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The Amityville Horror
On November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered six members of his family at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville — a real and tragic crime for which he was convicted. The 'haunting' came later: the Lutz family fled after 28 days in 1975-76, and Jay Anson's 1977 bestseller made the house infamous. But DeFeo's own attorney admitted the story was 'created over many bottles of wine,' and investigators found the paranormal claims unsupported.
PARANORMAL
EXPLAINED
40.67° N · 73.41° W
Our read
SettledFabricated / hoaxOpen
Evidence — 12 claims
7 supported · 4 resolved · 1 contested
supportedresolvedcontested
Sources — 4
4 sources · reference + secondary + journalism
112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, New York. November 13, 1974. Six members of the DeFeo family were shot dead in their beds while they slept. Ronald DeFeo Jr., the eldest son, was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to six consecutive 25-years-to-life terms. He died in prison in March 2021. The murders are documented historical fact. What came next is a different kind of story entirely.
What happened
In December 1975, George and Kathy Lutz moved into the house with their three children. They paid a discounted price — the DeFeo murders were recent and the neighborhood knew it. Twenty-eight days later, they left, claiming the house had driven them out through a sustained campaign of paranormal activity: green slime, demonic pig-faces at windows, cloven hoofprints in snow, a priest repelled by flies in January, doors wrenched off hinges, and a levitating Kathy Lutz.
Jay Anson turned their account into a 1977 bestseller. A film followed in 1979. The house became one of the most recognizable addresses in American paranormal mythology.
Adjacent specimens
Paranormal
The Enfield Poltergeist
Beginning August 30, 1977, the Hodgson family at 284 Green Street in Enfield, North London reported moving furniture, knocking noises, and disembodied voices that lasted roughly fourteen months. Two investigators from the Society for Psychical Research were present for most of it, recording about 1,500 incidents. A police constable signed a statement saying she saw a chair move on its own. Some events were later admitted to have been faked. Others were not.
1977-08-30
Paranormal
The Bell Witch
The Bell Witch is one of America's most famous ghost legends, set on the John Bell farm near Adams, Tennessee, around 1817 to 1821. As the story goes, an unseen entity called 'Kate' tormented the family, afflicted daughter Betsy, and was even blamed for patriarch John Bell's 1820 death. But there is no contemporary record of any of it — the tale rests almost entirely on a newspaper editor's 1894 book and a family manuscript no one has ever produced.
1817
Paranormal
The Rosenheim Poltergeist
The German state telephone company tried to disprove a haunting and ended up itemizing one on a bill: the speaking clock in a Bavarian law office was dialed dozens of times in fifteen minutes, on rotary phones that physically could not dial that fast.
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