# 112 Ocean Avenue was a violently haunted house

**Verdict: Contradicted.** The 1974 DeFeo murders were real and are not in dispute. The haunting that supposedly drove the Lutz family out 13 months later is a different matter. The defense attorney who helped shape the story has said on the record that he and the Lutzes invented it, a federal judge found the book to be largely fiction, every subsequent owner has reported nothing paranormal, and researchers have documented dozens of factual impossibilities in the 'true story.'

Category: Unexplained Phenomena · Era: Post-Watergate America · First circulated: 1975–1977 · Believed by: One of the best-selling haunted-house accounts ever published
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/amityville-horror

## Summary
A real mass murder at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York, became the backdrop for one of the most famous haunted-house stories in American pop culture, yet the haunting itself rests on the word of one family, a defense attorney's later on-record admission that they built the story together, and a book whose 'true' details keep failing to check out.

## The claim
That after Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered six members of his family at 112 Ocean Avenue in November 1974, the house became host to a genuinely malevolent paranormal presence that violently tormented the next occupants, George and Kathy Lutz, during the 28 days they lived there in December 1975 and January 1976, manifesting as slime, swarms of flies, cold spots, levitation, and a demonic 'presence'; and that Jay Anson's 1977 book and the resulting films documented real events.

## Origin and timeline
- 1974-11-13: Ronald DeFeo Jr., 23, shoots and kills six members of his family, his parents and four siblings, in their beds at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, New York.
- 1975-11-21: A Suffolk County jury convicts DeFeo on six counts of second-degree murder after his insanity defense, built around a claim that he heard voices, is rejected; he is sentenced to six consecutive terms of 25 years to life.
- 1975-12-18: George and Kathy Lutz close on the house, sold well below market value given the crime, and move in with their three children.
- 1976-01-14: The Lutz family leaves the house for good after roughly 28 days, later saying they fled a violent haunting; they never return, even to collect most of their belongings.
- 1976-02-14: The Lutzes give their first public account of the haunting to a Long Island newspaper, setting the story in motion.
- 1976 (mid): George and Kathy Lutz meet with DeFeo's former defense attorney, William Weber, and writer Paul Hoffman to discuss a possible book deal built around the house's story.
- 1977-09-13: Jay Anson publishes 'The Amityville Horror: A True Story,' based on roughly 45 hours of taped interviews with the Lutzes; it becomes a multimillion-copy bestseller.
- 1977-05: The Lutzes sue Weber, Hoffman, two self-described psychics, and several publishers for $4.5 million over rights and privacy claims; the defendants countersue for $2 million, alleging fraud and breach of contract.
- 1979-09-10: Federal judge Jack B. Weinstein dismisses the bulk of the Lutzes' suit, stating the book appeared 'to a large extent' to be 'a work of fiction, relying in large part upon the suggestions of Mr. Weber,' and refers possible ethics violations by the attorneys to the New York State Bar Association.
- 1979-09-17: William Weber tells People magazine: 'I know this book is a hoax. We created this horror story over many bottles of wine.'
- 1977–1987: James and Barbara Cromarty buy the house and live in it for a decade, reporting no paranormal activity; they later sue the Lutzes, Anson, and the publisher over invasion of privacy and the story's commercial exploitation of their home, and change the house number to deter tourists.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The Lutzes fled the house in the middle of winter, in only 28 days, leaving most of their belongings behind; that is not something people do without a real fright.
  Evidence: The abrupt departure is genuine and undisputed. But it is also consistent with a family that had bought a stigmatized, oversized house it could not really afford, at a steep discount tied explicitly to a mass murder, and needed a story that explained walking away from the investment without simply admitting buyer's remorse or financial strain, a motive the Lutzes' own eventual book deal gave them a direct financial incentive to supply.
- Claim: The book describes green slime oozing from walls, swarms of flies in winter, cloven hoofprints in the snow, and a hidden 'red room': vivid, specific details that read as more than an urban legend.
  Evidence: Independent researchers who compared the book against weather records, police logs, and the house's actual layout found the specifics did not hold up: there was no snowfall on the nights the hoofprints were supposedly found, no police record of the repeated visits described, and the 'red room' the Cromartys later found was an ordinary closet, never hidden and never bloodstained.
- Claim: A local Catholic priest, referred to in the book as 'Father Mancuso,' claimed he was warned to leave the house by a disembodied voice and later suffered inexplicable ailments, corroborating the Lutzes independently.
  Evidence: The real priest behind that account, later identified as Father Ralph Pecoraro, gave inconsistent versions of his experience over the years and, in at least one sworn statement connected to the Lutzes' litigation, described his visit and reaction in far more modest terms than the book's dramatization. He is a single source relayed through the same book and family whose credibility is itself in question, not an outside corroborating witness.

