The Amityville horror: The boy who lived in the
true-life haunted house breaks his 40-year silence.
- The house where the Lutzes in Long Island lived was site of mass murder
- Family lasted only 28 days in the haunted house in 1976
- Daniel Lutz, who was 10 at the time of the ordeal, insists it was true
- Reclusive Lutz has agreed to relive his ordeal for a new documentary
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| High Hopes - 112 Ocean Avenue. |
First there were the flies, a plague of them that, even in December, swarmed
inside the imposing clapboard house as George and Kathy Lutz were unpacking
their belongings.
Then there were the cold spots in rooms and hallways, the odd smells of
perfume or excrement and the jolting sounds at night.
George became increasingly volatile and would wake at the same time — 3.15am,
a time that would later assume a sinister significance.
Other disturbances were far more terrifying: objects that flew across the room, walls
oozing green slime, the crucifix that turned upside down on the wall, the hidden red
room in the basement and — who can forget — the glowing eyes at night of some
demonic, pig-like creature.
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| George Lutz. |
By then, they had fled in terror with Mrs Lutz’s three young children from a previous marriage, taking little more than the clothes they were wearing.
It was January 14, 1976. They had lasted just 28 days inside 112 Ocean Avenue, a rambling house in the Long Island town of Amityville, 30 miles from New York City.
They never returned, but the Amityville Horror, as their story became known, has come
back to haunt — or at the very least, intrigue — us with the decision by one of the
children to break their 37-year silence about what happened.
Daniel Lutz, a ten-year-old boy at the time but now a spooky-looking, middle-aged
man with deep-set, piercing blue eyes and an unsettling smile, insists he was
menaced by spirits in the house and that his family’s stay there has ruined his life.
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| Daniel Lutz |
And he blames the evil presence on his stepfather George, a man whose occult dabblings, says
Daniel, opened the gateway to dark forces he couldn’t control.
The six-bedroom house, with swimming pool and boathouse, was meant to be their dream home and was aptly named High Hopes. Instead, it turned into a nightmare.
Their experience in those four weeks was turned into a best-selling book, The
Amityville Horror, and a 1979 hit movie of the same name.
The notoriety of America’s ‘most haunted house’ has since spawned an entire
industry of books and documentaries, not to mention 11 Hollywood sequels and
remakes, including two due to come out next year.
But what really happened inside that house has remained hotly contested for years
as the Lutzes — both in their 30s at the time — became embroiled in legal battles
that reinforced the notion they were just in it for the money.
Sceptics immediately cast doubt on the story, and it emerged Mr Lutz, a land surveyor,
couldn’t really afford the house, even at its knockdown price of $80,000 (£53,000).
Perhaps they had fled the property for reasons other than evil spirits.
The suspicions seemed confirmed when, just before the 1979 film came out, local
lawyer William Weber claimed he had dreamt up the story with the Lutzes ‘over
many bottles of wine’.
The lawyer had defended 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo, who had shot dead his parents
and four younger siblings in the same house 13 months before the Lutzes arrived.
DeFeo, who was jailed for life, claimed he had heard them plotting to kill him.
The murders were thought to have been committed at around 3.15am.
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| Ronald DeFeo |
Weber — who had fallen out with the Lutzes over money — claimed he had passed detailed information about the murders to the couple who then weaved it into their fantasy account — in which, for instance, the neighbour’s cat became a pig-like demon that left cloven hoof prints in the snow. But the couple always stuck to their story, even if they conceded that some details had been exaggerated or invented by the media.
Take the ‘red room’, for example — a small, red painted room, around 4ft-by-5ft,
that George Lutz discovered behind shelving in the basement.
The room was not mentioned in the building plans and the Lutz’s labrador
cross, Harry, refused to go near it, cowering in fear. But previous tenants
insisted it had simply been used for storage.
Nor did the Lutzes take what might have seemed obvious steps to verify their story.
For example, they never took samples of the mysterious, gelatinous green slime that
apparently oozed from the walls and through the keyhole of the playroom door in
the attic.
Yet, inconveniently for the cynics, George and Kathy both passed a lie detector
test.
The couple later divorced, with Kathleen dying in 2004 and her ex-husband two
years later. But the controversy has now been given new life by the re-emergence
of Daniel Lutz.
A clearly troubled individual, he left home at 15, spending some time living homeless
in America’s south-west.
