American Hauntings: The True Stories behind Hollywood's Scariest Movies—from The Exorcist to The Conjuring: The True Stories behind Hollywood’s Scariest Movies—from The Exorcist to The Conjuring

by Robert Bartholomew

  While Anson’s book is no literary masterpiece, he does spin a captivating story that begins slowly and builds to a crescendo. It is an enthralling tale filled with mystery and suspense, a tale of good versus evil and one family’s struggle to survive against demonic forces. But perhaps the story’s greatest appeal is the religious element, for if true, many of the events would appear to confirm the validity of Christianity: the upside-down cross, the cloven footprints in the snow, the priest being ordered to get out, and the refusal of Kathy’s aunt Theresa, a former nun, to enter certain rooms, as they had an evil vibe.65 On another occasion a group of priests discussed the likelihood that there was a demonic presence in the house.66 It is a story that many people would like to believe because it reinforces their Judeo-Christian world view. There is only one problem: The Amityville Horror is a work of fiction.

  Follow the Money

  To gain insight into the underlying motivations in the Amityville saga, one need only follow the money trail. At his murder trial, the prosecution suggested that Ron DeFeo Jr.’s motive for murdering his family was his desire to collect his parents’ life insurance policies, after he initially claimed that he knew nothing about the killings.67 DeFeo later changed his story, saying that his sister Dawn and an unidentified third party were the real killers. “She was plotting to profit from the family inheritance,” DeFeo claimed.68 His appeal was denied, perhaps because of his former attorney, William Weber, who testified that DeFeo was unreliable and had previously given at least fifteen different versions of what happened.69 Weber was no saint and was motivated by visions of dollars from a book deal with the Lutzes; in 1979, he confessed to creating the hoax with them.

  Then there are the Lutzes, who may have perpetrated their hoax in order to gain relief from a mountain of financial woes. Stephen Kaplan, who investigated the case from its early stages, believes it is extremely likely that the Lutzes orchestrated the haunting in order to get out of paying a costly mortgage. “This is a couple who had great financial dilemmas” after looking at buying a house in the $30,000 to $50,000 range, only to suddenly find themselves “in debt for an $80,000 house,” he said.70 Other investigators concur. In 2004, after examining the case for decades, Rick Moran concluded that when he bought the house, George Lutz “didn’t have sufficient income to meet the mortgage payments. In fact, I was amazed any bank would give him a mortgage at all, given the tax assessments in Amityville at the time. The house was a liability.”71 Even though the Cromartys bought the house for a mere $55,000, they complained that it was hard to sell, due to the high property taxes.72 There is no question that after buying the house in 1975, the Lutzes found themselves in an unsustainable situation, with the average cost of a home on their street being over $100,000. Money from George Lutz’s surveying company was drying up, and George was planning to save money by turning the basement into an office in order to stop paying rent at his business site. He was also in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service over his business expenses.73 George also planned to save money on marina fees by putting his speedboat and cabin cruiser in the boathouse that came with the home.74 The Lutzes’ plight was evident as soon as investigators began looking into their story. In 1978, Jordan and Moran observed,

  The purchase of this home was less than logical when one considers not only the cost of taxes, but also the cost of fuel to heat a three-story Dutch colonial that sits on the windward side of a river not half a mile from the Great South Bay of Long Island. All in all, the logic of such a move would escape anyone who thought about it for more than five minutes, unless other considerations were to enter into the argument, a profit motive perhaps, that would not be readily obvious to the casual observer.75

  By their own admission, the Lutzes were in a financial bind. As Jay Anson observed, soon after buying the house, they had “a very serious payroll deficit” at the survey business and faced “mounting bills.”76 The Lutzes’ scheme to create a haunted house—and profit from the story—worked, and by September 1979, George Lutz testified under oath to a federal judge that he had received $100,000 for the book and another $100,000 from the first movie that opened that summer.77 He revealed that by 2000, they had made over a quarter of a million dollars from the original book and $160,000 from the movie. Ironically, he said that about one third of this went to lawyers to either initiate or fend off lawsuits over various claims about the case.78

