Residents still haunted in Amityville by sightseers to house of horror

"Six in Amityville Family Found Murdered at Home" was Newsday’s headline 50 years ago.

The killings gave rise to dubious claims the home was haunted and inspired a 1979 movie, "The Amityville Horror." These stories, the real along with the fictional, seeded an industry of myth that still churns out movies and television documentaries about what happened in the home on Amityville's Ocean Avenue. People still drive by the house, stopping for a glimpse and a selfie. The neighbors aren't so fascinated. By and large, they find the fascination tasteless and exhausting.

"We’re sick of it," said Gerald O’Neill, a real estate agent who has lived in Amityville much of his life and represented a buyer or seller on several occasions when the so-called "horror house," in reality a pleasant Dutch Colonial, had sold.

"It’s continued to be a nuisance tourist attraction ... The only horror here was the fact that this kid (murdered) his family," O'Neill said.

A grisly story

The story began the evening of Nov. 13, 1974, when Ronald DeFeo Jr. blew into Henry’s Bar, on Merrick Road, and told a man sitting at the bar that someone had shot his mother and father. The truth would eventually prove to be even worse: DeFeo's sisters, Dawn, 18, and Allison, 13, and his brothers, Mark, 11, and John, 9, had also been killed, shot in their bedrooms. Within days, authorities concluded that Ronald DeFeo was the killer.

Newsday reported, citing law enforcement sources, that he stood to benefit from $200,000 in insurance policies covering his family and spent part of the day after killing them getting high on heroin.

"It all started so fast," he told police, Newsday reported. "Once it started, I just couldn't stop. It went so fast."

DeFeo also said, at various points, that police had beaten the confession out of him, his mother had done the killings, or his sister Dawn was the killer. Convicted of murder, he spent the rest of his life in a Sullivan County prison. He was 73 when he died in 2021.

A year after the killings, George and Kathy Lutz moved into the house. Their accounts of persecution by malevolent supernatural forces there — demonic voices, ghostly apparitions, an evil pig named Jodie — formed the basis of what Newsday once described as an "ostensibly nonfiction book written by Jay Anson," published in 1977.

Movie made millions

Journalists debunked the Lutzes’ story and a lawyer involved with the book called it a hoax concocted "over many bottles of wine." But the subsequent movie, starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder, grossed $86.4 million. More than 40 spinoffs and sequels with the name "Amityville" in the title have been made since, a producer told Newsday last year.

Paula Uruburu, an emeritus professor of English and film Studies at Hofstra University, said the book and the original movie found an audience that had been primed by "Vietnam, Watergate, mid-’70s cynicism, this wholesale malaise going on in this country ... Metaphorically, it was a representation of all that for people."

If owning a house in Amityville was, for some, the American dream — a place where families were nuclear, neighbors chatted at the Broadway gazebo and even the village name evoked friendliness — "Amityville Horror" undermined that vision by depicting "literally the destruction of the family" by demonic forces from inside the house, Uruburu said.

"It’s the American dream come true, and it all came crashing down in the worst way possible," Uruburu said.

Growing up in nearby Massapequa, Uruburu was friends with Dawn DeFeo. They played on the same softball team, according to Uruburu, and sometimes shopped together at the Sunrise Massapequa Mall.

Uruburu recalled visiting the DeFeo home.

"I thought they were rich because they had this big house on one of the nicest blocks in town, with a pool, boathouse ... There was a big staircase," with family portraits hanging on the wall, she said.

Unheard-of violence

"It wasn’t just a murder, it was six people killed," Uruburu said. "I remember we were in church for the funeral, and seeing these six coffins brought in, you could hear a pin drop. And the idea that it was her own brother that killed his family — that was unheard of. We’ve become immune to this kind of violence, but at this time it was unheard of."

Sometimes, Uruburu said, she takes pictures of the house when its current occupants decorate for Halloween or Christmas. The sight reassures her.

"It makes me think of a living family there," she said, "not the tragedy of what happened."

Amityville Mayor Dennis Siry, a retired FDNY firefighter, said in a text message that he’d "like to see it be forgotten about. We’ll remember the DeFeo family and let them rest in peace, but not give Ron any type of publicity. Let his name be forgotten, like any mass murderer."

When a Newsday reporter visited Ocean Avenue this week, residents declined to talk. On nearby South Ireland Place, Kathleen Schmidt said she and her younger sister had been friendly with Dawn and Allison DeFeo, whom they knew through school at St. Martin of Tours School in Amityville and St. John the Baptist High School in West Islip.

"For us that grew up here when this happened, when I was a teenager, it was devastating," Schmidt said, adding that she was "extremely tired" of the sightseers — hundreds came this Halloween — and found the tradition offensive.

"Let these people rest in peace," she said.

Another neighbor, Matt Bielo, said that was unlikely to happen.

"Tourists aren’t going to go away," Bielo said. "The only way they go away is if they knock down the house, and it’s a nice house so that’s not going to happen."