How do we understand the reputation of the Amityville Horror House?

If I ask you to think of a famous haunted house, will your mind wander to a white Dutch Colonial house, with quarter-round windows lit from within to look like red eyes? Yes? Then the reputation of 112 Ocean Avenue has done its work, aided and abetted by The Amityville Horror.

Even if that wasn’t the first house you thought of, Amityville’s reputation stretches before it, ready to snag your attention at the first opportunity. After all, the design of the house reappears intermittently, as do elements of the haunting. A presence that hates Christian icons? A child’s invisible friend that takes a dislike to a parent? Items going missing around the house, reappearing elsewhere, if at all? The fact that the haunting apparently contains ghosts, poltergeist activity, demonic shenanigans and possibly even a portal to hell just adds to Amityville’s towering reputation.

This is the final instalment in the Legendary Buildings with Fearsome Reputations series. We aren’t going to dwell on whether the story is a hoax. We’re going to focus instead on the house and its reputation, one that sees it branded as ‘the Amityville Horror house’. The reputations of Bedlam and Newgate Prison continue despite the fact that they no longer exist on the sites that cemented their reputations. Yet the Amityville house still stands. The only difference is that it was renumbered to try to deter tourists from visiting, while the famous quarter-round windows were also removed to alter the house’s appearance (Jacob 2021).

The house, and its reputation, remains…

The Sources

I will admit upfront that one of my sources is Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror, the book that brought the story to widespread attention. Many consider it to be a hoax and better read as fiction. This may indeed be the case, which surprisingly suits our purposes here. After all, we’re looking at where the reputation of the house came from. Where better to start than the book that made the idea of a haunting famous? It doesn’t necessarily have to be true to be of value to a folklorist – otherwise, we’d be out of work. Folklore is as much about belief as it is about what people actually did. If we want to dig into the reputation of 112 Ocean Avenue, what people believed is our starting point.

My other main source is the 1979 film adaptation. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg, it stars James Brolin as George and Margot Kidder as Kathy. While there are sequels and a 2005 remake, it is the 1979 film that cements the house’s reputation in cinema. You’ll find plenty of Reddit threads in which people ask if they should bother watching The Amityville Horror. Respondents will tell them they don’t need to if they’ve seen other haunted house films.

Ironically, those haunted house films after 1979 owe a great debt to The Amityville Horror. So if you think a lot of it seems familiar because you’ve seen it in the later films, this is what set the standard.

A Brief History

Ronald DeFeo shot his parents and four brothers and sisters inside their home at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, Long Island, on 13 November 1974. People referred to the house as ‘the DeFeo house’, even once the Lutz family moved in. The notoriety of the crime created a reputation even without supernatural forces. That said, there are suggestions that DeFeo claimed he heard voices within the house that told him to commit the murders.

A judge sentenced DeFeo to six terms of 25 years to life. He died in March 2021, still in prison.

On 18 December 1975, George and Kathy Lutz bought the house, fully aware of its history, for the knockdown price of $80,000. They added some of the DeFeo furniture to the deal for an extra $400. Lutz admitted in 2005 that they’d looked at around fifty houses in the months leading up to the purchase of the Amityville house. He also insisted that, contrary to depictions in the films, Kathy’s children accompanied them on the viewing and loved the house (quoted in Belanger 2005).

We’ll get into the events of the haunting in a moment. It apparently got so bad that the family abandoned the house and its contents after 28 days on 14 January 1976. That said, Lutz admitted they didn’t know they weren’t coming back when they left (Belanger 2005). They later submitted around 45 hours of recollections of events in the house to Jay Anson. He used this oral testimony to write The Amityville Horror about the ‘haunting’. The book was published in September 1977 and was later adapted for the screen as The Amityville Horror, released in July 1979.

