The Amityville Horror House

On the night of November 13th, 1974, six members of the DeFeo family were shot dead in their beds at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. The killer was their own son. Thirteen months later, George and Kathy Lutz moved in with their three children, telling themselves that what happened to the DeFeos had nothing to do with them. They lasted 28 days. What they experienced inside that house — the voices, the visions, the figure in the yard with glowing red eyes, the slow unraveling of a man who went to sleep one person and woke up another — became the most famous haunting account in American history. But not everyone believes them. In this episode of The Breeze Files, we walk through the murders, the 28 days, and the question that has followed this story for fifty years: was it a haunting, a hoax, or something in between?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Thirteen months later, they lasted twenty-eight days. What they claimed happened inside that house launched one of the most famous and most contested haunting stories in American history. In this episode of the Breeze Files, we go room by room through the Amityville case. The brutal murders, the Lutz family terrifying account, and the investigation that followed. And the uncomfortable question that shadowed the story for 50 years. Did any of it actually happened? Welcome to another edition of the Breeze Files. I am your host, Cody Breeze, along with my co-host, Nick Holly.

SPEAKER_01 1:39

What's up, everybody?

SPEAKER_00 1:41

All right. So today we talk about one of the most controversial paranormal cases in American history. We're talking about the Amity Bill House and the Amity Bill War. Nick, what can you tell me about this? Thank you for that interesting fact. I did not know that. Um have you ever seen any of the films? We're gonna get right into it. We're gonna we're gonna inform you guys if you guys aren't familiar with it. It is one of the most famous cases in American history. This is the Emily Bill house. To understand Emily Bill, you have to start with the DeFeos. Because what happened in that house in November of 1974 was not supernatural. It was something worse. It was entirely human. He moved his family to Amdeville, a quiet suburban town on Long Island in 1965. The house at 112 Ocean Avenue was large and comfortable. A Dutch colonial with a boathouse on a canal, a swimming pool, a Finnish basement. By outward appearances, the Defoees were living the American dream. The reality inside the house was darker. Ronald Sr. was domineering and volatile. By multiple accounts, he was physically abusive to his wife and children. His eldest son, Ronald Jr., also known as Butch, had a serious drug problem and a history of violent outbursts. The relationship between father and son was explosive. On the night of November 13, 1974, sometime after 3 in the morning, Butch DeFeo took a 35 caliber Marlin rifle and walked through his family's house. He killed his father first and then his mother, then his siblings, one by one, room by room. All of them were found face down. All of them appeared to have been asleep. The lack of struggle has always been one of the most disturbing elements of this case. Six people in separate rooms, and not one of them woke up in time to run or fight. Theories have ranged from sedation to a kind of collective paralysis of disbelief. That each person who heard the shot before their own simply could not process what it meant. Butch DeFeyo was arrested the following day. He confessed. At the trial, he attempted an insanity defense claiming voices had told him to kill his family. The jury didn't buy it. He was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to six consecutive life terms. He died in prison in 2021, having spent nearly 50 years behind bars. The house sat empty for 13 months, and then the Lutz family moved in.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

