Ep. 25 - Amityville

Kathryn (00:10) Welcome to I Scream You Scream, your weekly scoop of the most chilling histories, mysteries, and paranormal perplexities. I'm Kathryn.

Gina (00:19) I'm Gina.

Kathryn (00:20) Every month we choose a new topic and new ice cream flavor to go along with it. This month's topic is demons, and we're going to be eating apple cinnamon ice cream while we tell our stories. So grab a spoon and let's dig in.

Gina (00:35) So excited about this ice cream, man. I'm gonna take a bite.

Kathryn (00:38) Yeah, this is great. Yeah, okay. Off to a good start. Well, the good start is just the fact that I showed up with some.

Gina (00:41) Mm-hmm. Dude. Yeah, awesome work. I didn't know how to say that in a way that didn't sound a little... But genuinely, yay.

Kathryn (00:50) Thank you. Wow, good job! You did the one thing you're supposed to do.

Gina (01:00) How did you make your ice cream? What? Walk me through it.

Kathryn (01:02) Okay, so I looked up a recipe and then I was like, no. And then did oat milk, mixed some apple cider and sugar. Then...

Gina (01:16) Mmm.

Kathryn (01:22) ...mixed some cinnamon with chopped up apples, put it in, and then I did a little squirt of caramel sauce.

Gina (01:26) Mmm. Caramel apple ice cream? Dude, that's fucking good. That's very, very good. I too went down the "look up a recipe and say fuck no" route. So I made vanilla ice cream and separately I made an apple crumble. And then while the vanilla ice cream was churning, I just dumped the apple crumble in there. So it's got like little bits of cinnamon apples, it's got like the oat crumble topping, and it's full of bits.

Kathryn (01:34) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. What's yours? Yeah. Mm. Yes. Perfect.

Gina (01:58) Which is why earlier before we hit record, you mentioned that your ice cream was melting. Mine's not because the ratio of ice cream to bits is wildly, wildly too many bits. So I'm very happy. It's gonna be a lot of chewing.

Kathryn (02:10) Yeah, I will. Well, I'm not going to tell you what I had planned to add because I'm going to try adding some for the next episode if I have time. I ran out of time today. So, but yeah, this is great.

Gina (02:19) Mmm. I'm really curious. So if you guys have been listening for a while, you might notice a little bit of a change in our tagline that we start the show with. Normally we say histories, mysteries, and true crime. It is now histories, mysteries, and paranormal perplexities for reasons. Kathryn, what are those reasons?

Kathryn (02:34) Yes. So nothing changes but the reasons are we are now six months in, give or take, I don't know what day it is, I think we're six months in, and we've just been thinking about how we want to describe what we're doing and what kind of stories we want to tell, and we discovered the types of true crime stories we want to tell fit very nicely into the histories and mysteries categories. And we weren't really being as forthcoming about our obsession with the paranormal perplexities. So we just wanted to mix it up. Literally the only thing that changes is two little words with two new little words. Stories are gonna be the same, vibe is gonna be the same. And yeah. That's so don't be alarmed if you're like, what, am I in the right place? Yes, you definitely are. I also want to address, I'm sick because I can hear myself now. So, yeah, that's all that is. I've got like whiskey lounge voice going on right now. I love it. I love sick voice, yeah.

Gina (03:37) You have the sexy voice, the sexy sick voice. I always get mad if I get sick and I don't get the sick voice, I'll actually get mad about it.

Kathryn (03:58) Yeah. Everyone loves sexy sick voice. But like I always imagine like I feel it's gotten better. It was definitely way worse, whatever, two or three days ago. And I just imagine like...

Gina (04:01) Mm-hmm.

Kathryn (04:12) ...hearing one thing, but like everyone else is probably hearing this, you know what I mean? Like, it's like we probably do not sound like... Exactly, exactly.

Gina (04:18) It's exactly what you—there was no change in your voice when you did that, Kathryn. What are you talking about? Do have to say, for the sake of your mental health, your voice sounds way sexier than that.

Kathryn (04:29) See, don't make me laugh because I'm gonna be coughing through the—wow, thanks for thinking I sound sexy. That's funny.

Gina (04:37) Yes, that's my girl.

Kathryn (04:41) I have nothing else. I have nothing else. I've been sick for a week. I've been dead to the world for a week.

Gina (04:46) Been a disturbingly long time since Kathryn and I have seen each other.

Kathryn (04:50) Been like a few days. No one—how long has it—

Gina (04:52) Oh my god, did we not talk all of last week?

Kathryn (04:55) Yeah, I don't see... Yeah, I think it's been over a week.

Gina (04:57) Oh my god, yeah.

Kathryn (05:01) Okay, that actually—you know what? Feelings validated. Yeah, yeah, because we were kind of making fun of ourselves like, oh my god, like we can't go a day without seeing each other. It's been over a week. So...

Gina (05:03) That's a sizable amount of time. Hehehehe. I don't even have—I don't have anything funny to say. I'm just basking in the sorrow of thinking about being apart. Anyway. Chug it.

Kathryn (05:17) I know, I'm like, do we just end there? Is this our transition? I have to drink my ice cream now. Love this as a goblet, by the way.

Gina (05:29) It looks sick as fuck, you just drinking straight from it. Very cool.

Kathryn (05:31) Yeah. I'm gonna make note of that. And I'm ready for your story.

Gina (05:40) Excellent, because I have prepared a story.

Kathryn (05:42) Yay!

Gina (05:45) In the early hours of January 14th, 1976, a family of five fled their Long Island home after spending 28 days in a living nightmare. After a series of unsettling encounters that crescendoed into one final straw, they piled into the car and left everything behind at 112 Ocean Avenue, never to return. The house, located in the quiet suburb of Amityville, would go on to become one of the most infamous and most hotly debated paranormal cases in American history.

