in the fall of 1974, and Butch Defeo was a problem. He'd been a problem for years. He was using heroin and LSD regularly. He was volatile and

aggressive. He'd been in and out of trouble, and his relationship with his father was toxic in the truest sense of the word. The two fought constantly, screaming matches that sometimes turned physical. Neighbors heard it. Friends knew about it. It was a open secret. But here's the thing about the Defeo household that people often overlook. Despite the dysfunction, despite the anger and the drugs and the violence, they stayed. They all stayed in that house together. The family dynamic was complicated in ways that outsiders couldn't fully understand. There was money. Ronald Sr. made a good living, and the family wanted for nothing materially. The house was beautiful. The cars were nice. On the surface, everything looked fine.

Beneath the surface, it was a powder keg waiting for a match. And Butch, he was the fuse. By the fall of 1974, Butch de Feo's drug use had escalated dramatically. He was spending hundreds of dollars a week on heroin alone, and he was funding his habit in ways that created constant friction within the family. He'd stolen money from his father's business. He'd forged checks. On one occasion, and this is documented in police records,

Butch had staged a robbery of his own car, claiming that a bag containing over $20,000 in cash from the dealership had been stolen at gunpoint while he was making a bank deposit. The family suspected the truth, that Butch had stolen the money himself to fund his addiction. And the confrontation that followed was, by multiple accounts, one of the most violent episodes in the household's history. Ronald Sr. beat Butch badly enough to leave visible bruises.

And Butch, rather than backing down, reportedly grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun and pointed it at his father's face. He pulled the trigger. The gun didn't fire. It was either unloaded or malfunctioned, depending on which account you believe. But the intent was clear. Butch Defeo had tried to kill his father months before the actual murders, and the family's response to this was nothing. No police report. No hospitalization. No intervention. They absorbed the incident and went on living under the same roof. That detail alone tells you something profound about how deeply dysfunctional this household was.

In a healthy family, a son pointing a loaded shotgun at his father would be a crisis point, a moment that changes everything. In the Defeo household, it was just another Tuesday. Friends and acquaintances of the family later described a home where screaming was background noise, where fear was a constant undercurrent, and where the patriarch's temper set the emotional temperature for everyone. Some people who knew Louise Defeo said she lived in a state of perpetual anxiety, always trying to anticipate the next eruption, always trying to position herself between her husband's rage and her children's safety.

It's a grim portrait, and it makes what happened next feel, in some terrible way, almost inevitable. Now, we come to the night that changed everything, and I want you to understand something before we go any further. What I'm about to describe is not legend. It's not folklore. It's not the plot of a horror movie. This is documented, verified, courtroom-proven fact. Six real people lost their lives on this night, and that should never be forgotten in all the sensationalism that came later. It was a Wednesday, November the 13th, 1974. A cold night on Long Island, the kind where the damp from the nearby canals seeps into your bones.

At approximately 3.15 in the morning, and remember that time, because it's going to come back later in ways that'll make your skin crawl. Ronald Defeo Jr. moved through the house on Ocean Avenue with a 35-caliber Marlin Liver action rifle. He started in his parents' bedroom on the second floor. Ronald Sr. was shot twice, once in the lower back, once in the upper back. Louise Defeo was shot once while lying beside her husband. Neither of them, based on the physical evidence. appeared to have woken up or struggled. Think about that for a moment.

A 35-caliber Marlin rifle is not a quiet weapon. It's a big gun. It's loud. And yet, nobody in the house woke up, not after the first shots, not after the second. That detail, that impossible, inexplicable silence from the rest of the family,

would become one of the most debated aspects of this case for decades to come. Defeo then moved through the house, room by room. He went to Dawn's room. She was shot twice while lying face down in her bed. Then Allison's room, 13 years old, shot once. Then the room shared by the two young boys. Mark, 12 years old, shot once. And John Matthew, nine years old. Shot once. All of them were found in the same position, lying face down in their beds. None showed signs of having fought back. none appeared to have even moved. Six people murdered in their sleep with a high-powered rifle

and not one of them ran, screamed, or tried to get away. The crime scene photos, which are publicly available in court records, are haunting. Not because of graphic violence, but because of the stillness. The beds are neat. The bodies are positioned almost peacefully, as if they simply never woke up. When detectives from the Suffolk County Police Department arrived at the scene, They were baffled.

How does someone fire a rifle repeatedly, inside a house, and nobody wakes up? Multiple theories were floated over the years. Some investigators suggested the family may have been drugged beforehand, though toxicology reports didn't conclusively support that theory. Others speculated that the first shots may have been muffled somehow. Defeo himself in one of his many contradictory statements over the years suggested he'd used a silencer, but a silencer on a marlin lever action rifle is extremely impractical,

and no physical evidence of one was ever recovered. The most commonly accepted explanation among forensic experts is simpler, and in some ways more disturbing. The family members may have been in such deep sleep that the sound, while loud, didn't fully register before Defeo reached their rooms. In a large house with solid construction, the sound dynamics can be unpredictable. And once you factor in the speed at which Defeo moved, he knew the layout of the house intimately.

He knew exactly where everyone slept. The whole thing could have been over in minutes. But there's another theory that I think deserves mention, even though it's deeply uncomfortable. Some researchers have suggested that at least some family members did wake up, but were frozen in terror. That they heard the shots, heard the footsteps coming down the hall, and simply couldn't move. It's a well-documented physiological response. Tonic immobility, sometimes called playing dead. The body locks up.

You can't run. You can't scream. You just lie there, waiting. We'll never know for certain. The dead can't tell us what they experienced in those final moments. But the physical evidence tells us one thing clearly. Whatever happened in that house at 3.15 in the morning on November the 13th, 1974. It was efficient, it was methodical, and it was carried out by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

The next evening, Thursday, November the 14th, Ronald DeFeyo Jr. burst into Henry's bar, a local watering hole in Amityville where he was a regular. He was frantic, panicked, or at least he appeared to be. You got to help me, he told the other patrons. I think my mother and father are shot. A small group from the bar, including Defeo, drove to the house on Ocean Avenue. It was one of Defeo's friends, Bobby Kelsky, who entered the house first and discovered the bodies of Ronald Sr. and Louise in their bed. The police were called immediately. When officers from the Amityville Village Police Department arrived, followed quickly by Suffolk County homicide detectives, they found all six victims in their beds.

The scene was methodical and chilling in its orderliness. There was no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle, no sign of robbery. This was personal. Initially, Defeo told police that the murders were the work of a mob hitman, a man named Louis Felini, whom Defeo described as having a grudge against the family. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. This episode is brought to you by Spreeker.

