You're Wrong About - Winter Book Club: The Amityville Horror Part 2 with Jamie Loftus

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

Sarah continues telling guest host Jamie Loftus about the Amityville Horror, and the two touch on ghosts, fallen angels, poltergeists, the space race and intimidating pictures of Mandy Moore.  Here's where to find Jamie:The Bechdel Cast [podcast] My Year in Mensa [podcast] and Aack Cast [podcast] Support us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-the-bechdel-cast-30089535/https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-my-year-in-mensa-55379945/https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-aack-cast-by-jamie-loftus-83922273/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

And if I were a fallen angel, like would I appear as a giant pig? I don't know. If I've been around for millennia, sure. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we tell you about best sellers that you read the first 13 pages of and then got bored. I feel like The Amityville Horror specifically is a book you would see underneath the leg of a table. Yes.

You know, it serves multiple functions. I think that that's an honor. If you can write a book that can hold up someone's auntie's table, you're doing something right. I mean, if you find an early paperback copy of The Amityville Horror, the copyright page is often really funny in those because it's like first printing September 1977, second printing November 1977, third printing January 1978. Like I'm making this up because I don't have one of these in front of me, but I've seen

copies where it goes through eight or 10 printings in about a year because the way the public gobbled this book up just means that there's like so many copies of it floating around in the world with us all the time. When there's a huge cultural motherload like that, I think it's going to be so easy to get an early edition of something, but it's not. They've kind of all like disappeared and scattered to the winds. Right. They just didn't agree.

Mm-hmm. With me today is my ghost guest, Jamie Loftus. Hello. It's good to be back. And you are not a ghost yourself, but you like to talk about ghosts. And you've talked on this show before about shady ghost hunters. And now we're talking about shady ghost victims. That sounds harsh, but you know, some listeners may draw that conclusion.

I've certainly drawn that conclusion so far. And shady ghost media, perhaps. And we're exploring, I think, a larger trend that I've always been talking about on this show, which is why was there so much craggulous nonfiction in the 1970s about the existence of scary supernatural forces and the Catholic Church specifically being the way to deal with that. How did these stories influence the culture we ended up in today? The gorgeous symbiotic friendship between the Catholic Church and the American policing

system. Chef's kiss, incredible corruption, match made in heaven. And so we're talking about the Amityville horror today, which inspired a movie, which is not the safest in the world, and inspired many sequels and a remake starring Ryan Reynolds. And just it's one of our modern day folk tales, basically. Jamie. Yes? I was wondering if you would be interested in doing a bonus episode for January, where

we talk about the two main Amityville adaptations, like James Brolin one and the Ryan Reynolds one. Really? Yes, I would love that. Yay! Woohoo! Oh, good. I was wanting to watch, I've never seen the Ryan Reynolds one, and it looks like it

takes itself really seriously. I'm excited. I remember watching it probably while baking something one time. And yeah, I just remember feeling like, well, Ryan Reynolds is playing a scary dad, and he's doing a good job, and that's the movie. I love Ryan Reynolds' Serious Guy era. I'm so happy about that. Yeah, I feel like there's so much to talk about with these movies.

Yeah, if you want to hear bonus episodes, you can support us on patreon.com slash you're wrong about, or you can spend your money on a neat pen. It's none of my business. I love that. Ultimately, it's none of our business. And so we got through the first week of occupancy at the scary house. Yeah, would you bring us up to speed for where we are as we're starting off today? Okay.

I don't remember the exact date we're at right now, but I do know that it is Christmas time. The couple being terrorized by the Amityville horror, they've been recently married. They have just bought a house on the water that is very much out of their price range. But the reason that they're able to get this house in the first place is because there was a horrific full family homicide there the year before. So they move into this house, they're constantly like, it's cold because of ghosts, but it's actually cold because it's December. And they're only heating the whole house with what sounds like one log.

But there's three kids, they immediately start to have difficult experiences. They are also sleeping in the murdered people's beds, which I can't stop thinking about. I remember from when I watched the 70s movie a long time ago that you see the families die in the beds. The Amityville horror is kind of like taking place in the aftermath of this crime, but then to the point where it almost kind of downplays how horrific the original crime was, it's very sad. And it sounds like this whole family is sleeping on top of evidence.

Is that wrong? I mean, I know that some things were more loosey goose in the 70s than they are at least are supposed to be today. Missy the five-year-old daughter has some of the bedroom furniture from the murdered family. So like the oldest son of the family, Ronnie DeFeo, has been found guilty of murdering all of his other family members who were in the house that night. So I guess you could say, well, they've already solved the crime, so they don't need to preserve

stuff. But that's like a very, I think 1910s kind of viewpoint because I mean, like you can't necessarily preserve an entire house full of furniture, but you do need to preserve at least things that are relevant to the crime and could be retested forensically, like for an appeal or something like that. It just seems like all the furniture should be in a storage unit, but that's a part of their problem, right? George and Kathleen's problem is they can't afford enough furniture to fill up this big

scary house that they've bought, and then George is not being nice to anyone and they're making it seem like, or the way that the book tells the story, the book is like, the house is making George so hostile to his wife and his new children. And it seems like maybe he might just be a hostile person, unclear, but he's like at a bar deciding if he wants to buy a second boat, even though he just put his whole new family into debt. And so where we leave off is I'm mad at him, I'm mad at him also. And there's a description of George and Kathy disciplining their children with a wooden

spoon and a strap, including Missy, who's five, which is like, okay, wow, that's beating with intent to cause pain. I guess on what you were telling me, I mean, it sounds like the book is presenting it in a very matter of fact way of like, needing you to go with the idea that they're only doing this because they're in the house and this isn't something they would normally do. And like, this isn't behavior George would normally display, but the book also doesn't give you a ton of information about what they were like before this happened. You know, I'm not trying to cancel George Lutz, but maybe I am.

I mean, we know nothing about them before it's like they spring into existence at the moment that they start having these problems. And I think, I think this fits well with the style of a lot of true crime I've read where the victims are supposed to just be as relatable as possible, which I think is also one of the historic problems with the genre where it's like, you care about this crime because you relate to these people, which is if you're trying to make people relatable, then they can't be specific or themselves really. They're presented as this couple that is very normie, idyllic, just scrappy enough to be

rooting for them for the 70s. Oh, but I wanted to clarify it because I'm pristicity about this kind of thing. And I feel like there's some ambiguity in the wording around the furnitures that the Lutz is by from the murdered family that a fae is. So I'll read again, they got the dining room set, a girls bedroom set, which I assume includes a bed, but that's ambiguous. It could just be dressers and stuff. Sure.

A TV chair and Ronald DeFeo's bedroom furniture. And then it says the DeFeo's bed. So without a doubt, apparently the bed in which the elder DeFeo's were sleeping when they were murdered, like, I just can't get around. I mean, this seems sensational, but I can't get around the suggestion that maybe they don't have the murderer's bed, but instead they have the murdered couple's bed, which is worse. Would you rather?

Oh boy. Would you rather sleep in the murderer's bed or the murdered bed? And if I couldn't look at the beds beforehand, right, I think I would choose the murderer's bed because I think that the moment of the murder would be section intense and terrible moment for the victim, whatever specifically happened. I would imagine that being more attached to the bed and my own personal superstition than like this scary person or this person who did the scary thing slept here.

I feel the same way. I would ultimately throw it away and sleep on a mattress on the floor, which I've done for years at a time. I want a mattress on the floor right now. We're very consistent, but I would feel like I would be more sensitive to like the sudden terror and trauma trapped in the furniture of someone who died, who wasn't expecting to. That sounds very unpleasant. Right.

And so the last thing that happened before we wrapped up last time is that George sees a giant pig in his daughter's window with little red eyes. Jodie, Jodie. And so he runs into the house. He finds her lying on her stomach. There's this whole motif of people lying on their stomachs or seeing the kids lay on their stomachs because that's how the victims were found. The year before, important lore.

