These are some of the facts as they are known.
On November 13, 1974, in the house at 112 Ocean Ave., Amityville, 24-year-old Ronald DeFeo murdered his family. DeFeo used a high-powered rifle, shot to death his father, mother, two brothers and two sisters. All six members of Ronald DeFeo’s family were killed as they slept and all, said police, were found lying in the same position, on their stomachs with their heads resting on their arms.
At his murder trial, Ronald DeFeo testified that he had killed his family because he had heard voices. "Whenever I looked around, there was no one there, so it must have been God talking to me," he said.
On December 18, 1975, more than a year after the terrible murders, a family of five moved in. They were George and Kathy Lutz and their children Daniel, 9, Christopher, 7 and Missy 5. Twenty eight days later the family fled the house, claiming it was haunted.
According to the Lutzes and their priest, the following events took place during the 28 days the Lutzes lived at 112 Ocean Avenue:
•While the priest was blessing the house as the family move in, a strange masculine voice clearly said to him "Get out!" As he drove back to the rectory, the hood of the priest’s car flew open, smashing against his windshield. One of the welded hinges tore loose. The right door flew open. The car stalled. The priest summoned a friend for help and later the friend called the priest and said, "Do you know what happened to me after I dropped you off? The windshield wipers, they began to fly back and forth like crazy! I couldn’t stop! I never turn them on! What the hell is going on?"
•In the house windows flew up and down and doors were repeatedly ripped off their hinges in the house even though they were securely locked.
•Mrs. Lutz levitated a foot above her bed on several occasions and floated toward an open window. On one of the occasions, when her husband pulled her back, her 30-year-old face had been transformed into the face of a 90-year-old woman - "the hair wild, a shocking white, the face a mass of wrinkles and ugly lines and saliva dripping from the toothless mouth."
•In the dead of winter, hundreds of buzzing flies materialized in one of the upstairs rooms of the house.
•A 12-inch crucifix hung in a closet by Mrs. Lutz revolved until it was upside down and gave off a sour smell.
•The insides of the toilet bowls in two upstairs bathrooms turned absolutely black, "as though someone has painted (them) from the bottom to the edge just below the rim" even though Mrs. Lutz had recently scrubbed both bowls with Clorox.
•Lutz discovered a small secret room in the basement, a room that appeared in no blueprints of the house. It was painted solid red - and had the smell of blood. In one of the red walls, Lutz saw a vision of a face - a face that he would later find from newspaper photographs was that of Ronald DeFeo.
•Every time the family priest would attempt to help the Lutzes, bleeding blisters would erupt on his hands. Telephone calls between the Lutzes and the priest were continually interrupted or cut off by loud noises and eerie sounds, making it impossible for them to communicate.
•While standing outside the house one night, Lutz saw the face of a pig with glowing red eyes in the window of his daughter, Missy. Missy began to continually talk of "my friend Jodie, the biggest pig you ever saw." One night Missy pointed toward her window and there were the two red eyes again. "That’s Jodie," Missy said. "He wants to come in." Mrs. Lutz swung a chair at the window, breaking it and "there was an animal cry of pain, a loud squealing."
•The flowing red eyes again appeared at a downstairs window. When Lutz ran outside, there were tracks in the snow - "No man or woman had made those tracks. The prints had been left by cloven hooves, like those of an enormous pig."
•A bartender who had worked at a party in the house at 112 Ocean Avenue when the DeFeos had lived there told Lutz that he had found the secret red room in the basement and that after seeing it, "I used to have nightmares about it. Sometimes I’d dream that people - I don’t know who they were - were killing dogs and pigs in there and using their blood for some kind of ceremony."
•Mrs. Lutz continued to feel invisible hands gripping her and one day found flaming red welts covering her body, "as though she had been burned by a hot poker."
•Green gelatinous slime began to ooze from the ceiling and from door openings.
•A white-hooded figure, its face half-blasted away as if by a gun, appeared in the living room fireplace and was permanently burned into the fireplace wall.
Today, the home is occupied by a family that is living there in peace. The front of the home, as well as its number on Ocean Avenue, have been changed and despite the regular visits by the curious and believers in the supernatural, life along Ocean Avenue in Amityville is fairly routine. Sometimes a car will pull up in the middle of the night. A passenger will get out and cut away a piece of grass from the home. Sometimes another car will pass in the middle of a hot, summer afternoon, stop and the occupants will stare. Sometimes a deranged individual may even try to break into the home. But mostly, it is just another house in Amityville with nothing more than a horrific history.