The Amityville Horror

The story of the Lutz family, who moved into a house on Long Island in December 1975, a year after six members of the DeFeo family were killed there, and said supernatural forces drove them out.

On 13 November 1974, Ronald DeFeo, then 23, shot dead his parents, his two sisters and his two brothers at the family home at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, on Long Island. Wikipedia records that he went into a nearby bar that evening saying his parents had been shot. A group went back to the house with him, and police found six family members dead in their beds. NBC News reported his death in prison in 2021, aged 69.

George and Kathy Lutz moved in with their three children on 18 December 1975. Joe Nickell, writing in Skeptical Inquirer, notes that the family said terrifying supernatural forces soon made them leave. Jay Anson told their story in The Amityville Horror (1977), sold as non-fiction. The AFI Catalog records that American International Pictures bought the film rights in 1978 for more than $200,000.

Benjamin Radford, also in Skeptical Inquirer, reports that William Weber, who had been DeFeo's lawyer, later said he and the Lutzes had invented the story over a great deal of wine. Radford writes that Weber hoped to use it to win his client a retrial, and that the Lutzes later conceded almost all of it was fiction.