He runs in her room, the pig ghost is gone, and then he sees that her little rocking chair is slowly rocking back and forth, which is pretty creepy. That's a good, that's a good one. That is so Christmas Day is basically fine, except that Missy is talking about Jodie, who's her imaginary friend, a pig. She doesn't mention it to George crucially, so they don't connect that with the vision of the pig the last night. Wonder why that is.

The kids don't like George because George is mean. And so she's sitting in her little rocking chair watching the snow fall and talking to Jodie, which honestly sounds pretty nice. Yeah. And nothing really sinister happens on Christmas Day, except that Father Mancuso, who blessed the house and who the scary voice said get out to, has the flu and is very sick. That's supposed to be very scary.

Day after Christmas, Kathy notices the way she sees it. Danny and Chris have changed since they moved in. They become more rebellious and less obedient. And the book says, but Kathy was not yet aware of her own personality changes, her impatience and crankiness. That's enough out of both of you. She yelled at her sons. I see you're asking for another beating.

Now shut your mouths and get up to your room, like I said, and stay there until I call you, which is just really depressing. The day after Christmas, Kathy, Jesus Christ. Baby Jesus hasn't dropped his umbilical cord yet. I never thought about the baby Jesus having an umbilical cord. There is still an umbilical cord, even if it's a virgin birth, right? Yeah, I assume so. Bible heads sound off in the comments.

He wouldn't have a belly button if he hadn't been born, which I think is why people argue that Taylor Swift was made in a lab or something. And then Kathy feels the spirit of a woman embracing her in the kitchen. And it's initially kind of nice, but then this sweet perfume smell starts making her dizzy and then she shouts, no, leave me alone. And the ghost departs, which is very polite. I vaguely, I think I remember this scene from the movie and it being pretty scary. It's funny, I don't remember the scene from the movie.

And I walked in about a week and a half ago. And the more we talk about this, the more I'm like, oh, I think that I am at times mixing this up with other seventies ghost stories because there's just simply so many of them. Right. I'm just going to be spit-palling on this the whole way through. But like, was that a response to the space race partly? Oh, I mean, I've been watching the Twilight Zone because it's the holidays

and that's what you do. And I find it really interesting how many Twilight Zone episodes are directly about either Americans going out into space and bothering people on other planets or about people coming to earth from space and bothering us to bother Americans. And just like this conviction that the near future was going to be all about extraterrestrial communication and space colonization and that we were no longer alone in the universe. And I don't know, like, I feel like that would create a big response in a lot

of directions when being like fear of what we're going to become if we go out and be space botherers. And then also, how do we make space for the spiritual when we're learning so much about the world? And is this challenging the old ways and how can religion prove itself to still be relevant? The fact that Americans were going to be space pests was this like necessity. It was an inevitability and it couldn't be avoided.

We have to be space pests because we can. We're going to go into space and we will be annoying if we do it. We know this about ourselves. Our colonial instincts simply take over. OK, so we're connecting ghosts, Christianity and the space race. That's my goal today. I'm down to snack off that charcuterie board. And then, I mean, we also know that the sixties have brought in, you know,

a kind of age of Aquarius vibe, which we've seen various Christian thinkers be really freaked out by how Lindsay Satan is alive and well on planet Earth is one of my big examples of this because it's like a fun title. But, you know, they just there is that if you do something like transcendental meditation, which the Lutz's do, or if you think that you have like which powers you're playing yourself because that's actually Satan working his magic through you, and now you're just like falling into Satan's hand like in that scary part at the end of Fantasia.

Oh, whoa. But then there are there are always religious scare tactics in the world. So what is it that lets them have such success across the board? Right. Kathy's brother in what strikes me is like truly a boss move is getting married the day after Christmas, the absolute balls. I know that it happens in Hallmark movies all the time, but you really shouldn't do that.

And so Jimmy comes over before his wedding. They're going to head over to the venue. He's brought fifteen hundred dollars in cash to pay for the remainder of the wedding expenses and the money disappears into the house. I think it's very funny that these ghosts want money, but they do. Is that explored further in the book? What the ghosts are planned to do with the money? We never get into it.

And I feel like I'm actually going to spoil very ending conclusions because there's an afterward where they're like, share the ghosts that we think we're there and they break it down. And basically there's a nice lady ghost. There's a little boy ghost. There's a fallen angel, which is manifesting as Jodie. And there's a poltergeist. So there's at least four different spirits in this house.

Hold on. So where are the other ghosts at? So not all of the people who were killed by DeFeo stayed in the house's ghost. Only like a couple hung out and then also a fallen angel and a poltergeist. This sounds like a walk into a bar joke. Isn't that weird? It's like, yeah, and they never explore that. What is the rules of a poltergeist again?

I'll read them to you. OK, this is fascinating to me. I just so assumed that they were like it's being haunted by the dead family. Well, right. That's the obvious answer. And yet they went elsewhere with it. Twist. This is thrilling. OK, the afterward says most poltergeist manifestations are said to occur in the

presence of a child, usually a girl, approaching puberty. Here, none of the let's children seems to have been old enough to serve as the trigger. Moreover, most poltergeist antics seem childishly malicious rather than vicious or physically harmful. But on the other hand, his father, Nicola, who wrote the foreword, points out in his demonical possession and exorcism, a book that is out of print, but which I really want to read. Poltergeist sometimes serve as the first manifestation of an entity ultimately

bent on demonic possession. OK, based on that description, I think the poltergeist wants the money just to have it that qualifier that it's like this poltergeist only appears to young girls on the crest of womanhood. You're like, well, that's setting up some red flags for me. Who who said that the first time? It's a really good question. Who did? I don't love that at all.

And so maybe the poltergeist becomes or is a manifestation of the fallen angel. And then so this is a quote from, quote, an experienced researcher into paranormal phenomena. So who chooses to remain nameless? My friend from Canada writes, it seems logical that this entity, together with the voices that ordered father Mancuso to depart and Georgian Cathy to stop their impromptu exorcism, which is coming up, may have been invited in during the course of occult ceremonies performed

in the basement or on the house's original site. OK, so somebody in the past invited a malevolent fallen angel who's just been like hanging out for who knows how long this fallen angels just been like air being being at this murder house. So wait, so the implication there is that by the time these murders took place, the fallen angel was already a resident. Yes, for a long time. It's interesting because it turns from like a ghost of the victims

are haunting a story into a we almost suffered the same fate as the people who lived here before us because we were afflicted by the same fallen angel were to believe the fallen angel had some negative influence on Ronnie DeFeo and has something to do with the murder, the fallen angel. Yeah, that's what develops. It may be easier to talk about demonic entities because you don't have to talk about motivation. And also it's just a way of like avoiding discussing mental illness

in any way, shape or form by being like, well, it couldn't have been mental illness. It was demons. That's a really good point, too. Right. This is a time also when as a country, we're clinging to not that things are hunky dory today, but I do feel like compared to where we were in 1975, 76, when these events take place, our understanding of mental illness is like something that exists and that we should talk about and hope for managing as opposed to just like, let's ignore it as hard as possible.

Like it does feel like we've progressed from there. I mean, even the way that George and Kathy is like meditating, very innocently meditating is treated as an affront to God by the storytelling is like, OK, this story would basically disappear if there was a more public mental illness discussion in the 70s. But lucky for Amityville horror heads, there wasn't. So it's demons that slipped in under the door. OK, so here's what the entity was trying to do,

according to the experienced researcher. Oh, direction, Kathy's inexplicable transes, mood changes and odd dreams and physical transformations can all be read as symptoms of incipient possession. Some who believe in reincarnation say that we pay for past errors by being reborn in a new body and experiencing the consequences of our actions. But any entity as resolutely malevolent as the ones who tormented the Lutz's would have realized that a return to the flesh might entail retribution

in the shape of physical deformity, illness, suffering, oh boy, and other, quote, bad karma. Thus, a particularly nasty spirit might avoid rebirth entirely, instead, seizing the bodies of the living in order to experience food, sex, alcohol and other earthly pleasures. It is. It's a horny little devil. Yeah. And it also wants food and alcohol, apparently. It wants to go to a bar on Long Island and drink light beer.