  Some of the Lutz children have also tried to profit from the Amityville cash cow. One of those is Christopher Quarantino, who was seven years old when he lived in the house with his mother, Kathy, and stepdad, George. In 2011, he gave an interview to Fate magazine’s Rosemary Guiley. He said he was trying to raise money by organizing an online pay-per-view webcast “fireside chat” where he would talk about his Amityville experiences and the haunting at his home in Phoenix, Arizona, where he was living at the time. He claimed that the haunting had followed him there. In discussing her interview with Chris, one gets the distinct impression that the Amityville “haunting” was genuine, as there is no mention of it being a hoax. To its credit, Fate did publish the original exposé on the case, by Peter Jordan and Rick Moran, in 1977. But of course, negative articles are not good for business for a magazine whose core audience is made up of believers in the paranormal. Guiley ends her piece by noting, “FATE has not contacted others originally involved in the case, pending further disclosures from Quarantino.”79 Reminding readers that the Amityville case is a hoax would seem to be pertinent information, but it is conveniently left out!

  Then there is writer Jay Anson. In the years after the publication of the book and until his death in 1980, Rick Morgan made numerous TV and radio appearances during which he would debate Anson. Despite his skeptical perspective, Moran says that the pair became friends off the air. As it turns out, privately Anson was a skeptic. Moran writes, “Did he believe it? No! He didn’t believe in the ‘paranormal,’ but that didn’t stop him from writing the book.” So why write the book? “Anson was open about his need for money: he was not a young man and he earnestly wanted to pen a best-seller.”80 On October 9, 1977, the New York Times published an interview with Anson. He said he “approached the story . . . as a reporter, so that by the end of the book, you believe or you don’t believe. These are the facts. This is what happened to the family . . . to the priest. You make up your own mind as a reader.”81 Perhaps, but a good reporter verifies facts—or at least attempts to. Anson never bothered to verify that his book was indeed “a true story.” In the book’s afterword, Anson writes that many of the Lutzes’ “impressions and reports were later substantiated by the testimony of independent witnesses such as Father Mancuso and local police officials.”82 Nothing could be further from the truth. One hour of basic research at a public library, a few phone calls to people listed in the book, or a call to neighbors would have set alarm bells ringing. In March 1979, Anson was interviewed by Writer’s Digest, and he noted that in attempting to verify parts of the Lutzes’ story, he had conducted “several hours” of interviews with Amityville police officers, the priest, and members of the Amityville Historical Society.83 Anson’s credibility here is dubious. The police are adamant that they were never called to the house until after George Lutz left, and even then they observed nothing supernatural.84 As early as 1977, the priest told investigators that the claims attributed to him in the book were false.85 As for the historical society, they say that neither Lutz nor Anson was told that the Shinnecock Indians believed that the land where the house stood was haunted by demons, because the story is false. But that did not stop Anson from claiming otherwise in the book. The Shinnecock never lived in Amityville, prompting the society’s librarian to observe, “I’ve lived in this area all my life, and I’ve never heard these stories before.”86 Peter Jordan says that Anson told him that writing the book was strictly a business proposition. “You’re one of those naysayers—one of those skeptics who likes to write non-ghost stories. I like to make money . . . and one day I predict that
you are going to be sitting there broke, writing your little non-ghost stories, and I am going to be on an island out in the Bahamas or somewhere, with a truckload of cashmere sweaters.”87 While Anson made millions on the book, he never got to enjoy his cashmere sweaters. He died of a heart attack on March 12, 1980.