George and Kathy Lutz were not naive people. They were practical, grounded, working class. George ran a land surveying company. Kathy was a mother of three. Whatever had happened in that house was there's a money. Not something that would follow anyone else's side. The price was eighty thousand dollars for the month. They needed the space. The moving trucks arrived. The family carried boxes to the front door. The same front door that DeFayos had used, the same hallway, the same staircase. George later said that the house felt cold from the first moment. Not the cold of a house that had been empty through a Long Island winter. Something else. A cold that didn't respond to the heat being turned up. A cold that seemed to come from inside the walls. That first night, George couldn't sleep. He laid in bed staring at the ceiling while Kathy slept beside him. He said something felt wrong, but he couldn't have told you what. He got up, walked downstairs, checked the doors and windows, everything was locked, everything was still, and he went back to bed. He checked his watch before he closed his eyes. It was 3.15 a.m. He didn't know yet that 3.15 was the estimated time of the DeFeo's murders. He wouldn't make that connection for days. But it would happen again the next night. And the next night after that, every single night he spent in that house, George Lutz woke up at exactly 3.15 a.m. Not 3.10. Not 3.20. 3.15. Like something was waking him on purpose. Within the first week, George developed what he could only describe as a compulsion. The house had a fireplace in the living room, and George became obsessed with keeping it burning. Not because the house was cold, the heat was on, the family was comfortable, but he couldn't stop feeding it. He would get up in the middle of the night to tend it. He would skip meals to keep the fire going. Kathy would find him standing in front of it, staring into the flames, not responding when she spoke to him. It wasn't like him. George was not a brooding man. He was not prone to fixation. But something in that house had reached inside him and turned a dial. And he couldn't find a way to turn it back. He started losing weight. He stopped going into the office. He became short-tempered with children in ways that frightened Kathy, because it wasn't who he was. She said later that she felt like she was watching her husband disappear in slow motion, that the man sitting in front of the fire every night looked like George, but something essential about him was draining away. About a week after moving in, Kathy arranged for a priest to come and bless the house. Father Ralph Bacaro was a family friend. He arrived one afternoon while the family was still unpacking. He walked to the ground floor, saying prayers, sprinkling holy water. The family was grateful and relaxed. It felt like the right thing to do: a fresh start, a cleansing. George shook the priest's hand and showed him upstairs. On the second floor there was a small room, a sewing room used for storage. Father Picaro stepped inside and began to pray. And then a voice spoke to him. It was not Kathy's voice. It was not George's. It came from inside the room, from nowhere visible, and it said, but the force he described as physical. Get out. Father Picaro left the room immediately. He finished the blessing of the house as quickly as he could, and he said his goodbyes. He did not tell the Lutzes what had happened in that room, and later admitted he didn't want to frighten them. In the days that followed, the priest developed blisters on his hands, the hands he had used to hold the prayer book in that room. The calls, he said, never connected properly. There was interference on the line, a strange noise. He could never get through. The Lutzes said they never received a warning. Missy was five years old when the family moved into the house. She was a cheerful, imaginative child, the kind of kid who collected dolls and talked to herself while she played. In the first days of the new house, nothing seemed to bother her. She was happy to have a bigger room. And then she found a friend. She started talking about Jody. Jodi was, she explained to her mother, a pig, but not a regular pig. Jody was big, and Jodi could talk. And Jodi had big red eyes that glowed in the dark. Kathy smiled and nodded the way parents do when their children announce a new imaginary companion. But the things Missy said Jodi told her were not the things a five-year-old should know. Missy told her mother that Jody said the house was his. She told her that Jodi didn't like certain people coming inside. She began to repeat things about the DeFeo family. Details Kathy was certain no one had told her. Information she had no way of accessing. When Kathy asked where she had heard these things, Missy said Jodi told her. One night, Kathy went to check on Missy and found her standing at her bedroom window, looking out into the backyard. It was the middle of the night. When Kathy asked what she was looking at, Missy didn't turn around. She said Jodi was outside. Kathy looked out the window. In the darkness of the yard, just visible at the edge of the tree line, she saw two red points of light. Like eyes, watching the house. She grabbed Missy and took her out of the room and did not sleep the rest of the night. It was December. Long Island, December is cold. Not a time of the year where you expect insects of any kind, let alone large ones. But within the first two weeks, the Lutzes discovered a room in the house that was thick with flies. Not a few flies. Not a handful that had found their way in through a gap somewhere. Hundreds of them, black, fat, clustered on the windows of the room at the back of the upper floor, buzzing continuously, unmoved when George tried to clear them. They returned the next day and the day after that. There was no source he could find, no food, no nest, no entry point. They were simply there, every morning, as if they had always been there. George called an exterminator. The exterminator found nothing they could explain. The flies continued. By the second week, Kathy was genuinely frightened, not of the house, but of her own husband. George had always been a warm person, patient with children, affectionate with Kathy, and reliable. But the man she was living with now has something different. He sat for hours without speaking. He snapped at the kids over nothing. He would be standing at the living room window after dark and stare out at the canal, and when Kathy touched his shoulder, he would flinch as if she had burned him. He smelled different, she said. She struggled to describe it. Something animal, something damp, something old. He had also started to look different. His face had taken on a gauntness she couldn't account for given how much he was eating. His eyes, she said, had changed. Not the color, but something behind them. Like someone had turned a light down. George himself described it as feeling like he was being hollowed out, like something was taking up residence in the space where he used to be. He said he had thoughts he didn't recognize as his own. Dark ones, violent ones, directed at his family. He didn't act on them, but they were there. And they terrified him because they felt like they were coming from somewhere outside of himself. If George was slowly being eroded, Kathy's experiences were more sudden, more physical. The first time it happened, she was asleep. She felt arms around her, but not George's arms. George was beside her, but the arms of something she couldn't see, wrapping around her, from behind, pulling her close. She said it felt real, not like a dream, not like the half-imagined sensation of falling asleep. Real pressure, real weight, real warmth, and then a horrible cold underneath the warmth. She lay completely still, terrified to move, until it released her. It happened again and again. Whatever it was seemed to grow bolder with each passing night. And then there was the mirror. Kathy was getting ready for bed one evening and caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She told George later that at first she thought it was a light, a trick of the shadow. But she stopped and looked more carefully. And the face in the mirror was not hers. It was the face of an old woman. Deeply lined, sunken, wrong. And it was smiling at her. She screamed. George came running. By the time he got there, the reflection was hers again. Just Kathy, pale and shaking, staring at herself in the glass. By the fourth week, the family had reached a breaking point that none of them had words for. They weren't sleeping. The children were frightened and clinging. George had become a shadow of himself. Kathy was holding the household together through sheer force of will, but she was fraying. On the night of January 14th, 1976, something happened that none of them fully described in public. George awoke at 3:15 a.m., as he always did. But this time, he said, he didn't feel just wrong. He felt like something the house was reaching a conclusion. Like whatever had been building over the past 28 days had arrived at the moment they had been moving toward all along. He woke Kathy. He didn't explain. He just said, we're leaving right now. Kathy didn't argue. She woke the children. They took what they could carry: some clothes, some essentials. They left the furniture. They left the food in the kitchen. They left Missy's toys. They walked out the front door at somewhere around 3:30 a.m. And they got in the car and they drove away. George did not look back at the house. He said later that he was afraid of what he might see looking back at him from one of the windows. They never returned. Not once. Whatever they left behind in that house, they left forever.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

