The Amityville Horror
Based on Wikipedia: The Amityville Horror
In September 1979, a lawyer named William Weber sat down for an interview with People magazine and made a confession that should have killed one of America's most enduring ghost stories. "I know this book is a hoax," he said. "We created this horror story over many bottles of wine."
The book was The Amityville Horror. The wine-fueled evening had taken place years earlier, when Weber met with George and Kathy Lutz to discuss how they might all profit from the house at 112 Ocean Avenue—a Dutch Colonial where, thirteen months before the Lutzes moved in, a young man had murdered his entire family in their beds.
Weber's admission didn't matter. By then, the book had sold millions of copies, a blockbuster film had terrified audiences across the country, and the Amityville story had embedded itself so deeply in American culture that no amount of debunking could dislodge it. The tale of demonic possession, mysterious voices, and green slime oozing up staircases had become something more powerful than fact. It had become myth.
The Real Horror: November 13, 1974
Before there was a haunting, there was a massacre.
At 112 Ocean Avenue, in the quiet Long Island suburb of Amityville, twenty-three-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr. picked up a rifle in the middle of the night and methodically shot six members of his family. His parents. His two brothers. His two sisters. All killed in their beds, all found face-down, as if they hadn't stirred or struggled.
The case baffled investigators. How could six people be shot without anyone waking up, without neighbors hearing gunfire, without a single victim fleeing or fighting back? DeFeo initially tried to blame the murders on a mob hit, but his story quickly unraveled. Seven weeks of trial testimony later, he was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to serve six consecutive twenty-five-year-to-life terms. He would die in prison in March 2021, having spent more than four decades behind bars.
The house sat empty for thirteen months. The murder weapons were recovered. The blood was cleaned. The furniture, eerily, remained.
A Bargain at Any Price
George and Kathy Lutz were looking for a fresh start. They had married in July 1975, blending their lives together—he was a non-practicing Methodist, she a non-practicing Catholic with three young children from a previous marriage. Daniel was nine, Christopher seven, and Melissa, whom everyone called Missy, just five years old. They had a dog, too, a mixed Malamute and Labrador named Harry.
When they walked through 112 Ocean Avenue, the real estate broker told them the truth. This was the house where Ronald DeFeo had killed his family. Was that a problem?
The Lutzes talked it over. They decided it wasn't.
The price helped their decision. At eighty thousand dollars, the five-bedroom Dutch Colonial with its distinctive gambrel roof, swimming pool, and boathouse on the canal was a steal—far below market value for a waterfront property on Long Island's south shore. For an extra four hundred dollars, they could keep the DeFeo family's furniture.
They moved in on December 18, 1975.
Twenty-Eight Days
What happened next depends entirely on whom you believe.
According to the Lutzes, a friend insisted the house be blessed. George called a Catholic priest he knew, Father Ralph Pecoraro—referred to as "Father Mancuso" in the book to protect his privacy. The priest arrived that first afternoon while George and Kathy were still unpacking boxes.
When Father Mancuso entered a second-floor bedroom—the room that had once belonged to Marc and John Matthew DeFeo—and flicked holy water while beginning his prayers, he heard a voice. It was masculine, authoritative, and unmistakably hostile.
"Get out."
The priest said nothing to the Lutzes about what he had experienced. He simply left. But later, according to the story, he developed a mysterious fever and blisters on his hands resembling stigmata—the wounds of Christ. When he tried to call George to warn him away from that second-floor room, the phone line crackled with static and cut out.
The phenomena escalated. George woke at 3:15 every morning—the approximate time of the DeFeo murders. Kathy had nightmares. The children behaved strangely. Cold spots appeared throughout the house. Windows shattered. Doors ripped from their hinges. A ceramic lion bit George's ankle. Mysterious odors came and went. Green slime oozed from the walls.
And there were the eyes. Little Missy claimed she had an invisible friend named Jodie, a demonic pig with glowing red eyes that would appear at her window.
