Most Haunted House in America: The Amityville Horror
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Hi, After Dark. My name is Sarah. I'm a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and I study history, which is why I love After Dark so, so, so much. I love how Maddie and Antony take these really scary, spooky, supernatural stories that we've all heard about and ground them historically. And I think that's just such an interesting part of the pod. And I really, I just love you guys so much.

So I submitted an idea about the Amityville Horror House. I watched Amityville Horror as a young kid, too young to be watching it. And I just want to hear you guys dig into what happened and historicize this whole story. Thank you so much.

On the 18th of December 1975, Kathy and George Lutz, with Kathy's three children from a previous marriage plus the family dog, moved into their new home, 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville. The town of Amityville lies on the south shore of Long Island, where the sea breeze smells of salt and old money.

The houses are colonial revivals, with bone-white clapboard facades with manicured lawns. The Lutzes' new home at 112 Ocean Avenue seemed big in broad daylight, but loomed even larger by night. Two windows high up in its sloping roof looked out rather like eyes,

George and Kathy had looked at more than 50 houses along the Long Island shore before finding this one. It had a boathouse, a large yard, and was being sold for only $80,000, furniture included. And they knew why the price was so low. Anyone who read the newspapers knew about the murders.

But the Lutzes weren't superstitious, and they knew a bargain when they saw one, even if the price was still twice their budget. The children's shouts bounced happily off the walls as they ran around exploring their new home.

But 28 days later, those same walls would, supposedly, bleed green slime. Doors would be blasted off their hinges by so-called demons, nightmare eyes would wait at windows, and the family would be chased from their home. Welcome to Amityville, home of America's most haunted house. ♪

♪♪

Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddy. And today we're looking at the history of what is arguably the most haunted house in America. This haunted house story grew out of a violent, shocking mass murder, a troubling blurring of the lines between real human horror and paranormal myth making. And it's one of those things where we can actually...

trace the history of a haunting, which is very rare when we come across these haunting stories. So that's why we thought it was one of the ones that was worth zoning in on.

It's also a story that's got a surprising amount to do with the horror film The Exorcist. And this gets so easily overlooked, I think, but how that changed American society in the 1970s and sort of shaped people's ideas about the paranormal in profound ways. Our guest today to help us guide us through this story is Dr. Joseph Laycock, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Texas State University and

author of some of the best named books I think I've come across in this podcast. Firstly, The Penguin Book of Exorcisms. And he has also co-authored, amongst other things, of course, The Exorcist Effect, Horror, Religion, and Demonic Belief. Joseph, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thanks so much for having me. We are so excited to have you here. Can I just say The Penguin Book of Exorcisms? Yes, please. Immediately, yes.

Sounds incredible. Joseph, we're going to get into the, as Anthony says, the myth that's been built around this case and the actual history, the facts of it as well. I'm looking at a picture in front of me of a book titled The Amityville Horror, A True Story. It's a really lurid cover. It's got this wooden cover.

colonial house that's kind of glowing orange and there's sort of trees that almost they're on fire surrounding it. There's a sort of devil's tail coming down, snaking down and there's flies all over the cover as well. It claims in the title itself to be a true story, but there's something about the marketing of this cultural product that suggests to me it might be a little bit more than that. So

Is this a case, and we'll get into the details of the case, but is this a case that's going to blur those lines between fact and fiction? Yes, it does blur the lines between fact and fiction because some of this we know really happened. The address is correct. The Lutz family really purchased the house. They really abandoned it.

Lots of other details are implausible or unlikely or have been literally disproven. Skeptics have looked at weather reports that contradict details in the book. It was not dark and stormy that night and so forth. But the Amityville horror is still sold in bookstores, often in the section on the occult or religion, and not with similar paperback horror novels. So the first thing I'd like to know is,

How big is the Amityville Horror House story in the American psyche? Well, part of the American dream, particularly in the period after World War II, was to get a big house in the suburbs for your family. So I think a lot of what is appealing about this story to Americans is the idea of what if your dream becomes a nightmare?