It’s likely that the house may have retained notoriety as “the DeFeo house” had the Lutzes never bought it. Or, if they had bought it and found it to be an ordinary family home, in which nothing supernatural occurred. The house probably wouldn’t have been any more well-known than any other murder site from the 1970s. But what about the haunting?

The Haunting

The haunting began as these things often do – slowly. George constantly complained of feeling cold in the house, and everyone seemed more on edge. The front door slammed shut at night, despite being locked when anyone went to investigate.

Let’s remind ourselves how stressful moving is before we continue. Recent research listed moving house as more stressful even than childbirth (Shaw 2025).

A family friend insisted they have the house blessed, so their parish priest, Father Mancuso (real name Father Ralph Pecoraro), came to do so. The priest seemingly knew nothing of the DeFeo murders before he went to the house. He felt unease only in the room Kathy intended to use as a sewing room. In the 1979 film, this is the room in which Father Delaney, played by Rod Steiger, is bombarded with flies.

George heard a marching band in the living room at night, only for the noise to stop as soon as he went downstairs. He kept waking at 3:15 am, approximately the time of DeFeo’s murderous rampage. Father Mancuso repeatedly tried to call the family to warn them about the house. Each time, interference on the line prevented the conversation.

Kathy felt an invisible presence hug her from behind, a move accompanied by the scent of old-fashioned perfume. This is the one part of the haunting that sounds comforting, rather than frightening. It also complicates what else occurred.

Secret Spaces

George and Kathy discovered a secret room in the basement behind the stairs, its walls painted solid red and smelling of blood. A bartender later told George about this room, having seen it for himself. The bartender claimed he later dreamed people killed dogs and pigs inside it.

In the book, George also found a well under the front steps, left over from the previous house. The book largely glosses over the well, despite a visiting medium telling George that he should cap the well to prevent “it”, presumably the demonic presence, from getting out. The film relocates the well to the secret room, turning it into a portal to hell.

Research

George also researched the house, apparently through the Amityville Historical Society, and Anson’s book repeats his claims that the Shinnecock tribe used land along the river as an enclosure for the sick, mad, or dying. It was not a burial ground “because they believed it to be infested with demons” (Anson 1979: 80). The Montaukett Nation later confirmed that the Shinnecock did not live near Amityville. They also cared for their sick and dying people, so no such exposure pen ever existed (AmityvilleMurders.com, 2011).

Anson’s book throws John Catchum/Ketcham into the mix, claiming he was driven out of Salem for practising witchcraft. Once in Long Island, he supposedly built a house within 500ft of the Amityville house, where he continued to summon demons. While John Ketchum left Ipswich, MA and settled on Long Island, there is no evidence he was a witch (AmityvilleMurders.com, 2011). Had he been, I can’t help thinking the Salem scholars would have unearthed it by now.

Showstopping Activity

More gross things happened, such as flies entirely covering windows on the inside, or black goo coating the inside of the toilet bowls. They described repeatedly finding the children sleeping on their stomachs, in the same position in which the DeFeos were found. Kathy also experienced a retrocognition where she saw that Mrs DeFeo was shot in the head while sleeping on her stomach, a detail never made public. (Mostly because she wasn’t).

At one point, a force broke open the front door from the inside, with the door hanging from one hinge. When they got a locksmith to fix the front door, they didn’t tell him about anything else in the house. It seems “[t]hey didn’t want the news spreading around Amityville that again there was something funny going on at 112 Ocean Avenue” (Anson 1983: 40). The ‘again’ refers to an existing reputation for the house, likely connected to the murders.

Some of the activity feels more like a poltergeist, like the ceramic lion that moves from the sewing room back to the living room, apparently of its own accord. Such activity also centres on one person, and much is made of George’s physical similarity to Ronald DeFeo. He was also the one who experienced much of the physical illness in the house, suggesting he ‘triggered’ the events by resembling DeFeo.

On 14 January 1976, the family left the house at 7 am. They did not return.

