There’s a house up for sale in the state of New York. The location is good — it’s an hour and a half drive outside the New York City, so, rural enough to satisfy a country-dweller, but definitely not isolated from the big city. The house itself was built in 1927, and is situated on an 11,850 square-foot lot. It’s got five beds, 3.5 baths, and is listed at $850,000. But, uh…there’s one catch. You might have heard of The Amityville Horror? Yeah. It’s that house. Definitely a little more ominous than purchasing the house from Full House or The OC.
Some background, if all you know about the house in Amityville, N.Y. is that portals to Hell sometimes happen to open up in basements. Yes, there’s the string of Amityville films, but the films were actually based on a book, which was based on a (gulp) real-life event: Ronald DeFeo Jr.’s massacre of all six of his family members on November 13, 1974. According to DeFeo’s police confession, “the voices from the house made him do it.”
But wait, it gets better. Because the very next year, George and Kathy Lutz purchased the property at 112 Ocean Avenue (later changed to 108 Ocean Avenue to confuse visitors, if you’re noticing a discrepancy), complete with the DeFeo family’s furniture still in it, for a cool $60,000. The couple, along with their three children, moved into the house that December. And that’s when things really started to get weird.
In the 28 days the Lutz family lived in the house, they witnessed all sorts of terrifying phenomena. According to The Amityville Horror, George would wake up at 3:15 every morning — the exact time DeFeo killed his parents and four younger siblings with a lever-action Marlin rifle. Kathy was plagued with nightmares of the murders — nightmares that revealed to her the order in which the family was killed, and the rooms they were killed in. The kids turned into stomach sleepers — the position the bodies of the DeFeo family were in when they were discovered. The family would hear noises of doors slamming, windows closing — even the voice of a demon telling them to get out. Mysterious black stains developed on the toilets and the walls. Swarms of flies plagued the family, despite the December chill. Things were so bad the final night the Lutz family stayed in the house that they actually never gave an account of it to anyone.
And now, that experience can be yours for the taking! The good news is, not everyone who’s lived in the Ocean Avenue home has had the same experiences as the Lutz family. James and Barbara Cromarty purchased the home in March 1977 for just $55,000 and never encountered anything out of the ordinary with it.
So maybe the Lutz family was just crazy? Hard to say. James Smith, a realtor who visited the home when it was last up for sale in 2010, reportedly felt a chill in the air when he stepped into the basement. As he told the blog Savive’s Corner back in 2011, “You know that feeling when you are sleeping and you can tell someone is looking over you, someone is standing there before you even see them, and then you open your eyes and you see someone standing there? That’s what it felt like.”
Are you brave enough to put up an offer? The good news is, the house’s iconic quarter-moon windows were replaced by a pair of much less demonic-looking rectangle windows in August 1987, by then-owners Peter and Jeanne O’Neill. You can change the facade. But can you change the house’s memories?
(Via Estately)