And Stephen King, the horror author Stephen King, recalls watching the Amityville Horror in theaters and the audience was shouting things like, oh my goodness, think of the repair costs. So the horror wasn't really so much the idea of there being a demonic presence as this is the collapse of all of your sort of middle class aspirations. And so it's sort of a consummate haunted house story and it's been –

parodied on shows like The Simpsons and so forth ever since. So it's deep in the American psyche. I think even Americans who can't name the Amityville Horror or Long Island, if they see the image of a house with two big eyes like windows on the front, that's going to resonate for them.

I love that if it's been in The Simpsons, absolutely it is enshrined in American culture. So we now have an impression of how big this case really is. It starts, as we mentioned at the beginning, with a real set of murders, an actual crime that takes place. So can you take us, Jo, into that moment of the murders and tell us the details of those and the resonance, I suppose, of them in the moment that they happened?

Sure. Well, the case originates with an actual mass murder event, right? So there is actually a dark history to that house. Ronald DeFeo lived with his siblings and his parents and murdered all six of them with a rifle. And it was unusual that the neighbors were not awakened by the shooting that happened around three in the morning.

So DeFeo received six life sentences for this, and there was never really a satisfying motivation for the crime. And it's very hard to tolerate a lack of meaning like that. So out of this kind of void, a truly senseless crime, it created an opportunity to create a new story. Yeah.

He first tried to claim that his sister had committed the crime and then that a mafia hit man was responsible. And finally he said, well, I did it, but I was possessed by evil forces. Right.

But we also have to remember these crimes happened after the film The Exorcist came out at the end of 1973. That film created a massive demand for exorcism. People saw that film. They were told it was based on a true story. They were fainting and running out of the theaters. So it was exactly the right moment in American history to make a claim like that. So I don't actually blame DeFeo for thinking that maybe that could work.

And I think that's the sort of key thing of this whole story, isn't it? It's that absolute melding together of popular culture and the reality that's happening, and also this belief in the supernatural, the paranormal all coming together and fact and fiction absolutely blending. Let's move then to the Lutz. So we heard that the Lutz family buy this house. It's going cheap because these murders have taken place there.

And this is only, I think, a couple of months after the DeFeo trial has happened and this claim of possession has been made. So the Lutz move in and everything is presumably cleared up and the house is clean and livable. At what point do they start to claim to experience the hauntings that follow? Is it soon after? Is there an active decision? What happens when they enter this house?

Well, it's really hard to know that historically because there are conflicting reports, right? So we can read the Amityville Horror by Jay Anson, which kind of gives us a step-by-step of the first thing they notice are swarms of flies that they cannot eliminate. The children are seeing a sort of pig-like creature with glowing eyes that they named Jody.

Kathy Lutz looks in the mirror and sees herself as this aged crone, and then she's back to normal. The walls are bleeding some sort of mysterious substance. So some of these things have kind of the ring of truth to them. You know, there's a species of fly called cluster flies, for example, that could have really been infesting a house.

Some of them were almost certainly sort of made up by Jay Anson to make a better story. And then you have some of the children who are now grown up who insist, well, these things really happened. You know, this was not a scam. This was not a made up. So it's difficult to decide, you know, which version of the story is closest to the truth.

So we have these events taking place and I have a list of them in front of me. And I mean, some are really quite laughable. Joe, you've named some of them. The pig. Did you say it was called Jodie the pig? I love that. That's what the children named it. Yes. I mean, what else would you name the ghostly pig? There are things here like Kathy, the mother's body levitating out of bed and being taken into a closet. We've got a marching band being heard in the house. Love that.

marching band in the house, right? I mean, I would be furious. I would sell the house at that point. They're prevented from leaving, they claim, because of a sudden hurricane and a power cut. I'm going to use that excuse when I'm late for recording sessions in the future. George, the stepfather, says that he sees visions of a monstrous creature living in the house. So you've got all of these very varied and different elements going on. And I suppose...

The obvious question is, as you've alluded to there, Jo, you've got this seemingly perfect middle class aspirational family moving into this aspirational middle class house. And there might be darker or more complex things going on behind closed doors in terms of those human relationships. And that's without a potential supernatural element being involved.

added in, or the complication of belief in that. There's also the debt that they must have taken on presumably to buy this house. We mentioned in the opening there that it's sold for $80,000, which is going quite cheaply for a house of this kind in this moment because of the murders, but they still have to take out considerable debt in order to buy this life that they aspire to.