The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast.

podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. Detectives were skeptical from the start. The story didn't add up. There was no evidence of an intruder, no witnesses, and Defeo's behavior was off. Within hours of questioning, the story began to unravel. By the early morning hours of November the 15th, less than 48 hours after the murders, Ronald Defeo Jr. confessed.

Once I started, he told detectives, I just couldn't stop. It went so fast. He described moving through the house room by room with the Marlin rifle. He told them he'd collected the spent shell casings and his bloodstained clothing, placed everything in a pillowcase, and disposed of it by tossing it into a storm drain along the way to work the next morning. Police later recovered the evidence exactly where he said it would be. Defeo was arrested and charged with six counts of second-degree murder. The investigation that followed was thorough, and the evidence against Ronald was overwhelming. Detectives from the Suffolk County Police Department's homicide squad pieced together a timeline that left no room for an alternative suspect.

The Marlin rifle was traced to a purchase Defeo had made. Gunpowder residue was consistent with his involvement. His initial story about the mob hitman fell apart within hours. Louis Felini, the man Defeo had accused, had a verified alibi and no connection to any motive. But the investigation also raised questions that have never been satisfactorily answered. Chief among them was the issue of sound. The 35 caliber Marlin produced a substantial report. We're talking about a rifle cartridge, not a quiet little handgun round.

And at least eight shots were fired. inside a wood frame house with neighbors on both sides. And yet no neighbor called the police that night. Nobody reported hearing anything unusual. In a quiet residential street where houses were relatively close together, that silence defied easy explanation. There was also the question of the family dog. The Defeus had a large sheep dog that was found alive and unharmed after the murders. The dog hadn't barked, or if it had, no one reported hearing it. Dogs bark at strangers. dogs bark at loud noises. But this dog, apparently, slept through a massacre.

Detectives also noted something about the crime scene that unsettled even the most experienced investigators on the squad. There was minimal blood transfer between rooms, suggesting that Defeo hadn't tracked significant amounts of evidence on his feet or clothing as he moved from victim to victim. For a crime of this magnitude, six shootings in a matter of minutes, the scene was remarkably contained. almost methodical.

These observations led some investigators to suspect that Defeo had planned the killings far more carefully than as panicked, drug-fueled confession suggested. This wasn't a spontaneous eruption of rage. The evidence pointed to premeditation, calculation, and a level of cold-blooded efficiency that troubled everyone who worked the case. One more detail that I think is worth mentioning. When detectives examined the victim's bedrooms, they found something odd about the bedding. In several rooms, the sheets and blankets were relatively undisturbed.

The victims weren't tangled in their covers, weren't half out of bed, weren't positioned in ways that suggested they'd been startled awake and then restrained. They were lying flat, face down, almost placed, as if someone had positioned them, or as if they'd been paralyzed before the shots were fired. That observation fueled years of speculation about whether the family had been drugged. sedated with something that would keep them unconscious, while Defeo moved from room to room. The toxicology reports were inconclusive on this point, but they didn't rule it out entirely either. Some substances, depending on dosage and timing, might not show up clearly in a 1974 toxicology screen.

The technology simply wasn't advanced enough to detect everything. We may never know the full truth of what happened in those final hours. but the physical evidence paints a picture of something far more deliberate and far more disturbing than a young man simply snapping under pressure. The trial of Ronald Defeo Jr. began on October 14, 1975 in Suffolk County Court, presided over by Judge Thomas Stark. The prosecution was led by Assistant District Attorney Gerard Sullivan, who would later write his own book about the case. The defense was handled by Attorney William Weber,

and William Weber, remember that name, because he's going to become very important later in our story in ways that have nothing to do with the trial. Weber's defense strategy was insanity. He didn't deny that Defeo killed his family. The confession and physical evidence made that impossible. Instead, Weber argued that Defeo was driven to murder by voices in his head, that he was psychologically broken by years of abuse at the hands of his father,

and that he was not in a rational state of mind, when he pulled the trigger. The prosecution painted a very different picture. Sullivan argued that Defeo was a cold, calculating killer who'd been fueled by a toxic combination of drug abuse, rage, and greed. Ronald Sr. had a significant life insurance policy, and Defeo stood to inherit a substantial amount of money. Several psychiatrists testified on both sides,

offering conflicting assessments of Defeo's mental state. But the jury wasn't buying the insanity defense. On November 21st, 1975, almost exactly one year after the murders, Ronald Defeo Jr. was found guilty on all six counts of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to six consecutive terms of 25 years to life in prison. He would spend the rest of his natural life behind bars, eventually dying at the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Falsburg, New York, on March 12, 2021, at the age of 69. But Defeo's conviction wasn't the end of the story, not by a long shot.

Because even as the trial was wrapping up, a new family was about to move into 112 Ocean Avenue. And what they claimed happened to them over the next 28 days would transform a local murder case into the most famous haunting in American history. George Lee Lutz was 28 years old in December of 1975. He was a former Marine, tall, broad-shouldered, with a thick, dark, Beard, who ran a land surveying company. His wife, Kathleen, was a few years older, and she brought three children from a previous marriage into their blended family.

Daniel, 10 years old. Christopher 7. And Melissa, who everyone called Missy, just five. The Lutzes were looking for a home. They'd been searching for a while, and when their real estate agent showed them the listing for 112 Ocean Avenue, they couldn't believe the price. $80,000. For a five-bedroom Dutch colonial on the water in Amityville,

that was a steel, even by 1975 standards. Comparable homes in the area were selling for well over 100,000. Of course, there was a reason for the discount. The agent was legally required to disclose the property's history, and she did. The murders had happened just 13 months earlier. The house had sat empty since the killings, and the previous contents, furniture, personal belongings, much of it still in place, had been sold with the property.

Let me say that again, because it's important. The Lutz's were not just buying the house. They were buying the house with the Defeo family's furniture still inside. The beds, the dressers, the dining room table. Nearly everything the Defeo family owned was still there. The family's belongings had been included as part of the estate sale. Now, I want you to think about that for a moment. These are the same beds where six people were murdered in their sleep,

the same furniture that was in those rooms on the night of November 13th, and the Lutz family moved right in. George later said the price was simply too good to pass up. He acknowledged the history, said it didn't bother him, and noted that he didn't believe that dead people could hurt the living. He changed his mind about that pretty quickly. The Lutz is closed on the house on December 18, 1975, and moved in that same day.

