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A man murders his family, and a horror legacy is born.

This November 2024, will see the 50th anniversary of Ronald De Feo Jr shooting dead his whole family at his house in Amityville, Long Island. That house stood at 112 Ocean Avenue, and this mass murder was the start of a horror legacy that became one of the most famous hauntings in the world.

Before I give you all the facts that have been uncovered over the years, and you decide what you think is true – or not – all of these events have caused real psychological and physical damage to many people in one way or another. So if you want to comment or discuss it anywhere, please bear this in mind and be kind.

Straight out of the gate I ordered a copy of Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror from Abe Books (a great site for used copies of older books. Find it at www.abebooks.com or www.abebooks.co.uk). I first read this when I was a teenager in the 80’s, and it scared the pants off me at the time. The book tells us that it is the true story of what happened to the Lutz family when they moved into 112 Ocean Avenue, and fled after 28 days having been subjected to all manner of horrific poltergeist activity. Reading it as an older and wiser grown up, I can’t say that any of it scared me at all. Nor did I find much of it screaming out ‘haunting’ to me. But I could be being a bit harsh, given my nature, so let’s break it all down.

Voices Told Me To Kill Them All

Ronald De Feo Jr was a 23 year old car salesman who lived at Ocean Avenue with his Mum and Dad, and 4 younger brothers and sisters. He had a reputation for being an angry and troubled young man, who drank heavily and regularly did drugs. In the early hours of 13th November 1974, he took a rifle and shot dead all 6 members of his family. When the family was found, they were all face down in their beds: his Mum and Dad had both been shot twice in the back of their heads, and his siblings all had one bullet wound in their backs. There was evidence that some of them had been shot elsewhere and placed in their beds afterwards, with the police allegedly stating that the murder scene seemed to have been staged. De Feo Jr had reported to the Police that he had gone home after work and found them all dead, but he was soon arrested and charged with the murders of six family members: his father, Ronald Sr; his mother, Louise; his sisters, Dawn and Allison; and his brothers, Mark and John-Matthew.

At his trial, Ronald De Feo Jr said that he had heard voices telling him to kill them all and that he had seen a hooded figure like ‘something demonic’ shortly before he did it.

But Ronald De Feo Jr admitted that he was told to say that voices told him to kill his family so that he could plead insanity and maybe get a more lenient sentence. He never heard any voices. He had already tried to kill his father the year before he shot everyone, but the gun hadn’t gone off and his father was spared. De Feo Jr had also thought to get rid of the murder weapon and his clothes from the murders before he’d gone to work the next day, pretending that all was normal. These weren’t the actions of someone who wasn’t thinking straight.

There are endless theories about the murders – that he couldn’t have done it by himself, that his sister was involved, and that the neighbours would have heard gunshots. De Feo Jr has never given a straight answer to what actually happened that night. His story changed so many times in the years since the murders that it is pointless trying to speculate.

The only definitive fact to all of this is that all of his family were shot and killed, and that he had a lot to do with it.

The Lutzes Move In

In December 1975, George and Kathy Lutz moved into the house at 112 Ocean Avenue with children Danny, Chris and Missy. The Lutzes had managed to buy the house – a huge 3 storey affair on the water with a pool and a boat house – for $80,000, which was an absolute steal at the time. The whole family was aware of the murders that had happened the year before, but it’s reported that none of them had any concerns about it, not when they were getting their dream house.

The paranormal activity allegedly started from the day they moved in.

The Priest

In the book, a priest is called by Kathy to bless the house the day they move in. He’s called Father Mancuso and allegedly had issues after entering the sewing room on the middle floor. He came over feint and queasy, feeling extremely ill, whilst being attacked by a swarm of flies. He then heard a guttural, disembodied voice telling him to ‘get out’, which he did. Quickly.

His troubles didn’t stop there. On the way home from Amityville, his car took on a mind of its own and he lost control – unable to steer or brake to bring the car to a stop. He developed huge pustulous sores on the palms of his hands in the days after his visit that grew bigger and bigger as time went on. He had to take to his bed for weeks suffering from a fever. In fact, it’s alleged that he didn’t start to feel well again until he decided to have nothing more to the do with the Amityville house and the Lutzes. All these issues were attributed to the ‘evil’ in the house, attacking him and making him ill.

The priest’s actual name was Father Ralph Pecoraro and he has spoken out since the incident to say that he never actually set foot inside the Amityville House. Attorney William Daley stated in an affidavit that “Father Ralph J Pecoraro has indicated that his only contact relating to this case was a telephone call from the Lutzes regarding their ‘psychic’ experiences.”