Today, we are gonna be looking at the twisting, turning, and ultimately baffling circumstances that caused the Lutz family to leave everything behind. So let's start at the beginning. Before they moved into their home at 112 Ocean Avenue, George and Kathy Lutz, who were both 32, had been married for about a year. And they had decided to look for a house for them and their three children, who Kathy had had in a previous marriage. So we have Danny, who is nine, Chris who is seven, and Missy who was five. So three like small children. And by all accounts, they were like a totally normal family, nothing weird, nothing suspicious. They were just a family of five looking for a new house. Specifically, they were looking for a home in the $30,000–$50,000 price range, which sounds wacky to us today, but like with the conversion rate, that is house buying money. Like it would be six figures now. It's on the lower end.

Kathryn (07:17) I can't.

Gina (07:22) But still it's house money.

Kathryn (07:23) I just—I just still can't. Like that. Just, I can't.

Gina (07:25) I know.

Yes, so by this point, they had already seen over 50 homes within that price range, and none of them were quite right, which I can't even imagine looking at 50 homes. I think when we were looking for this flat...

Kathryn (07:28) It would be different if salaries also increased the same amount. Like my reaction would be different. I don't know. I already have so much to say. I'm so excited. I love this story. Okay. Please continue.

Gina (07:54) We did maybe four or five viewings and I thought I was about to go insane. So I can't imagine 50.

Kathryn (08:00) We got close to 50 when we were house hunting. It's fucking different, man. Yeah, I like—I was about to say my god same and then I thought back to it—we definitely didn't get to 50. I just want to be clear. But like from the very, very start to the very, very end probably 30, 35.

Gina (08:02) Really? It's different. Yeah. I guess it's such a commitment, isn't it? It's different than an apartment.

Kathryn (08:24) Such a commitment and there's—well and it's different. My experience was not the same as their experience. Know what I mean? How something's so different now. Back then you could go back and see the same house three or four times and sit around and decide and eventually come back. You know what I mean? So like that is a lot for then. Nowadays I'm like...

Gina (08:31) Hmm. That's true.

Kathryn (08:45) I know people who've put 50 offers on 50 houses. You know what I mean? Like it's just different. So yeah, actually, yeah, that's quite a bit for how much easier it was to buy a house back then. That's a lot.

Gina (08:48) Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah, yeah, it was quite a bit. So when Edith Evans from Conlin Realty Office told them about a three-story house with six bedrooms, a heated pool, and a boathouse on the Amityville River, they just had to see it. The only catch was that it was out of their price range at $80,000. But they kind of figured like it couldn't hurt to take a look, you know, so they headed over to...

112 Ocean Avenue, which winds up becoming the famous Amityville house, if you haven't put that together from me saying that address 50 times. And once they saw it, it was pretty much a done deal. The Lutzes were all in despite the price tag and the warnings that they received about the house's history. Kathy and George moved their family into the home. They were told that the house had been the site of the infamous DeFeo family murders. Wherein...

Kathryn (09:32) Surprise!

Gina (09:55) ...23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr., aka Butch, used a rifle to kill his parents and all four of his siblings around 3:15 a.m. on November 13th, 1974. His parents were named Ronald Sr. and Louise DeFeo, both 43 at the time of death, and his siblings were 18-year-old Dawn, 13-year-old Allison, 12-year-old Marc, and 9-year-old John.

And these murders were just riddled with really weird circumstances. So all six victims were found lying face down in their beds with no sign of a struggle whatsoever. And none of the neighbors had heard any gunshots, which like makes no sense. And also even like the not waking up thing—you might think they might have been sedated or like drugged or something like that. Autopsies revealed zero drugs like that in their system.

Kathryn (10:51) Just quick question, just refresh me. There were four people or—how many people did he kill? Six? Okay. Okay, okay, that's what I—yeah. But like, you can't get through six people without the other ones hearing. Like that’s a lot of gunshots to sleep through if you're in the same house. Yeah.

Gina (10:58) So two parents, four siblings. Yeah. So it's a lot. Right. Exactly. It's so weird. Yeah. So to this day, we are not sure how Butch did this alone. And the idea of him having an accomplice in this has been floated for a long time. But ultimately, they never found anybody else. They never charged anybody else. So when it wound up going to trial, Butch was represented by a lawyer named William Weber, who we will come back to later.

And he pled not guilty by reason of insanity, saying that he heard demonic voices telling him to kill his family. Jury didn't buy it though, because Butch's story changed like a million times, and they wound up sentencing him to six consecutive life sentences. The DeFeo family home really quickly became kind of an infamous murder house, and it sat empty for almost a year until...

George and Kathy Lutz decided that they didn't mind living there. And even though the house was outside of their budget, it was too good of a deal to pass up. So they made an offer and it was accepted.

Kathryn (12:15) I get it.

Gina (12:17) Yeah, I get it too.

The Lutzes moved into the house on December 18th, 1975. And what truly happened next, we will probably never know. The story of what the Lutz family went through has been told so, so, so many times across so many different types of media, and all of the details are never quite the same. But one thing that happens in almost every version of the story...

Gina (13:00) ...is that while they were in the process of moving in, George and Kathy brought in a Catholic priest named Father Pecoraro to bless the house. Now apparently, Pecoraro knew right away that something wasn't right. He just had this gut feeling when he got there that something in the house was just rotten, bad vibes. But he sucked it up and he went room by room doing the whole blessing thing. And when Pecoraro entered the sewing room...

He was in the process of blessing it when he heard a masculine voice from behind him say, “Get out.” But when he turned, no one was there. Yep, Pecoraro was obviously super freaked out by this. He allegedly just rushed out of the house without telling George and Kathy what he heard. And that sewing room that he was in, that used to be John and Marc DeFeo's room, the two brothers who were murdered.

Kathryn (13:39) Ghosts and spirits and whatnot.

Gina (13:42) So the move-in proceeded as planned and once the family was settled, things got even weirder almost immediately. The entire family's personalities started to kind of shift by a few degrees once they moved in. Everyone was a little bit more tense, a little bit more irritable, and this change was the most noticeable in George, the dad.

Kathryn (14:05) Yeah.

Gina (14:05) He had always been this kind of hardworking, well-kept guy who like really took care of himself, cared about his work ethic and his appearance. But once they moved in, all of that kind of started going out the window. He stopped caring as much about work. He stopped caring as much about his appearance. Things that were not like him and were so the opposite of who he normally is that it was noticeable and weird. So a few days after Christmas...