Is that too obvious a reason to try and make money off of this and to say that there's a haunting? And are they trying to make money off this? Is that what those claims really speak to, that they want to commercialize the house in some way? Yeah, I think they absolutely wanted to make money off of this. I think they just realized even though we got a good deal, it doesn't mean we can actually afford this house. I don't think that they thought about property taxes.

George Lutz ran a construction company, which can be very profitable, but it can also have dry spells where you're not bringing much money. One of the sort of striking details of the Amityville horror is George's brother has a wedding and George is supposed to pay the caterers. And he says, well, the demon stole the cash that was supposed to be used to pay the caterers. This is one more way the demons are tormenting me. I can't help but think

Did you pocket that? Right. And that's another few hundred dollars towards paying off the debt. I also spoke with Jerry Sulphin, who worked for a psychical research group that was associated with Duke University. And he said George Lutz was calling me literally every day because he wanted an official certificate that his house was haunted.

And I said, that's not something that we do. I can't give you something like that. I can come out and see the house if you want, because he was driving up to visit family in Boston. And he said that George Lutz was having a garage sale.

And the story that George Lutz has always told is, I will never return to the house. The night we left, that was the last time I was ever there. We never, ever returned. And Jerry Sulfin said, that is just absolutely not true. And one of the reasons that he came back was to try to get some more money out of this. So all the evidence that I found does point to whatever else this was about. This was very much about money and that the Lutzes really did expect to have a nice windfall off of this haunted house story.

So, Jo, we do know now that the whole Amityville horror story was a fabrication. Is this accepted in America now that it is a fabrication? Or has it moulded into something different in that American imagination? Does it exist in a place where people are willing to

maybe looked at it as a true story, as the true inspiration behind some of the biggest popular culture moments of the 20th century.

It's interesting to me because I think that the kind of smoking gun that we have, that this was a hoax, that this was done for financial reasons, was not a bigger story. But I'm not aware of hardly anyone, unless they are a huge sort of Amityville horror buff, who is aware that there was an element of trickery and deception involved here. I think that the narrative told in the Amityville horror and in the movie adaptation is

And the 40 odd other titles kind of building on that story just massively floods and overwhelms anything critical or describing evidence of a hoax. So I think most Americans, it's not like they've heard there's a hoax and they disagree with it or they disbelieve it. They've never heard that before. And that's probably going to be the way that things are for some time.

Well, I hadn't heard of the hoax. I wasn't aware of the very blatant, when I was looking at the research for this episode, how blatant the hoax was and how admitted, to a certain extent, blatant.

depending on who you're speaking to, the hoax was. So Joe, could you talk us through the steps of that hoax? Right. So the hoax begins with William Weber, who's the attorney for Ron DeFeo. And as an attorney, you know, there's not a lot you can do in this case where the facts of the case are very clear that this person has killed their entire family. And so he is sort of angling for an insanity defense. And with Ron DeFeo's claims that he was possessed by some sort of evil force,

And he somehow meets the Lutzes who are sort of figuring out how they're going to get out of the situation where they've bought too much house. And William Weber, this is his version of the story, is over several bottles of wine. They come up with a plot where he is going to feed information about the murders to the Lutzes. The Lutzes will use that to tell the story that the house is haunted. There really is an evil presence motivating people to kill, just as Ron DeFeo claimed, right?

And so William Weber, as a lawyer, draws up a contract and says, I've got a horror writer on deck and we'll each get a cut of the proceeds and this author will write the book.

And they agree to this. The Lutzes think about it a bit further and they say, you know, we've already got all the information we're ever going to need about these cases. We don't really need to work with this lawyer anymore. Let's cut him out of the deal. And so they form their own contract with Jay Anson and split the money in a way that's more favorable to them. Jay Anson goes on to write the Amityville Horror Story.