And one of the very first things they did was arrange for a priest to come, bless the home. That priest was Father Ralph Pecoraro, though that's a pseudonym used in the later book. His real name was Father Frank Mancuso, and some accounts identify him as Reverend Pecoraro. Regardless of the name, what he reportedly experienced during that blessing

would become one of the most chilling details in the entire Amityville saga. According to the account later published in Jay Anson's book, and corroborated in interviews the luteses gave over the years. Father Pecoraro entered the house and began his blessing on the second floor, in a room that had been used as a sewing room or playroom. As he sprinkled holy water and began his prayers, he heard a voice, not a whisper, not a murmur, a voice, deep, commanding, and unmistakable. Two words, get out.

The priest reportedly felt a sharp, stinging, slap across his face. His hands began to blister. He didn't finish the blessing of that room. He retreated downstairs, completed a partial blessing of the first floor, and left the house. When he later called the Lutz's to warn them, to tell them that whatever was in that house was dangerous and that they should stay out of that second floor room, the phone line allegedly filled with static. The call was disrupted. The warning, if it was delivered at all, was delivered in fragments. Father Pecoraro would later become a controversial figure in the story. Some accounts say he confirmed the events publicly. Others say the Catholic Diocese of Rockville

Center pressured him to distance himself from the case. What's clear is that the church was deeply uncomfortable with the publicity, and Pecoraro's involvement became a source of tension between the Lutz's and the local diocese for years. But that was just day one. The Lutz's had 27 more days to go. What follows is the account of the Lutz family's experiences inside 112 Ocean Avenue, as they describe them in interviews, depositions, and in cooperation with author Jay Anson for the 1977 book, The Amityville Horror. I'm going to present these events the way the Lutz has told them, and then, because this is a show that deals in facts, we'll examine what the skeptics and investigators found. But first, the story as the Lutz family,

told it. Almost immediately after moving in, George Lutz began experiencing something strange. He was cold, not just chilly, bone deep, teeth chattering cold. The house had a working heating system, and George kept cranking it up, but he could never seem to get warm. He began spending hours in front of the fireplace, feeding log after log into the flames, but the chill wouldn't break. And then there was the sleep issue. Every single night, without face, George woke up at exactly 3.15 in the morning. Wide awake. Alert. As if something had shaken him out of sleep.

He'd lie there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, feeling that same heavy pressing silence that I described at the beginning of this episode. He didn't know, not at first, that 3.15 was the estimated time of the Defeo murders. When he later learned that detail, it shook him to his core. Meanwhile, Kathy was having experiences of her own. She reported vivid, disturbing nightmares, dreams about the murders, dreams in which she was inside the house on the night of the killings, watching them happen. She said she'd wake up with red welts and marks on her body, as if she'd been grabbed or

scratched in her sleep. On at least one occasion, she claimed to have been levitated off the bed, physically lifted into the air while sleeping, only to be slammed back down onto the mattress. The children were affected too. Daniel and Christopher became irritable. and withdrawn. They fought constantly, which their parents said was out of character. But it was little Missy, five-year-old Missy, whose experiences were the most unsettling. Missy told her parents she had a new friend, an invisible friend named Jody. Now imaginary friends are common for kids that age. There's nothing inherently alarming about a five-year-old inventing a playmate. But Missy's descriptions of Jody were specific in ways that

made her parents deeply uncomfortable. She described Jody as a pig, a large pig with glowing red eyes, and Jody, according to Missy, lived in the house. Jody had always lived in the house, and Jody told Missy things. Things about the house, things about the family, things that a five-year-old couldn't possibly know. George reportedly saw the creature once. He said he looked up at Missy's second floor bedroom window from outside the house one night and saw two glowing red eyes staring back. Not human eyes. Not a reflection. Two red luminous points of light hovering in the darkness of his daughter's room. And the phenomena kept escalating. There were the flies, hundreds of them, clustering in the sewing room. The same room where Father Pecoraro heard the voice

say, get out. This was December and January on Long Island. It was freezing. Flies. don't swarm in the dead of winter, and yet there they were, covering the windows, buzzing in thick, angry clouds. George would kill them, clean them up, and the next day, they'd be back. There was the green slime, a thick gelatinous substance that the family said oozed from the walls and the keyholes. It appeared without explanation and defied identification. It wasn't condensation. It wasn't mold. It was something else entirely. There was the stench. A sickly sweet, rotten smell that would fill certain rooms without warning and disappear just as suddenly. It was strongest in the basement and in the sewing room, and it carried an

almost physical weight, heavy and cloying, the kind of smell that makes you gag. There were the sounds. Footsteps on the stairs when no one was there. A marching band. Yes, a marching band that George and Kathy both claimed to hear playing music somewhere inside the house in the middle of the night. Door slamming with tremendous force. Windows flying open. The front door being ripped from its hinges and the heavy wrought iron hardware twisted and bent, as if by enormous force. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after these messages. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen.

Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your friends. podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. There were physical changes to the house itself. A ceramic lion decoration moved on its own, turning up in different rooms. A crucifix that Kathy had hung on the wall was found inverted, turned upside down.

The garage door was damaged from the inside, as if something had battered against it. And there were the changes in George. This is the part that, when you read between the lines, is perhaps the most frightening of all. George Lutz, by his own admission and by Kathy's account, began to change. He became obsessive about the fireplace, spending hours chopping wood and tending the fire. He stopped bathing regularly. He lost weight. He became short-tempered, angry, and paranoid. He began to look different. Kathy later said that George's appearance started to resemble Ronald Defeo Jr. His eyes took on a hollow, distant quality.

His face seemed to shift and harden. It was as if the house, or whatever was inside it, was remaking George in the image of the man who'd committed murder there. There was a moment, and both George and Kathy described this independently in interviews. When George looked at Kathy, and for just a split second, saw someone else's face superimposed over hers. not Kathy's face, someone else's. And in that moment, he felt a surge of violent rage that wasn't his own.

A fury directed at the woman lying beside him in bed that came from somewhere outside himself. It passed. He didn't act on it. But he knew in that moment that whatever was happening in that house was getting inside him, changing him. And he was terrified that if they stayed much longer, he wouldn't be able to stop it. I want to talk about the basement. because this is one of the details that doesn't get enough attention, in my opinion.

During their time in the house, the Lutz has discovered something in the basement that wasn't on any floor plan, wasn't mentioned in any real estate listing, and apparently wasn't known to previous visitors or inspectors. Behind a set of shelves in the basement, there was a small room. It was roughly four feet by five feet, barely large enough for a person to stand in. The walls were painted red, not a warm, cheerful red. A deep, dried blood crimson that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. The Lutz has called it the Red Room. The family's dog, a large mixed breed named Harry, refused to go near it.