This fallen angel should hang out with my mom's friends. They'll go, they'll get mudslides. It'll be fun. Yeah. I guess possess someone more fun than George Lutz. And then he can like go spend the day mall walking and going to TGI Fridays. Yes. So that's the idea of what's happening here, which I think maybe is more interesting to have in mind from the beginning. I wish I knew that at the beginning.

Yeah, that's such a fun sitcom set up to murdered ghosts, a fallen angel. What's the last one? And a poltergeist and a poltergeist who might be a stage of the fallen angel. We're not sure. It's like the sex in the city cast, probably. You can figure out who's who. Oh, OK. So they go to the wedding.

George is going to cover for the missing $1,500 that the ghosts took. While taking communion, he becomes violently nauseated. Now that you know that there's a fallen angel trying to possess him, I'm sure that makes sense in a different way than it would have. Sure. OK. And so he covers the missing $1,500 with two checks. One of them is from his personal account, which he knows he doesn't have the money in,

but he's going to cover the draft as quick as he can. The other is from his surveying company. So that's not great. IRS wise, certainly not. Yes. And he will get audited later in this book, which is. Wait, really? Yeah. The IRS is bothering him at the same time as the ghosts. Oh, God.

Which I guess maybe the ghosts wanted him to get in trouble and that's why they took the money. I don't know what their plan is. Who is telling these ghosts about the American taxation system? So it's a stressful wedding. Also, their guard dog is drowsy. This is a major plot point. They're like, it was 6 p.m.

And Harry was asleep and it's like maybe because it's cold as balls. All this stuff with Harry is not working for me whatsoever. They're just describing dog behavior and then saying it's the devil. You're like, no, all dogs are angels and I'm not following for it. Yeah, just angels who want to bark through the night. You'll remember this from the movie. Kathy's Aunt Theresa, former nun, comes to visit. And the movie, they just made her still fully a nun.

And so she stepped in, really freaked out and then left and threw up because the story loves to have people experience nausea as proof of demons. Am I remembering this correctly where she comes in and she's like, like it's right. It's very goofy and the scenes over so quickly. Dealing with nausea, you have to wonder, like, is this like gas? Or like, are they living near a large refinery or something like that?

Like it kind of points to environmental sickness. I would definitely buy that, especially because they just moved into this house. They don't know how it works. I feel like the first couple of months of like living anywhere, you're still learning the quirks of the house of what is the correct amount of heat to have in the house. Like what are the levels that I but no, but she was sick because of ghosts. And I guess something like mental illness manifesting in someone you've

just married or in one of your children is something that is scary and blameless and kind of scary for maybe the same reason that goes through scary or moving into a house that is killing you financially and also maybe contains or is near something that's making you sick is scary because this is supposed to be where the troubles aren't. A lot of this house is like what you know when you enter it of you know, would you feel physically ill if you didn't know that a horrific bajillion homicide took place here very recently?

Maybe not. But we're assuming that auntie does know that when she comes over. So can you really blame someone for feeling deeply uncomfortable in a house where they know that that's happened? Like not very recently, not everyone's going to be comfortable with that. Yeah. And so in this one, she just gets out of there as fast as she can. She says, there's something bad in here, Kathy. I must go now.

And I'm going to start saying that every time I leave someone's house, I must go now. I must go now. If you don't want to be at a party, just pretend you suddenly realize there's a malevolent spirit there. There's two ghosts, a poltergeist and a fallen angel in here. I have to go home. It's not, but I'm socially anxious. I must go now.

Being socially anxious feels like there's a poltergeist and a fallen angel at the party. Let's just say it's that. Yeah. This is my favorite line of dialogue. Kathy says, George, I'll finish up downstairs later. I want to transfer some of the canned goods into a closet I found down there. We can use it as a pantry. I just love the idea of any human being saying I want to transfer some of the canned goods. It just fills me with delight.

The kids bring over a boy named Bobby, who they met on the street. He refuses to come in past the entryway, which freaks Kathy out, which is like, he's a kid, he lives here, he knows what happens. I think that's that makes sense, especially if you're a kid, especially if you're a kid who lived locally when this horrific murder took place last year, Kathy, use your head. Yeah, that like everyone in this community was here for it. If we're in Christmas in the events of this story, it happened around Thanksgiving of the year before.

So right. Because there were children in the DeFeo family, it's possible that these new kids would have known these kids. Yeah. The let's is they're awfully self-centered. I'll say that I feel like in a way that the people who made it maybe didn't see coming or intend to at all. The story struck many nerves.

And I think one of them was this idea that like we really can't build over tragedy and expect the slate to be totally wiped clean. Right. But so if we're to believe the way this chapter talks about the day they're having, it's been a pretty scary afternoon. Aunt Teresa came freaked out. She left, Lil Bobby came by. He wouldn't come in the house.

And then Kathy goes to transfer the canned goods to the closet in the basement. And there's a secret room behind the closet painted solid red. That is pretty scary. I would be afraid of that. I actually find that creepy. That I would be terrified if I found that in my new murder house. Secret rooms are always scary. Like I feel like it's the stuff of dreams to find an extra room in your house

that you didn't know was there before. And so a secret room painted red, like that is sinister. I wonder if there's like pictures of this anywhere. So if you search Amityville Red Room, I think it'll come up. Interesting. OK, I'll do that right now. Amityville Red Room. Oh, wow. OK, that's actually very scary.

What are you seeing? It looks a little different than I was expecting. It's actually scarier. The room is like cement. It looks like a little cell. There's a formal floor, but the walls are cement and covered in this red paint that's like flaking off in this kind of freaky pattern. But the paint is so bright.

Oh, this is actually very. This is scary. OK, I'm scared. Sarah, it's very creepy. That is the thing about like scary stuff in your house. It's like often something you can't really do anything about. Yeah, it's not like a spirit you can communicate with or that's going to like ramp things up or be like, I'm a fallen angel. Get the fuck out of here.

It's going to be some kind of remainder that you don't know where it came from or why it's there and you just sort of live with it under you. So this room is discovered. Yeah. And George responds in this book's version of the events in kind of classic horror movie idiot form. George removed the four wooden shelves, then shoved hard against the plywood. It swung all the way open. It was a secret door.

The room was small, about four by five feet. Kathy gasped from the ceiling to the floor. It was painted solid red. What is it, George? I don't know, he answered, feeling the three solid concrete block walls. It seems to be an extra room, maybe a bomb shelter. Everyone was building them back in the late fifties, but it sure doesn't show up in the house plans. The broker gave us.

Do you think that if Fayos built it? Kathy asked, holding nervously onto George's arm. I don't know that either. I guess so, he said, steering Kathy out of the secret room. I wonder what it was used for. He pulled the panel closed. Do you think there are any more rooms like that behind the closets? Kathy asked. I don't know, Kathy, George answered.

I'll have to check out each wall. Did you notice the funny smell in there? Yeah, I smelled it, George said. That's how blood smells. George. Oh, George. Sweetie. That interaction alone, fictional or not. You know, Kathy is the only one asking the questions and he's like,

uh-huh, I also noticed that and it was actually my idea. And then she's like, George, I'm worried. Freaky stuff is going on. This is dressing me out, basically. George patted his wife on the head. Don't worry, baby. I'll find out what the hell that room is all about. We can use it as an extra pantry.

George. He turned out the light in the closet, shutting out the side of the rear wall panel, but not obscuring the fleeting vision of a face. He glimpsed against the plywood and a few days George would realize it was the bearded physics of Ronnie DeFeo. No. So at this point, are we is George being a doofus

or is this the fallen angel talking? Has the fallen angel made entry? I think this is the fallen angel. So I'll suspend my disbelief and be like, no, George's inability to read the room is actually a fallen angel. It's not just how he is. The key to how this story works is that like George is progressively more inattentive, aggressive, uncaring,

refusing to work, completely out of touch with his family's needs and emotions. And then after the fact, they're like, oh, that was the entity. That wasn't George. It was the entity. It took us a really long time to tell the difference. Is it not a red flag? If you can't tell whether someone's being regular,

abusive or ghost abusive, I really love that his last line in this chapter is we can use it as an extra pantry. And so now I'm going to imagine him saying that and smelling her hair in a comforting fashion. Okay, chapter 10, December 28th, Father Mancuso talks to Sergeant John Frido, whose name I hope I'm saying right. If he is indeed a real person, I don't think he is. Basically, Father Mancuso tells him that he's stressed out

about the experience that he had at the Amityville House and he wants the sergeant to tell him about the murders. He says, I understand the boy, Ronnie DeFeo, said he heard voices. So he's starting to kind of do a little bit of detective work. Sergeant John Frido doesn't think much of this, but then he leaves and he throws up. So demons, demons. This entity just makes everyone barf once and then they'll let you go after that.