Further evidence from the Diocese states that Father Pecoraro petitioned to be moved from his diocese to a different parish because of all the attention he was getting from the publicity he was subjected to by the book and the movie. He never came to bless the house and he didn’t suffer any illness because of it, other than the annoyance of reporters constantly trying to speak to him.

Cold Spots And Slime

From the minute they moved in, George said that he couldn’t get warm. Both he and Kathy experienced cold spots all over the house, but George in particular sat burning logs in the fireplace all day and night because he just couldn’t warm up. They also had the boiler running all day as well to try and warm the place, but nothing seemed to work. The Lutzes attributed this to the haunting and said that it was always cold because the house was demonic. But they moved into a giant, three storey house, that had sat empty for the best part of a year, and was situated near the water. It was also mid December when they moved in, so it seems plausible that the house would have been difficult to warm up. It would have been damp from being empty for so long, and would have definitely been drafty, being so big. I would say this was more of an environmental issue than a paranormal one.

In the book and the movie, rivers of slime poured down the walls and stairs, seeping out of the very pores of the house. Since then, it’s been said many times by many people that the slime was small blobs that would appear on the floors. Again, this can be down to a damp house being warmed up and I wouldn’t say this was anything like ectoplasm, as it is believed. The same can be said of the black mould in the toilets.

I’m betting that if they had stayed longer, this problem would have eventually disappeared, along with many others.

Swarms Of Flies And A Foul Stench

One room in particular in the house, the sewing room, seemed to be the centre of swarms of flies along with a foul stench. Anything could have crawled into the walls and died, leaving behind a nasty smell and the perfect conditions for flies to lay eggs. And flies can appear any time of the year, if the conditions are right. As a teenager I was convinced that the flies from the book were demon spawn. How could they not be? They are all over the book cover, as well as the pages inside.

But they’re just flies.

This room seems to be the room at the centre of many things. It’s where Father Mancuso – or Father Pecoraro, as he we know him – became physically ill and was told to get out. It’s the same room where Danny had the window slam down onto his hands and stay there, with no adult being able to release him. The windows were old sash windows, I believe, and could easily slam down if the mechanism had broken. Swelling in the wood from damp could make it difficult to lift it again.

Damaged Hands

When Danny got his hands slammed in the window, they were flattened and mangled – making the family think a trip to the emergency room would be needed. In his documentary, My Amityville Horror, Danny says that while he was downstairs in the kitchen with his Mum, tending to his hands, the door to the kitchen had opened and they had both turned to see who was coming in, but saw no one there. Then a spirit walked through the door, past them at the sink, knocked a knife off the table, and sat down in a chair. He says that the spirit sat there for some time before it just disappeared. He doesn’t say what it looked like, or who he thought it was, just that it was a spirit.

Shortly after this, his hands were amazingly back to normal, as if nothing had happened.

There’s no way to explain this – either the spirit or the hands – so this could be said to be paranormal.

A Ghostly Embrace

This one is also difficult to explain, so could also be thought of as paranormal. Kathy and George practiced transcendental meditation – thought to be a spiritual meditation – and reported that after one such session together in the kitchen, something had taken hold of Kathy’s hand, but there was no one else with them in the room. She also reported smelling a perfume from time to time, and felt someone embrace her from behind. (Not George.) Kathy firmly believed that this was the spirit of Louis De Feo, coming to visit, and claimed that it never frightened her or caused her harm. It was always warm and comforting to her.

I’ve never thought that a sudden waft of a certain scent is a visiting spirit. I quite often get this kind of thing happen in my apartment or out in my car, but I don’t automatically think ‘ghost’. It could be any one of many different things causing the smell – flowers, someone’s perfume lingering, an air freshener – but not a visitor from the other side. So the perfume does not mean a haunting to me.

The embrace is something we can’t explain because none of us were there to see or feel it. In fact, we can only take Kathy Lutz’s word for it. There is absolutely no way of proving this in any way, shape or form. We only know that it allegedly happened, because Kathy said it did.

A Ghostly Marching Band

George Lutz reported that he would wake up at 3.15am every morning, hearing a marching band downstairs, and sometimes the sound of people having a party. He would get up and run down to the ground floor, trying to catch whatever it was, but the noise would stop the minute he set foot in the downstairs hallway and all would be silent again.

3.15am is allegedly the time that De Feo Jr committed the murders, so George and Kathy linked this to the haunting and to why George was waking up in the early hours every morning.

