The Amityville House

Some houses are haunted because of what happened inside them. The Dutch Colonial on Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island, may be the only house in America that became world-famous for two completely different stories — one of them a mass murder that no one disputes, and the other a haunting that people have been arguing about for fifty years.

It’s a handsome house. Three stories, gambrel roof, a boathouse out back on a canal that leads to the Great South Bay. Two quarter-circle windows on the top floor that, lit from inside at night, look unsettlingly like a pair of eyes.

Those windows are the most famous part of the house. They’re also gone now. One of the owners had them replaced, because people kept stopping in the street to stare.

The DeFeos

On the night of November 13, 1974, a twenty-three-year-old man named Ronald DeFeo Jr. — known to everyone as Butch — walked into Henry’s Bar in Amityville and shouted for help. “You got to help me! I think my mother and father are shot!”

A group of men from the bar followed him back to his family’s house at 112 Ocean Avenue. What they found, and what police found when they arrived, was one of the worst crimes in Long Island history.

All six members of Butch’s family were dead in their beds. His father, Ronald Sr., forty-three. His mother, Louise, forty-two. His sisters Dawn, eighteen, and Allison, thirteen. His brothers Marc, twelve, and John Matthew, nine. Each had been shot with a .35-caliber rifle at around three o’clock in the morning. Every one of them was found lying face down.

At first, Butch told police that the killings must have been a mob hit, carried out by a hitman he named. Within a day, his story fell apart. He confessed.

“Once I started,” he reportedly told detectives, “I just couldn’t stop. It went so fast.”

The Questions

Even in a case with a confession, there were things no one could explain.

The rifle was loud. The house was not large. Yet none of the six victims appeared to have woken up and tried to flee. Neighbors did not report hearing shots. The family dog, tied up in the yard, didn’t bark. Investigators found no evidence that the victims had been drugged, though there were questions about whether the testing at the time was thorough.

Butch DeFeo’s defense attorney, William Weber, argued that his client was insane — that he had heard voices telling him to kill. The jury didn’t believe it. In November 1975, Ronald DeFeo Jr. was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to six consecutive terms of twenty-five years to life. Over the years, he told many different versions of the crime, sometimes blaming accomplices, sometimes blaming his sister Dawn. He died in prison in 2021.

The house sat empty for a year.

The Lutzes

On December 18, 1975, George and Kathy Lutz moved into 112 Ocean Avenue with Kathy’s three young children, Daniel, Christopher and Melissa. They knew about the murders. The house was a bargain, priced well below its value, and it even came with some of the DeFeos’ furniture.

Twenty-eight days later, on January 14, 1976, they fled the house in the middle of the night, leaving almost everything behind — clothes, food in the refrigerator, the children’s toys. They never went back.

What they said happened during those twenty-eight days became the most famous haunted-house story in American history.

The Story

According to the Lutzes, the trouble began on the day they moved in. They had invited a Catholic priest to bless the house. While he was sprinkling holy water in a second-floor room — the room they planned to use as a sewing room — the priest said he heard a deep masculine voice command him: “Get out!” He said nothing to the family at the time. Later, the Lutzes said, he developed blisters on his hands and a high fever.

Over the following weeks, the Lutzes described a cascade of terrifying events. Swarms of flies appeared in the sewing room in the middle of winter. George began waking every night at around 3:15 a.m. — the hour, he would later learn, of the murders — and felt compelled to check the boathouse. Cold spots spread through the house. A heavy front door was torn from its hinges. Green slime oozed from the walls. Kathy said she felt the embrace of an unseen woman and had nightmares in which she relived the murders. She said she levitated off the bed. George said he had begun to look like Butch DeFeo and, like him, felt drawn to the bar the young man had frequented.

Their five-year-old daughter, Missy, said she had a new friend: a pig named Jodie, with glowing red eyes, that only she could see. George said he saw the red eyes himself, staring in through the window. The next morning, they found hoofprints in the snow.

In the basement, behind a wall of shelves, they discovered a small hidden room painted entirely red. The family dog refused to go near it.

On the last night, the Lutzes said, the house erupted. The children’s beds slammed up and down. Doors banged. Something seemed to be stalking them. They grabbed the children and ran.

The Book

In 1977, a writer named Jay Anson published The Amityville Horror: A True Story, based on hours of taped interviews with the Lutzes. It became a massive bestseller. A movie followed in 1979, and then sequels, remakes, documentaries and spin-offs — dozens of films bearing the Amityville name. The story spread around the world.

So did the doubts.

The Problems

Almost from the beginning, investigators and journalists found holes in the Lutzes’ account.

The local police said they had never been called to the house during those twenty-eight days, though the book described police visits. Weather records showed that there had been no snow on the night the Lutzes said they found hoofprints. The front door that was supposedly torn from its hinges showed no damage. The priest, who appeared in the book under a pseudonym, gave accounts that differed from the Lutzes’ version. Researchers combed through the property history and found no evidence of an ancient burial ground or the other dark lore that later accounts attached to the land.

Then came the most damaging claim. William Weber — Butch DeFeo’s own defense lawyer — said publicly that he had met with George and Kathy Lutz before they ever published their story, over several bottles of wine, and that together they had created the haunting. Weber hoped the story might help him win a new trial for his client by suggesting the house itself had driven DeFeo to murder. The Lutzes and Weber ended up suing each other.

George and Kathy Lutz insisted until their deaths — Kathy in 2004, George in 2006 — that their story was true. They said Anson and the filmmakers had exaggerated details, but that the core of it happened. They took lie detector tests and said they passed.

The paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, who later inspired the Conjuring films, visited the house in 1976 with a camera crew and declared it genuinely haunted. During their investigation, a photographer took a famous image that appears to show a little boy with glowing eyes peering out from a doorway on the second floor. Skeptics believe the “boy” was one of the investigators. Believers point out that the figure resembles John Matthew DeFeo.

The People Who Came After

Here is the part of the story that rarely makes it into the movies.

In 1977, a couple named James and Barbara Cromarty bought the house. They lived there for about ten years. They said nothing strange ever happened to them — except for the endless stream of tourists who drove by, knocked on the door, trespassed in the yard and peered in the windows. They sued the Lutzes and the publisher. The address was changed to discourage sightseers. Later owners also said they experienced nothing unusual.

The house has been sold several times since. The quarter-moon windows were replaced with ordinary square ones. The house was renovated. And still, people come, every Halloween, to stand on the sidewalk and stare.