Amityville Horror House: History and Reported Hauntings

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated July 27, 2026 · How we verify

The Amityville Horror house is a five bedroom Dutch Colonial Revival at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, on the south shore of Long Island, New York. It is the site of a documented mass murder in 1974 and the subject of a 1977 book by Jay Anson that sold an estimated 10 million copies and launched a film series that began in 1979. The murders are a matter of court record. Almost everything that came after them, the paranormal claims made by the family who lived there for 28 days, has been contested in print, in interviews and in court ever since.

Quick Facts

Location: 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, Long Island, New York

Style: Dutch Colonial Revival, five bedrooms, distinctive gambrel roof, swimming pool and boathouse on a canal

Murders: November 13, 1974, six members of the DeFeo family shot and killed

Convicted: Ronald DeFeo Jr., second-degree murder, November 1975, six terms of 25 years to life

The Lutz occupancy: December 18, 1975 to January 14, 1976, 28 days

The book: The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson, published September 1977

Status: Private residence. Not a tour stop and not open to the public

The DeFeo Murders

On November 13, 1974, 23 year old Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed six members of his family inside the house at 112 Ocean Avenue. After a trial lasting seven weeks he was convicted of second-degree murder in November 1975 and sentenced to six terms of 25 years to life. He died in prison in March 2021.

This is the verified core of the Amityville story, and it is worth keeping separate from what followed. Six people were murdered in a suburban home on Long Island. Everything else attached to the address is testimony, publishing and dispute.

The Lutz Family’s 28 Days

In December 1975, George and Kathy Lutz bought the house for $80,000, a price considered a bargain at the time. Kathy had three children from a previous marriage: Daniel, 9, Christopher, 7, and Melissa, 5. They also had a Malamute and Labrador crossbreed dog named Harry. During their first inspection the real estate broker told them about the DeFeo murders and asked whether it would affect their decision. They decided it would not. Much of the DeFeo family’s furniture was still in the house and was included in the deal for $400.

The family moved in on December 18, 1975. A friend of George Lutz learned the history of the house and insisted it be blessed. George, a non-practicing Methodist, knew a Catholic priest who agreed to perform the rites. In Anson’s book the priest, in real life Father Ralph J. Pecoraro, is called Father Mancuso.

By mid-January 1976, after a second attempt at a blessing by George and Kathy themselves, the family experienced what they described only as their final night in the house. They declined to give a full account of it, calling the events too frightening. On January 14, 1976, the Lutzes left 112 Ocean Avenue with their three children and their dog, abandoning their possessions. A mover arrived the next day to collect their belongings and reported nothing unusual inside the house.

The story first reached the public through the local newspaper Newsday on February 14, 1976. That report already contained a split in the account: some friends of the Lutzes confirmed strange phenomena had driven them out, while another said they left because the heating system had failed and they could not afford to repair it.

How the Book Came to Be

Tam Mossman, an editor at Prentice Hall, introduced the Lutzes to writer Jay Anson. The Lutzes did not work directly with Anson. They submitted roughly 45 hours of tape-recorded recollections, and the book was built from those tapes. Anson is said to have taken the title from H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”, published in 1929.

The book spawned an industry. John G. Jones wrote four sequels between 1982 and 1989, Robin Karl added another in 1991, and Hans Holzer wrote three more, two of which became films. Will Savive published a factual account of the case, Mentally Ill in Amityville, in 2008.

Reported Phenomena

The claims below are what the Lutzes and Father Pecoraro described. They are reported experiences, not verified events, and several of them have been directly contradicted by later investigation.

A masculine, disembodied voice demanding “get out” during the first house blessing on December 18, 1975. In a 1979 interview for the television series In Search of…, Father Pecoraro said he entered the home, was slapped by an invisible force and was told to get out by a disembodied voice.

A telephone call on December 24, 1975, in which the priest warned George Lutz to stay out of the second floor room where he had heard the voice, the former bedroom of two of the DeFeo children, cut short by static.

A high fever and blisters on the priest’s hands resembling stigmata following his visit.

A sense that the couple were each living in a different house, as they later described their differing experiences.

Cloven hoof prints reported in snow on January 1, 1976.

Greenish-black slime coming up the staircase at Kathy’s mother’s house in Deer Park, New York, where the family had gone to stay. That image closes Anson’s book.

Disputes Over Accuracy

The book has been challenged on multiple points. Father Pecoraro stated in an affidavit during a lawsuit in the late 1970s that his only contact with the Lutzes about the matter had been by telephone. Other accounts have him visiting the house but experiencing nothing unusual there. His 1979 television interview contradicts the affidavit.

James and Barbara Cromarty, who bought the house for $55,000 in March 1977, rejected the claims of physical damage to doors, locks and windows, with Barbara Cromarty arguing that the items appeared to be original and unrepaired. The Cromartys also said the “Red Room” was simply a small basement closet that was never concealed and would have been known to the Lutzes.

Local Shinnecock Indians rejected the claim in chapter 11 that the house stood where the tribe had once abandoned the mentally ill and the dying. Researchers Rick Moran and Peter Jordan investigated the cloven hoof prints and found that no snow had fallen at that time. No neighbor reported anything unusual while the Lutzes lived there. Police officers appear in both the book and the 1979 film, but records showed the Lutzes never called the police. There was no bar in Amityville called The Witches’ Brew.

Stephen Kaplan and other critics noted that details changed between editions. In the original hardcover, Father Pecoraro drives “an old tan Ford” whose hood flies up against the windshield. Later editions make the car a Chevrolet Nova, and later still it reverts to a Ford.

In May 1977, George and Kathy Lutz filed a lawsuit against William Weber, the defense lawyer for Ronald DeFeo Jr., writer Paul Hoffman, alleged clairvoyants Bernard Burton and Frederick Mars, Good Housekeeping magazine, the New York Sunday News and the Hearst Corporation.

Visiting

There is nothing to visit. The house at 112 Ocean Avenue is a private home in a suburban neighborhood and has been continuously occupied since the Cromartys bought it in March 1977. There are no tours, no open days and no public access to the property or the canal frontage behind it.

Anyone drawn to Amityville should treat the address as what it is: someone’s residence on a residential street, and the site of a real crime in which six people died. Reading the book alongside the documented objections, from the Cromartys, from the Shinnecock, from Moran and Jordan, and from police records, gives a fuller picture than either the film series or the paperback does on its own.

Address: 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, New York

See The Amityville Horror for Yourself

Sources

• Uspto (official)
• amityvillehistoricalsociety.org
• The New York Times
• snopes.com
• Wikipedia: The Amityville Horror

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