Well, this other author that William Weber had picked, he actually puts an article out in Good Housekeeping with an early version of the story. And that's sort of the very beginning of this claim that there is a haunted house in Long Island. It appears in Good Housekeeping. And so once the Amityville horror novel is selected into a movie and made into a successful movie,

William Weber sort of says, well, if I can't have my fair share of this money, then nobody can. I'm going to tell everyone that it's a hoax. And so what emerges is a long set of lawsuits and counter lawsuits between Weber and the Lutzes and these various authors. So we have lots and lots of evidence that there was this kind of conspiracy to perpetuate a hoax. But

this isn't very interesting. And so most of the media coverage emphasises the claims of the supernatural and does not get into contracts and lawsuits and lawyers. I'm Matt Lewis, host of the Echoes of History podcast, where every week we'll be delving into the real life history that inspires the locations, characters and storylines of the legendary Assassin's Creed franchise.

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That's BetterHelpHELP.com. One of the things which sparked my interest a few moments ago, Joe, you mentioned The Exorcist and the movie and the impact that was having in America at this time. And actually, suddenly my vision started to clear and I started to see, ah, okay, there's a real context and social and cultural context to what's starting to unfold here, I suppose. So can you give us...

a bit of an example of what that impact is and how big that film was and just give us, for people who may not have seen it, now I've actually seen The Exorcist, I've seen it quite a few times. What exactly is that movie about?

So it's adapted from a true story where a young boy was believed to be possessed by a demon and given an exorcism. In William Peter Blatty's adaptation, you have a young girl named Reagan who is possessed by a demon that appears to be named Pazuzu.

And no one will believe that this is a possession. They believe it's some kind of medical problem. Even when a Catholic priest is called in, the priest thinks demons couldn't possibly be real. This can't really be what's happening. William Peter Blatty, as he wrote the story, he wanted us to think that this priest finally gets it. He has a demon inside of him. So now he knows it's all real. The supernatural is real. But lots of audiences saw that and thought the devil won.

Right. Devil 2, Priest 0. So that made it a very controversial film. Give us a bit of an insight into how much of an impact this movie was having at that time, because I think it's very difficult for us to get to grasps with that.

Right. So the United States is a Protestant majority country. And for years, Catholics were associated with sort of superstitious immigrants from Ireland and Italy and Mexico. And the Catholic Church did not want to give an inch to that stereotype. And so prior to the exorcist,

We only know of two Catholic exorcisms performed in the United States. So it was extremely rare and never happened. And then the movie The Exorcist came out in 1973. It was based on one of these two exorcisms that took place in 1949.

And people were just fascinated by it. I mean, they had lines going around the block. And when the theater had to cancel a screening, there were riots. So they had to station police outside the theaters to watch all of this. And people were having these profound emotional reactions. There was a psychiatrist who published a journal article in a psychiatric journal and said, I've discovered a new mental illness. It's called cinematic neurosis abuse.

Because I have four people who had to be institutionalized immediately after watching this movie. And so the Catholic Church kind of scratches its head and says, well, we thought exorcism was very embarrassing and you thought it made us superstitious, but apparently you really like it. And so gradually the church has now completely reversed its position to where now a Catholic exorcism is more common now.

than really at any point since probably the 1600s. So the 1970s, it really was a moment where

Americans were very interested in the idea of the occult and the supernatural and in this idea that kind of supernatural evil could be real. And if it is, then we need some kind of protection to fight it off. And maybe that's the Catholic Church. But that was also part of what made this scary was the belief that Christianity was sort of slowly dying out. So who's going to protect us if we move into a haunted house?

I find this intersection absolutely fascinating between superstitious belief and popular culture, particularly film in this moment, Jo. It's so interesting to me. We certainly think about this a lot on our podcast, the witch trials of the 17th century in particular, and the endurance of superstition at, yes, an institutional church level, but also in popular culture and folk culture.

I find it fascinating that in the 1970s, we think of that as an intrinsically modern moment compared to the centuries previously. The technology that's able to produce and feed popular culture is developing all the time. Cinema obviously has this huge power at the end of the second half of the 20th century.

Do you find it completely predictable that film and superstition go hand in hand in this moment? Or is it surprising that actually that pantomimic or at least dramatic approach to the idea of a haunting on screen has this real life effect and actually affects people's mental health, affects their

their belief system. Is that a surprising thing or not? I think it was very surprising at the time. 1968 was the year that Rosemary's Baby came out, and that won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. And so that was the moment when people realized, you know, maybe horror movies could be a serious genre.

