In 1977, the world was introduced to the most famous haunted house
in history. The first line of this not-so-humble-abode’s address - 112
Ocean Avenue - might not ring any bells, but the second surely will - Amityville.
Prior to 1977, that was the strange name of a sleepy suburb on the outskirts of
New York City. Today, it’s synonymous with one thing: the Amityville Horror.
That’s the name of a book written by Jay Anson that chronicles the experiences of
the Lutz family, who moved into 112 Ocean Avenue a week before Christmas in 1975.
Within a few days, the Lutzs started to have strange, unsettling experiences. They were
subtle at first - inexplicable cold spots and foul odours around the house. And in the basement was
a bricked-up room with blood-red walls, which didn't appear on any of the building plans.
But as the weeks went by, the paranormal activity escalated.
George Lutz woke one night to find his wife levitating above their bed.
A creepy demon with the face of a pig was spotted peering through windows on the ground floor,
and cloven-hoofed footprints appeared all around the house after a night of heavy snowfall.
The family called a Catholic priest to exorcise whatever entity was haunting them. But as soon as
he whipped out the holy water, a disembodied voice barked ‘get out,’ and he was slapped around the
face by an invisible hand. By the time he got home that evening, fresh blisters covered his skin,
and he developed wounds on the palms of his hands that looked suspiciously like stigmata.
Just 28 days after moving into their new home, the Lutz family left it in terror for
their lives and their immortal souls. They didn't even bother to pack their things.
Like many famous horror stories, this one's supposed to be true, though for obvious reasons
plenty of people have their doubts - more on that later. But what very few people realise
is that the most spine-chilling aspect of the entire account is, in fact, completely true.
If you've watched the film adaptation of the Amityville Horror, you'll recall an estate
agent informing the Lutz that a mere year before, 6 people were murdered in the house.
Those murders really did take place, and to this day, exactly how - and why - they were carried out
remains a mystery. Some suspect Mafia involvement, others believe the killer had help from an
unidentified accomplice, and still, others blame whatever malignant force festers within the house.
But one thing is for certain - in this case, the reality really is far scarier than fiction.
This is the true story of the Amityville Horror.
In the early hours of the 13th of November, 1974, 23-year-old Ronald 'Butch' DeFeo
left his home at 112 Ocean Avenue. He worked at his father's car dealership,
but as the son of the boss, his main responsibility was to sit around on
his arse doing bugger-all all day, before clocking off early to head to the pub.
Unlike his son, Butch's father was usually pretty conscientious, but for some reason,
that particular morning he failed to show up for work. It wasn't like Ronald's senior to take a day
off, and it was practically unheard of for him to do so without telling someone . Butch called home
from the dealership to find out what was going on, but nobody answered the phone. That was odd too -
Butch lived with his parents and his 4 siblings, and there was almost always someone at home.
Butch was befuddled but went on with his day. As usual,
he left early and went to see his girlfriend before heading to the local bar to meet some
friends around 6pm. Throughout the day he called home periodically, but there was still no answer.
By this point Butch was beginning to get worried, so he left his friends at the bar and walked the
five or so minutes home. The family's cars were parked in the drive, but the front door
was locked and when he rang the doorbell, nobody answered. Butch didn't have a key,
so he nipped round the back of the house and climbed in through an unlocked window.
Inside he soon discovered why nobody had been answering the phone all day:
every member of his family was dead.
Shortly thereafter, the police turned up to a grizzly scene. Butch's parents and his four
siblings were all found lying face down in their beds, shot by an unknown assailant.
Amityville was simply not the kind of place where such horrors happened,
and the local police were baffled - there was no sign of a forced entry,
and nothing had been stolen. Struggling to see a motive for the crime, they asked Butch - who
was now sobbing uncontrollably - whether he knew anyone who might have wanted to hurt his family.
As it happened, he did. Butch's great uncle, Peter DeFeo, was a Caporegime
in the Genovese crime family - in other words, he was Mafia. A few years earlier,
one of Peter's criminal colleagues - hitman Louis Fallini - had laid low at
the DeFeo residence for several weeks. During that time, Fallini and Butch's
father apparently fell out. Butch thought the murders must be some kind of payback.
Fearing Fallini might target the sole DeFoe family survivor,
Butch was taken into custody for his own protection.
The police, meanwhile, began searching the house for clues, and it wasn't long before they made
a breakthrough. To their surprise, the vital evidence wasn't found near any of the bodies,
but in the only bedroom the killer apparently hadn’t visited - Butch's.
Tucked away in a corner were a couple of empty cardboard boxes, which turned out
to be the packaging for two Marlin rifles, one a .22 calibre and the other .35. And sure enough,
the police later confirmed the murder weapon was a .35 calibre Marlin rifle.
Unsurprisingly, suspicion befell Butch, and his story started to shatter
In his statement, he'd told the police exactly what I just told you - that
he got up early and went to work, then visited his girlfriend, went to the bar,
and finally discovered his entire family dead in their beds. That was plausible
enough and Butch had solid alibis for all of it... but there was one small problem.
According to Butch, the murders occurred after he left for work. But forensics
findings put the time of death between 2 and 4am. Since Butch claimed to have left
the house sometime after 4, he would have been home during the murders.
Cornered by his own testimony, Butch immediately changed it, claiming he was indeed at home when
Fallini murdered his family, but for some reason the hitman had decided to spare him.
It was an obvious lie - why had Butch spent half the day feigning concern for
his family if he knew they were dead? Why hadn't he reported the crime as soon as
Fallini left? And for that matter, why even lie in the first place?