Estranged from his wife and two grown-up children, he now lives in Queens, New
York, where he works as a stonemason.
His side of the story would probably have remained secret had a friend not
contacted a young film-maker, Eric Walter, who had set up a website devoted
to the Amityville saga.
He persuaded the reclusive Lutz to speak in a new documentary, My
Amityville Horror.
And given how much he says he loathed his late step-father, a domineering ex-marine
who Daniel says would beat the children with a wooden spoon, one might expect him
to want to rubbish George Lutz’s tale of demonic possession.
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| One of Ronald DeFeo's victims being removed. |
and seeing a demonic figure in his little sister’s bedroom.
I just wanted somebody to believe me. It has been in my dreams my whole life,’ he said, his expression looking tortured as tears welled in his eyes. But then, he is asking us to believe a lot.
He recalled seeing his step-father’s bookshelves lined with titles on Satanism and
magic. And he even claimed he saw George Lutz move a spanner telekinetically
in his garage — before the family ever moved to Amityville.
George’s beliefs and practices triggered what was going on in the house,’ he
said, his voice shaking. ‘It was like a magic trick gone bad that you couldn’t shut off.’
Daniel Lutz, whose real father had died, said he started feeling uneasy about the
Amityville house within two hours of moving in. Taking a box upstairs to their
playroom he found it swarming with flies.
He swatted a hundred but, after fetching his mother, discovered the dead flies had all
gone. ‘That’s when my confusion started,’ he said.
He recalled seeing his step-father’s bookshelves lined with titles on Satanism and
magic. And he even claimed he saw George Lutz move a spanner telekinetically
in his garage — before the family ever moved to Amityville.
George’s beliefs and practices triggered what was going on in the house,’ he
said, his voice shaking. ‘It was like a magic trick gone bad that you couldn’t
shut off.’
Daniel Lutz, whose real father had died, said he started feeling uneasy about the
Amityville house within two hours of moving in. Taking a box upstairs to their
playroom he found it swarming with flies.
He swatted a hundred but, after fetching his mother, discovered the dead flies had all
gone. ‘That’s when my confusion started,’ he said.
George Lutz recounted how, on the last night the family spent in the house, his wife’s
face temporarily transformed into that of an ‘old crone’ and she later levitated off
the bed.
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| Daniel Lutz |
Daniel, who shared a bedroom with his brother, Christopher, claimed that that night they also ‘shared a levitation experience’ in their beds — ‘we both woke up with our footboards smashing each other and banging off the
ceiling’.
Pursued by the media as their story emerged, the family briefly went into hiding, but eventually moved to California.
The documentary makers unearthed various reporters, psychic investigators and
paranormal specialists who descended on the house for a seance after the story
broke, and who are still buzzing with theories.
Some clearly sympathise with Daniel Lutz’s view of his stepfather as a man who
dabbled in the occult and paid the price; some wonder whether his stories of
supernatural torment hide a more conventional tale of domestic abuse.
Bobby Sylvester, Daniel’s cousin, said there was always something off-putting about
George, and the family had to tread lightly around him.
As a child, you realised there was something not right about this man — something
not good,’ he said.
For the Amityville sceptics, Lutz’s passion for the occult may be the solution they are
looking for, one that even explains why the couple managed to pass a lie detector test.
For if the domineering head of the household already believed in telekinesis and the
powers of darkness before they moved into a house that had just been the scene of a mass
murder, it’s not stretching credulity to assume he and his family might be susceptible to
supernatural explanations for mundane occurrences.
It’s what psychologists call the power of suggestion. Alternatively, Daniel Lutz could
just be recalling exactly what happened.
Certainly Daniel — who declined all approaches for further interviews — has no plans
to make any financial gain out of any of this.
Eric Walter, the new documentary’s director, is a sceptic but added that he doesn’t
believe ‘a family would abandon everything and flee unless they were genuinely
scared’.
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| George, Kathleen and Daniel Lutz. |
Down on Ocean Avenue, where Daniel Lutz’s old home changed hands for $950,000(£626,000) two years ago, the house has a different street number and its famously malevolent-looking quarter-moon windows, which gave it the appearance of a face, have been replaced to distract attention, especially on Halloween.
But the owners may as well ask the nearby Atlantic Ocean to recede than to expect the
gawkers not to seek them out.
True or outrageous hoax, the Amityville Horror is just too chilling a yarn to be allowed
to slip from our imagination.