And this is barely a week after the Lutzes moved in. Kathy was in the kitchen when she said she felt something come up from behind her and embrace her, like it was holding her from behind, and it started patting her hand. This is super fucking weird and scary, but she doesn't describe it as a scary encounter. She says that she actually felt kind of comforted by it.

Kathryn (14:45) Ooh. Yeah, the hand pat is comforting, potentially. Yeah.

Gina (14:56) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Potentially. So it’s whilst she was in the embrace of whatever this thing was, her son Chris started screaming from upstairs. So motherly instinct kicks in. She like sprints upstairs. She finds Chris in the upstairs bathroom and her other son Danny was in there as well. And they were staring down at the toilet. And when she looked in it, she saw that the bowl had turned completely black.

Kathryn (15:26) Ew.

Gina (15:26) Mm-hmm. So one of her sons, Danny, goes to the other upstairs bathroom—I think he was just trying to get like cleaning supplies to try and clean this weird black toilet—and he saw that that toilet in the other bathroom had turned black too. And not just that, it had a foul fucking odor. It smelled so bad. The three of them kind of start running around trying to open up the windows, air out the house. And when Kathy entered the sewing room...

She saw that the windows were completely covered in flies. Which like, fine, maybe you have like a fly problem, that’s, you know, whatever. But it was the East Coast in the middle of December. Flies are not out and about.

Kathryn (16:07) I was gonna say—even if you have flies, like a fly problem like that, that is not fine. Like you—black toilets and flies, even if it's not demonic, it is minimum absolutely repugnant and something needs a fixin'. Yeah.

Gina (16:16) That's not normal. You—yeah, fucked up and gross. Not long after that, George was putting their daughter Missy to bed, and they were chatting about her imaginary friend named Jodie, who, according to Missy—Jodie, you're not going to like this one. So her imaginary friend Jodie, according to Missy, this Jodie was a pig, which is actually kind of cute.

Kathryn (16:37) Mm-mm. Immediately no. Immediately no. No! Absolutely not! No. Absolutely not. No. All right, continue. So sorry. Mm-mm.

Gina (16:56) And George didn’t really—it’s such like a little kid, like... I’ll get there. But like us, George isn’t really thinking anything of it because she’s five. And so it's like completely normal behavior for her to have an imaginary friend or whatever. And as George was tucking her in, Missy pointed to the window and said, “There he is. That’s Jodie. He wants to come in.” So George turned and says that he saw with the full moon shining behind it...

Kathryn (16:57) Sorry, that is so cute. But also demonic. Continue, I'm sorry, I don't...

Gina (17:26) ...two red eyes staring back.

Gina (17:26 continued) George heard a shriek come from behind him, and then he turned to see Kathy rush into the room, like run in. She picked up one of Missy's little like play chairs, like you know those little chairs that are made for kids, and Kathy flung it at the window, breaking the window and hitting whatever this thing was. And whatever it was, it let out like a noise of pain, and then suddenly it was gone.

Kathryn (17:44) Mm-hmm. Ew.

Gina (17:56) Shortly after that, George says that he saw hoof prints in the snow outside Missy's window, but they were only going away from the house. And more than that, the prints looked like they were made by an animal walking on two legs.

Kathryn (18:13) Demon behavior... Gross.

Gina (18:15) Demon behavior. Mm-hmm. One night in early January, Kathy and George were in their bed. Kathy was asleep. George was still up. When all of a sudden, Kathy started levitating off of the bed, George?

Kathryn (18:29) Casual. I'm sorry. So this is why—like you're just rolling through all these things and I'm still like the toilet was black, what the fuck? Like... Here's the thing, like immediately I'm always like, just fucking leave. I would leave. Like you gotta leave a situation like this. My house is haunted as fuck. I know for a fact I wouldn't actually leave because, you know, like...

You don't just buy a house and like two weeks later you leave because some weird stuff is happening. But like hearing these stories is like, well, she's just casually levitating now. That's not a thing that happens. Like you can explain stuff away. But if I woke up and Phil was levitating? Immediately, no. Immediately, no. Straight up don’t care what time of night it was.

Gina (18:57) Got a mortgage. Yeah.

Kathryn (19:23) I would find myself a priest and I would go. Like I would just be like peace out, Phil, it's been fun, but absolutely not. Like so sorry.

Gina (19:33) I do think I would let Tom levitate for a while. Like I would stop it, but I would want to see where he's going, you know?

Kathryn (19:37) I would stop it. I would like—no, I would literally be like, get your ass back in bed. Like we are not doing this today, absolutely not.

Gina (19:43) Well, okay, so George has—or George had the same exact reaction as you. Like he immediately tried to like grab for her. Yeah, but he found that he couldn't move or speak. He was paralyzed. Yeah. So Kathy, who was like levitating at this point, slowly starts moving as if she's being pulled to their bedroom closet. And before she gets there, while George is watching, she kind of slips, like it's as if something dropped her and she just crumbles to the floor.

Kathryn (19:51) Okay, like pulled her. Okay. God damn it! Okay. Ugh. Okay.

Gina (20:16) And that's kind of the end of that encounter. I guess they just—yeah, she was just let go. And then George could move again. Like, I know, fucking freaky though. So by this point, they've been there for a few weeks. It's pretty clear to George and Kathy that this house is haunted as fuck. So they go to the Amityville Historical Society to see, okay, maybe there's something else in the history that we missed.

Kathryn (20:18) She was like, let go. Ugh.

Gina (20:41) Maybe other people have had similar experiences. Let's just like do some digging and see what we can find. They allegedly found that the land that the house was built on was used by the Shinnecock tribe as a holding area for people who were sick or dying. Apparently, the Shinnecocks didn’t use it as a burial ground because they thought it was infested with demons.

Kathryn (21:06) Are you serious? Okay. I've never heard this. Yeah, I've never heard that part of the story. Hmm, interesting.

Gina (21:07) Mm-hmm. Well, I'll get there. Just go along with it. So like, great, they have this information, didn’t know what they were gonna do with it, but like at least they knew now, you know?