But initially people said, well, this is a ridiculous movie. It has witches. It has the Antichrist. No one believes in any of this stuff. Well, not long after that, America was in the throes of a full satanic panic where everybody believed doctors and lawyers could actually be Satanists, just like in the movie Rosemary's Baby. So movies have a strange way of

giving your brain a model of things that are possible, of things that could really happen. Neuroscientists who have studied the effects of cinema on the mind have said, your brain is very good at retaining information. It's not good at remembering where it got that information. And so if you were in an old house in the middle of the night and you hear a strange sound, your brain is going to begin rifling for things that could be, and it very well may come up with

the Amityville horror, right? If that's a movie that you've seen. So I think there is a cycle here where horror films kind of put ideas into certain people's heads. Some of those people use those ideas to interpret what they're experiencing. And if the result is something like the Amityville horror, then that becomes fodder for yet another horror movie based on a true story. And the cycle goes around again.

So let's bring this back to Amityville then. How do you think that concept fits into what's happening with the Lutzes? Do you think that's impacting or how has that shaped their experiences slash their fabricated story? Yeah, I don't think that we would have had the Amityville horror were it not for The Exorcist for a couple of reasons. One,

The Exorcist sold millions and millions of copies. It made people very wealthy as a novel and claiming to be based on a true story.

And the Lutzes were absolutely correct that if they did the same thing, they could make a best-selling novel. They were correct about that. They saw the market as it was, right? And secondly, there really was this kind of supernatural fervor going on in the 1970s. And a lot of Americans really did feel that supernatural evil was real, that the ideals of the Enlightenment had written all of this off without sufficient evidence to

And now it was not only all around us, right? It could literally be in your house attacking your family, but that we had kind of turned our back on religion, right? And so there was a very famous Time magazine cover in the 1960s that said, is God dead? Today, it seems silly to think that Christianity would be dying out in America. But in the 1970s, people really believed that. And they said, this could be

This could be the end of being a Christian culture. We're becoming a secular culture. And who will protect us from the forces of evil once that happens? And so that was another factor that made the Amityville Horror so successful. So Joe, to finish this episode, I'd love for you to give us an idea, in your opinion, what you think the legacy of this particular haunting fabrication

And mindset is, I suppose, in terms of American culture now, how has this impacted how America understands religion, hauntings, horror? Has it shaped it, do you think? Yeah, I think it has. So, you know, now the church that is doing the most in America to talk about things like fighting the demonic cult,

is not the Catholic Church, it is the Pentecostal Church. The Pentecostal Church has gotten very established and very powerful, and demonology is a big part of what they do. This idea that they are combating demons, and that literal demons can be lurking in your house, can be lurking in various buildings, churches that they don't like, stores that sell things that they deem to be a cult, and so forth.

And the logic of the Amityville Horror shows up in a lot of this. So it's never clear with the Amityville Horror why is this an evil place, but it's an evil place. And one claim was, well, the Shinnecock Indian tribe would bury their sickly dead here.

This was immediately debunked, by the way, by the Amityville Historical Society, who said the Shinnecock Indian tribe did not live in Amityville. This is simply made up. But those kinds of stories are still very common in Pentecostal spiritual warfare groups. So they will say things like,

This old tree in our town is where Native Americans practiced idolatry. And so we need the church to come out and pray over this tree and banish the demons from it. And things like that simply did not happen in American culture before the Amityville horror came out. So I think that the sort of logic of spiritual warfare owes something to this movie and to this story.

Well, if you have enjoyed listening to this episode with Dr. Joseph Laycock, then you don't have too much longer to wait for another installation because next week we will be doing another ghost busting exploration. Myself, Maddy and...

Joe will be taking you on another dark history tour. But until then, thank you for joining in. If you've enjoyed this episode, please share, like, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a five-star review. It helps other people discover the podcast too. And until next time, thanks for listening.

At NYU Stern, excellence is forging your own path. Discover the Executive MBA program in Washington, D.C. Engage with leaders and explore a diverse range of perspectives on business in one of the world's most connected cities. The program brings world-renowned NYU Stern professors to D.C. with classes one weekend per month, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It's time to become the kind of emotionally intelligent leader you'd like to follow. Search NYU Stern EMBA in D.C. for more.

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