  The publisher also bears some responsibility for failing to ensure that a book claiming to be “a true story” is actually true. When Newsday journalists Alex Drehsler and Jim Scovel made queries about the book being riddled with errors and inconsistencies, the director of corporate affairs for Random House refused to discuss the book but did offer an insightful observation. They were told that “authors are responsible for the content and accuracy of the writing, but that ‘many books are published in good faith which include errors.’” Drehsler and Scovel pointed out at the time that despite the cloud over the accuracy of the Lutzes’ claims, it was still being marketed as “A True Story” in the subtitle.88 In December 1977, Curt Suplee of the Washington Post contacted Prentice-Hall editor Tam Mossman, who had hooked the Lutzes up with Jay Anson to write the book. After observing that there were obvious factual errors in the manuscript, Mossman did not seem overly concerned. “It’s impossible for an editor to go through everything with a fine-tooth comb,” he said.89 Even today, the book contains Jay Anson’s affirmation, “To the extent that I can verify them, all the events in this book are true.”90 If there is one indisputable aspect to this case besides the obvious tragedy of the loss of six lives, it is that the Amityville Horror is a story of American greed, for how else can one explain how a book of fiction continues to be marketed as fact? The publishers fail to mention anywhere in the book that the story has been discredited. The reason for this omission is obvious: money. Some recent editions have even dropped the subtitle “A True Story,” such as the one by Pocket Star. However, this is little consolation, because on the back cover blurb of the same edition, it states, “This is the spellbinding, bestselling true story that gripped the nation.”91 This is clearly deceptive. It is no wonder so many people still believe that the Lutzes’ story is true.

  The claim that The Amityville Horror is based on a true story has become a profitable Hollywood formula, as a virtual cottage industry has popped up among filmmakers. Despite clear evidence of a hoax and scores of inaccuracies in the book, when the film The Amityville Horror was released in July 1979, like the book, it too was billed as “based on a true story.” The advertising campaign even featured the phrase “For God’s Sake, GET OUT!”—a reference to the priest who recanted his story under oath. This was soon followed by Amityville II: The Possession in 1982 and Amityville 3-D the following year. But the sequels did not end there. In 1989, Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes was released, quickly followed by The Amityville Curse (1990), Amityville: It’s About Time (1992), and Amityville: New Generation (1993). In Hollywood, if there is public interest and money to be made, there is no such thing as too much of a good thing. Hence, 1996 saw the release of Amityville Dollhouse, followed by The Amityville Haunting in 2011 and, most recently, The Amityville Asylum (2013). Dozens of books have been written on the subject. Many of them continue to assert that the haunting was genuine. A good example is the popular “Complete Idiot’s Guide” book series, published by Penguin, who commissioned Nathan Brown to write The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Paranormal. In it Brown states that it is difficult to tell whether a hoax was perpetrated or not. He also says that parapsychologist Stephen Kaplan made claims that the affair was a hoax. He continues, “It is generally believed that this began a personal vendetta for Kaplan against both the Warrens and the Lutzes. He later recanted his accusations and publicly apologized.”92 What is his source for this extraordinary claim? There is none. In fact, the 286-page Idiot’s Guide is devoid of references.

  The news media also bears some of the blame for keeping the Amityville myth alive. At their core, news organizations are in the business of generating viewer interest and peddling a product—information—and the more sensational the product, the more likely viewers are to tune in and stay tuned in. A good example of this state of affairs took place on Halloween night in 2002, when the American Broadcasting Corporation’s Primetime Thursday aired a TV segment on Amityville. The show contacted Joe Nickell, who gave an extensive pre-air interview on the Lutzes’ hoax. Yet the show deliberately slanted interview clips to marginalize Nickell and give greater credence to the Lutzes’ story than the facts warranted. Those viewers tuning in who were unfamiliar with the hoax were led to believe that the case was still in dispute, because the show created a mystery where none exists. Reporter Elizabeth Vargas then presented a photo taken in the Lutz house during an overnight ghost hunt, which purports to show the face of a young boy, mysteriously caught on camera. Vargas closes by saying, “But no one has an explanation for this picture. Is it really an eerie looking little boy, and, if not, what is it?”93 Nickell, a photographic expert, told Vargas during a pre-air interview that he was convinced the photo was a fake—and that it would have been the simplest matter to produce such an image. Yet his attack on the authenticity of the image as a paranormal artifact was left out.94 The producers of Primetime Thursday were intent on presenting a spooky segment for Halloween. They succeeded, but only because they omitted key facts, the most important one being that the entire affair was a hoax. Clearly, billing the segment as “The Amityville Hoax” would not have been as exciting as an eerie image of “the Amityville Boy Ghost.” The moral of the story is that sensationalism sells, but it comes at a cost: credibility.