When they tried to bring Harry into the basement, he'd plant his feet, whimper, and resist with everything he had. If forced into the basement, he'd cower against the far wall, as far from the Red Room as he could get, and shake uncontrollably. Now I want to be careful here, because this is where fact and speculation start to blur. The existence of the small room in the basement appears to be verified. Subsequent owners and investigators have confirmed that there is, in fact, a small enclosed space in the basement of the house. Whether it was painted red at the time the Lutz's lived there is less certain. Some investigators have confirmed the red paint.

Others have suggested it was a normal utility space that was given a sinister reinterpretation, after the fact. What's interesting, and this is where it gets genuinely creepy regardless of which side of the debate you fall on, is the history of the land itself. The property at 112 Ocean Avenue sits on land that, according to local historical records, was once used by the Shinnecock Nation. Some researchers have claimed that the specific parcel was used as a place where the sick and the dying were taken, essentially a place of death. Others have gone further. suggesting that it was a site where the Shinnock confined members of the tribe who were mentally ill or considered dangerous. Now, I want to be transparent here.

The Indian burial ground trope is one of the most overused and culturally insensitive cliches in horror storytelling. And its application to the Amityville case has been criticized by Native American scholars and by skeptics alike. The historical evidence for any specific Shinnock use of the property is thin at best. and some researchers have called it outright fabrication. But it was part of the narrative that the Lutz's and their supporters promoted, and it became embedded in the mythology of the house. Whether there's any truth to it, that's for you to decide. By early January of 1976, the Lutz family had had enough.

The escalation over those final days was relentless. George described waking in the night to find himself standing outside in the cold, with no memory of leaving. the house. Kathy reported being embraced from behind by invisible arms. Not a comforting embrace, but a restraining one, like something was holding her in place. The children were having night terrors so severe that they'd wake up screaming and refused to go back into their bedrooms. The house itself seemed to be physically deteriorating in ways that defied the normal pace of entropy. A banister on the staircase was ripped from its supports. Ceramic fixtures cracked without being

touched. Windows that had been locked were found wide open in the morning, the rooms below them freezing, and the smell, that sweet, putrid, unmistakable smell, was everywhere now, not just in the basement or the sewing room, everywhere. The final straw, according to George, came during a series of events on the night of January 14th that pushed the family past the breaking point. George described being physically thrown from a chair by an invisible force. Kathy said she was struck across the face. The children were screaming. The house was filled with noise.

Banging, crashing, the sounds of something moving through the walls. George said he looked at the clock. It was 3.15 in the morning. Of course it was. At some point during that final night, and the exact timeline varies depending on which account you read, the family made a decision. They were leaving. Not in the morning. Not after packing their things. Right now. They left almost

everything behind. Clothes, furniture, personal belongings. All of it stayed in the house. They loaded into George's van with the dog and drove to Kathy's mother's house in nearby Deer Park. It was the middle of the night. They were terrified, disoriented, and emotionally shattered. They never spent another night at 112 Ocean Avenue. Twenty-eight days. That's all it's. took. Twenty-eight days to turn a family's dream home into a place they couldn't escape fast enough. The Lutzes would later say that even after leaving, the effects lingered. George continued to have nightmares. Kathy reported ongoing physical symptoms. Headaches, fatigue, a persistent feeling of being watched that took months to subside.

The children struggled emotionally and socially. Daniel and Christopher had difficulty in school. Missy stopped talking about Jody, but she also stopped sleeping through the night for a long time. George and Kathy's marriage already stressed by the financial strain of the house purchase, and the trauma of those 28 days, would continue to deteriorate. They eventually divorced in the late 1980s. Both would go on to remarry, and both would spend the rest of their lives dealing with the aftershocks, not just of what they said happened in the house, but of the media storm that followed. Whatever had happened in that house, whether paranormal or psychological,

it didn't just haunt a building. It haunted a family for the rest of their lives. And then, the story went public. After leaving the house, the lutz is connected with author Jay Anson, a writer who'd done work for the Archdiocese of New York. Through a series of interviews, conducted primarily over the phone, with the lutz's providing roughly 45 hours of tape-recorded testimony, Anson wrote what would become one of the best-selling horror books in publishing history.

The Amityville Horror, A True Story, was published in September of 1977 by Prentice Hall. That subtitle, A True Story, was doing a lot of heavy lifting, and it would prove to be the most controversial two words in the entire book. The book was a sensation. It sold over 10 million copies and spent months on the New York Times bestseller list. It scared the daylights out of readers across the country and ignited a national conversation about the paranormal that hadn't been seen since the 1973 release of The Exorcist.

And then came the movie. The Amityville Horror hit theaters on July 27, 1979, starring James Brolin as George Lutz and Margot Kidder as Kathy. It was directed by Stuart Rosenberg and produced by American International Pictures on a relatively modest budget. budget. It was a massive commercial hit, earning over $86 million at the domestic box office, making it one of the highest grossing films of 1979. The movie took significant liberties with

the source material, as Hollywood always does, but it preserved the core narrative, the dream house, the creeping dread, the escalating phenomena, and the desperate escape. Rod Steiger's portrayal of the priest was particularly memorable, and the movie's tagline, became iconic. For God's sake, get out. But even as the book and movie were making the Lutz is famous and wealthy, the cracks in the story were already beginning to show. And here's a detail about the book's creation that I think is critically important. Jay Anson never actually set foot inside 112 Ocean Avenue, not once. He wrote the entire book based on the Lutz family's tape-recorded accounts, those 45 hours of testimony, without independent,

verifying a single claim. He didn't visit the house. He didn't interview the neighbors. He didn't check weather records or police logs. He took the lutzes at their word and crafted a narrative around what they told him. Anson also made a decision that would prove deeply controversial. He presented the book as nonfiction. A true story, right there on the cover.

That wasn't a marketing gimmick. It was a declaration. And it meant that every claim in the book, the green slime, the levitation, the demonic pig, the voice telling the priest to get out, carried the implicit weight of factual reporting. Readers were being told in no uncertain terms that this really happened. The book itself contained factual errors that a basic fact-checking process would have caught. Dates were wrong in some passages.