Kathryn (21:20) Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Gina (21:22) A few days before the Lutzes would abandon their home, they said that there was this really, really, really bad storm which left them with 10 broken windows, rainwater stains all over the walls, all over the furniture, everywhere. Plus the locks on two of the rooms had been twisted so badly because of the storm that the doors could no longer be shut. And one of these was the sewing room.

Kathryn (21:47) Wait, how does that happen? Am I—how does that happen? Okay, so I'm not just unintelligent. That's weird, right? Okay. Okay. Thank you. I was like, do I ask? Do people know this? Or is this part of the weirdness? Okay, so sorry. I like questioned my intelligence there for a second. Okay, weird.

Gina (21:50) Mm-hmm. No, no, no, yes, you are right to be having the feelings that you're having. Yes, I will, yes. Yep. Despite all of this, none of their neighbors suffered any damage from the storm at all.

And all of this weirdness kind of came to a head on January 14th, 1976. By this point, the disturbances were constant. Doors would slam shut and open at random hours. There were incessant cold spots no matter how high they cranked the heat. There were weird instances of like green goo dripping down the walls, out through the keyholes. The family had also—this is one of my favorite things ever.

They had started to hear the phantom sounds of a marching band coming from their living room, which is wild.

Kathryn (22:48) Okay. Why? Marching band. Oh my god.

Gina (23:11) Imagine an entire marching band haunting you. And they also reported being constantly woken up by things at 3:15 in the morning, the same time the DeFeo family murders took place. And the night leading up to January 14th was no different. They woke up to, again, what sounded like a marching band in their downstairs living room. But it had voices underneath the music. Not loud enough where you could hear what the voices were saying, but loud enough that you could tell someone was saying something.

Lightning started flashing outside the house. The bed started shaking. And George found that once again, he was completely paralyzed, and he couldn't move or speak.

Now at this time, his entire family was in the bed with George and Kathy because it was scary times. So all of the kids had just like gotten into bed with them. And as George lay there unable to move, he said he felt what he described as hooves walking across him towards his family.

So he realized what was happening—that there was maybe this thing coming for his kids and his wife—and so he had this crazy burst of adrenaline where he just like forced himself out of this paralysis, grabbed his kids and Kathy and just ran for the stairs where they saw a figure dressed in white pointing at them. So they immediately were like, fuck that. And they sprinted right past it, which like—relatable. Totally. Yeah, would do the same.

They ran right outside, they piled into the car, and they got the ever loving fuck out of there. In total, they were only in the house for 28 days.

Kathryn (24:21) Yeah.

Gina (24:33) And they never even returned to collect their stuff, which was later auctioned off.

Kathryn (24:38) That always like blows my mind. There are many haunted house stories out there. Kind of an alarmingly high number of stories like that where there are families that will just bounce and like not even care to return. I'm like, damn, that's how you know it's bad. Like...

I'd like to think I'd at least like—we have a lot of crap, you know. I would come back during the day with like protection.

Gina (25:06) Yeah.

Kathryn (25:10) Yeah, I would struggle. I would definitely struggle. I mean it's gotten to the point now where knowing how much time it would take to wrangle both Cinnamon and Spooky—the reality is I would get nothing. I would literally not have time to get any like physical object because just getting Cinnamon would be—I mean that would take more than enough time, you know what I mean? So it's like...

Gina (25:12) Yeah. Yeah. They did have a dog, actually. I didn't mention this, but they did have a dog. His name was Harry. He went with them when they left. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Kathryn (25:38) I didn't know that. I never knew that they had a dog. Did—was there any like weird stuff with him? Like did he? Okay.

Gina (25:44) Yes. Yes. There are a few weird things with Harry. So at one point, George reported that he saw out of the window a shadowy figure hanging out by the boathouse. And so he did what any dog-owning person would do and kind of let the dog out to go kind of sniff around and scope out the area for you. And when the shadowy figure—I think it ducked behind the boathouse or something—and so George said, “Get him, Harry. Go get him.” And the guy was gone.

Gina (29:38) Dun, dun, dun. We will probably at some point do an entire episode on the Warrens, or at the very least, like they will play a role in many of the episodes that we're gonna do. But for the purposes of this story, here's what you need to know if you are not familiar with the Warrens.

So Ed and Lorraine were a husband and wife team of paranormal investigators. Ed styled himself as a demonologist. Lorraine claimed she was a clairvoyant and a medium. And they're kind of household names within the paranormal community, but not always for good reasons. They're often accused of things like sensationalizing, fabricating, or just straight up lying about things and stories that they helped publicize. In a lot of circles, they're actually considered to be more like really skilled performers than credible investigators. So as always, grain of salt, especially where the Warrens are concerned.

When they entered the home, Lorraine almost immediately said she felt a very dark energy that the Warrens would later describe as the quote, “personification of evil.” They took several photos of the house over the course of their investigation and one in particular has become really, really famous because it's really fucking creepy. I'm actually going to text it to you. I don't know if you've seen it before.

Kathryn (30:56) I was gonna say, I probably have. I don't know what one you're talking about. I hope I've seen it.

Gina (31:01) Okay, I'm gonna send it. For anyone who is—anyone who I'm not texting—so it's like this picture of what looks to be a child staring blankly at the camera from the bottom of a staircase, and his eyes are like bright white, like it's really creepy.

Kathryn (31:16) Yeah. Yeah, like glowing and it's like—yeah, yeah. And he's looking kind of like this, like it's not just casual. Yeah. Okay.

Gina (31:25) Yeah, like super creepy picture. Yeah, yeah. So the Warrens claimed that this was the ghost of John DeFeo, one of the DeFeo brothers, who was only nine years old when his brother murdered him.

The team wound up performing several seances in the home and they concluded that there was a demon at play and they even implied that the house might contain some kind of portal to hell. And there's some speculation that that red room that we talked about earlier was the portal.

There were a few other investigations into the house as well. Some agreed with the Warrens that something was up. But it is worth noting that at least two groups independent of the Warrens declined to investigate due to what they called a lack of observable data.

