The Amityville Horror
The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson was initially reviewed and posted on YouTube on October 24, 2021, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.
Also, this is when I decided to start mixing cocktails with the book review, so from now on, the reviews will include a side of booze with the books.
The first cocktail I decided to make, in keeping with the horror theme, was called Devil’s Kiss, which is 1 part spiced rum, 1 part coffee liqueur, 1 part grand marnier. Mix all in a cocktail shaker over ice, strain into shot glasses...or in my case, one big whiskey tumbler. This recipe is from the book The Encyclopedia of Cocktails: Over 1,000 Cocktails for Every Occasion from Cider Mills Press.
I had not seen the movie prior to reading the book, but I knew who the DeFeo’s were due to being a true crime buff, and even though the events detailed occurred over Christmas, they are scary, so I read them for my spooky stuff theme over October.
The family that was impacted by the events, the Lutz family, were not the source of the events at the Amityville House. The events that started this ball rolling occurred the year prior, at 3:15am on November 13, 1974, when 23 year old Ronald DeFeo shot to death his parents, two brothers, and two sisters in their house in Amityville, NY, at 112 Ocean Avenue, Long Island, Amityville, NY.
His trial had just concluded the following year in November 1975, he was arrested, tried, and convicted for the murders of his family, sentenced to six consecutive life sentences, ultimately dying in jail on March 12, 2021, so he is now dead. I don’t know if anyone actually believed him as to why the murders were committed, but his trial had just concluded when the Lutze’s purchased the residence for the knockdown price of $80,000, this was in 1975 dollars. The house even then, because of all the perks and bonuses, it was on the riverfront, it had a boat house, it was a good plot of land, and it was a huge house, it was probably worth about $180,000, but due to the high publicity of the crime committed there, was sold cheap cheap cheap.
The family went ahead and bought it and on December 18, 1975, they moved in. And the weird things started happening almost immediately. Things got creepy. The family did know about the houses history, the realtor disclosed that prior to purchase. But they believed places don’t have memories, this is just a house, we’re going to go ahead and buy it and make new memories here. Yes it’s sad, but this is now our home. Let’s make the most out of this. We’re a growing family.
What’s interesting is that there are two concurrent levels of weirdness with the story. First, you have the Lutz family being directly impacted. But, Kathy Lutz was Catholic, and while George Lutz was not, their marriage was blessed and sanctioned in the Catholic church, and Kathy Lutz’s parish priest, Father Mancuso, was going to come over and bless the house for them. He showed up, he starts blessing the house, and he very clearly hears a voice tell him to Get Out. He did NOT Get Out because he’s a man of God, and if you have faith, you don’t run from the devil you do your job which is blessing the house.
So he stayed, blessed the house, and on his way home he nearly dies because his car starts acting weird, and he feels like he’s being forced off the road, even though there are no other cars on the road where he’s driving. Eventually, the hood pops up and flies in his face while he’s driving, he pulls over, gets to a gas station and calls his friend from a payphone, this is 1975 so there are no cell phones, and his friend comes and picks him up and gets him back to his car. That friend, after dropping Father Mancuso off at the rectory reports that he gets in his car and his windshield wipers go crazy and won’t turn off, so even he is being peripherally attacked.
Over at the residence itself, George Lutz starts waking up at 3:15am every night….the same time the DeFeo’s were killed. Kathy and the children are all starting to sleep on their stomachs, which is relevant because this is how the DeFeo family were all sleeping when they were executed by Ronald DeFeo. So George is waking up at the same time the crime occurred, and everyone else is assuming the victim’s poses.
I mean…if you’re moving into a murder house, find out a little bit about the crime so that when the weirdness happens, you can be appropriately freaked out by it, and not just be like “oh, we just decided we’re sleeping on our stomachs now, even though we’ve never done this before…”
During the day, George can’t get warm, even though the thermostat reads 75, he’s freezing cold and burning through their supply of firewood. The family is going through personality changes, the parents are becoming surly, the kids are starting to misbehave, their fighting with each other and acting out, like actual fist fights, which they had never done before.