It's kind of like taking Azo. So funny, and Mancuso, especially because I'm going off the assumption that he's not even real. I just think it's so funny the things they attribute to him. They're like this sweaty barfing priest. Like this guy's a mess. It's like he's lucky he's not real. They should be an Amityville spinoff called Mancuso.

And then it's just a sweaty barfing priest. That's the movie. So John Frido, when he was talking to Mancuso, mentions that Ronnie DeFeo first reported the murders when he ran into the Witches Brew, which is a bar near the house where all of this is happening. Oh, yeah. Excellent name for a bar. I do think that's a great name for a bar.

I want to have a local bar called the Witches Brew. Yes, absolutely. So he runs in and tells the bartender everyone is dead. He initially, in real life, claimed that he was not the killer and then confessed pretty quickly and then changed his story many times until his death. When did he die? Do we know? He died earlier this year.

No kidding. OK. As you can imagine, immediately after that conversation, George walks into the Witches Brew and the bartender does a double take. Why do you think that's happening? No. Oh, wait, I remember. I know it's coming. I know it's coming. I'm excited. Excuse me, mister, said the bartender. You pass him through.

No, answered George. I live here in Amityville. We just moved in. The bartender nodded. Well, you're a dead ringer for a young fella from around here. For a moment, I thought you was him. He rang up George's money. He's away now.

Won't be back for a while. He put the change on the bar. Maybe never. He liked my accent. I feel like I'm there. I feel like I'm at the Witches Brew right now. George took the money and shrugged. People were always mistaking him for someone else they knew.

Oh, my God, George. Maybe it was the beard. A lot of guys wore them these days. Well, see you around. He headed for the entrance to the Witches Brew. The bartender nodded again. Yeah, drop in again. George was at the door.

Hey, asked the bartender. By the way, where'd you move into? George stopped, looked back and pointed toward the general direction of the West. Oh, just a couple streets from here on ocean. The bartender felt George has used beer glass slipping from his hand. When he heard George's final remark, one 12 Ocean Avenue, it dropped from his hand and crashed to the floor. Yes, everything slows down.

And it goes to the phone goes everywhere and the music gets all weird. Oh, this is great. And then he looks like Paul Giamatti and the illusionist. Oh, my God, that rocks. OK, this is the most fun I've had with this story in a bit. It's like the moment when you go to the door and you're like, where's Jessica and the old ladies? Like, Jessica has been dead for 15 years.

I love that it also the logic of this scene demands that it's like the the bartender's like, hey, you look like that guy that moided his whole family last year, but he only gets unsettled when he finds out that George also lives in the house. It's like, well, it was unsettling from the beginning of the conversation. Right. He's already in the neighborhood. And in the first location the killer went to after the crime. In this story, I wish that you got more

insight into the kind of town he's nearby, because those are the fun parts. Like when that guy last time came over with a six pack and was like, hey, you guys want to chill out? You guys want to hang? And they were like, no. I was like, oh, come on. Seems like the locals here are lovely. Yeah, I like that someone came and then took a six pack back home

with him because he just didn't like what he found. I mean, he has his pride after all. He does. And then Kathy by George, a ceramic lion. OK, posed as if it was like crouching to pounce for Christmas. The same Christmas where there weren't that many gifts for the children, by the way, right? She like thought that the lion moved when she turned her back and was kind of spooked by that, but then was like, whatever.

But then when George comes home from the bar, there's a crash. And he thinks that someone has left the lion in the middle of the floor because he tripped over it. But no one left the lion in the middle of the floor. It moved by itself. And then and we're back to nothing burgers. And then in the next chapter, Kathy sees teeth marks and George is ankle.

He got attacked by the ceramic lion. She bought him. I believe about your closet. I believe that it's cold. I even believe that you thought you saw a pig ghost, but like what? But you thought you were attacked by your shitty Christmas present. Sounds like you're projecting. I used to have a poster of Mandy Moore that I thought was going to kill me.

Oh, how come? Well, her eyes moved when I did. That's like with all the great paintings. Yeah, I think it was just such an artful photo that was in J 14 that I really thought it was out to get me. OK, next day, Kathy's feeling a little depressed. I think we're also meant to assume this is based on ghosts. George rushes to work finally to cover the check that he wrote for the wedding.

He finds that an IRS inspector is there to look at the company's tax returns. Hurray. Did the poltergeist bring the IRS to George's door? Yeah, the poltergeist found a pay phone, put in a quarter and was like, I'd like to report to George Lutz. I think he's been siphoning company funds to pay for weddings. That's why he needs all the money. He took fifteen hundred dollars in quarters so he can make his freaky little IRS calls.

George goes to Newsday to research the history of the house because he's not spending a whole day at work. Fuck that. What would that do? Fix the problem? He's not going to do that. And so he sees his first picture of Ronnie DeFeo and realizes that the face staring back at him could have been his own. There's a record of the trial, which happened between September and November of that year.

So the month before. Wow. I think it's so bizarre that the book is deflecting how fresh this would be for this whole community. Right. It's like things that you're just constantly noticing when it mentions a date or something, but that the book itself isn't reflecting on. Right. And so in the microfilm that George is reading, there's a mention of police brutality

enforcing a confession from Ronnie DeFeo, which we never return to again. Oh, and I went on to attorney William Weber's parading psychiatrist to the stand to substantiate his plea of Ronnie's insanity. Does the book make any value statement on the validity of that? The book doesn't. But its origin story connects to that in an interesting way. And that's all I will say about that for the moment. George is driving home from Newsday now.

He has car trouble again, obviously demons. Father Mancuso has read palms, demons and the. Oh, sorry, George doesn't go home. Why would he do that to help his wife? That would be ridiculous. He goes to the Amityville Historical Society. And here we have two entirely fabricated things that I'm just going to read to you.

Neat. And this part will be racist. Oh, not neat. It seems the Shinnecock Indians used land on the Amityville River as an enclosure for the sick, mad and dying. These unfortunates were penned up until they died of exposure. However, the record noted that the Shinnecox did not use this tract as a consecrated burial mound because they believed it to be infested with demons. Which, like A, the Shinnecox weren't by the Amityville River.

I think they were about 50 miles away. OK. B, they didn't pen up the sick, mad and dying to die cruelly of exposure. See, if they did so, I don't understand why they would use a piece of land to the size of a single home residence for it. I haven't looked into this, but I do feel like demons, as we're understanding them in this book, are a Christian and specifically a Catholic concept. If A through C is true, which it isn't,

D doesn't even reflect the beliefs of the Shinnecox. So, God, that is the most lazy 70s bullshit racism available. I didn't I didn't know if that was going to come up in this story, in particular, because it seems like the image and the idea of like the haunted burial ground comes up so often in this era. And so I haven't done enough research to feel like I could intelligently unpack it to any degree, but it's so everywhere and so clearly wrong in racist and fucked in the way that it's presented.

And honestly, like in upstate New York, historical society, quote unquote, in the 70s, I fully believe that they would say something like this, right? Especially in the Northeast, it was like how intensely pro-colonial local historical societies were until like pretty recently. Yeah, like this feels based specifically on the idea that that this land was rescued from indigenous people who were using it to commit murders. No, it's like with colonialism means it is used from thence forth and ever since for murders, but it's not really saving it

from being used as the site of murders. Interesting intellectual backbend to justify murder. It's very telling. Yeah. What's really surprising to me, because I think of this book as being kind of like a coleslaw of recent media and being like powerful, partly because it's so derivative and is able to be kind of a like cuisinarded salad of things that people have been liking recently in the 70s. Sure. This actually appears to be where the trend of the quote built on

an Indian burial ground story comes from. I had Colin Dickey writes that this is where this first shows up. And then of course, we're going to see it very soon after in the movie version of The Shining, not the book. Yes. And then in Poltergeist and then in Pet Cemetery. It becomes like an instant cliche. But this seems to be where that pop culture trend of this moment originates, which I would not have guessed.