Interesting. As a side note, because I thought it was funny, one of the investigators would later attend a screening of the movie when it came out and he said, quote, “The two hours I spent watching the film with a rowdy disruptive pot smoking audience was much more of a horror than the six hours I spent in the house in Amityville.”

Kathryn (32:20) My goodness, wow. Okay. Yeah. My goodness, I loved that movie. Sorry.

Gina (32:39) One star review from this guy. That was really funny. Yeah. Well, just the thought that an excitable, stoned audience is worse than a demon. Come on. I liked it. So curmudgeonly. Anyway, so back to 1976. At this point, Weber and the Lutzes are still a team. But things were about to get even messier. Enter William Weber with a bottle of wine and a book deal.

Kathryn (32:52) Classic. Yeah.

Gina (33:12) The honeymoon period really didn't last long. The Lutzes parted ways with Weber after they got into an argument about how the money from the book deal would be split. Weber wanted to give the Lutzes 24% of the book's profits, and the Lutzes, who had actually lived through this, thought that they should get more than—less than a quarter of the proceeds. Anyway, by all accounts, they didn't part on great terms. It was a very fuck-you situation.

Kathryn (33:13) Mm-hmm.

Gina (33:39) So the Lutzes instead decided to approach a journalist and a filmmaker—his name was Jay Anson—and he wound up writing the now famous book *The Amityville Horror: A True Story*. And he did it for an even split of the profits. So, pretty good deal. Yeah.

Kathryn (33:55) Nice. That's a good split.

Gina (33:58) Yeah, the book's title became a little bit problematic, though. It's one thing to write a book. It's another thing to call it a true story—especially when the writer, Anson, was kind of known to artfully embellish things that he probably shouldn't.

Gina (34:00 continued) Robert Bartholomew, who is a sociologist specializing in mass hysteria, described Anson as “a writer who didn't let the facts get in the way of a good story,” if that tells you anything.

Anson, of course, has a slightly different version of events. In an interview with *Writer's Digest* in 1979, he said, “I have no idea whether the book is true or not, but I'm sure that the Lutzes believe what they told me to be true,” which is an important point of distinction. Yeah.

Kathryn (34:46) Yeah, I get that. I feel like we've talked about that in quite a few of our stories.

Gina (34:51) And we'll get more into that in a second. But regardless, the book was published in 1977, and it was almost immediately and immensely popular. Went on to sell millions and millions and millions of copies worldwide. It has since grown into a franchise of something like 17 movies, hundreds of copycats. I mean, everyone's heard of Amityville. It's fucking massive. And it starts with this book—media-wise anyway.

But despite the book's popularity, it was also met with some very intense criticism. Publication after publication started calling out discrepancies in Anson's version of events. For one thing, the whole thing with the full moon shining behind Jodie the Pig couldn't have been true because on the night the Lutzes said that it happened, it was actually a three-quarter moon. Not to be that guy, but...

Kathryn (35:45) Not to be that guy. Okay.

Gina (35:45) And also on the night when George said that he saw hoof prints in the snow, there was no snow on the ground.

And another thing: the storm that the Lutzes reported had fucked up their doors and broken a bunch of windows was not strong enough to do any of the things that they described—by a long shot. According to *The New York Times*, the winds that night were only about 10 to 12 miles per hour, which on the Beaufort scale is enough to make leaves and twigs kind of move around. But that's it. Definitely not enough to crack a window or damage anything, really.

So cracks are starting to show. Anson responded to all of this criticism by saying, “They say that on such and such a day when I said it rained, it didn't rain. So what? I'm a perfectly normal human being and sometimes I make mistakes.”

Kathryn (36:38) Wait, who's— Which one said that?

Gina (36:49) Anson. Yeah, yeah. The writer. Yeah. Which is like fine, I get that. But when you have a book that literally says in the title *A True Story*, that creates some issues. And also what's interesting to me about that quote from Anson is that he's taking ownership of the Amityville narrative and he's not referencing the Lutzes in any of it. It's not “George and Kathy made mistakes,” it's “I make mistakes.”

Kathryn (37:03) So that was my initial response. That's kind of—I think that's why I asked who said it because I was like, why the fuck is he saying he was wrong? Like, my thought would be...

This is me like devil's advocating here. The three-quarter moon one, I'm like, okay. That one I can slide. Three-quarter moon, full moon—what's the fucking difference when we're talking about light shine? You know?

Gina (37:28) Mm-hmm. And like, yeah, maybe it wasn't the moon. Maybe it was in like a different visual phenomenon that you were seeing, you know?

Kathryn (37:34) Right, like, who knows? Maybe it was like light from the lake house or whatever it was or boathouse or whatever.

Gina (37:38) Mm-hmm.

Kathryn (37:41) Then shoot, what was the other one? I had this all—like I got distracted. So the storm one, that one actually makes me think like all that does to me is like that's more evidence for demonic activity because like, okay, yeah, so the storm wasn't strong enough. Therefore, it was probably a demon. You know what I mean?

So that one, I'm on their side with. The other one—what was the third one? I'm so sorry. I had it already.

Gina (37:43) The storm. Yep. There was no snow on the ground when he said he saw the hooves.

Kathryn (38:11) Okay, so that one—that one's weird. I do wonder—that's... So one of the things I was gonna say is a little bit of a tangent, but I get so stressed out, you know, when like court cases and all that kind of stuff, you have to like remember dates. I'm like, what if...

Gina (38:27) Mm. Yeah.

Kathryn (38:29) I accidentally say I was doing something Wednesday, but it actually was Thursday. You know what I mean? Like that to me is like, okay, well, could he have just accidentally said a different night? Was it the night before? Like, was there snow on the ground the night before and then it melted or like, you know, did it not snow until the next night or whatever? In a situation like this, I understand like...

Kathryn (38:52) You remember the day you moved in, you only lived there for 28 days. I feel like that's a little bit smaller room for error. I don't know, not defending them. They could very well have been making it up and I don't know, but none of those things are enough for me to be like, oh my god, they lied. The only—the weirdest thing about that to me is the fact that he was the one saying “I was wrong.” ‘Cause it's like, well, why were you...

