Possessed or Not Possessed? The Amityville Horror

This is a gothic thought experiment, not a factual claim. I am not diagnosing anyone, excusing anyone, or suggesting that real people were harmed by supernatural forces. I am asking what happens when we read a well-known story through the old language of possession and haunting — and, more often than not, what happens is that the old language falls away and something entirely human is left standing in the room.

Before there was a book, before there was a house that people drove past slowly with their windows down, before there was a franchise that has now produced more films than any of them are worth, there was a night.

On the thirteenth of November, 1974, in a Dutch Colonial house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island, a twenty-three-year-old man named Ronald DeFeo Jr. moved through the rooms with a .35-calibre rifle and shot his family while they slept. His father, Ronald, forty-three. His mother, Louise, forty-three. His sisters Dawn, eighteen, and Allison, thirteen. His brothers Marc, twelve, and John Matthew, nine. Four of the six were children. They were found face down in their beds, and one of the small, terrible facts of the case is that none of them appear to have woken.

That is the horror of 112 Ocean Avenue. I want to be very clear about that before we go any further, because everything else you have ever heard about this address was built on top of those six people, and most of it was built for money.

The house that came cheap

Thirteen months later, in December 1975, George and Kathy Lutz bought the DeFeo house. They bought it cheap — cheap precisely because of what had happened in it, which is worth sitting with for a second: the entire story that follows begins with a couple getting a deal on a mass-murder site and being surprised, apparently, that it did not feel like a fresh start.

They lasted twenty-eight days. Then they fled, and the story they told about why they fled became The Amityville Horror: A True Story, Jay Anson’s 1977 book, assembled from something like forty-five hours of the Lutzes talking into a tape recorder, and it sold on the order of ten million copies. Green slime coming out of the walls. Cold spots. Swarms of flies in January. A red-eyed thing shaped like a pig, which they called Jodie. Cloven hoofprints in the snow. George waking every night at three-fifteen in the morning, which was said, with the tidiness that these stories always have and real life never does, to be about the time of the murders.

It is a good ghost story. It has the one quality every good ghost story needs, which is that it is happening to somebody else and you get to close the book.

The ordinary explanation

Here is where, in this series, I am supposed to walk you carefully through the mundane reading, weighing it against the supernatural one like a fair-minded man. I will, because I promised I would. But I want you to know going in that this is not a close call, and pretending it is would be its own small dishonesty.

The single most useful piece of evidence in the entire Amityville affair is a sentence spoken by William Weber, who had been Ronald DeFeo’s defence attorney and who was there, with the Lutzes, at the start. In 1979 he told People magazine, more or less, that they had created this horror story over many bottles of wine. Weber had reasons of his own — there was a falling-out over who got the book — but the picture he paints is the one that survives contact with the facts.

Because the facts do not cooperate with the ghost. Researchers went looking for the snowfall that would have held those famous cloven hoofprints and found there had been no snow on the night in question. The next family to live in the house, the Cromartys, reported no slime, no cold spots, no pig — and found the doors and locks and windows, described in the book as torn from their frames by unseen forces, sitting exactly where doors and locks and windows usually sit, undamaged. And in twenty-eight nights of demonic siege, the Lutzes, a family with a telephone, never once called the police.

That is not a haunting. That is a manuscript.

The possession hypothesis, fairly stated

Let me give the other side its honest hearing, because the series is worthless if I don’t.

The old language would say: some houses go bad. That a place where six people were murdered in their beds is not a neutral pile of brick, that it holds something, that George Lutz waking at three-fifteen was the house speaking through the one man tuned to hear it. The Warrens — Ed and Lorraine, the demonologists you may know from the films — came to the house in March of 1976 and left with a photograph they said showed a small boy with glowing eyes peering out from a doorway. George Lutz insisted, to the end of his life, that it was real, and never took the recantation the way his old lawyer did.

And I will grant the possession reading exactly one true thing: the dread of that address is genuine. But it is not the dread of a demon. It is the dread of the beds.

The gothic reading

So here is what the Amityville story is actually about, once you take the pig away.

It is about the ease with which we will build an entertainment on top of the murdered — the speed of it, the appetite for it, the ten million copies. Six people, four of them children, were killed in that house, and within three years their deaths had become the foundation of a haunted-house brand that is still, half a century later, stamping the word Amityville onto direct-to-streaming films that have nothing to do with any of it. Somewhere there is a movie called Amityville with a shark in it. I am not going to look it up. I don’t have to; you already believe me.

That is the real haunting: not a spirit that will not leave the house, but a story that will not leave the dead alone. When the 2005 remake invented a murdered child named Jodie DeFeo to make the ghost more frightening, George Lutz — the man who had spent thirty years insisting his own ghost story was true — sued them for making things up. There is no line in any of these films more revealing than that.

The verdict

Run it through the rubric and it barely resists.

Discontinuity of self? That belongs to the killer, and it is a matter for a court and a conscience, not a demonologist. Contagion? Real — but the thing that spread was a product, not a spirit; it spread through bookshops and box offices, and it is spreading still. Thresholds, ritual residue, the language of witnesses becoming unreliable — you can find all of it if you want to, because we grafted it on afterward, in the edit, over the wine. The banality test — is there a mundane explanation that explains enough? — is not merely passed here. It is passed so completely that the supernatural reading looks, in hindsight, like the marketing it was.

Verdict: Not Possessed.

The horror at 112 Ocean Avenue was entirely, unbearably human, and it was over by dawn on the fourteenth of November, 1974. Everything after was a business. The demon was a decision made by adults who needed a bestseller, and the only thing that ever truly haunted that house is the thing we keep doing to it — coming back, and back, and back, to sell the beds.

Say their names instead. Ronald. Louise. Dawn. Allison. Marc. John. That is the part that was true.

A note on the facts: the DeFeo murders, the Lutzes’ twenty-eight days, William Weber’s account, and the debunking (the absent snowfall, the undamaged house, the never-called police) are matters of public record and reputable reporting; Snopes rates the “based on true events” claim false. I keep the murders sober and the ghost story skeptical on purpose. The first is real. The second was for sale.