Descriptions of the house's layout didn't always match the actual floor plan. Whether conditions described in the narrative didn't correspond, with historical records. These weren't major narrative problems. Most readers wouldn't notice. But they suggested a book that had been written quickly for maximum commercial impact without the kind of rigorous verification

you'd expect from a work claiming to be true. Anson would go on to defend the book until his death from a heart attack on March 12th, 1980. He was just 58 years old. He never recanted, never acknowledged any fabrication, and maintained that the Lutz's account was genuine. But the questions about his methodology and about the book's relationship to verifiable

truth never went away. Let's be honest about something. This is a story that, from the very beginning, had problems, and it's important, especially on a show like this one, where we care about the truth, to lay those problems out clearly. The first major blow to the Amityville narrative came from a surprising source, William Weber, the defense attorney who'd represented Ronald Defeo Jr. at trial. In a 1979 interview with the Associated Press, Weber made a stunning claim. He said that he and the Lutz's had concocted the haunting story together.

His exact words, as reported by the AP, were that the horror story was created over many bottles of wine. According to Weber, the scheme worked like this. The Lutz's would get a sensational story they could sell as a book, and Weber would get renewed public interest in the Defeufeuze. case that could help him secure a new trial for his client on the grounds that the house itself, whatever supernatural forces inhabited it, bore some responsibility for driving Defeo to murder. It was Weber claimed a mutually beneficial arrangement that got out of hand when the Lutz's

cut him out of the book deal and partnered with Jay Anson instead. The Lutz's vehemently denied Weber's claims. They acknowledged meeting with him. That much is documented, but said the meetings were about the history of the house and the Defeo case, not about fabricating a haunting story. They maintained until their deaths that what they experienced was real. But Weber's accusation opened the floodgates, and investigators began picking the story apart. Dr. Stephen Kaplan, a parapsychologist who ran the Parapsychology Institute of America, was one of the first researchers to publicly challenge the Lutz's claims. Kaplan had actually been contacted by the Lutz's before they went to Jay Anson.

But the relationship soured when Kaplan insisted on conducting a rigorous, controlled investigation, rather than simply validating their story. After examining the available evidence and interviewing witnesses, Kaplan concluded that the haunting was a hoax. Then there were the logistical problems. The Lutz's story included some details that just didn't hold up under scrutiny. The cloven hoof prints in the snow, for example. One of the most vivid details in the book was the discovery of clove and hoofed footprints in the January snow around the house, as if some demonic creature had been circling the property. The problem. Weather records from the National Weather Service showed that there was no snow on the ground in Amityville during the period the Lutz's claim to have found the prints. No snow,

no footprints, period. The damage to the front door and the garage. The Lutz has described the front door being ripped off its hinges and the garage door being bent and battered. But Subsequent inspections of the property revealed no damage consistent with these claims. The doors were intact. The hardware was undamaged. If something had torn the front door open with enough force to bend wrought iron, there should have been physical evidence. There wasn't. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after these messages. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen.

Apple Podcasts, Spotify, in about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. The police response. In the book, the Lutz has described calling the Amityville Police on multiple occasions during their 28 days in the house. But Amityville Village Police Department records show no calls from 112 Ocean Avenue during the period in question. None. If you're experiencing the kind of terrifying, violent paranormal activity described in the book.

Doors being ripped off, objects flying across rooms, family members being physically assaulted. Wouldn't you call the police? And if you did call, wouldn't there be a record? Father Pecoraro's account also proved problematic. While the priest initially seemed to support the Lutz's version of events, his story shifted over time. The Catholic Diocese of Rockville Center distanced itself from the case entirely, and Pecoraro himself gave conflicting statements about what he'd actually experienced during the blessing. Some accounts had him hearing the voice and being slapped. Others had him simply feeling uneasy. The details changed depending on who was asking and when. And then there were the subsequent occupants. After the Lutz's left,

the house didn't sit empty for long. In March of 1977, James and Barbara Cromarty purchased just 112 Ocean Avenue for the price of $55,000, even less than the Lutz's had paid. The Cromartis lived in the house for a full decade, 10 years, and in that time, nothing. No cold spots, no green slime, no flies, no levitating family members, no voices telling them to get out, no invisible pig named Jody with glowing red eyes, nothing paranormal whatsoever. Barbara Cromarty was quoted in interviews saying that the only scary thing about the house was the stream of tourists, curiosity seekers, and would-be ghost hunters who showed up at all hours, trespassing on the property and peering through windows.

The living people were the problem, not the dead ones. The Cromarties actually sued the Lutz's, along with Jay Anson and the publisher, for damages related to the ongoing public nuisance caused by the book's popularity. and they weren't the only ones filing lawsuits. The legal fallout from the Amityville story was almost as convoluted as the story itself. The legal history of the Amityville case is a tangled mess, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But there are a few key moments worth highlighting. In September of 1979, U.S. District Court Judge Jack Weinstein dismissed the Cromartie's lawsuit against the Lutz's,

but made a statement that was absolutely devastating to the Amityville narrative. Judge Weinstein stated, based on the evidence presented, that the Lutz's claims were essentially not supported by the facts. He described the haunting account as largely fabricated and noted that the evidence pointed to a profit-motivated scheme rather than genuine paranormal activity. That's a federal judge on the record, essentially calling the whole thing a scam. But the Lutz has never wavered, not publicly anyway. George Lutz maintained until his death on May 8, 2006. that the events were real. Kathy Lutz had died two years earlier on August 17, 2004,

and she, too, had never recanted. And this is where the story gets genuinely complicated, because here's the thing. People can be wrong about why something happened to them, without being wrong that something happened. It's entirely possible, and some researchers believe this is the most likely explanation, that the Lutz's did experience something in that house,

but that the something was psychological rather than paranormal. Consider the circumstances. They moved into a house where six people had been murdered. They were sleeping in beds where people had been shot to death. They knew the history. George, who was spending hours alone in the house while Kathy and the kids went about their daily lives, was essentially marinating in the knowledge of what had happened there.

The human mind is a powerful thing. Under the right conditions, sleep deprivation, stress, the power of suggestion, awareness of a home's violent history. Perfectly rational people can experience things that feel absolutely real but have entirely mundane explanations. Cold spots in a drafty old house. Strange smells from aging plumbing or mold in the walls. Creaking sounds in a structure built in 1924. Nightmares fueled by the knowledge that you're sleeping in a murder house. And then there's the financial dimension. The luteses were not wealthy.