I wouldn't have guessed that either by a long shot. I sort of thought that this story would have come in the middle of a wave of those stories. So that's what I really thought was going on. It's one of those things that feels like it's been in hacky fiction for a really long time. It's funny to compare this to Poltergeist, where just the idea that this development is haunted because the developers lied and they said they moved to burial site and they really just moved the headstones. And so the idea is this has come up and so you shouldn't have built

your dream house on a place where there was a complicated history and you were disturbing the spirits of everyone who's buried there. And like you're the aggressor and you're the invader and you shouldn't be here. And that's kind of how I always what I've taken to be the personess of the site, this idea of like you are disturbing the blameless dead and they're going to get upset with you about that. So like don't build on burial grounds. But now I feel like seeing it in its original format,

it's more along the lines of like these burial grounds are full of evil spirits because the people who use them were bad and they're going to get you. Right. It's tied to, oh, evil has always been happening here. And this is a continuation of that evil instead of any. Yeah. Empathy or understanding of how colonialism works. I mean, this is I think the darkest area of its legacy we've talked about so far. But again, like it's always fascinating to me when something this hacky affects a nation this deeply, what is it touching on that matters so much to us?

And this idea of where the curse originates, it's like, is it in the violent and murderous act of colonization, which creates ghosts? Or in this book, is it that the curse comes from the land that the colonizers innocently settled on and it's a big divide? Is this a thread that goes through the rest of the book? Or is it yet another kind of dropped thread? Yeah, it's not it's not a trend like Father Mancuso's flu is a trend. And here's another made up thing.

One of the more notorious settlers who came to the newly named Amityville was a John Ketchum or Ketchum who had been forced out of Salem, Massachusetts for practicing witchcraft. And then and in the margin, I wrote, why didn't they just execute him? A valid question. He doesn't appear to have been a real person and also. OK, you guys, do you realize that like the whole the reason we study the Salem witch trials is because they weren't actually witches.

And that's why it's problematic that they were executed for being witches. Like the point of that story is that you shouldn't execute people for being witches. Well, that's why Hocus Pocus is so fun because Hocus Pocus is like, no, they were witches, but aren't they funny? They were and and they sing songs and they're funny. Yeah. So it's the night before Christmas Eve. George comes out from his adventures and his research trips that he's been doing while Kathy has been cleaning, presumably.

And they finally say the G word for the first time. Kathy says, George, do you think it's haunted? And George says, no way. I don't believe in ghosts. Besides everything that's happened around here must have a logical and scientific explanation to it. I'm not so sure. What about the lion? What about it? He asked.

Kathy looked around the kitchen where they were sitting. Well, what about what I felt those two times? I told you, I know somebody touched me, George. George stood up, stretching. Oh, come on, honey. I think it's just your imagination. He reached for her hand. George, why have you spent the entire day

like verifying your concerns about the haunted house you live in, and then you're coming home and telling your wife you don't think it's haunted? Right. George has this inability to take his own wife seriously in a way that I find so frustrating because clearly, I mean, he's just such a horrible communicator. Like, they are having the exact same concerns and he feels that he's confirmed some of them,

but he's just refusing to communicate with her about that because reasons. Yeah, the real G word here is George. There's so many things in here that go nowhere. And one of them is that George keeps feeling himself drawn out to the boathouse. But why? And apparently, after he read about the murders, he decided that maybe the elder Ronald DeFeo hit a bunch of money out there and his ghost wants to tell George

where the hidden money is and then all George's money problems will be over. George, sweetie, it's almost seven and the heat is not, even though it's supposed to come on at six demons, demons, the boys threatened to run away and then relent. What are they threatening to run away over, just being afraid of the house? Or according to the book, it's because George takes away their TV rights. OK, I used to respond to losing my TV rights like that. If you lose TV, you have no rights at all as a child.

I know. But again, it's framed as the kids being like misbehaving as they never had before. And it's like, I don't know. They're fighting with each other, which they never used to do. And Kathy sees a demon face in the fireplace. It's like how George saw a scary face in the scary closet. Wow. Father Mancuso has blisters. The ailments of this man know no end.

He has blisters every four pages. We get a health update on this priest. Now, I feel like I know the answer to this question already. But is Father Mancuso ever described as seeking medical attention? Not really. He really feels that the best route is to get away from the demons. Yeah. At this point, Kathy tries to call him. He picks up and then he hears the same static he heard when he was talking to

George before and he hangs up and he's like, no, stop calling me demons. A lot of his story is feeling conflicted about. He knows that he should help this family, but he really doesn't want to. And it's at this point that he first starts thinking about demonology and that demons might be in the mix and mentions that he's never met an exorcist. Although every priest is empowered to perform the rites of exorcism, but the Catholic Church prefers that this dangerous ceremony be restricted to those clerics who have become specialists in dealing with obsession

and possession, which are different things. Oh, yeah. No, of course, I knew that. And then the family has a nice night in the house. They have burgers and fries and just are in a good mood. And then that evening, Kathy sees glowing red eyes out the window. They go out to investigate and what should they find in the snow? But the footprints of enormous cloven hooves like those of an enormous pig.

No. Wait. So Jody is I don't know why this took me out of it. Jody is big. Yeah. Jody is a big pig. So she's like a wild feral hog. She's not like Wilbur. Yeah, exactly like a feral hog. So yeah, there's a giant feral hog stalking their house and befriending their daughter. And when you put it that way, it is pretty scary.

Yeah. I was picturing Ariana Grande's pig. I also find it interesting that Jody can apparently fly, but like chooses not to or was like, I'm going to leave some hoof prints because I know that'll freak people out. Is that not powerful? Mm hmm. I will walk today. Today I walk. I will wink down the street. And if I were a fallen angel, like would I appear as a giant pig? I don't know if I've been around for millennia.

Sure. Anyway, so Kathy's in the kitchen. She gets another hug from the friendly and yet overbearing cheap perfume mom type ghost. And then she senses a struggle going on over possession of her body that somehow she had been trapped between two powerful forces. And then she passes out. It's meaningful to me that also the evidence of this affliction is like Kathy's depressed, Kathy's not getting anything done.

Kathy doesn't want to leave the house. I mean, that's how I would feel. But like circumstantially, yeah, of course, you're depressed. What reason do you have to feel good at this time? It's getting dark at three thirty and you're married to George. It's too much. Aye, aye, aye, and you're married to George and George spent the whole day researching ghosts, but will engage with you about it zero percent.

So I mean, of all the things that bother me about this marriage, that really bothers me. Like you just spent your whole day and you can't have a single second of emotional honesty with your wife because you need to be right about everything. It's just sad. It makes me sad. I hate to be a broken record, but I have to bring up that the real villain of Rosemary's baby is Rosemary's shitty husband, who the neighbors only have to talk to on two occasions before he's like, sure, I'll drag my wife

and have Satan impregnate her to help my career. Sounds good. Yeah. How like haunting these stories is some level of awareness that like American husbands are like doing a terrible job. They're useless at best and actually terrifying at worst. Yeah. The masculine ego is demons, much like American colonialism, which is also demons. Yeah. And you can't get a house without a demon.

I feel like in so much 20th century scary stories, folklore or fiction, there's this awareness of like the dad is scary alongside the supernatural or the supernatural thing is like scary is a way of expressing the inexpressible, which is that dad is scary and having maybe I'll marry a nice guy. And then my kid will be provided for financially is like not a good way to run an economy. Yeah, perhaps there's some dead ends there. Oh, and speaking of which, Kathy passes out and then she asked Danny to call daddy at his office.