## Why people believe it
- The story is grafted onto a real, horrifying crime: the DeFeo murders happened, are a matter of public court record, and lend every later claim about the house a borrowed authenticity it would not have on its own.
- Jay Anson's book was marketed and sold explicitly as nonfiction, and the 1979 film's framing, print advertising, and the sheer scale of its sales (in the tens of millions of copies and box-office dollars) gave the account a cultural weight that outran the thin, contested evidence underneath it.
- A financially struggling young family with a plausible motive to fabricate is a less satisfying story than a genuinely evil house, and horror sells better as 'true,' an incentive that ran through the Lutzes, their ghostwriter, their would-be literary agent, and every subsequent film studio alike.
- Once the legend was established, later owners' insistence that nothing paranormal ever happened could itself be read by believers as part of a cover-up or a house that had simply 'gone quiet,' a claim that is functionally unfalsifiable and keeps the story alive regardless of the negative evidence.

## Open questions
- The haunting itself is not in genuine dispute; the co-author's on-record admission, the federal judge's ruling, and decades of negative evidence from every later owner settle that question. What remains genuinely unresolved is narrower and predates the haunting entirely: Ronald DeFeo Jr. never gave one consistent account of the murders themselves. Over the years he variously blamed a Mafia hitman, then named his sister Dawn and two friends as participants, and in a 2000 prison interview with researcher Ric Osuna described killing only Dawn and his parents while others staged the rest of the scene. Osuna's subsequent ballistics review raised specific questions about whether Dawn's wounds are consistent with DeFeo having acted entirely alone. That dispute has never reopened DeFeo's conviction, and it does not make the later paranormal claims any more credible, but exactly who was in the house on the night of November 13, 1974, remains less settled in the specialized literature than the conviction alone suggests.

## Sources
- William Weber, quoted on the record: 'I know this book is a hoax. We created this horror story over many bottles of wine.', People magazine (1979)
- Ruling dismissing Lutz v. Hoffman et al., finding the book appeared 'to a large extent' to be 'a work of fiction, relying in large part upon the suggestions of Mr. Weber,' and referring possible attorney ethics violations to the New York State Bar Association, Hon. Jack B. Weinstein, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York (1979)
- People v. DeFeo: conviction on six counts of second-degree murder and sentencing to six consecutive terms of 25 years to life, Suffolk County Supreme Court, New York (1975)
- Public statement and litigation by James and Barbara Cromarty (subsequent homeowners), disputing the book's factual claims and suing over commercial exploitation of their home, Cromarty family press conference and civil suit records (1977)
- Independent fact-checking investigation cross-referencing 'The Amityville Horror' against weather records, police logs, and the house's physical layout, Rick Moran and Peter Jordan, researchers
- The Amityville Horror: A True Story, Jay Anson (Prentice-Hall), the primary text whose 'true story' claims are the subject of this entry (1977)
- Amityville Hoax, Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research: https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/amityville-hoax/
- The Amityville Horror Conspiracy: a twenty-year independent investigation concluding the haunting was fabricated for profit, Stephen Kaplan and Roxanne Salch Kaplan (Toad Hall, Inc.) (1995)
- The Night the DeFeos Died: Reinvestigating the Amityville Murders, Ric Osuna (Xlibris Corp.) (2002)

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/amityville-horror