They'd stretched financially to buy the house, and they were under significant economic pressure. A book deal, a big book deal, would solve a lot of problems. That doesn't necessarily mean they fabricated the entire thing from whole cloth. But it might mean they embellished, exaggerated, took real feelings of unease and discomfort, and amplified them into something spectacular enough to sell. The truth, as it so often does, probably lives somewhere in the messy middle. No discussion of the Amityville horror is complete without mentioning Ed and Lorraine Warren,

the self-described demonologist from Monroe, Connecticut, who investigated the house and became arguably the most famous paranormal investigators in American history, largely because of their involvement in this case. The Warrens visited 112 Ocean Avenue in March of 1976, roughly two months after the Lutz's had fled. They brought a team that included a camera crew from Channel 5 in New York and several other psychics and sensitives. During their investigation, Lorraine Warren claimed to have made contact with demonic entities in the house. She described being overwhelmed by negative energy and said she experienced physical symptoms,

nausea, dizziness, and a crushing sense of oppression, particularly in the basement and in the sewing room on the second floor. The Warren's investigation also produced what became one of the most famous pieces of alleged evidence in paranormal history, the so-called ghost boy photograph. Taken by an infrared camera that had been set up on the second floor during a seance, the image appears to show a young boy with glowing eyes peering out from one of the doorways. The Warren's claimed it was the spirit of one of the murdered Defeo children, likely John Matthew, the youngest. The photograph has been analyzed extensively over the decades. Skeptics have pointed out that one of the human investigators present during the shoot, a man named Paul Bartz, bore a strong resemblance to the figure in the photo and was known to have been moving around on that floor during the session.

The most widely accepted debunking holds that the ghost boy is simply Bartz, caught in an odd position by the infrared camera. But the Warren stood by the photo, and it became a centerpiece of their lecture, books and television appearances for the next several decades. The Amityville case was the rocket fuel that launched the Warren's into national prominence, and they rode that fame all the way to their involvement in other high-profile cases, the Perron family haunting, the Enfield Poultergeist, the Annabelle Doll case,

many of which were later adapted into the enormously successful conjuring film franchise. Ed Warren died in 2006. Lorraine Warren died in 2019. Like the Lutz's, neither ever recanted their claims about what they experienced at 112 Ocean Avenue. While the Amityville haunting story was dominating headlines and bestseller lists, Ronald DeFaio Jr. was sitting in a prison cell at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, and he was talking, a lot, and his story kept changing. Over the years, DeFeyo offered at least half a dozen different versions of the events of November 13th,

17, 1974, and each new version was more outlandish than the last. In his original confession, he acted alone. He moved through the house, killed his family, disposed of the evidence, and went to work the next day as if nothing had happened. Then years later, he changed his story. He claimed that his sister Dawn had actually helped him. According to this version, Don hated their father as much as Butch did, and the two of them had planned the murders together. Defeo said that Dawn had shot their mother and the two youngest boys, and that he had then turned the gun on Dawn after she'd done her part. There's no physical evidence to support this claim, and most investigators dismissed it as a self-serving attempt to spread the blame. In yet another version, Defeo claimed that a friend, or possibly a mob associate, had been present in the house and had participated in the killings.

Again, no evidence. And then there were the supernatural claims. As the Amityville haunting story gained traction, Defeo, perhaps seeing an opportunity, began suggesting that voices had compelled him to kill. He described hearing commands in his head, feeling an overwhelming compulsion that he couldn't resist. He tied these claims directly to the house itself, suggesting that whatever evil dwelt within 112 Ocean Avenue had possessed him and forced him to commit the murders. This, of course, was exactly what William Weber had been hoping for,

when he allegedly collaborated with the Lutz's on the haunting narrative. If the house could be established as a source of supernatural evil, if a court could be convinced that demonic forces had influenced Defeo's actions, then there might be grounds for a new trial or even a reduced sentence. It didn't work. Defeo's appeals were denied and he remained in prison until his death. But his shifting stories added another layer of complexity and doubt to an already murky situation.

If you couldn't trust the convicted killer's account of the murders and you couldn't fully verify the Lutz's account of the haunting, then what could you trust? The answer for many people was nothing. And for others, the answer was everything. Regardless of whether you believe a single word of the Lutz's account, there's no denying the cultural impact of the Amityville horror. It became a phenomenon that transcended the original story

and took on a life of its own. The 1979 film spawned an entire franchise. Over 20 movies and counting, depending on how loosely you define Amityville as a brand. We're talking sequels, prequels, reboots, and dozens of cheap direct-to-video knock-offs that slapped Amityville on the title to cash in on the name recognition.

There's Amityville, too, the possession, which was actually a prequel based on the Defeo murders. There's Amityville 3D. There's the 2005 remake starring Ryan Reynolds. And there are films with titles like the Amityville Asylum, Amityville Playhouse, and even Amityville in Space. A 20-22 movie that is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds. The book spawned sequels and companion volumes. There were documentaries, television specials, and true crime features.

The case became a staple of paranormal investigation shows. and remains one of the most discussed hauntings on podcasts and YouTube channels to this day. But the impact went beyond entertainment. The Amityville horror changed the way Americans thought about haunted houses. Before Amityville, ghost stories were largely the domain of folklore, campfire tales, and gothic literature. After Amityville, they were real estate problems. The case raised genuine legal questions about property disclosure. If a house is believed to be haunted,

does the seller have to tell the buyer? Can a home's reputation for paranormal activity affect its market value? In New York State, these questions actually led to a significant legal precedent. In the 1991 case of Stambovsky v. Ackley, a case that became known in legal circles as the Ghostbusters ruling in the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division ruled that a seller who had actively promoted a house as haunted in national media could not then deny its reputation when selling the price. property. The court held that the house was haunted as a matter of law, not because ghosts actually

existed, but because the home's widely publicized reputation materially affected its value and marketability. The Amityville case didn't directly produce that ruling, but it absolutely created the cultural environment in which such a case could be brought. And there's another dimension to the Amityville story's cultural impact that deserves attention. What it did to the paranormal investigation field itself. Before Amityville, paranormal research existed largely on the fringes of public consciousness. There were serious researchers doing careful work, people like J.B. Rhine at Duke University, who'd been conducting controlled ESP experiments since the 1930s, but they operated in relative

obscurity. The general public didn't think much about ghost hunting as a discipline. It was the stuff of late-night television and paperback novels, not mainstream conversation. After Amityville, everything changed. The combination of the book, the movie, the media coverage, and the Warren's high-profile involvement transformed paranormal investigation from a niche academic pursuit into a pop culture phenomenon. Suddenly, everyone wanted to be a ghost hunter. Equipment manufacturers began marketing electromagnetic field detectors and infrared cameras, to amateur investigators.

Paranormal societies sprang up across the country and the template that the Amityville case established, the true story narrative, the blend of factual tragedy and supernatural claim. The charismatic investigators, the media circus, became the standard playbook for paranormal entertainment that persists to this day. Think about it.