On January 14, 1976—just twenty-eight days after moving in—the Lutz family fled. They took almost nothing with them, abandoning their possessions to whatever malevolent force had claimed the house. The movers who came the next day to collect their belongings reported experiencing nothing unusual.
The Making of a Phenomenon
The Lutzes might have remained an obscure footnote in Long Island history if not for a chain of introductions that led to author Jay Anson. An editor at Prentice Hall connected them, and the Lutzes submitted approximately forty-five hours of tape-recorded recollections for Anson to work from. They never met with him directly.
Anson shaped their recordings into a narrative published in September 1977. He reportedly chose the title as a nod to H.P. Lovecraft's classic weird tale "The Dunwich Horror" from 1929. The book became an immediate sensation, eventually selling an estimated ten million copies across its various editions.
Two years later, Hollywood came calling. The 1979 film adaptation starred James Brolin as George Lutz and Margot Kidder—fresh off her turn as Lois Lane in Superman—as Kathy. Rod Steiger, an Academy Award winner, played the tormented priest, renamed Father Delaney for the screen.
The movie established the visual iconography that would define the Amityville brand for decades: that distinctive house with its quarter-round attic windows glowing like jack-o'-lantern eyes in the darkness. The actual house in Amityville wasn't available—local authorities denied permission for filming—so producers found a similar Dutch Colonial in Toms River, New Jersey and modified it to match.
The Unraveling
Almost immediately, the story began falling apart.
Researchers Rick Moran and Peter Jordan investigated the claim that cloven hoof prints appeared in the snow on January 1, 1976. Weather records showed there had been no snowfall at that time. The book described police officers visiting the house, but official records confirmed the Lutzes never called the police during their twenty-eight-day residence. A bar called "The Witches' Brew" figures into the narrative—but no such establishment existed in Amityville.
James and Barbara Cromarty bought the house in March 1977 for fifty-five thousand dollars—significantly less than the Lutzes had paid just two years earlier, a discount that reflected the property's newfound notoriety rather than any supernatural taint. They examined the doors, locks, and windows that the Lutzes claimed had been violently damaged and found them to be original, unrepaired equipment.
The "Red Room"—described in the book as a mysterious hidden chamber discovered behind a false wall—was simply a small closet in the basement, clearly visible and unremarkable. The Cromartys lived in the house for a decade and reported nothing unusual. "Nothing weird ever happened," James Cromarty later told reporters, "except for people coming by because of the book and the movie."
Local Shinnecock Indians rejected the book's claim that their tribe had once used the site as a place to abandon the mentally ill and dying—a detail that conveniently tapped into the "cursed Indian burial ground" trope that has haunted American horror fiction since settlers first needed to explain away their unease about living on stolen land.
Even Father Pecoraro's role proved inconsistent. In an affidavit filed during a lawsuit, he stated that his only contact with the Lutzes had been by telephone. But in a 1979 television interview for the series In Search of..., he described entering the house and being slapped by an invisible force while a disembodied voice told him to get out. Both accounts cannot be true.
The Wine and the Confession
The legal proceedings revealed even more troubling details.
In May 1977, George and Kathy Lutz filed a lawsuit against William Weber—Ronald DeFeo's defense attorney—along with several alleged psychics, a writer, and various media companies. They claimed invasion of privacy and mental distress. Weber counter-sued for two million dollars, alleging the Lutzes had backed out of a book deal.
The Cromartys, weary of curiosity seekers showing up at their home, sued the Lutzes, Jay Anson, and his publisher.
It was during these trials, according to an article in Skeptical Inquirer, that the Lutzes admitted "virtually everything in The Amityville Horror was pure fiction."
Brooklyn District Court Judge Jack B. Weinstein dismissed the Lutzes' claims in September 1979 and expressed concern about the ethical conduct of Weber and others who had been involved in crafting the story. "There is a very serious ethical question," he wrote, "when lawyers become literary agents."