Gina (39:10) Totally same. The next bullet point that I have is I can see how all of these things could be true at once. Like complete and total same page. Yeah.

Kathryn (39:28) Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what it is. It's like, yeah, maybe it was a three-quarter moon. And also, who fucking cares? Like, that doesn't change the story at all.

Gina (39:36) Like the whole point of paranormal encounters is that empirical evidence is really hard to come by. So yeah, it doesn't make sense. That's what makes it paranormal. Totally.

Kathryn (39:42) It doesn't make sense, yeah. Right.

Gina (39:47) So yeah, like not really sure what's going on. And even the investigations into the Lutzes seemed plagued by like just weird circumstances. So a 1979 *Writer's Digest* article by a guy named William Slatterley about the book itself said that the weirdness just didn't stop.

Before I tell you this part, I do want to caveat that I haven't seen any of this bit referenced or discussed in any other source. And the article that I pulled it from was just chock full of bias. So instead of just one grain of salt, maybe use the whole shaker this time. Really—go, gadget critical thinking is what I'm saying.

Kathryn (40:25) Okay. Got lots of salt over here. Okay. Okay. Cool.

Gina (40:37) So he said that two reporters from *People Magazine* were on their way to interview Anson about the book when their car caught fire as it sat outside the Amityville house, and the smoke from the cars was orange. I don't know much about cars. I don't think that's normal.

He also said that on separate occasions, at least two reporters scheduled to go on TV to debunk the story mysteriously called in sick at the last second. That one I'm not like as suspicious of because people get sick and also maybe someone didn't want them telling that story. But—and these are the ones that I'm like, this is fucking weird—there are even accounts of weird things happening to people who had early copies of the book's manuscript.

Kathryn (41:02) Yeah.

Gina (41:15) So one woman brought a copy of the manuscript home only for her house to catch on fire that night. The only thing left unharmed was the manuscript.

Kathryn (41:22) Whoa. Eww. That's weird.

Gina (41:26) Mm-hmm. In another kind of instance, a man had a copy of the manuscript in the trunk of his car, and he did the thing—I know I'm saying “the thing.” I've never done this—but he did a thing where he drove through what he thought was a puddle, and it wound up being this really deep hole full of water. So his car kind of fell into—

Kathryn (41:45) I'm so scared of that happening. I'm so afraid of that. Yeah.

Gina (41:55) Yeah. So the next day, they fished the car out of this ginormous puddle thing. The whole thing was filled with water. The only dry object in the car? The manuscript.

Kathryn (42:02) The fuck?

Gina (42:03) But when it comes to the actual experiences of the Lutzes, there is even more damning pieces of evidence too. So the famous picture that the Warrens took—the one that we looked at earlier—turns out it was a hoax and it's been debunked. It was actually just a member of their team who was kneeling and wearing glasses, which caused the glare that we see.

Kathryn (42:23) Weird. I thought—that's strange. I thought it was just like one of their sons or something like that, that they like—oh my god. It does look like a kid, though. Yeah, poor guy.

Gina (42:31) It was just like a grown-ass man. Which is weird because it looks like a kid. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Also, the local Catholic diocese denied ever being involved with blessing the house, and upon asking, the Amityville Historical Society said that there was no evidence that the land had ever been used by the Shinnecock tribe in any way.

Kathryn (42:55) Okay. Interesting.

Gina (42:58) Weber himself went on record saying that the whole thing was a hoax. He said that he and the Lutzes had designed the tale over, quote, “many bottles of wine,” and that they used aspects of the DeFeo case to make shit up for the paranormal activity elements. He also said that the Lutzes were specifically interested in, quote, “developing the demonism aspect of the case.”

According to Weber, he told the Lutzes that a neighbor's cat would often look in through the DeFeo family's windows, which became Jodie the Pig. He also said that Butch DeFeo's father had once smacked his mom while she was holding a plate of spaghetti, and that had become the mysterious goo on the walls and in the keyholes. He also claimed that the Lutzes had made the entire thing up for financial gain because they bought a house that was beyond their means and they were struggling to pay their bills.

So Bartholomew—that sociologist I mentioned earlier—he also thinks that the Lutzes agreed to do this for financial gain. He says, quote, “The Amityville myth persists in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It is starkly obvious that it's a hoax, but people still want to believe.”

The Lutzes, however, never ever went back on their story. George has said, quote—and this gets to like what we were talking about earlier, because I totally agree with it—“If we had tried to perpetuate some kind of hoax, I think we would have been much surer of when and how things happened, because we would have been inventing them.”

Kathryn (44:04) Okay, yeah. Like this whole time as you were describing, I was like, my god, these guys totally tricked me. Like they tricked all of us, blah, blah. But I'm also like, honestly, same. Like I would be—I don't know. I'm just, I'm such a bad liar that like, I would be so obsessive about memorizing everything and getting everything right that it would just—yeah, I don't know.

Gina (44:38) To hold up for years under such intense media scrutiny? Like even if they were lying, if the whole thing is a hoax, that is kind of impressive that they are able to stay strong for that long. Like, damn.

Kathryn (45:09) Yeah. Honestly, listen—let's say it is a hoax. That's like, just for argument's sake, it's a hoax. That's really impressive, because here we are a zillion years later talking about whether or not it is a hoax. You know what I mean? Like, that's a pretty successful hoax if you ask me. So I'm almost like—I kind of hope it wasn't real, because that's a lot more impressive than if it was, I think. I don't know.

Gina (45:28) Mm-hmm. And yeah, and the Lutz family wound up taking a polygraph test in 1979 and they passed. The polygraph—I have a quote from the polygraph specialist. He was a guy named Chris Gougas and he said, “They were pretty frightened and it took us nearly two hours to get them calmed down, but what they told us, they believed.”

Kathryn (46:02) That's why that's such an important distinction, because like if you genuinely believe something is happening to you—whether or not it really is happening—it's still not a lie because like, you genuinely believe it's happening, you know?

Gina (46:14) Mm-hmm. Yeah, I know polygraphs aren't, you know, watertight, but it's just instances of—it's just such a conflict of like one side saying yes, it's true, and the other side saying like, no, it's absolutely not. And there just seems to be zero gray area that people operate within in this story. So we're kind of coming up on the end here.

