At first glance, this cute three-story home with black shutters and wrought iron fence looks like the American dream.
Then you realize: it's that house.
The five-bed, four-bathroom Dutch Colony on Ocean Avenue in Amityville was the scene of New York's most infamous mass murder. A young man shot and killed all six members of his family while they were sleeping with a .35 caliber Marlin rifle. , one by one.
The bloodshed that Ronald DeFeo Jr. caused on the morning of November 13, 1974 was something straight out of a horror movie, and ultimately one. The 1979 classic “The Amityville Horror” starred Margot Kidder and James Brolin as a buying and selling couple. After the murder, he enters an empty house and a demonic presence appears.
DeFeo, then 23, was a heavy drug user known as “butch.” Over the years, he blamed everything for the massacre, from voices in his head to hired killers to his own sister.
He was sentenced to six terms and 25 years in prison for the murder of his parents, Ronald and Louise. his two sisters, Dawn, 18, and Alison, 13; and his two brothers, Mark, 12, and John, 9.
He was never paroled. He died in 2021 at the age of 69 at Albany Medical Center, near the Sullivan Correctional Facility north of Fallsburg, where he had been incarcerated. His cause of death was never made public.
On the 50th anniversary of DeFeo's macabre breakthrough, Crime Stain is like a little Amityville pop. 9,500, totally unshakable, try as much as you can.
Laura DiDio is interning as a reporter-in-training at the Long Island Press and has access to an exclusive story about a crime that shocked the village and the world.
“New York in the mid-1970s was not free of murders, but Amityville definitely was,” she told the Post.
“This is a mostly middle-class, upscale neighborhood, and there hasn't been a murder in 50 or 60 years. Local men died in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, but nothing like this has ever happened before. There wasn’t.”
This legend actually took root about a year after the murder.
In December 1975, during DeFeo's trial, the three-story home was purchased by newlyweds George and Kathy Lutz for $80,000. They moved from Brooklyn with Kathy's three children, Daniel, 9, Christopher, 7, and 5-year-old Melissa, known as “Missy.”
Soon, the Lutzes claimed to be experiencing a variety of paranormal phenomena, including slime oozing from the walls, sudden drops in temperature, and strange sounds and smells.
According to 1977's “The Amityville,'' a best-selling book based on the Lutzes' experiences, Mr. George said he woke up at 3:15 a.m. every day — just as Mr. DeFeo began his killing spree. Same time – Meanwhile, Kathy claimed to have been levitating above her bed. Horror: true story. ”
The children all began sleeping face down in the same position DeFeo's victims were found in, but Missy claimed she had made a new friend. It was a demonic pig called “Jody”.
When Father Ralph J. Pecoraro, a local Catholic priest, arrived to bless the house, he fled, claiming he heard voices telling him to “get out,” George told reporters at the time.
The Lutzes fled just 28 days after moving in, but their stay was too short and they never made the $60,000 mortgage payment.
The Lutzes' story was a gift to fans of the paranormal.
The film was released two years after the book was published, and is the first in a long-running series that now includes more than 20 films.
“This is a story that will never go away,” said DiDio, who co-produced a 2012 documentary called “My Amityville Horror.”
“It's become a brand. In fact, Amityville is almost a cottage industry.”
Alexandra Holzer is a paranormal investigator and the daughter of parapsychologist Dr. Hans Holzer, who investigated the house after the incident in the 1970s. He concluded that the house itself was not haunted, but perhaps the land on which it was built.
“My father believed that DeFeo Jr. may have been possessed by an old American Indian chief, and that an unscrupulous real estate developer had built a house on a sacred Indian burial ground. ” explains Holzer.
“He believed that all the turmoil in that house was due to this little-known fact.”
Years after the murders and the books and movies that followed, visitors flock to what has been dubbed “the world's most haunted house” to get a glimpse of what all the fuss was about.
DiDio said the crowd, which would sometimes swim up the creek to spy on the house from behind, included another spooky visitor in 1984.
Ricky Casso, a teenage Satanist and drug addict from Northport, Long Island, frequently visited the house. He stabbed and slaughtered his 17-year-old friend Gary Lauers more than 30 times in his hometown on June 19, 1984, then hanged himself before his trial.
The 3,600-square-foot property on Ocean Avenue has changed hands numerous times since the 1974 Amityville murders, and owners Jim and Barbara Cromarty have decided to divert curiosity from the address. I even changed it.
Other owners replaced the unusual windows on the upper floors, which gave the house its spookiness, with square windows. Repaired the boathouse. Added a sunroom. The kitchen was renovated and the basement completed. No one had reported any ghosts.
In 2000, the Amityville Record re-examined the house and found that life on Ocean Avenue was “fairly routine” aside from “regular visits from curious people and believers in the supernatural.” He added that most of it is “just another house in Amityville and nothing else.” More than a horrible history. ”
When The Post visited the city last week, some neighbors were playfully putting up Halloween decorations named after the horror.
The property sold for just $605,000 in 2017, but is now estimated to be worth $1,137,300, according to Zillow.
The property's current owners declined to comment, as did the late Lutz's surviving children, the mayor of Amityville and a local church.
“Towns often try to bury these types of events because it’s not good for business, but we’re not kidding,” Holzer said.
But it never stays buried for long.
“We will never be able to completely suppress our desire to be curious, because that is the very definition of our humanity,” she added.