Unsurprisingly Butch had no answer to any of these questions,
and with his flimsy fable torn to shreds, he made a full confession. In his own,
chilling words: "Once I started, I just couldn't stop. It all went so fast."
Detailing his deeds that morning, the sheer evilness of Butch’s crime emerged. After murdering
his entire family in cold blood, Butch had had a nice relaxing soak in the bath, got changed,
then drove out of town to dispose of the murder weapon and his blood stained clothes in a storm
drain. As we've already seen, in an attempt to further cover his tracks he proceeded to have
a completely normal day, going to work, hanging out with his girlfriend and having a few drinks
with his mates, all while the bodies of his entire family grew cold in their beds at home.
Butch was put on trial for 6 counts of murder. His defence lawyer, William Weber, tried to convince
the jury Butch was innocent on the grounds of insanity, but the ploy failed. Butch was
sentenced to 6 consecutive jail terms of 25 years, one for each of the family members he’d slain.
In many ways it was an open and shut case. Along with Butch's confession there was
a whole boatload of evidence that he was the killer. But when you think about it,
several aspects of the crime don’t add up.
Butch DeFeo fired 8 shots that night (a pair for each parent, and one for each sibling),
and forensics confirmed the bodies hadn't been moved post-mortem,
meaning all 6 members of the family were slain in their beds.
As you probably noticed, guns are loud. The house at 112 Ocean Avenue is pretty
big and the bedrooms are split across two floors - it would have taken Butch
several minutes to move from room to room as he systematically snuffed his nearest and dearest.
Which leads us to a very obvious question - how the hell did nobody wake up?
Butch himself explained this little conundrum by claiming to have laced
the family dinner with sleep-inducing barbiturates, but no trace of any drugs
showed up in the toxicology reports. And let’s not forget about the neighbours.
In many films about the Amityville Horror, the house is shown as being relatively remote,
presumably to amp up the fear factor. In reality,
it's on a regular street lined with lots of other houses.
During Butch's trial a reenactment of the murders revealed that a single shot
from the murder weapon could be heard a full 5 blocks away.
And yet, not a single neighbour heard any of the *8* gunshots fired that night.
There's also the question of motive - it was well known in Amityville that Butch was bad news - he
drank heavily, took drugs, and committed several petty crimes. He also had a truly terrible - and
sometimes violent - relationship with his father, which had been deteriorating in the
weeks leading up to the murders. But there was no discernible motive for the other 5 killings.
Butch was even said to be particularly close to Dawn, the eldest of his four younger siblings.
Even for someone like myself with a permanent lease on the biggest tent in the sceptics camp,
it's all a bit strange. Add in the Lutz's story of pervasive paranormal activity and
demons lurking in the dark, and you have to ask yourself - is it possible that
the whole thing might actually be true? That there's something... unnatural in that house?
There's certainly some convincing evidence here.
In 1979, George and Kathy Lutz volunteered to a polygraph test to prove once and for
all that their story was true. They did things properly too, recruiting Chris Gugas to carry
out the test (he was one of the leading polygraph experts in America at the time).
The couple were separately asked 5 questions about their paranormal experiences at the
house - ranging from a simple 'are you telling the truth?' to the slightly more specific 'did
you levitate that one time?' , Gugas ultimately concluded that both were telling the truth.
If, on the other hand, you happen to be a fellow sceptic,
there’s ample reason to dismiss the Amityville Horror as just another hoax.
To start, several key scenes in the original book are demonstrably inaccurate. The Catholic priest,
who apparently got beaten up by a ghost while trying to bless the house later swore in
court that he'd never even been there. And those cloven-hoofed footprints that appeared in the snow
all around the house? Records show it didn't snow anywhere near Amityville on the day in question.
Then there's the infamous hidden 'red room,' portrayed in the film as a gateway to hell.
Turns out it was merely a mundane storage room with red paint on one of the walls,
and it was never 'hidden' as Kathy and George Lutz claimed. The kids used to play there often,
which presumably wouldn't have been a great option had it been a literal entrance to the underworld.
Most damning of all - in 1979, William Weber (Butch DeFeo’s defence attorney) confessed to
concocting the whole thing with George and Kathy Lutz over copious amounts of wine. Weber revealed
that it wasn't malevolent forces, but mounting mortgage debts that convinced the Lutzs to flee
the house. They conjured all the ghosts and goblins stuff to try and make some fast cash.
Considering they earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from the
Amityville horror, it’s safe to say that went quite well.
It's also worth pointing out that several other people have lived in the house since the Lutzs,
and not one of them has ever reported anything unusual.
In the decades since the Amityville Horror was released, the story has become a money-making
behemoth, birthing over 25 films, dozens of books, and a load of documentaries that I strongly
urge you not to bother watching. All these retellings have created an awful lot of noise,
and now there's so much fiction entwined with the facts, it's difficult to know what to believe.
Ultimately, there’s not a shred of actual evidence that anything
supernatural inhabits 112 Ocean Avenue - now 108 Ocean Avenue - one of the
former owners changed the address in a futile attempt to deter morbid tourists.
It’s ironic that, amidst the tall tales, most folk have forgotten the
genuine horror that haunts this house: the brutal 1975 massacre of six people.
Butch DeFeo died behind bars in March 2021, and during his 46 years in prison, he implicated
everyone from, his sister Dawn, their mother and a shadowy figure who mysteriously appeared
at the house and handed him a gun. However, the exact details changed with each retelling.
Ultimately, we may never know the truth. But one thing is
for sure - what happened that night in Amityville was truly horrifying.
Thanks for watching.