The Lux story might have made an original folklore, if not for what happened next. In 1977, author Jay Hansen published the Hampton War based on George. But alongside the book's success came scrutiny. Serious scrutiny. Investigators began checking the Lutz's claims against verifiable records. What they found was troubling. The Amdeyville Police Department stated that they had received no calls from the Lutz family during the 28 days they lived in the house. Despite the Lutz's claiming numerous incidents severe enough to warrant outside help. No police reports, no documentation. Father Picaro, the priest, initially supported elements of the Lutz account, but under examination, his story shifted. His diocese stated that the church had no official involvement with the house and could not corroborate the claims. Neighbors who lived on Ocean Avenue during the Lutz's family's 28 days said that they noticed nothing unusual, no strange activity, no apparent distress from the family. Nothing that would suggest a household being terrorized by supernatural forces. The DeFeo's family defense attorney, William Weber, made a claim that they would become central to controversy. He said he had sat with George Lutz and together they had constructed the haunting story over a bottled wine as a strategy to reopen the DeFeo case and create reasonable doubt around Butch DeFeo's conviction. Weber filed a lawsuit. The Lutzes denied everything. The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court. And yet, the Lutzes never recanted. George Lutz until his death in 2006 maintained that everything they reported was real. Kathy Lutz, who died the same year, said the same. They passed lie detector tests twice. They stood by their account under legal examination. Whatever happened to them, or whatever they believed happened to them, they never let go of it. The case for a hoax is substantial. The lack of police records is hard to explain away. The attorney's claims, while self-serving, are specific enough to take seriously. The physical evidence, the green slime, the cloven prints, the levitation, was never documented by anyone outside the family. Subsequent owners of the house, several of them, have reported nothing unusual. One family lived there for nearly a decade and said it was a perfectly ordinary land. James Cromarty, who bought the house after the letz's, was openly frustrated by the attention the story brought to his property. He said unequivocally that nothing strange ever happened there. He said the only monsters he encountered were the curiosity seekers who showed up on his lawn at all hours. The case against a clean hoax is more complicated than it's often presented. The Lutzes were not sophisticated media operators. They did not initially seek publicity. The book came later through a connection made by others. And the financial picture of the hoax theory doesn't quite add up. The couple had made comparatively little for the book rights, and the disruption to their lives was enormous and sustained. They moved repeatedly. They faced grasp. They spent decades defending themselves. There is also the matter of what George Lutz described as his own psychological deterioration. Whatever caused it, whether supernatural forces, the genuine stress of living in a murder house, or something else entirely, the man who moved into 112 Ocean Avenue in December of 1975, was not the same man who drove away in January. People who knew him confirmed the change. In Father Picaro's account, however inconsistent, it became over the years, began with something. A room. A feeling. So does the possibility that something, not necessarily supernatural, but something genuinely disturb the people who pass through that house. These two things are not mutually exclusive. People can be frightened by a house where six people were murdered. They can experience genuine psychological trauma. And they can, in telling that story, add to it, shape it, allow it to grow beyond what they actually experienced. Whether the Amdeville Horror was a hoax, a haunting, a trauma response, or a combination of all three, one hundred twelve Ocean Avenue has earned its place in history. Not because of ghosts, but because of the questions it refuses to answer. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of the Amityville Horror House. Um I remember when I was younger watching the film, and it scared the living shit out of me. Not the one with Ryan Reynolds, uh, but the original one. The one with Ryan Reynolds, I wasn't like the biggest fan of. Uh not that I don't like Ryan Reynolds, but I kind of just don't like Ryan Reynolds. Uh, but anyway, um, so Nick, what did you take from everything that you learned about this house?

