Inside the Amityville Horror House and the Long Island Town Where It Still Stands Today

Long before the waterfront Dutch colonial house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, N.Y., made headlines—first, for mass murder in 1974 and two years later, for claims of demonic possession—local realtor Jerry O’Connell knew it as home to his best friend in high school and, later, to his own brother.

“I spent a lot of time in that house,” O’Connell tells A&E Crime + Investigation, describing its “grand” interior (five bedrooms, four baths, finished basement, 3,600 square feet), boat house and riverside swimming pool complete with a curving slide. “Every owner who has owned the house since the murders and then, the book and movie, were local people. They knew the house came with baggage. They also knew that the story about what supposedly happened there after the murders was bulls---.”

The indisputable facts of what happened in this placid village along Long Island’s south shore remain a matter of record: In the early-morning hours of November 13, 1974, Ron and Louise DeFeo, along with four of their five children, were shot dead in their beds, leaving the house at 112 Ocean Avenue a grisly crime scene. The DeFeo’s eldest, Ron Jr., the only survivor, eventually confessed to police that he was the one firing the rifle. “Once I started, I just couldn’t stop,” DeFeo said, adding that “voices from the house” turned him into a killer. At his 1975 trial, defense lawyer William Weber argued—in vain—that DeFeo was innocent by reason of insanity. On November 21, 1975, DeFeo was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to six consecutive sentences of 25 years to life in prison. (He died in prison, in 2021, at age 69.)

Also factual: Less than one month after DeFeo’s conviction, George and Kathy Lutz and their three children moved into 112 Ocean Avenue for the bargain-basement, “as-is” price of $80,000 that included the furnishings. And the gore. “The homicide forensics team didn’t clean anything up. So Kathy Lutz moved in and she was scrubbing blood and bone and brain matter off walls, floors and bed frames,” investigative reporter Laura DiDio recalls to A&E Crime + Investigation.

The family lasted just 28 days in the house before they fled in alleged terror, leaving everything behind. George and Kathy described eerie paranormal experiences in the house—swarming flies, red-eyed apparitions, menacing voices and more. “It was like they had been visited by every type of haunting except Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman,” DiDio says.

At the time, DiDio worked as a news producer for New York City’s WNEW Channel 5 where she earned several exclusive interviews with the Lutzes and was entrusted with a key to the house for getting footage for her stories. During one visit, the station’s news anchor reported feeling a chill and their cameraman inexplicably doubled over halfway up the stairs to the scene of the murders. On another, DiDio’s dog stood at the foot of those stairs staring upward, baring his teeth and growling.

“I was like, how come I don’t feel anything inside the house?” DiDio says now. “A lot of this stuff was made up, but there were a lot of creepy things that did happen.”

Briefly, the Lutzes teamed up with Weber, DeFeo’s lawyer, to sell their story for a book, Jay Anson’s 1977 The Amityville Horror, and a subsequent movie by the same name. Opening in theaters in July 1979, the movie starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder was one of that summer’s top-grossing films. However, in September of that year, Weber admitted to People magazine that the series of spooks that occurred at the house was a “hoax” and that he and the Lutzes “created this horror story over many bottles of wine.”

But the viral popularity of the sensational story (by 1981, Anson’s book had sold 6.5 million copies and was reprinted 37 times) already started sending scores of looky-loos to Ocean Avenue, clogging traffic on the roads and in the waterways in the 9,700-person town. “They came by busloads and in boats on the Amityville River,” DiDio says. “I was getting calls at the TV station from local teenagers asking if they could have sleepovers in the house.”

The macabre pilgrimages continue today, despite various efforts to foil them by making the house less recognizable. Subsequent owners repainted the dark exterior to a pale off-white, changed the official address to 108 Ocean Avenue, filled in the swimming pool and replaced the quarter-circle third-story windows—previously rendered on the 1979 movie poster as fiery orange eyes—that faced the road. However, “the house still gets some attention from tourists,” O’Neill, who has lived in Amityville for 72 of his 77 years, says with a sigh.

Today, waterfront VRBO rentals just blocks down river from the old DeFeo house can go for as much as $1,600 per night.

When the Lutzes’ story and subsequent book and movie put a stain on the name Amityville, there was briefly talk around town about the village possibly buying the property and tearing it down “so that [it] would just go away,” O’Neill recalls. “There was also talk of having the house moved into the village center and officially make it a tourist attraction. None of that happened.”

Did they ever think of just changing the name Amityville? “No, no, no. Not a chance,” O’Neill says.

O’Neill was the listing agent when the Ocean Avenue house last went on the market, in 2016 for an asking price of $850,000. “It’s a big, beautiful house. A classic, with a great location on the water. It has a grand center hall with a wide center staircase. Great for entertaining,” O’Neill says. “Every time it came on the market, there was a good local buyer paying a fair market price.”

His 2016 listing sold in 2017 at the reduced price of $605,000 (Zillow estimates it could go for more than $1.1 million today) to what DiDio describes as a respectable young family of four with a small wellness business in town. She and O’Neill both note that, of all the residents of the house since the Lutzes, none have run from it screaming or reported any kind of disturbance aside from gawkers in the street, sometimes tying up traffic.

“All because of a tired old ghost story that was not true,” O’Neill says. “We just wish it would go away. The only horror about that house is the fact that a kid killed his whole family there.”