On December 22, so four days in, Kathy is in the kitchen and she feels something come up behind her, embrace her, and pat her hand. She did not freak out, she thought it was comforting at first. It would probably wig me out. But then her kids start shrieking about the toilet, she runs upstairs, and the toilets are coated in black nastiness. No idea what it is. But it was black, and it would not scrub off. The closets in the bedrooms start to reek, and despite it being 6 degrees outside, the windows in what will be her sewing room are just coated in flies. No idea where the flies came from, they should have all been dead from the cold. And that night, when George wakes up at 3:15am, he goes downstairs and finds that the front door has been ripped off it’s hinges. Like it’s hanging by one hinge ripped off. And nobody heard anything.
Their daughter Missy has developed an imaginary friend, a pig named Jodie. And on the other side of town, Father Mancuso has developed a flu that will not go away. And while he’s in his fever dream fighting this flu with 103 degree temperature, he keeps dreaming of Kathy’s sewing room…the one with all the flies in the window. So Father Mancuso decides he needs to call George and tell them not to go into the sewing room. At the same time, George is thinking he needs to call Father Mancuso. So when the Father calls, George was not really surprised, he knew who it was. But right when father Mancuso is saying hey, stay out of that room, there’s a loud crack, and the phone goes dead on both ends. Neither of them can hear the other, and when they tried to call back, the phone at either end would just ring and ring. Not even a busy signal, which would alert the other party the line was active just someone was using it. It would just ring.
On Christmas Day, George wakes up as usual at 3:15am, goes out to check the boat house because he thinks the door is banging, he gets up, gets dressed, goes outside, and on his way back to the house, he sees his daughter Missy looking at him from her bedroom window. And behind her he sees a pig…like maybe her imaginary friend, Jodie the Pig….but with glowing red eyes. Except why can George see this imaginary friend?
So George goes running upstairs and Missy is sound asleep in her bed. She is not standing at the window. But the rocking chair is moving. So there’s a lot of weirdness going on. And not once did they go “hmmm….maybe we should get an exorcist in here.” Like that never occurs to any of them. It occurs to Father Mancuso. He appeals to the church for one, and the church is like “well, let’s see if there really is something going on, let’s reach out to Universities, or see if the Lutz’s want to” but the church never did anything.
The day after Christmas, Kathy’s brother is getting married, and when he shows up to pick up the family for the wedding prep, the $1,500 that he had in his pocket to pay the caterer and wedding venue vanished from his pocket. And it’s never found. I’m pretty sure Jimmy thinks one of the kids stole it, but it never turned up. That’s probably what I would think, that one of the mischievous little tykes got into his wallet and took it. But it vanishes, and George ends up covering the costs from a personal check.
Kathy starts dreaming about Louise DeFeo having had an affair, which I guess is true, I don’t know, I didn’t actually look into the DeFeo murders beyond the bare minimum, but she is dreaming about this. And the ghostly hands that she’s feeling on her in the kitchen are becoming a lot more insistent, not as friendly and comforting, a lot scarier. Now she’s feeling attacked.
Her Aunt Theresa, who was a nun, comes to visit, and there are certain rooms that she refuses to enter in the house. And the house starts yielding secrets. In the basement, they find a hidden room with a capped well. Mancuso’s health is vacillating between ok and vicious flu, and for some reason, his rooms at the rectory start to smell very much like the Lutz’s house. George and Kathy are starting to get kind of suspish about all of this. Their continued inability to reach Father Mancuso did not help.
Ultimately, Mancuso does make contact with them and advises them to reach out to the paranormal department at Duke University. Which George Lutz does. And Duke says ok, we’ll send a paranormal investigator. In the meantime, while George is waiting for this, he finds out one of his employees has a girlfriend who is psychic, and she offers to come out and take a look at the house, which offer George accepts, and this whole shitshow just keeps escalating.