And Danny does. But of course, George isn't there because he's already on the road and he's supposed to be back soon, but instead he goes to the witches brew. No kidding. And orders a miller is because this ghost demon wants to inhabit his body and drink Miller, get a six pack and go home. Why are you at the witches brew? Yeah, go hang out with six pack guy.

You can each get your own six pack and drink them by the sound. So but he's quizzing the bartender. So we get to have another bartender scene. Hooray. The bartender tells George that he actually was inside one 12 Ocean Avenue once because he tended bar at a party they threw. And he says, I was down in the basement. A lot of booze and be a float that night. It was their anniversary.

He looked around the bar again. Did you know you got a secret room down there? George pretended ignorance. No, George, why lie to all these people? What do you gain by lying? Like you're just making the book longer, George. That's the goal here. So yeah, uh-huh.

The bartender said, you take a look behind those closets and you'll find something that'll really shake you. George leaned over the bar. What was it? A room, a little room. I found it that night. I was down in the basement. There's this plywood closet built up beside the stairs.

I'm using it to ice beer and see. When I bumped a keg against one end of the closet, it seems the whole wall is loose. You know, like a secret panel, something out of an old movie. Okay. I was, I'm sorry. The bartender is in possession of a staggering amount of knowledge. And I know, and the frustrating thing is I know

that he's going to disappear from the, from the narrative and we'll never hear of him again. And he's probably entirely made up, which is a shame because he's the most likable character. I know it's difficult cause I'm falling in love with him. And we're going to have to say goodbye so soon. And he should marry Kathy. He should marry Kathy.

I mean, it looks like he is down to have an honest conversation unlike some people at the witches brew right now. He's like, hey, you want to hear about a thing I saw? He's playing, you know, maybe irresponsibly fast and loose with Intel, Hiltel, anyone, anything. He's great. He's like a law and order character before that existed. So he tells about how he let him match

and could see that it was all red and then George pays him and it's about to go. And then the bartender says, you want to know something really flaky about that little room? I used to have nightmares about it. Nightmares like what? Oh, sometimes I dream that people, I don't know who they were,

were killing dogs and pigs in there and using their blood for some kind of ceremony. Oh, that was just an idea that he had. And George says dogs and pigs. The only two animals that exist in this book. Oh my God, this plot bartender is killing me. I love him. And yeah, and I love it also when in any kind

of a satanic panic adjacent text, someone is like, oh, I don't know. It was a sacrificing babies on an altar with an inverted cross and chanting. Is that unusual? I just figured they were fancy. So of course the implication is that somebody, and we're not foreclosing the idea

that the DeFeos did this, which would then be blaming them for their murder, but that somebody was using this red room basically to do witchcraft in and chant and sacrifice dogs and pigs. And that's why they have a pig angel demon, I guess. Is Jodi independent of these other four or is Jodi one of them?

Well, I think Jodi is a manifestation of the fallen angel. Got it. You can have your own interpretation of this. What if Jodi's like a whole other thing just hanging out or just an actual pig ghost? Or just an actual pig, okay. And then in a wonderful scene,

Kathy's like, George, you gotta call father Mancuso. He gets home, she's fainted. He's been interviewing the bartender and she asked him to call the priest and he asked the priest to come bless the house again. And the priest is like, hell no. But he does do a remote blessing in a church. And then after that, his quarters are haunted

by the smell of human excrement, which is always associated with the devil, according to this book, which is the first time I've heard that in my life. And that's saying something coming from you. So yeah, I read about the devil all the time. Quite a bit. This is your first time saying

that the devil smells like poo poo? Yeah, it's not that sinister because toddlers smell like that. Well, they are trying to kill us, but not on purpose. I thought the devil would smell enticing, right? He smells like brimstone. This has been established. Oh, well, I mean, some find the scent of brimstone

to be very enticing. You know, it's just a little bit on the neck. Jay Anson's coming in here like, as we all know, the devil smells like shit. And you're like, okay. The red room also smells like devil poop. And so that's rough. I can't be fun.

Kathy says, I just had a thought, George. Do you think our transcendental meditation had anything to do with all this? George shook his head. Nah, nothing at all. But what I do know is that we've got to get help somewhere. It might as well be, as they entered the living room,

Kathy screamed, cut off the rest of George's words. He looked to where she was pointing. The ceramic lion that George had carried up to the sewing room was on the table next to Kathy's chair. It's Jaws beard at George and Kathy. No. Why didn't you take a picture? You're like, Jaws closed, Jaws open,

Jaws closed, Jaws opened. Haunted, not haunted, haunted, not haunted. I like picturing Jay Anson finishing a chapter with the exclamation point and then like pulling it out of his typewriter and being like, damn, Anson, you're good. Yes. And then cracking open a Miller.

That sounds nice. It's Miller time. It does feel like he had fun writing this book and maybe that helped make it successful. I hope that's true. There's a long tail, but it does seem like he's having a blast. Yeah.

George, the asshole in a conversation with Kathy the next day after their haunted statue, after they throw their haunted statue into a garbage can outside the house, like that ever does anything. Kathy says, how can you fight what you can't see? This thing can do anything at once. No, honey, George said,

there's no way you can convince me. A lot of this isn't just our imagination. I just don't believe in spooks. No way, no how, no time, which I believe is a quote from the Wizard of Oz. Finally, he taught Kathy into going to bed with a promise that if he couldn't get help by the next day,

they would get out of the house for a while. Oh, okay. And so begins a trend of Kathy being like, this house is fucking haunted AF, let's leave and George being like, nah, and then they're stuck there. I feel like he's so many levels of having screwed his family over

that I wonder how much is just like him clinging to this delusion of like, if this doesn't work out, I am the world's biggest fuck up. Although I don't know that he's that self aware. So maybe I'm giving him too much credit. Yeah, but I think like as if you're unwilling to admit to making a mistake

that negatively affected people, then like you can keep digging deeper and deeper in an intense way. People love to do that. I've seen it. It's the pastime that's sweeping the nation. And then George does his off and he wakes up because he hears marching band music downstairs.

He's going to hear a marching band. It will sound to him as if there is a marching band downstairs on and off until they flee. A marching, like that scene in the Wolf of Wall Street, the marching band, you know, the one, okay, okay. So there's some, so there's some Suza coming from the basement. Right, it's just like,

do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do. I mean, it would be very jolly really. I'm in a better mood. Oh yeah. Oh my God. So that's all delightful. It sounds to him like there's 15 musicians. He runs downstairs.

He can't see anything. The sound stops immediately. And then he goes back upstairs and Kathy is levitating. No. Levitating two feet above the bed. Oh, this sounds like the work of the Warrens. If you ask me, that's the first thing that's really hit me is like, that sounds like a Warren punch up.

Oh, talk about that. I think that the nature of Warren's story is based on the research I did for the other episode. There's often just these like wild unverifiable claims that include levitating, that includes slamming against a wall, that include just kind of these tacitly agreed upon lies. I would need to like sit down with my notes

and actually verify this, but seems like the stories in which those like levitating claims come up usually are with families that are in on the scam, which it sounds like the Amityville Horror may be an example of because it's like the Amityville Horror family and many Warren families stood to gain something by the PR and the book deal money

and movie rights, A, B, and C, by being like, yeah, for sure, I was levitating. Why not? How much money are you gonna give me? Yeah, I was levitating. That's striking me as a Warren hallmark. And then afterward, they give a list of things that happened in this house that line up

with other ghost stories. And so I wonder if levitating gives it kind of a paranormal pedigree. It's a great Dua Lipa song, that's for sure. With the Warrens, what are the classic ghost things that we're looking for here that tend to show up? With the Warrens, there's always a little bit of levitation. There's always a girl child that's in touch

with the great beyond, which I feel is a super media trope that kind of takes off out of these stories as well. There's a lot of young girls that are in touch with the supernatural or children in general, but usually girls, which is true of this story as well with Jodi. Also, another thing that you think you alluded to earlier is this whole like the wrong person is doing the seance.

