The Amityville Horror: Hoax, Haunting, or Something In Between?

For half a century, the Amityville Horror has lingered in the collective imagination like a shadow on the wall that never quite fades, no matter how much light we shine on it. Few stories have made such audacious claims, or attracted as many professional skeptics and true believers.

Every few years, a new documentary or dramatization pops up, promising to finally reveal the truth. Yet even now, fifty years after the tragic events that unfolded at 112 Ocean Avenue, that truth remains elusive.

112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, NY

Before we dig into the question of the haunting itself, we’d do well to remember how this sensational story began.

In November of 1974, six members of the DeFeo family were found shot to death in their beds. Ronald DeFeo Jr., the eldest son, was convicted of slaying his entire family.

That crime was chilling enough. But to add another layer of high strangeness, none of the neighbors—and, more disturbingly, none of the victims—so much as stirred during the massacre. Each family member lay facedown, shot by a high-caliber rifle, in a quiet suburban home with thin walls and neithbors just 30 feet away. Police found no signs of struggle. And toxicology reports returned no evidence that any of the victims had been drugged.

But even that enormity just served as a prologue to the madness which followed.

A year later, George and Kathy Lutz purchased 112 Ocean Avenue, at a discount that can only be called suspicious. You may be calling out that detail as a shopworn haunted house trope, but read on.

The Lutzes moved into their dream house along with their three children. And they left less than a month later, claiming they had fled from psychological, spiritual, and even physical, torment at the hands of entities unknown.

The subsequent book and movie gained the case, which was cemented in infamy as the Amityville Horror, worldwide notoriety. Skeptics promptly accused the Lutzes of chicanery, arguing that the haunting was an opportunistic hoax designed to cash in on the DeFeo tragedy.

It’s an easy; even rational, accusation to make. The trouble is, the cynical cash-grab theory doesn’t fit the facts.

For one thing, the Lutzes didn’t profit the way people imagine. They abandoned the house and most of their possessions, including furniture, clothing, and appliances, leaving behind a financial disaster. Had they simply kept the property and sold it years later, they would have made more than the modest proceeds of their media deals.

If you’re on the make for a quick buck, wrecking your finances by spreading false claims of your single most valuable asset being cursed is not a sound plan.

Zoomers can’t even get the haunted house discounts they gave to Boomers.

“The fact that the Lutzes took a financial bath doesn’t prove they weren’t lying,” you might say. “Maybe they were just really dumb.”

OK, let’s set the money angle aside. We still have to contend with the remarkable amount of empirical evidence this case generated, including the photograph.

Every investigator produces it sooner or later: the image often called the single most credible, and unnerving, ghost photo ever.

During a later investigation by controversial demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, an infrared camera reportedly captured the image of a small boy with glowing eyes peeking from a doorway. The picture has been called a fake, a photographic fluke, and a misidentification of one of the investigators. Yet after decades of scrutiny, no one has ever demonstrated how the image was staged. For half a century, this image has resisted all attempts to sweep it under the rug.

The problem with dismissing Amityville as mere fiction is that it refuses to behave like a nice, tidy story. The Lutzes’ accounts were inconsistent, sometimes confused, and occasionally contradictory. And that’s precisely what makes them ring truer than a carefully engineered hoax.

Contrast the Amityville Horror with contemporary creepypastas, which conveniently align with pop culture tropes. The Amityville accounts come off as messy and human; too scattered to be written with a con artist’s precision, yet too unsettling to be ignored.

Peter Laws, host of Into the Fog, recently revisited the case and came to a similar conclusion. He observed that Amityville stands apart because of its marked convergence of documented tragedy, residual evidence, and inexplicable events. The murders themselves are verifiable. The physical house still exists. Multiple independent investigators have thoroughly examined it.

In short, we aren’t dealing with the slick, well-rehearsed script of a con job, or the ephemeral secondhand gossip that sustains most urban legends. We have a trail of clues with a documented chain of evidence. It’s fragmented and strange, but it’s undeniably real.

If the Lutzes fabricated it all, the story would have faded by now. People soon tire of clever frauds. But something about that house: the impossible silence of the DeFeo murders, the inexplicable photographs, and the troubling hints of simmering violence, continues to draw notice.

Photo: Richard Drew/AP

Switching gears to a theological track, the kinds of circumstances surrounding 112 Ocean Avenue in the mid-70s were exactly the conditions you’d expect to invite a spiritual disturbance. With the prior owners, you had accustions of domestic abuse, drug use, and even possible mob ties. And the house may not only have been built on an old Indian burial ground, but the former site of an Indian insane asylum. The phrase has been beaten to death, but there’s no better term for what the Lutzes walked into than a paranormal perfect storm.

That doesn’t mean everything in the book or the film should be taken at face value. Hollywood’s fingerprints are all over the popular portrayal: the bleeding walls, the priest suffering a breakdown the attempt to impose some kind of tidy resolution. Unfortunately, embellishments meant to sell tickets have become confused with the Lutzes’ original testimony. It’s to the point that skeptics who refute some invention of the book or movie declare the whole story a hoax.

And yet, the presence of exaggerations only reaffirms that Hollywood needed some kernel of truth to exaggerate. Peeling back the layers of media-induced illusion and telephone game babble, we’re left with the unnerving conclusion that something truly uncanny happened in Amityville in the 1970s; strange events we’re still at a loss to understand.

Most ghost stories live or die based solely on witness credibility. The Amityville Horror forces us to grapple with evidence that defies easy dismissal. Even the contradictions hint at authenticity, because real experiences of the preternatural are often incoherent to those who encounter them.

In the end, we will likely never know precisely what took place at 112 Ocean Avenue between the DeFeo murders and the Lutz family’s flight. But the case remains singular among paranormal accounts because it blends verifiable tragedy with inexplicable phenomena. Whether you blame demonic oppression, restless souls, or freak psychological breakdowns, this case can’t be chalked up to mere fabrication.

Perhaps that’s why the Amityville Horror refuses to fade from the public mind: not because it was perfectly told, but because it wasn’t. Beneath the distortions of paperback publishers and screenwriters lies a faint but stubborn thread of truth.

And like all such threads, it leads back to the same fundamental mystery: that the seen and unseen worlds sometimes touch, leaving behind marks no human storyteller could invent.

Watch the Into the Fog video:

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Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.