The Aftermath

The 1979 and 2005 films don’t deal with the aftermath because it doesn’t fit their storytelling structure. Anson describes how events followed the family to Kathy’s mother’s house in an epilogue, then cuts off the story. Yet in a 2005 interview, Lutz described how they spoke to DeFeo’s attorney, William Weber, to find out precisely what he experienced in the house. Weber apparently passed on stories he’d heard, though details are unclear (Belanger 2005).

Of course, the story of the ‘haunting’ got out. The ensuing media frenzy is allegedly why the family collaborated with Anson to tell their side of the story through his book. I say ‘allegedly’, because Weber also claimed he and the Lutzes invented the story one night over a few bottles of wine. While Weber insisted it was a hoax, Lutz continued to maintain it was real until he died in 2006 (Lapin 2021).

In March 1976, a TV news crew took over the house with a crew of experts, including Ed and Lorraine Warren. Naturally, Lorraine insisted that “[w]hatever is here is, in my estimation, most definitely of a negative nature. It has nothing to do with anyone who had once walked the earth in human form. It is right from the bowels of the earth” (Anson 1983: 182). That opinion completely overlooked the apparent presence of at least three ghosts, an elderly couple and a little boy. But hey, demons.

From the 2005 interview with George, it sounds as though the Lutz family agreed to the experts being brought in to see if the house could be ‘fixed’ so they could return. He also passed on an explanation that someone gave him that a person’s own sensitivity dictated the phenomena they experienced. Someone else might move in and not trigger anything at all. This becomes a handy way to explain why no one who later lived in the house experienced any activity (Lapin 2021).

Anson likewise tried to explain why the Lutz family experienced the haunting and no one else did by noting that poltergeist activity could end suddenly (1983: 188). Yet by his own admission, this was not a poltergeist even though he himself noted the similarity to poltergeist activity. He also believed that poltergeists were usually not as malevolent as the activity inside the house appeared to be. To him, the flies, odour of excrement, and inverted crucifix all said “demon” (1983: 186).

Daniel Lutz, who was 10 in 1975, spoke out in 2013 and didn’t discredit George’s claims. Instead, he blamed George’s interest in the occult for bringing dangerous beings into their lives (Getlen 2013). His brother Christopher, who was 7 at the time, said that he believed some of the incidents happened, but they’d been exaggerated. For Christopher, George exploited the events for financial gain. Like Daniel, he blamed George for trying to summon supernatural beings (Smith 2013).

But what about the house…

I said we weren’t going to discuss whether it was a hoax, didn’t I? It was worth a detour because, as I said at the beginning, folklore is about belief. Some people believe Amityville really happened, others believe it was a hoax, and yet more think it’s somewhere in between. Any and all of them could be right.

Here, though, we’re here to discuss the reputation of the house. Built in 1925, it stands near the Amityville River. It doesn’t seem to have had much of a reputation before the DeFeo murders. They put the house on the map, although George insisted it didn’t impact their decision to buy the house. As James Brolin says in the film, “Houses don’t kill people.” (Tell that to the Wicked Witch of the East)

An article in 2021 stated the house had been on the market four times since the 1974 murders. So that means it had been for sale three times between 1976 and 2021. On average, that would be one owner every fifteen years, which doesn’t sound like an overly terrifying house. As far as the 2021 article went, the house was last listed in 2016 and sold in 2017. Scrolling through the photos in that article, which you can find here, the house looks beautiful following renovations. It also looks incredibly lived in. The renovations removed the infamous eye-like half-round windows on the uppermost floor and expanded the verandah. Renumbering the property sought to deter tourists. But the real house almost doesn’t seem to matter anymore, because we have…

The House in Pop Culture

The 1976 media storm created the reputation of the Amityville house as being haunted, rather than the site of six murders. The presence of the Warrens at the seance added to this reputation. Their proclamations of demonic presences helped (which, oddly, no one noticed in the 49 years before the murders).