Nobody else ever woke up and witnessed this, only George, so we have no idea as to whether it happened or not. There is no way of knowing.

A Personality Change

Kathy and the children noticed a change in George’s demeanour the longer they were in the house, with him becoming angrier and more violent towards them as the days went by. Kathy even explained that her and George took wooden spoons to the children, beating them one day when they had been particularly naughty. But both Chris and Danny Lutz have said that George had a temper and would treat them like they were in the army. Danny Lutz stated in ‘My Amityville Horror‘ that George was a former marine and ‘it’s all he knew, he knew nothing about how to be a father’. The children would have to address him as Sir or Mr Lutz.

Danny also said in his documentary that he felt like he was possessed – that he had no control over his body.

The Red Room

The family dog, Harry, uncovered a ‘secret room’ in the basement behind some shelving that had been blocked off and painted red. I’ve read so much about this red room that it just seems ridiculous to even have to talk about it now. But the truth about it is this – it was a cupboard under the stairs that was painted red. It wasn’t even a room. Friends of the De Feo children have said that they used to play in there when they used to come over. It wasn’t a place where Native Americans did experiments on their mentally ill, and it most certainly wasn’t a portal to hell where demons could cross over. It was just a cupboard.

‘Jodie’ The Demon

Missy Lutz, who was five years old at the time they moved into Amityville, had an imaginary friend that she called Jodie. Jodie, from drawings done by the young girl and from witness accounts, was a pig like creature with glowing red eyes and sharp wolf like teeth. George, Kathy and Danny all reported seeing the creature, with Kathy stating that she had witnessed Missy talking to something in her room and hearing a distinctive separate voice answering her daughter, but seeing nothing when she’d enter her room. Missy would talk to something sitting in her rocking chair in her bedroom and the chair would rock by itself – George and Danny have said that at one point it rocked continuously on its own for over twenty minutes.

I can’t explain the rocking chair, and my brother has had his own experience with a rocking chair coming to life by itself in the middle of the night. I believe this could happen – my brother is not one to make things up – and this is why I’ll never own a rocking chair.

Jodie, however, is another story. When the creature has been witnessed from outside the house in a bedroom window, the glowing red eyes could have been the reflection of lights from the road or the water, depending on which way the window is facing. And the shadow that looked like a figure could be just a shadow. Many ghost sightings or photographs in windows have been proven to be just a reflection. And the house sat on a corner, so cars travelling up and down would reflect in the glass all the time.

In television interviews, George and Kathy explained that after one sighting of Jodie, they’d found cloven hoof prints in the snow outside the window, leading down to the water. I believe research has stated that there was no snow in Amityville this particular December.

Doors Exploding Off Their Hinges

In the book and in numerous interviews, George and Kathy said that the front doors of the house would explode outwards in the middle of the night, as if someone was trying to get out of the house.

In an interview with Jennifer Smith, published in the Seattle Times in May 2005, Christopher Lutz, now going by name Quaratino, stated that none of the events in the book or the movies is accurate. He says that the haunting was not a hoax, but it was extremely exaggerated. Unseen forces ripping the front door off its hinges never happened.

The Ceramic Lion

I’d forgotten all about this until I reread the book and the idea of a ceramic lion coming to life and biting someone on the leg seems utterly ludicrous to me. I feel bad even mentioning it, but it seems to be a large part of the haunting.

The Lutzes had a ceramic lion that they had in their living room. Kathy reports that she frequently saw it turn its head and growl at her, and at one point jumped up and bit George on the ankle. It left teeth marks in his skin and drew blood. After this they decided to move the lion to another room, but it would reappear in the living room by itself.

There’s no explanation for this, but at the time, possessed inanimate objects were quite the thing, but it was mostly confined to dolls biting and scratching, and moving about by themselves.

I feel very strongly about this, and I’ll argue about it until I’m blue in the face – I don’t believe that inanimate objects can be possessed. (Although it does make for a fun story, and I’m a huge fan of Robert the Doll at the East Martello Museum in Key West.) But if you think about it, what kind of demon would possess an inanimate object? What would be the point? I’m an all powerful entity so I’m going to possess this doll/ornament/ceramic lion and wreak havoc. Just, no.

More Unexplainable Incidents

Over the 28 days that the family lived in the Amityville house, George reported that Kathy levitated off the bed many times. Sometimes she levitated so high that he had to jump up to grab her and pull her back down. She would be fast asleep and only wake when she hit the floor or the bed as she was pulled down.

Towards the end of their residency, Chris and Danny said that their beds would raise up off the floor, sometimes high enough to slam into the ceiling in their bedroom. On the final night, their parents could hear their beds slamming into the floor above their heads as the poltergeist activity increased.

