Amityville Horror House

The most famous haunted house in America sits at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York, a Dutch Colonial with two quarter-moon windows set into its upper face like eyes. In December 1975, George and Kathy Lutz bought it for $80,000, a price low enough to worry them. They moved in. Twenty-eight days later they fled, leaving their belongings behind.

What drove them out became a publishing empire. They described green slime, swarms of flies in an upstairs bedroom, a basement they called the Red Room that radiated something wrong, and a pig-like creature with glowing red eyes their five-year-old daughter named Jodie. Ed and Lorraine Warren came to investigate, and their team produced the photograph everyone remembers: a small boy with glowing white eyes standing in a second-floor doorway, caught by an infrared camera left running overnight. Jay Anson turned the Lutz account into a book, The Amityville Horror: A True Story, in 1977. It sold an estimated 10 million copies. The 1979 film grossed $86.4 million, the second-biggest movie of the year behind Kramer vs. Kramer. The name carried roughly 35 films over the decades.

Almost none of it holds up. Researchers found no snowfall on the night the book describes cloven hoofprints in the snow. Records show the Lutzes never once called the police, though the book and film show officers visiting the house. Local Shinnecock people rejected the book's claim that the land was a burial site where their tribe had abandoned the dying. And in 1979, Ronald DeFeo Jr.'s defense attorney William Weber told People magazine, "I know this book is a hoax. We created this horror story over many bottles of wine."

Weber knew the house because of what happened there before the Lutzes. On November 13, 1974, around 3 a.m., DeFeo shot and killed six members of his family as they slept, all of them found face-down in their beds with a .35 caliber rifle. His parents. His two brothers, 12 and 9. His two sisters, 18 and 13.

That is the part the legend buried. DeFeo was convicted of six counts of murder in 1975 and died in prison in 2021. The owners who came after the Lutzes had the address changed from 112 to 108 and replaced the eye windows with plain squares, trying to stop the steady stream of tourists who drove out to stare at the place. The Cromartys, who bought it in 1977 and lived there a decade, found the legend impossible to outrun. Jim Cromarty put it plainly at a 1979 press conference: every family the Lutzes claimed had been cursed by the house had been fine. Only one family ever had a tragedy there, and it wasn't the one selling the story.