The house on Ocean Avenue has since had multiple owners. None of them have reported any strange encounters at all. The main problem now is—

Kathryn (46:22) Yeah.

Gina (46:47) Actually, it used to be—people coming to see it as a tourist attraction. There were reports that people would stand outside for just hours, they would knock on the door asking for Butch DeFeo—like just all kinds of fucked up shit. The house has actually been renumbered now to stop horror fans and ghost hunters from, you know, stalking it basically. And it's been sold at least four times since the murders.

Kathryn (46:52) Yeah.

Gina (47:14) The last time it was sold was in 2016 for—ready for this price jump?—$850,000.

Kathryn (47:20) Oh, that's actually way less than I thought it was. I thought it was going to be in the million. I thought it was going to be like 1 point something million.

Gina (47:25) Mm. I wonder if they take some off because it's kind of like, don’t really want to live there.

Kathryn (47:32) Well, at this point, I'm shocked that people are still trying to live there.

Gina (47:36) Yeah, and it's gone under some pretty serious refurbishments since then. The—you familiar with like the famous windows that they had that kind of looked like eyes?

Kathryn (47:44) Listen, I wasn't gonna try to hijack this, but I'm so familiar with it that I as a child, when I saw that movie, was like, “Who would ever choose to purchase a Dutch Colonial home?” They're like traditionally—they're notoriously haunted. Guess what bitch purchased a Dutch Colonial a year and a half ago.

Gina (47:56) You—mm-hmm. But it's beautiful. And haunted.

Kathryn (48:07) Didn't mean to. Didn't mean to. Similar shape, not the same windows, but we've got the whole like—that's part of the style, is like the prominent windows and the like gabled front or whatever. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Gina (48:10) Yeah. Yeah. So the ones that looked like eyes, I'm pretty sure those are gone now. A lot of the house has kind of changed. Yeah.

Kathryn (48:22) Okay. That's like a main—yeah, I guess that would—that would take care of a lot of like the tourist aspect of it.

Gina (48:30) Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, whether or not you believe the Lutz's story is really none of my business, but I do kind of wonder if the whole situation is more complex than just a binary true or false. George Lutz once said, quote, “I have never thought of my life story as being a big property. I don't control it. I don't have any say in the publishing rights. I didn't sell the movie rights or the pre-sale or the advertising.”

Kathryn (48:38) You—

Gina (48:59) “All I know is what happened to me.” So whether it was a demon, a haunting, a hoax, or something in between in that murky gray area I love so much, Amityville has become more than just a scary story. To me, it's a cautionary tale about how stories—especially the ones that we want to believe—really can take on a life of their own. And sometimes they hurt a lot more than they help. That said, I would love—absolutely love—to hear everyone else's take on this story.

So we have a submission link in the show notes. I would really love if you guys told me what you make—tell me what you make of all of this because I want to talk about it. I didn't really know much about Amityville before this and now I want to know everything. And yeah, that's all I got.

Kathryn (49:44) Yeah, Amityville's wild. I love that. That was one of the first horror movies I ever saw. I had a thing for James Brolin in that movie. That's—that's the whole thought. That's the whole thought.

Gina (49:52) James Brolin's hot. When I was researching this, I felt like it was my duty to watch the movie. And so I told Tom one night like I think—

Kathryn (50:02) Did you watch it? Okay, I was gonna say—well, sorry, continue.

So, yeah, well, so I was gonna say—not recommending it to you—but as far as horror movies are concerned, I feel like...

70s horror movies, they're so good. I don't care what anyone says. That's just such a great era of horror movies. And they're so much gentler, visually, than like the really terrible graphic gross, gory, blah kind of stuff. Not everything. There's some—there's some gnarly stuff. I'm thinking like stuff like Amityville, like something that would kind of fit in the confines of like a—whatever.

Gina (50:35) Hmm.

Kathryn (50:51) Vintage slasher or whatever. I guess this wouldn't be a slasher, but classic haunted house. It's not... I haven't seen it in a long time. How about I rewatch it and I'll let you know what I think. Yeah, I'll do that because now that we're talking about it, I really want to watch it anyway. Um, yeah.

Gina (50:53) Yes, my god, please do. Okay, sweet. Okay, let me know if I could handle it. I feel like older movies don't scare me as much as newer movies. I hate to say it, but a lot of it is because of the effects. They're just not as realistic.

Kathryn (51:14) I don't think that—yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And I think that the more—the further away you—like there was once upon a time, *Dracula* circa like 1930-whatever, was like the most horrifying movie ever. And now we look at it and we're like ha ha ha.

Gina (51:18) That's true.

Kathryn (51:34) I remember when the remake came out with—who was it, right? Was it Ryan Gosling? Was that the one that was the dad? Sorry, I'm back to Amityville.

Gina (51:41) Was that—are you talking about *Dracula* or *Amityville*? I have no idea. Can't tell you.

Kathryn (51:47) It came out in like 2008 or something like that. I remember that one being way scarier just because it was newer and everyone was like, oh my god, remakes. That was like in the era where remakes really did suck. So everyone was like, oh my god, it's not scary, blah blah, it's not as good as—they do anytime anything's remade. And I remember being, yeah, totally, that sucked and like being absolutely horrified. But yeah.

Gina (51:50) No clue.

See, I remember—I don't know why I did this—but I was really into the movie *Insidious* when I was a teenager.

Kathryn (52:19) God, that movie terrified me when I saw it. I didn't like that movie, yeah.

Gina (52:21) I loved it and I'm the biggest scaredy cat in the world. I've never been into scary movies in any way, or form. And for whatever reason, that movie and *Silence of the Lambs* are like the two where I'm fine for some reason.

Kathryn (52:32) Okay, *Silence of the Lambs* is not scary to me, but it's scary. That's the scariest movie my mom has ever seen in her life besides *Dawn of the Dead*, which she accidentally saw. And we accidentally just gave her PTSD. She's covering her ears right now as she watches us.

Gina (52:48) That happened to me with the—was it—is it *The Evil Dead*? Is that what it's called?