Both of the boys remember seeing shadowy spectral figures appearing in hallways and bedrooms, descending on them before disappearing into thin air.

One of George and Kathy’s friends, who is said to be psychic in the book, felt unbelievably sick when she drove up to the house and refused to go in. She would go on to come over extremely ill every time that she was invited over or thought about visiting Amityville.

Then there’s poor Harry the dog. He would endlessly bark at something that none of the family could see, even accidentally hanging himself trying to leap the fence from his pen to get at whatever it was.

The ghostly figures and the levitation I can’t explain. But Harry could have been barking at any number of critters scuttling about the boat house or garden. Dogs bark at other creatures. It’s a well known fact. It doesn’t mean that there was something paranormal hanging around.

It’s also important to state, that there has been nothing paranormal reported about the house either before or after the Lutzes lived there. Nobody before or since has ever had a bad experience in that house, unless you count the endless sightseers trampling the lawns since the movie came out.

The Aftermath

The Lutz family fled the Amityville house in January 1976, exactly 28 days after they had moved in. They left behind all of their belongings and refused to go back.

As news of the haunting spread through the newspapers and television, all manner of people wanted to come to the house to see it for themselves. This included self proclaimed demonologists, Ed and Lorraine Warren. For anybody who is not familiar with this couple, Ed claimed to be a demonologist and an exorcist affiliated to the Catholic Church. (He wasn’t.) And Lorraine Warren claimed to be a psychic medium.

When Lorraine visited the house, she claimed that the red room in the basement was a portal to hell where demonic entities can cross over. She also claimed it was the place where Native Americans brought their mentally ill to leave them to perish. She claimed that the house was built on a Native American burial ground and that the entity haunting the Amityville house was a chief who wasn’t happy with them being there. All very contradictory claims.

The house wasn’t built on an ancient Native American burial ground, and this has been proven through records and statements from Native American experts on the tribes that lived in the area.

A six hour vigil, filmed for Channel 5 New York in March 1976, was attended by the Warrens, another medium, and reporters Laura Didio and Marvin Scott, amongst others. This included a substantial crew, there to film everything that they could in the hopes of catching something on camera. Marvin Scott reported later that, even though Lorraine Warren and the other psychic present were experiencing feelings of evil and paranormal entities, he saw and felt nothing out of the ordinary. He almost found it boring.

The Amityville Horror Is Born

The Lutzes moved across the country to escape Amityville, but not before they met with William Weber, who was Ronald De Feo Jr’s lawyer, about writing a book on their experiences. William Weber was convinced that they could make a lot of money from the haunting and convinced them to record everything so that a book could be written. In the end, Jay Anson wrote The Amityville Horror from cassette tapes of George and Kathy Lutz documenting their time in the house. He became a very rich man on the back of the Lutzes by all accounts, earning millions from the book and movie rights.

George and Kathy made endless appearances on television, talking about their experiences and what transpired, and the Amityville house became the most famous haunted house ever known.

Interviews were granted to whomever asked for one, because they could no longer live a normal life, now that their story was documented in the media. Although it’s easy to say, looking at it from the outside, that they capitalized on the events, they couldn’t really earn money from a normal job after this, so we can’t blame them for it. What would you have done, or do, in the same circumstances?

As time went on, production companies capitalized on the Amityville name, making endless movies that had nothing to do with the actual events, but just had Amityville in the title. This seemed to be enough to draw in an audience.

The house changed hands many times, and even changed address, some new owners suing the Lutzes for lack of privacy. George and Kathy separated, and then divorced. The children refused to talk about the time that they lived in Amityville, Long Island, and life carried on.

So there are many things that allegedly happened over those 28 days that the Lutzes lived in the Amityville house. Some of them can be explained, and some of them can not. Whether you believe it or not, it seems that George and Kathy were the catalysts of the whole experience, with their children being subjected to some very traumatic events.

I do have one major question that I want to ask about the Amityville Horror, but I want to ask it of Chris and Danny Lutz, and I’ve been unable to contact them. So I’m going to wait until I can before I write about that.

Until then, it’s up to you to decide what you think is true. There is so much more information available out there that you can dig up. There is also a new documentary series available called Amity: Origin, which is quite interesting, although I’ve spotted a few things in there that I find a bit suspicious. It’s still worth a watch.

My next project involves 7ft tall silver men, so please subscribe to get informed when I publish the episode.

*Amity: Origin is available on Sky On Demand here in the UK.

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