The 1977 book no doubt entered the house into the long list of Internationally Infamous Properties. Yet it is perhaps the 1979 film house that sealed its reputation. The ‘based on a true story’ tag can be stretched incredibly thin: look at The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But the activity depicted in the film helps to make it feel ‘real’ for people. In reality, the Amityville house is close to its neighbours. In the film and the remake, the neighbours seem to be much further away. This isolates the house in the frame, isolating the family.

Yet there’s another angle at work. The murders forced the sale at a lower price, making the house affordable to a different class of people than those present in the neighbourhood. Stephen King described the film thus: “beneath its ghost-story exterior, [it’s] really a financial demolition derby” (2010: 153). In the film, Kathy tells George her family has always been a family of renters. She is the first to buy a house. Their acquisition of the house – and its efforts to expel them – could almost be read as a neighbourhood seeking to maintain the class status quo.

The economic pressures to remain in a difficult house continue to pop up in horror cinema. Even the design of the Amityville house haunts production design. The Haunting in Connecticut (2010) sees a family buy a former funeral home to allow their son to access experimental cancer treatment. The treatment keeps them there even after the weird activity in the house.

The Conjuring (2013) is an overt example of a film riffing on The Amityville Horror, with economic pressures driving a family to buy a house with an awkward history, albeit at auction. And yes, it even features the Warrens. Even the house in The Conjuring goes from a single-storey farmhouse to a much larger property more similar to 112 Ocean Avenue in the film, all the better to recall the spectre of Amityville. That The Conjuring ends with Lorraine telling Ed there’s a house in Long Island they need to look at shows how Amityville continues to pop up, even in a film about an entirely different house.

What do we make of the Amityville Horror house’s reputation?

Ultimately, the sequels and the remake merely serve to remind people of Amityville’s presence. The imagined house created by Anson and then Rosenberg continues to haunt popular culture, irrespective of the existence of the real house. At this point, the real house almost doesn’t matter. Its reputation is out there in the public domain, regardless of whether or not it is deserved. After all, whether we’re looking at folklore, legend, or even horror films, how true something is takes a backseat to how true something feels.

What do you make of the reputation of the Amityville house? Which version of the film do you enjoy most? Let me know below!

References

AmityvilleMurders.com (2011), ‘Revealing the Facts’, AmityvilleMurders.com, https://web.archive.org/web/20110707134040/http://www.amityvillemurders.com/facts.html. Accessed 17 October 2025.

Anson, Jay (1983), The Amityville Horror, London: Pan Books.

Belanger, Jeff (2005), ‘George Lutz’s Amityville Horror’, Ghostvillage, http://www.ghostvillage.com/legends/2005/legends36_04122005.shtml. Accessed 17 October 2025.

Getlen, Larry (2013), ‘Still haunted’, New York Post, https://nypost.com/2013/03/10/still-haunted/. Accessed 17 October 2025.

Jacob, Mary K. (2021), ‘Inside the ‘Amityville Horror’ house today, Long Island’s most notorious mansion’, New York Post, https://nypost.com/2021/03/15/inside-the-amityville-horror-house-today-long-islands-most-notorious-mansion/. Accessed 17 October 2025.

King, Stephen (2010), Danse Macabre, New York: Gallery Books.

Lapin, Tamar (2021), ‘The real story behind the infamous Amityville Horror house’, New York Post, https://nypost.com/article/amityville-horror-house-real-story/. Accessed 17 October 2025.

Shaw, Vicky (2025), ‘Moving house ‘comes above childbirth’ as most stressful life experiences ranked’, The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/moving-house-stress-tips-advice-buyers-b2749037.html. Accessed 19 October 2025.

Smith, Jennifer (2013), ‘Ex-resident of house debunks much of Amityville “horror”’, Seattle Times, https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/ex-resident-of-house-debunks-much-of-amityville-horror/. Accessed 17 October 2025.