Kathryn (52:51) God, I cannot believe you. So that's the one I was gonna say like when I said, 70s movies aren't scary. That's the one when I kind of took it back a little bit. That's the one I thought of because I was like, yeah, I'm shocked you saw that movie. The visuals in that—who—how—what's his name? I always forget his name and I feel so bad. But the special effects makeup guy for that one is just so huge. It like...

Gina (53:02) I didn't know what I was getting into. It was on a date. I didn't know any better. You...

Kathryn (53:19) Is it Tom Savini? Did he do it? Let me see. Yeah, Tom Savini. So he was in a documentary we were watching and I didn't know this—he took a lot of his inspiration, he—from like, I think Vietnam and like all the gore he experienced there. I hate to call it that, but like...

Gina (53:37) Whoa. BLEH. Yeah.

Kathryn (53:42) All the trauma, I'm gonna say, inspired a lot of his gore. And that's why it's so like realistic and gnarly because like he like really saw those things. Isn't that awful? Yeah. But so talented. I mean, I feel like he's one of those guys where I feel like you like know when you see his style. There's a specific style that he has and it's just next level.

Gina (53:43) Yeah.

Kathryn (54:08) Gross, but in kind of a weird way. I don't know. I'm shocked you've seen *Evil Dead*. I would never recommend that to you ever. Okay, that makes so much more sense.

Gina (54:08) I didn't mean to, did not mean to, was so scared.

Kathryn (54:19) I do think there is a subgenre for you that I think—I always—there have been many psychological horrors that I'm like, I kind of—see, but this is the thing. That is the most terrifying thing to me. And you're like, “Well, yeah, sure.” It's like, girl, you cannot say you will not watch horror and then be like, “Well, that's fine.” That’s the worst one! Like, do you know what I mean?

Gina (54:28) Psychological horror, I'm pretty okay with. Nah, that's fine.

Kathryn (54:48) Well, wait, okay, let's make sure we're talking about the same. What are some examples of psychological horror movies?

Gina (54:53) Okay, because the one that always comes to mind—like is *Shutter Island* a psychological horror or is that just like a psychological thriller?

Kathryn (55:01) So I think as far as a genre is concerned, like publicly, I think people would consider that a thriller. I would not argue that it is also a horror. I think so. I mean, yeah, I think that—so I would consider that a thriller. Also...

Gina (55:09) Okay.

Kathryn (55:25) It's very scary. Well, not very scary, but it has scary parts. I think the differentiator is really just style—like moviemaking style, you know?

Gina (55:29) Mmm.

Kathryn (55:32) But there are movies that—okay, so the fact that like you weren't freaked out by *Insidious*—*Insidious* has been like—it is on the list of like one of the scariest movies. Now, I'm referring to the study that they did that measured like heart rate. And they have a couple of really big jump scares in there, which I do not like. I hate a jump scare so much. Like...

Gina (55:41) Yeah.

Kathryn (55:59) I feel like if you're fine with that one, there's gotta be so many others that you'd be fine with too. Yeah.

Gina (56:02) But I don't know if I would be fine with it now, because I liked it a lot when I was like 15 and thought I would never die, you know? And I haven't watched it since then.

Kathryn (56:12) Isn't that so funny? I was thinking of that the other day. Sorry, we're getting like so off topic. I'm so sorry. But like this is also—I think—relevant, because like I was thinking of it because we're doing Demon Month and I don't know what triggered this thought. I must have just been working on one of my stories or something like that.

Gina (56:17) You—

Kathryn (56:30) And I have lived my whole life actively not believing in demons. I've always lived my life as if demons are real just in case. I do that with a lot of things. And...

Gina (56:41) Just in case, yeah.

Kathryn (56:44) The older I get—I was thinking back to the conversation we had on the podcast previously, where it's like, the older I get, the more I just believe in more and more and more because nothing fucking matters. And I was like, demons is like—the category of demons is one that I don't—I still don't know if I believe in demons, because if I said I believed in demons, I'd have to like...

Admit that I gotta go back to church. Like—and I don't want to have to go back to church every Sunday. So I'm like, I'm—there's constantly this push and pull of like, do I believe this because I genuinely believe it or do I believe it because I'm just scared? And like when you're scared, you do weird things and you say weird things and you believe weird things and...

Gina (57:11) Hahaha. Mm-hmm.

Kathryn (57:31) I don't know. I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore. These are the thoughts I have now that we have this podcast. ‘Cause I'm like, I don't—I don't know.

Gina (57:31) Yeah. I also don't know what my relationship is with belief when it comes to demons, but I have a feeling I'm gonna spend the next month figuring it out. And we can go on that journey together.

Kathryn (57:43) Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Anyway, so that's the story of Amityville.

Gina (57:54) Thank you for joining me.

Kathryn (57:56) Yeah, that was great. I love the story of Amityville. That's just such a classic. But I feel like every time I hear it, there's more to—like there's some—I even want to say more—but just different things like pop up that I've never heard before, you know?

Gina (58:02) And there's so much to it. Yes. Yeah, like if you guys enjoyed this episode, there is so much more out there that you can find. Like, highly encourage you. Do some creative Googling. Read some old records. Read the book, you know? It's a huge-ass fucking rabbit hole. I read parts of the book. I didn't have time to read the whole thing.

Kathryn (58:23) Wait, did you read the book? Okay, I totally forgot there was a book. I knew—I remember hearing about it years ago and being like, I got to read that. And I just—when you said you were doing Amityville, I just completely forgot about it.

Gina (58:36) Yeah. It's not super long. I think it's like 300-something pages. And the way that it's told is very—I can't remember the word for it off the top of my head—but it's told as if—it’s told like narrative. I don't want to say narrative fiction, but it's like, you know, it's not like a nonfiction book like a biography might be where it's really dry and there's not much interpretation. Like it's very—it was artistically done by a man who may have lied about the whole thing.

Kathryn (58:48) Yeah. Okay. Mm-hmm. Way.

Alright well, thank you for joining us. Until next time, little spoons, keep it cool.

Gina (59:10) Keep it creepy.