George Lutz, for his part, never fully recanted. He maintained until his death that the events were "mostly true" and pointed to polygraph tests he and Kathy had taken in June 1979. The examiners found no indication of lying. Skeptics countered that polygraph tests are famously unreliable—there is little scientific evidence they can accurately detect deception, which is why they are generally inadmissible in court.
The Franchise That Wouldn't Die
Truth proved no match for commerce.
The Amityville name has been attached to more than two dozen films spanning nearly half a century, most of which have virtually nothing to do with the original story. After the theatrical releases of the first three films—The Amityville Horror in 1979, Amityville II: The Possession in 1982, and Amityville 3-D in 1983—the franchise migrated to television and direct-to-video releases.
The sequels from the 1990s onward abandoned any pretense of connection to the Lutz family or the DeFeo murders. Instead, they focused on cursed objects supposedly linked to 112 Ocean Avenue—a haunted lamp, a possessed clock, a demonic dollhouse. The Amityville name had become a brand, a shorthand for suburban supernatural terror that could be slapped onto virtually any low-budget horror production.
In 2005, a big-budget remake attempted to revitalize the franchise. Ryan Reynolds played George Lutz in a film that exaggerated the isolation of the house, depicting it as a remote, Overlook Hotel-style estate rather than the suburban home it actually was—situated within fifty feet of neighboring houses. The real George Lutz called the film "drivel" and sued the producers for breach of contract, defamation, and libel. He particularly objected to a scene showing his character killing the family dog with an axe. The defamation claim was dismissed, but other aspects of the lawsuit remained unresolved when Lutz died.
The films kept coming: The Amityville Haunting, The Amityville Asylum, Amityville Death House, Amityville Prison, The Amityville Harvest. In 2025, the franchise reached what may be its absurdist endpoint with Amityvillenado—presumably a supernatural tornado touching down on Long Island.
Daniel Lutz Speaks
In 2013, a documentary called My Amityville Horror introduced a new voice to the conversation: Daniel Lutz, who had been nine years old when his family fled 112 Ocean Avenue.
Daniel, now a middle-aged man carrying decades of complicated feelings about his stepfather and his childhood, largely echoed the original story as told by George and Kathy. He described genuine terror in that house, experiences that had shaped his entire life. Whether those experiences were supernatural or the product of family dysfunction—George Lutz has been described by various sources as an intimidating figure who dabbled in the occult—Daniel seemed uncertain.
What was clear was the trauma. Whatever happened at 112 Ocean Avenue, it left marks on the children who lived there that no debunking could erase.
Why We Believe
The Amityville Horror endures not because it's true but because it resonates with something deep in the American psyche.
The story combines several potent elements: a real mass murder, a Catholic exorcism narrative, the anxiety of the 1970s housing market (the Lutzes were stretched financially when they bought the house), and the particular unease of suburban life—the fear that the American dream might curdle into nightmare. The Dutch Colonial with its eye-like windows became a symbol of domestic horror, the house itself seeming to watch, to wait, to judge.
There's also the matter of the Indigenous burial ground claim. Though dismissed by actual Shinnecock people, this detail tapped into a recurring motif in American horror: the idea that the land itself is cursed, that violence done to its original inhabitants might somehow rise up through the foundations. It's a way of acknowledging historical guilt while transforming it into entertainment, rendering genocide as ghost story.
Every subsequent owner of 112 Ocean Avenue has reported the same thing: nothing. No cold spots, no mysterious voices, no green slime, no demonic pigs with glowing eyes. The house has been renovated, its address changed to discourage tourists, its famous quarter-round windows replaced with ordinary rectangular ones. The current owners presumably sleep soundly.
The Amityville Horror was always less about what happened in that house than about what Americans wanted to believe could happen—and what they were willing to pay to be frightened by. In that sense, it remains one of the most successful hoaxes in American history, a lie that told us the truth about ourselves.
The bottles of wine that created it are long since empty. The story keeps pouring.