SPEAKER_01 25:37

Well, Cody, I think what happened to the DeFeo family was definitely tragic, and it kind of forever made an imprint on the Amneyville house. Um when we pivot to the Lutz family, uh that's when I think we kind of run into did it happen, did it not happen? And there's definitely tons of room for uh houses, uh embellishments, and there's just not a lot of credible evidence. You know, we're talking about a guy claiming these things who also claim to be slowly mentally deteriorating. Um we're taking the accounts from you know this gentleman uh as far as the rest of the family. Um, even the the wife. Um, I mean who's to say what's you know what really happened, but I'm just not so uh the plus account of what happened. Um I think it makes for a great horror story. I think it makes for a great plus film, but as far as fact I'm just not totally sure if that's actually what happened. It sounds pretty cool though. Yeah, I'm glad that they made uh so many films, uh especially the one with Ryan. Um pretty great to see him shirtless, but that's just me.

SPEAKER_00 27:18

Other than your opinion of Ryan Reynolds, I I do agree with uh most of what you said. Uh definitely, I do think that uh with the DeFeo family murders, uh, that it definitely leaves some kind of imprint on the house. It's just odd that it was only the Luxis family that experienced anything at this house. Uh I talked about the Gary Demon House uh a few weeks ago, and there's police reports, there's accounts from several different people that have experienced stuff or experienced paranormal stuff in that house compared to uh the Lutz's experience, where it was only them and even the the priest that you know they they talked about recanted his statement. So it definitely raises a lot of questions. The attorney saying that him and George Lutz uh fabricated the whole story and uh concocted it while drinking wine together. You know, and you want to believe the family because they they went to the grave with with this. They never went back on their word, but it's just you know, who's to know what really happened again? It comes down to that. We'll we'll never know what really happened in that house. Uh that's just the way it is. All right, guys. Uh with that, uh, we're gonna we're gonna wrap this episode up. Uh as always, I want to thank all you guys for listening to this podcast. It means a lot to me. I really love doing this, and I like that, you know, best friends is doing it with me now. Uh and we're having a good time doing it, you know, throwing some beers back, uh, just and and doing other crazy shit. I'm just kidding. We're really just sitting at my kitchen table uh talking about it. So all right, guys. As always.

SPEAKER_01 29:22

Wait, wait, Cody, hold on. Remember.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right, you're right. Oh shit. All right. Uh just another reminder, guys. Uh still haven't gotten any submissions yet, but I'm hoping one day, one of these days, uh one of you guys is going to email me, Tody Brees, C-O-D-Y-B-R-E-E-Z 25 at gmail.com, one of your paranormal experiences, your uncle, your aunt, your your dad, your cousin, your friend, your neighbor. Uh, I just I want to hear about it and I want to tell everybody about it. Or you can tell people about it if you really want to. Uh, I just think it's super interesting, and I think everybody, you know, would be interested in in hearing these stories that, you know, aren't well-known stories, but I I do think that there are definitely a lot of cases and a lot of instances of paranormal stuff that happens every day that we don't know about. And I'd like to know about it. And I'm sure others would too. So if you guys want to hit me up on that, either on my IG, maybe the TikTok, maybe, you know, the email, uh, just you know, let me know. Anyway, thanks again for listening. I hope everybody's having a good day or good afternoon, good evening, whenever you guys are listening to this. Um, this has been another episode of the Breeze Files. And always remember, you're never alone.