That's why the demons are getting in. That was, for some reason, something that was huge with Ed Warren was he was constantly making the distinction of like, well, a certain kind of person can do a seance, but only a priest can do an exorcism. And if someone who's not qualified to do an exorcism tries to do an exorcism, you're triple fucked. And that is often something like where someone

with good intentions or someone very desperate mistakenly invites an even worse demon into the home and makes their situation worse. Makes a lot of sense as a story for professional demon hunters to be telling because it's like a plumber going around being like, now he's scary story about somebody who tried to put in his own bathtub, he's dead now.

Call me A1 plumbers. They are, I like to think of the Warrens as the plumbers of ghosts for sure. They come in and they're like, oh, I see what your problem is. Kathy is levitating, she is slowly drifting away from him toward the windows exclamation point. Kathy, George yelled jumping up on the bed to grab his wife.

She was as stiff as a board in his hands, but her drifting stopped. George felt a resistance to his pull then a sudden release of pressure and he and Kathy fell heavily off the bed onto the floor. The fall awakened her. When she saw where she was, Kathy was incoherent for a moment.

Where am I? She cried. What's happened? George started to help her up. She could hardly stand. It's nothing, he reassured her. You were having a dream and fell out of bed. That's all. George. George, oh my God.

What is this? I think it says so much about marriage in the 70s that our relatable hero, it makes sense for him to be like, I'm gonna keep my wife in the dark about the fact that she levitates now. I mean, it sounds like it's just connected to that. And I feel like this is how it was like characterized in the James Brolin movie too of like,

oh, he's trying to protect her from what's happening by deceiving her because he's the man of the house and he has to protect everyone. Even though he's demonstrated he is not capable of doing that and he's head way over his head and he's kind of a fuck up. You know what also scary about the Amityville horror movie is that James Brolin got a percentage of profits

and it ended up being way more successful than anyone thought. So I think he made $17 million in 1979 money for being in the Amityville horror. That's like the ultimate straw and to gold of it all. And Margot Kidder needed to negotiate harder or have harder negotiators on her team because at the end of the day, it's always a horror story about women and finance.

Jesus Christ. And what do you have without Margot Kidder? Nothing, Margot Kidder is one of them. You have nothing, you have garbage is what you have. Father Mancuso goes to stay with his mother because he's so stressed out. Okay, king. And after the levitation incident,

George goes to deal with his feelings all alone without talking to anyone about it because of course he sits in the kitchen. He thought he had been a fool to mouth off about not believing in spooks. Kathy was right. How the hell can you fight something that can lift you clear off the bed like a stick of wood?

George Lutz, ex-Marine admitted he was scared. Wow. If you're a Marine and you're not scared a lot, then like maybe you don't take your job seriously enough. That's all I have to say about that. George hears the marching band strike up again. He looks about wildly. You sons of bitches, where are you?

He screamed. And then he sees that all the living room furniture has been moved as if to make space for a marching band. I love this menacing marching band from hell. Does the entity manifest as a whole marching band or does the entity go to hell briefly to be like, hey, I need like 50 demons to come do a marching band. Tryouts today for the marching band

in George Lutz's living room. Guys, we're doing a flash mob in George Lutz's basement. We're really gonna freak him out. Come on. It's a TikTok trend on demon talk. I feel like if they were really committing to demonizing what are supposed to be the ills of the 70s, it would have been like a rock band, right?

Like why a marching band is so innocuous. I know, and it's like really hometown uncanny, sweet Americana, right? I don't know what they're going for. I guess I see where they're going with it, but it's just such a funny idea. Okay, Father Mancuso visits the Chancellor and they explain the difference

between infestation, obsession, and possession, which like, I really have to tell you about that. I can't cut that. Oh, excuse me. Infestation has categories that include obsession and possession. There's obsession where the person is affected either internally or externally,

and possession by which the person temporarily loses control of his faculties and the devil acts in and through him. So the devil or a demon, I guess, is trying to take over George Lutz. And they recommend parapsychologists who work in Durham, North Carolina, which there appear to have been a lot of, at least in the 70s.

In North Carolina specifically? Like a concentration of them there? Yeah, I think so. Okay. But they're basically saying like, yeah, this could be demons, but like stay out of it, Father. And they forbid him to go back there,

which I think is what he was kind of hoping for because he's a fictional character. So it's easy to speculate about that. What an upsetting fictional dilemma this fictional character has fictionally entered into. George goes poking around in his basement, and he finds an old well. And then he has a call with Francine,

who is the girlfriend of a guy who works for him. And who is psychic. And she says, I think that your spirits may be coming from a well. George is amazed. Well played, Francine. Yeah, I like Francine. She's the only female character who's allowed to be anything

except a rag doll to be tossed around by demons. So that's good for her. Good. And then Father Mancuso's friend, who helped him out when he had car trouble early on in the book, gets a call from a voice that says, tell the priest not to come back or he'll die. And like, I just want to know what this voice sounded like,

probably like the moth man. I hope it sounded like the bartender. Then they have Francine over, because they just are bound and determined to infuriate these ghosts apparently. And it says, Kathy wasn't too happy about a stranger coming into her house to talk to ghosts,

particularly a young girl like Francine. Oh, well, two women in the room and a story that's made up, they have to hate each other. Oh, that's true. Yeah, this book probably doesn't pass the Beckdell test, because also the ghosts appear to be largely male. Problematic. So we again, return to the theme of Kathy telling George

she wants to leave and him being like, nah, I'm sure it'll be fine. Francine comes and she is possessed by the spirit of Father Mancuso. What? Which is convenient because he can't come because he has flu all the time. She's possessed by the spirit of Father Mancuso,

but he's alive. I know, I don't know. But she says, I would like to make one suggestion to you. Most people find out who their spirits are and find they like them. They don't want them to get lost or to go away. But in this case, I feel this house

should be cleared or exercised. So she says that as Father Mancuso? It's just like she's an answering machine because he's alive. He's in like, he's online island. He could just drive over and tell them, but instead he has to possess somebody. I just again, the first time we've had two women

in the room together and she can't be possessed by a living local priest, just like egregious. I mean, who just doesn't feel like driving that day. He's like, I can de-ice the windshield or I can possess Francine. It's a toss up. I know, I'm like such a broken record on this subject, but that's a fun one.

That's a fun one. He's like, I'm having car trouble. So I'm gonna possess the only other woman in the story. Well, the other one is busy levitating. So it's rough out there. Kathy's brother, Jimmy, and his new wife, Carrier, back from Bermuda. How time flies.

Yay. It's January 8th and they come over to show them Polaroids of their honeymoon. And then they stay in one of the bedrooms and Carrier wakes up and sees a little boy ghost, which is really the little boy ghost first entrance. I would like to have more little boy ghosts in this book, to be honest.

Okay, so little boy ghost, one of the two ghosts that live in the house. And then there's the kitchen perfume ghost. Right, mommy ghost. He wakes her up and asks where Missy and Jodie were, which is kind of rude, but kids don't have great boundaries about waking up sleeping people.

Sure. Ultimately, no harm, no foul. And this so spooks George and Kathy that George is like, okay, this priest won't come over. He's like, would rather astrally project than drive up and talk to us. So, or send another priest, by the way.

So let's just bless this fricking house ourselves. And so they go around blessing the house. That's a classic mistake. You're not supposed to do that. And Warren, no, no. That's a Warren, no, no. Wow, I can't, okay. Okay, feeling vindicated.

So Warren joined at heart. And so they're going around blessing the house. And then they hear this hum of voices that swells and turns into a cacophony. And then George hears a voice saying, will you stop? Which I think is a hilarious thing for a demon to say. It's also what everyone reading the book

is wanting to say to him at this point. Can you stop? Will you stop? Please just take a step back from the situation. You look ridiculous. Will you stop? Yes. And then we are going to close on a moment

that is kind of a crescendo before we get into the last days in the house and the family fleeing. Great. Father Mancuso and George finally are able to talk on the phone, which is very exciting, because that's been tough for them. Father Mancuso says, please get out.