Every ghost hunting show you've ever seen, from ghost hunters to paranormal state, to ghost adventure, owes a debt to Amityville. The format is identical. Go to a location with a dark history, set up cameras, record evidence, declare the site haunted. The Amityville horror didn't invent that formula, but it proved, beyond any doubt, that it was commercially viable. And once the money got involved, once it became clear that ghost stories could generate millions in book sales, movie tickets, and television ratings, the incentive structure changed permanently.

That's a legacy worth thinking about. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreker makes me.

the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousins swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. Because whether the Amityville haunting was real or not, it fundamentally altered the relationship between paranormal claims and commercial profit in American culture.

And that change has made it exponentially harder in the decade since, to separate genuine research from entertainment and authentic experiences from manufactured content. 112 Ocean Avenue didn't stop being a source of fascination just because the Lutz's left and the skeptics weighed in. The house continued to attract attention for decades. After the Cromarties sold the property in the late 1980s, it passed through several more owners. In an effort to discourage the constant stream of gawkers and trespassers,

the address was officially changed from 112 to 108 Ocean Avenue. The iconic quarter-round eye windows on the top floor were replaced with standard rectangular windows, dramatically altering the house's appearance and removing its most recognizable feature. but it didn't matter. People still came. They still drove slowly past. They still took photos. The house had become a landmark,

a dark tourist destination in a village that wanted nothing more than to forget. In 2010, the property was listed for sale at one point, $1.15 million. It was eventually purchased for $950,000. As of the most recent publicly available information, the house remains a private residence. And the current owners have asked, repeatedly and understandably, to be left alone. And you know what? They deserve that. Because whatever you believe about the Amityville horror, haunting or hoax, demons or dollar signs,

112 Ocean Avenue is someone's home. It's where people live, eat dinner, watch television, tuck their kids into bed. The people who live there now had nothing to do with what happened in 1974 or 1975. They just bought a house, a beautiful old Dutch colonial on the water in a nice Long Island village, and they'd probably appreciate it if the rest of us would let them live in it in peace. So here we are. We've walked through the murders, the haunting, the book, the movie, the lawsuits, the skeptics, and the cultural aftermath. And you're probably wondering what I think actually happened.

I'll tell you. But first, let me lay out the three most common interpretations. because this story doesn't have a neat, tidy answer. It has shades of gray. Theory number one, it was all real. The house at 112 Ocean Avenue was, and perhaps still is, a site of genuine supernatural activity. The murders weren't just the act of a disturbed young man.

They were influenced, or even caused, by demonic entities that had inhabited the property for generations. When the Lutz's moved in, those same entities turned their attention to the new occupants, and the 28 days of terror that followed were exactly what George and Kathy described. Proponents of this theory point to the consistency of the Lutz's accounts over time. While some details shifted, the core narrative remained remarkably stable across dozens of interviews spanning decades.

They point to the experiences of Father Pecoraro, to the Warren's investigation, and to the broader context of the Defeo murders themselves. How do you explain six people lying still while a rifle-fired repeatedly in their house how do you explain the methodical almost ritualistic positioning of the bodies how do you explain butch de Feo's claim that voices told him to do it theory number two it was a complete hoax William Weber told the truth he and the luteses fabricated the haunting story over bottles of wine intending to profit from a book deal while providing Weber

with ammunition for Defeo's appeal the lutz's were in financial trouble they'd made a bad investment on a murder house they couldn't resell, and they needed an exit strategy. The haunting gave them one, a spectacular, marketable story that turned a financial disaster into a gold mine. Proponents of this theory point to the weather records that debunk the snow prints, the police records that show no calls from the Lutz's, the undamaged doors, Weber's testimony, Dr. Kaplan's investigation, the Cromerty's decade of quiet living, and Judge Weinstein's devastating assessment. And then there's theory number three, the one I find most compelling.

Something happened, but not what the Lutz's said happened. This theory suggests that the Lutz's did experience genuine psychological distress in the house. sleeplessness, anxiety, paranoia, nightmares, feelings of being watched. All of these are well-documented psychological responses to living in a space associated with extreme violence. The knowledge that six people were murdered in your home, in the very beds you're sleeping in, can do real things to real people. The mind can manufacture experiences that feel completely authentic. Sounds, smells, physical sensations. All of these can be produced by a brain

under stress. The Lutzes then took these genuine experiences, the sleeplessness, the dread, the unease. And with the help of William Weber and later Jay Anson, amplified them into something saleable. The basic feelings were real. The flying pigs and green slime and levitating wives were creative additions. Embellishments designed to transform a story of psychological discomfort into a blockbuster horror narrative. This theory accounts for the sincerity that many people detected in the luteses.

They weren't lying about everything. And that kernel of truth made their account more convincing than a fabrication from whole cloth would have been. in. It also accounts for the factual problems. The details that don't hold up are the embellishments, the additions, the Hollywood ready set pieces that were layered on top of a genuine, but far less dramatic experience. There's actually a well-studied psychological phenomenon that supports this interpretation. It's called the Fear Expectancy Model, and it works like this. When a person enters an environment they already believe to be dangerous or haunted. Their nervous system shifts

into a heightened state of arousal. Heart rate increases, senses sharpen. The brain begins to scan for threats with an intensity that borders on paranoia. And in that state, the mind begins to find threats, even where none exist. A normal house sound, a pipe expanding, a beam settling, wind pushing through a gap in the insulation, gets reinterpreted as something sinister. A draft becomes a cold spot. A shadow becomes a figure. The normal anxiety that comes with moving into a new home

gets amplified a hundredfold when you know that home is a crime scene. Your brain is primed for horror, and so horror is exactly what it delivers. This doesn't make the experience any less real for the person going through it. That's the crucial thing to understand. stand. If your brain tells you there's something standing in the corner of your bedroom at

three in the morning, your fear response is identical whether the thing is actually there or not. Your heart races. Your skin prickles. Your muscles lock. The terror is genuine even if the cause is psychological rather than paranormal. And then you add the social dimension. The Lutz's weren't experiencing the house in isolation. They were experiencing it together as a family. George's anxiety fed Kathy's fear. Kathy's nightmares amplified the children's unease. The kids' behavioral changes confirmed in their parents' minds that something was genuinely wrong. It's a feedback loop. Each person's distress validates and intensifies everyone else's, until the entire family is living in a state of shared escalating panic. Psychologists call this collective delusion or mass

psychogenic illness, and it's far more common than most people realize. It doesn't require stupidity. It doesn't require dishonesty. It requires only a shared context of fear and a group of people who trust each other's perceptions. The Lutz's trusted each other. And that trust, ironically, may have been what made the experience feel so real and so overwhelming. So where does the truth lie? I think the truth is that the Defeo murders were horrifically, indisputably real.