  While on the subject of money, let’s not forget the many lawsuits and countersuits that have been filed over the years. In one instance, the Lutzes filed suit for $5.4 million against several parties for invasion of privacy, mental distress, and inappropriately using names for trade purposes. It was later dismissed. Several of the accused banded together and countersued for $2 million, claiming breach of contract and fraud. The Cromartys, who took over the house after the Lutzes, sued Jay Anson and publisher Prentice-Hall for just over a million dollars, claiming that their fictional story was ruining their lives. Even the priest whom the Lutzes had discussed in the book, Father Pecoraro (“Father Mancuso” in the book), sued the Lutzes and the publisher for distorting his involvement in the saga and for invasion of privacy.95 In 2005, shortly before his death from heart disease in the following year, Lutz told People that he had been involved in no less than fourteen different lawsuits related to the case.96 Many of these suits were settled out of court for far less than was asked.

  The Story Refuses to Die

  In March 2013, the Amityville haunting resurfaced again with the release of a documentary, My Amityville Horror, on the life of Daniel “Danny” Lutz, who was just nine years old at the time of the original uproar.97 The documentary is a case study of a troubled man who claims to have been physically abused by his stepfather, George Lutz, and of faded, garbled memories. While Danny seems sincere about what he can recall from the 28 days that he spent at 112 Ocean Avenue as a boy, the events, as he describes them, are clearly embellished, if not created entirely from his imagination, either intentionally or through memory distortion. He says that George possessed supernatural powers similar to those of Samantha on the TV show Bewitched. For instance, he claims that even before they moved to Amityville, he saw George lift a wrench into the air using only his mind. Among his other claims are that an invisible force threw him up a flight of stairs; that an evil spirit took possession of his body, and he had to be exorcised by priests, who beat him in the process; that he killed over a hundred flies in a room, only for the flies to suddenly disappear; and that his bed levitated so high that the bedposts stuck into the sheetrock. Danny’s claims stretch credulity. On one occasion, he tells how a window smashed down on his hands, causing them to “swell up to the size of a child’s baseball glove, five times their normal size.” He says that they suddenly returned to normal “in one second,” with the exception of a pinky. Clearly, Danny has a pr
opensity to embellish! The only question is whether he has come to actually believe that these events happened the way he remembers them or he is making them up. It may be that he created these memories after listening to his parents and reading about what had supposedly happened, after the fact.

  In the film, it becomes clear that Danny hated George Lutz and tried to undermine his authority. Using typical overstatement, he asserts that he tried to kill George “at least 50 times.” Danny said that George would make them march around the house like obedient little soldiers—a house that he did not want to move to in the first place. Danny lashed out. “I . . . started destroying this guy’s world every opportunity that I walked into” and would “just do anything” so “that we could go back home,” he said. Is it possible that some of the low-level poltergeist effects were actually orchestrated by Danny to scare the Lutzes into moving out? Historically, poltergeist cases typically center on a disgruntled child or adolescent in a home, one who is seeking attention or trying to exact revenge. It may be that Danny is telling the truth—recalling what he believes happened, based on false and embellished memories, combined with a traumatic upbringing in which the reality of ghosts was a taken-for-granted fact of life.98 Either way, it becomes clear by the end of the film that Danny has had to battle his own personal demons after moving out of 112 Ocean Avenue. He became temporarily homeless at age 15, and he still harbors a seething hatred for George. My Amityville Horror is more of a biography of a child from a dysfunctional family than a film about supernatural forces; it documents the emotional scars that remain decades later, which take the form of embellished, distorted memories—ghosts from the past that continue to haunt a little boy who is now all grown up.