Let things cool down for a while. If you get away, maybe we can all talk this thing out with more rationality. And then he's interrupted because Kathy screams and George has to hang up and runs into the hallway where on every wall in the hall, which is two walls, I'm pretty sure, were green gelatinous spots oozing down

from the ceiling to the floor, settling in shimmering pools of green slime. Money shot. Amazing. Oh, I'm so glad we got to the goo. That's so exciting. Classically, you need goo in a ghost story, right? I feel like goo really turns it up to an 11

in a way that you're like, and people believed this? You gotta have goo. And speaking of that, which one of you did this, Kathy Fume? Tell me or I'll break every bone in your bodies. Jesus fucking Christ, Kathy, calm down. Oh my God. We didn't do it, mama.

All three children chorused at once, dodging the slaps she was aiming at their heads. Kathy didn't just start acting like this last week. Sorry, no. You can blame the goo on the house, but like some of this stuff, the demon is gonna be like, excuse me, this is defamatory.

Wouldn't it be great if the demon sued J.Anson and like a journalist in the murderer kind of a way? And it was like, listen, this George guy sucked before he moved in here, all right? George stepped between his wife and the children. Wait a minute, honey, he said gently. Maybe the kids didn't do it. Let me take a look.

It's like we live in this extremely haunted house where we think porcelain statues are coming to life. But yeah, let's blame our kids before the ghosts that we now totally believe in at this point on page 171. You know it's bad when George is the voice of reason in a scene. Exactly. He went up to one wall

and stuck his finger into a green spot. He looked at the substance, smelled it, and then put a little against the tip of his tongue. Sure looks like Jello, he said, smacking his lips, but it doesn't have any taste at all. He tasted the goo. He walks up to the wall and he goes lick, lick, lick. To the demon goo?

Yeah, I think it's weird enough when cops in movies taste cocaine and they're like, that's cocaine, all right. Like that in itself seems weird to me. So this is like- That's absurd. That's so funny. What if there was a ghost hunter who did that

and was like, that's a ghost, all right. Well, if you taste it, you're like, yep, that's battery acid, all right, bye-bye. Like what? Oh my, I know. No, it's a good thing to taste fluids randomly leaking out of your house. We don't use anything toxic in construction, it's fine.

Is not licking a wall a rule that has become societally generally accepted in the last 40 years? Well, how did people eat all that lead pain? I guess people did used to lick walls. God, amazing. Well, you know, we've only got 11 years to live anyways, right, so. Oh God, okay.

So George, who doesn't care if he lives for another 11 minutes, tastes the ectoplasm. Kathy was calming down after her tirade. Could it be paint? She asked. George shook his head. Nope, he tried to get the feel of the jelly by rolling it against his fingertips.

I don't know what it is, but it sure leaves a mess. He looked around him as if realizing for the first time where he was in a rush, he recalled the conversation he had had with Father Mancuso a few minutes before. And the dreaded word devil almost slipped from his lips. What did you say, George? Ask Kathy.

I didn't hear you. He looked at his wife and children, nothing. I was just trying to think. He began to edge the others toward the staircase. Listen, he said, I'm hungry. Let's go down to the kitchen and have a bite. Then the boys and me will come back up here and clean up this gook.

Okay, King. Kathy, cook something. Kathy, I think we should talk about this over a sandwich. And then the boys and I will eat this goo for dessert. George is so flaccid. It's like, stunning. You just gotta get away from the demons if that's what you're dealing with.

Yeah, we're living in the sunk cost fallacy. And so we have a scene next where Father Mancuso tries to call them back and there's no answer because the whole family was out back in the boathouse where the noise of the compressor drowned out the sounds of the rings. George, Danny, and Chris were dumping gobs of green jelly into the freezing water beside their boat.

The compressor hose kept churning the substance, mixing it with the icy water so that it was swept below the ice. He's like, we must destroy all evidence of the fact that our house is being haunted. Let's take no pictures. So they got in from disposing of the goo and we read, by that evening, sitting beside the fireplace,

Kathy was all for leaving for her mother's. But when she suggested they get out of the house that night, George suddenly went berserk. God damn it, no, he shouted, jumping up from his chair, his face red with rage. All the pressures that had been building within him finally exploded. Every goddamn thing we own in the world

is in this house, he stormed. I've got too much invested here to give it up just like that. The children who were still up, cringed and ran to their mother's side. Even Kathy was frightened by a side of George she had never seen. He had the look of a man possessed. And then he runs around yelling at the ghosts.

He yells, you sons of bitches, get out of my house. And then he runs upstairs and opens the window and it just runs around yelling at ghosts. And then we learned that Sergeant Al Gianfritto, the probably fictional, is on duty that night and takes a look at the house as all of this is going on. Oh, he turned off his headlights. Something was holding him back from getting out of his car

and going up to that front door. He really didn't want to investigate why the owner was behaving like a lunatic. Gianfritto sat there and walked as a woman went around and shut all the windows in the house. And that's the scariest part in the whole book. Night night, wow, I know truly the police officer sits outside of a potential domestic violence situation

and is like, I don't know. I'm not really in the mood. Some kind of a supernatural force or whatever is holding me back. Wow, the things that make police intentionally bad at their job is demons. I've been meaning to bring that up. This has come up before, I think.

Demons are just a blame for everything we don't like, which is pretty comforting, I guess. But it's so interesting to me that I feel like there's been three or four different scenes at this point where George has a huge temper blow up, where the book goes out of its way to say, this is the first time you'd ever done that when even as readers at this point,

we're like, that's not true. We've heard him blow up at Kathy and the children many times. He does this like once every five days, we have a timeline in front of us. No one is looking out for Kathy whatsoever. And then also Kathy's clearly, Kathy's kids are clearly kind of scared of her too. This is just so dark.

It is, it's really, it feels like it's about a family that did go through this really dark time and like all the stuff about the family not getting along feels true to me. And then it feels to me, I wonder how it feels to you, like there's such a stark divide between the pretty realist stuff, like George's anger and even the cold and things like that.

And then the fake stuff just feels so fake, like the porcelain lion that bites people. I think it's genre too, but like that's so warreny to me where it's like there's some cases they work on that are absolutely like they really capture the public imagination because it feels real enough. And then you have stories like the time that Lorraine

talked to Bigfoot in the woods. You're just like, oh, there is a scale of like silly to, I'm like, is J. Anthony just trying to hit a word count? What's the strategy there? They're just throwing a bunch of stuff out there and seeing what sticks it feels like. Things have moved ahead in that like George is at the end of his rope.

Kathy has so much information being withheld from her. It seems like they're both independently certain that ghosts are real, but they cannot have a conversation about it. That's actually a good point. I mean, I guess I don't wish that this book was like more emotionally intelligent because then it wouldn't be fun,

but it's like, God, that sounds like torture to have reached the exact same conclusion as someone that you love, but you can't talk about it because it's the 70s. Like it's just so bizarre. This reminds me of how in love story, which was like one of the great best sellers of the 70s and one of the great love stories

of honestly the 20th century, it's like considered this normal thing that near the end, Jenny, the main character gets leukemia and her doctor tells her husband that she's gonna die and not her. And then she's like, what did the doctor tell you? And he's like, it's fine, don't worry about it, whatever. And she kind of just has to like figure it out

and just be like, listen, preppy, I know I'm gonna die. And this is like the same thing where you're just like, listen, preppy, I know there are demons. Can you just like level with me? But the idea of equal partnership and marriage seems so foreign, I guess.

It's almost like assumed that that's just not gonna happen. And that makes me sad. Also, I feel for the kids and I feel like the kids are gonna be dropped at the climax of the story anyways, because the book doesn't seem very concerned with them, so whatever. And most importantly,

there was a breakout star of this episode and it was the bartender. What do you think his name is in our personal canon? I feel like his name is something boring, but he's got a fun nickname that he's been called for 20 years. They're like, that's skunky. Skunky, yeah.

They've been calling it that since high school. No one remembers why, but he's a hoot. Skunky is a hoot. All right, I think our work is done here. We are gonna come back in the final installment of the Amityville Horror Book Club and talk about how these idiots managed to get out of this house,

and then what appears to be the real story behind how this incredible book made it into the world and the effect it has been having ever since, including on the people who we are describing in this story. Amazing. I can't wait.