Which I get…they may have gotten the house for half off market value, but its still their home. The entire family ends up sleeping every night, all together in the master bedroom, with the family dog guarding the bedroom door. Statues are moving, they’re seeing glowing eyes outside, there are actual pig tracks in the snow, and there’s no explanation for any of this. It’s not like Long Island is a hot bed of wild boar activity.
Father Mancuso starts developing blisters on his hands, which heal if it looks like he’s going to leave the Lutz’s alone, but as soon as he makes contact with them again, the blisters open up again and his flu comes back.
Kathy is breaking out with these weird scratches or pox marks which heal and then come back, one of the kids get’s their fingers slammed in a window. Nothing breaks but it basically pancaked his fingers, and the walls start oozing green slime. Not continuously, but this green slime starts coming out of the walls. And all of this escalates over the course of the month they’re in the house.
The last night they’re there, Missy slept with Kathy and the two boys stayed in their room on the third floor. They tried to leave on January 13th during the day, but a massive storm rose up and the family van wouldn’t start. Which forced them to stay one more night. The last night they were there, George basically stayed up all night. He’s reading the family bible, he’s trying to keep his family safe. The boys again slept in their room, Missy is with Kathy, the dog sat guard, and the houses temperature starts fluctuating wildly from 90 degrees to like freezing. Around 1am, Kathy starts sleep walking. Stopped at the door because the dog was there and she couldn’t step over the dog. The dog wasn’t stopping her, she just couldn’t step over him because she was asleep.
So George gets out of bed, shakes her a little bit, and she collapses. So he picks her up, puts her into the bed. As soon as she’s in bed, their dog jumps to his feet and starts choking and vomiting. When that gets stopped, George goes back to bed, and he’s kind of sitting up in bed, leaning back reading, and he hears what sounds like the boys beds on the third floor being dragged across the floor. And he can’t move. So he’s hearing this and he can’t move. He’s not sure if he’s being pinned in place, but he feels like a hooved animal standing over him and walking all over him.
Next thing he remembers, the two boys Chris and Danny come downstairs and they’re waking him up and telling him there’s a monster in their room. Normally, you just think a kids having a bad dream, but with everything else…they’re in the house for 28 days, and everything has been escalating over the course of the month. Kids are acting weird, Kathy’s getting these scratch marks, the walls are oozing slime, George can’t get warm, Missy has the invisible friend Jodie who looks like a pig and there’s some sort of hooved animal walking around on the bed.
So George tries to get up and see, when he hears Harry their dog start to bark furiously, just standing in the hallway barking. He wouldn’t go up the stairs, he wouldn’t approach the stairs, he just stood in the hallway, barking at the stairs. George finally pulls himself out of bed, looks up the stairs, and sees a gigantic figure in white pointing at him. Missy and Kathy have slept through all of this, but he grabs Missy, hands her to her brothers and tells them to get to the car, he grabs Kathy and follows. Missy and Kathy are still asleep through all of this!
Downstairs, the front door has again been ripped from the hinges. And this is a heavy door, made to withstand New England weather, so it’s like 250 pounds. The entire family runs to the car which starts, and they never return. They literally walked away from the house and everything in it, just leaving it all behind. And that’s January 14, 1976. So 28 days exactly, one lunar cycle.
Apparently, a lot of what the Lutz’s experienced was not uncommon for hauntings and demonic possessions. At one point in the book the theory is floated that that particular section of Amityville is where Native American tribes used to house their mentally insane or terminally ill. That has since been debunked. But does add an element of “AHA!” to the story when you’re reading it.
Paranormal researchers from Duke eventually made their way to Amityville and while they agreed the house was creepy and had cold spots, no such activity has ever been reported at this location again. Like ever. It just stopped.
Father Mancuso managed to eventually recover from his attacks and the Lutz’s moved to California to get as far away from Amityville as they possibly could.