I think the Lutz's experience genuine psychological distress in a house-sense. saturated with recent violence. I think William Weber saw a financial opportunity. I think Jay Anson wrote a hell of a scary book. And I think the line between what was experienced and what was invented has been so thoroughly blurred by time, by money, by the sheer gravitational pull of a good story, that we may never fully untangle it.

And maybe, maybe that's okay. Maybe some stories are more powerful for their ambiguity. Maybe the Amityville horror endures not because we've proven it true or false, but precisely because we can't. It lives in the space between belief and doubt, between the rational and the unexplained. And that space, that uncertain, shadowy middle ground where anything might be real and nothing is certain.

That's where true horror has always lived. Before we wrap up, I want to come back to something that gets lost in all the debate about hauntings and hoaxes. and I need you to hear this because I think it matters more than anything else I've said tonight. Six people died at 112 Ocean Avenue. Ronald DeFayo Sr. A flawed man by all accounts.

Controlling, volatile, sometimes violent. But also a man who went to work every day, who provided for his family, who sat at the head of the dinner table and carved the turkey at Thanksgiving. He didn't deserve what happened to him. Nobody does. Louise DeFeyo.

A mother, of five who, if the accounts of people who knew her are accurate, spent most of her adult life trying to keep a fractured household from flying apart. She loved her children. She stayed when staying was hard, and she died in her sleep next to a husband she'd shared a bed with for over two decades. Dawn Defeo. On the cusp of adulthood, navigating the complicated terrain between being a teenager and becoming a woman. She had friends. She had plans. She had a whole life ahead of her that she never got to live. Allison Defeo.

Right in the middle of those awkward, beautiful, terrible middle school years when everything feels like the end of the world. She was probably worried about homework, about whether the boy in her class liked her, about what she was going to wear tomorrow, the kinds of worries that feel enormous at 13 and heartbreakingly trivial from the distance of adulthood. Mark Defeo, a kid,

a boy who probably still played in the backyard, still watched cartoons, still had that spark of childhood innocence that the world hadn't ground down yet. John Matthew Defeo, a third grader. Still believed in magic, probably. Still thought his big brother was cool. Still had baby teeth for God's sake. They were real people with real lives, real hopes, and real fears. They had friends and extended family who loved them. They went to school and work. They celebrated holidays. They had inside jokes and favorite foods and things that made them laugh. They had voices that people recognized on the phone.

They had handwriting that was theirs alone. They had dreams, literal dreams, the kind you have when you're sleeping. And metaphorical dreams, the kind you have when you're awake and imagining what your life might become. And they deserve to be remembered as more than just the backstory to a ghost tale. Whatever happened to the Lutz family, whatever you believe, whatever theory you find most convincing. The foundation of this entire story is a genuine tragedy. A young man, fueled by drugs and rage and dysfunction, took a rifle and ended six lives in the middle of the night.

That's not entertainment. That's not a movie plot. That's six human beings who went to sleep and never woke up. Gone. All of them. In minutes. So when we talk about the Amityville horror, let's not forget what the real horror was. It wasn't ghosts. It wasn't demons. It wasn't green slime or flying pigs with red eyes. The real horror was a 35 caliber rifle and a young man who decided, in the darkest hours of a November night, to destroy everyone who shared his blood.

That's the true story of 112 Ocean Avenue, and it's more frightening than any ghost story ever written. The house still stands. If you drove past it today, and people do, every single day, you'd see a handsome Dutch colonial on a quiet street in a quiet village. The windows are different now. The address is different. The landscaping has changed, but the bones of the place are the same.

The same walls that heard rifle shots in 1974. The same basement where the red room hides. The same rooms where six people took their last breaths. Does evil linger in a place where terrible things have happened? Can violence leave an imprint on the physical world? a stain that no amount of time or paint or new windows can fully erase? Or do we bring our own ghosts with us, projecting our fears onto wood and plaster and glass, until the house becomes a mirror for whatever darkness already lives inside us?

I don't have the answer. Nobody does. But I'll tell you this much. If someone offered me that house tomorrow, at any price, for any reason, I wouldn't take it. And I think, if you're being honest with yourself, you wouldn't either. Because here's what I keep coming back to, long after the research is done and the notes are put away and the microphones turned off. It doesn't actually matter whether the Amityville haunting was real. Not really. Not in the way that matters. What matters is that something about that house, whether it's supernatural energy or tragic history, or just the raw, unprocessed weight

of human suffering, speaks to something deep inside us, something we don't like to examine too close. It's the fear that the places where we live, the spaces where we feel safest, can be contaminated by violence. That evil, once it enters a home, doesn't leave just because the crime scene tape comes down, and the blood gets cleaned up. We tell ourselves that houses are just structures, wood and nails and drywall and pipe, that they don't absorb anything, that they don't remember. But then we walk into a room where something terrible happened, and we feel that we feel that they don't absorb anything, that they don't remember. and we feel it, that heaviness, that wrongness, that prickling on the back of your neck that tells you this place has seen things it shouldn't have seen. Maybe that's all the Amityville horror ever was, not ghosts, not demons, just the echo of a terrible act, reverberating through the walls of a

house that witnessed something no house should ever have to witness, and a family who walked into that echo and couldn't handle what it did to them. Or maybe, just a little bit of a house. Just a little bit of Just maybe. There really is something in that house. Something old. Something patient. Something that's been there long before the families that would eventually call it home. Long before the Dutch colonial was built. Long before anyone drew property lines on that patch of Long Island Earth. Something that waits in the basement. In the red room. In the spaces between the walls where the light doesn't reach. Something that watches. Something that remembers. Something that still. waiting. Some places carry too much weight. Some stories run too deep, and some doors, once they've

been opened, are better left closed. Thanks for listening. I'll see you on the next one. This episode is brought to you by Spreeker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing.

Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen.

Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousins swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. This episode is brought to you by Sprieker. Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio.

If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Sprinker distributes it everywhere people listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next. big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. This episode is brought to you by Spreker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain.

Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones.

Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen.

Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple.

You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a podcast, Spotify, and about a podcast. doesn't apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need. explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio.

If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more Microsoft. microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it.

This episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones.

Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. This episode is brought to you by Spreker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen,

Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. This episode is brought to you by Spreker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives,

and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com.

Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it.