Stuff You Should Know - How the Amityville Horror Worked

Episode Date: October 25, 2018

In early 1975, the world was introduced to George and Kathy Lutz, a couple who had fled their home in Amityville, NY to escape a powerful, evil supernatural presence living there. And this being the 70s, the world went nuts for their story. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. No Nonsense.

Let's get down to business. Bryant, there's Jerry. What's going on with this thing rolling? And again, it's me, Josh. Put the three of us together. You get stuff you should know. The late 2018 edition, which is tense. It's Josh, Dr. Nonsense, Clark.

You have a degree in nonsense. That's true. And a little, I have a minor in tomfoolery. Oh, man. How you doing? I'm well. How are you? Good.

So I had to clear my throat, I had a little garlic chicken and it really kind of attacked my mucus membrane. It's fall, Chuck. Yeah. Halloween's almost here. Man, it's finally like cooling off a little bit. Yeah, I know. It's been a hot one.

Although the sun is still blazing hot. Yeah, in the sun. If it's in the shade, maybe after sundown and the wind's blowing. Big diff. You're in there. It's fall time. Yeah, for real.

I'm wearing my boots. Oh, nice. Got a flannel shirt on. I might as well be on a hay ride. Wearing my Pumas, my my favorite murder shirt. Nice. Yeah, that's a great shirt. The toxic masculinity ruins the party again.

What a great shirt. Yeah, they actually follow through with great show quotes and put them on t-shirts and sell a ton of them. That's smart. Yeah. That's the way to do it. We try. The key is selling a ton of them.

That's right. And having the good quotes. I feel like we ran out of good quotes seven years ago. That is not true, Chuck. Watch this. You ready? Uh-huh. It's show time.

What do you think? That's good. How about this? There's no business like show business. Oh, that's a good one too. You could write a song out of something like that. It's not show friends. It's show business.

Right. Well, look, wait, wait, before we start, I want to address the 10 people who are still listening at this point. I would like to announce the birth of my new website. What? Yeah, it's called thejoshclarkway.com. How much did it weigh?

It weighed nothing because it's a website. But there was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears put into its gestation and delivery. And our friend, Brandon Reed, who's such a great guy and a listener on the podcast, put it together through his business, Innovate with an E, built this awesome website. It's super 80s, super poppy.

I'm very proud of it. And I'm starting a newsletter just to celebrate the whole thing. And it's called thejoshclarkway. Did you look it up just now? I'm trying, but it's not loading. Oh, whatevs. We're cutting all this part out anyway.

Oh, wait, here we go. Isn't it beautiful? Well, it's still loading. It's because of my old phone. It's not because of your... I appreciate that. My phone just can't handle your website. There's so much to my website, it's like.

Oh, there you are. Yeah. Thejoshclarkway.com. And I also want to say, you may help me with the site too. So big ups and thank you to you, me, and Brandon for helping me put this thing together. So anyway, I just wanted to say welcome website.

Oh, I got a new fun thing to do. To hang out on my website? Sure. Sign up for the newsletter too while you're there. Oh, this is great. Okay. I'm glad I have this in my life now. You ready to get started?

Maybe I'll get a website one day. You should get a website. It's like the new thing. Everybody's getting one. Yeah. So, Chuck, we're talking fall here, which means there's only one word that comes to mind every fall. Pumpkins.

No, the other word. Candy corn. No. Diarrhea. No. Amityville. And specifically two words, the Amityville horror, which is for my money,

one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Yeah. One of the great ones. And being a kid in the 1970s when this stuff was going on and famous, like even as a little youngster, I remember being terrified at that paperback in the drugstore when I would go by the paperbacks and the look of that house just terrified me.

If the house looked any different, it'd be the story would have had 15% less spread. Or did the house end up looking creepy because of the lore? No. It's just a colonial. No, that house looked creepy. Well, yeah, if somebody didn't say this house is haunted, and by the way, look at it,

you'd probably be like, oh, that's an interesting looking house. But yeah, you put just even the hint of haunting to it, and that house was built for it. Well, it looked like it had eyes. Right. Which was one of the key things. It's a colonial, but it's one of those

colonials that is situated sideways on the lot. So from the street, you saw the side of the house, the chimney running down the side of the house, and those two eye-like windows on the top floor on either side of the chimney. Just amazing. It was a Dutch colonial to be specific. Yeah, and if you Google maps that thing now,

first of all, it is not any longer 112 Ocean Avenue. It is now 108 Ocean Avenue. That's right. The owners at some point, whoever owned it, I think, what, two or three years ago, successfully lobbied to have the address officially changed. It took them that long? To, well, I don't know how long they had to battle,

but they changed it by four digits. Right. Like, they'll never find a smile. Right, exactly. So I went and looked on the Google images, and of course now it looks, it's bright and sunny, and has a lovely yard, and it's in the middle of a lovely neighborhood, and there's a Chevy

in the driveway, and an SUV, and it just looks like any other house. But it's still, if you monkey around with Google, you can see that image, and there are big signs all over, like no trespassing. Sure, and they need them, believe me. Yeah, people just, I feel sorry for homeowners since the Lutzes.

Yes. I don't feel sorry for them, though. No, I don't either. Because they made up a bunch of malarkey. Yeah, that's one way to put it, but we'll get to that part later, right? All right, sure. Okay, let's set the scene here.

Yeah, a true horrific thing did occur there. Yeah, and I think that kind of gets swept under the rug a little bit, overlooked, you know? I agree. On November 13th, 1974, Ronnie Butch DeFeo, Jr. killed the other six members of his family, his own family, his mother, his father, his two sisters, Allison and Dawn,

and his two younger brothers, Mark and John. He's the older brother, killed his whole family. Yeah, nine, 12, 13, and 18 ages. Yep. That is just, I mean, this is one of those crimes that rightfully has gone down in American history is one of the worst. Yeah, and yeah, like you said, rightfully,

this guy was a bad, bad dude. From the outset, he denied doing anything when he ran into a bar called Henry's Bar in the little town of Amityville. I bet that place is great. And I'll bet too. And he said, somebody's just killed my family and all the bar patrons are like, I got to see this.

And they ran to 112 Ocean Avenue with Ronnie DeFeo. And they found all six members laying face down on their beds, dead. I think their heads, their faces resting in their hands. And Ronnie DeFeo said it was the mafia. Yeah, which I think his family had some tie, somehow to the mafia. He had an uncle named Carmine,

and that's all you need right there. Yeah, but there was one like a legit crime family that had some tie to his family. So maybe he just thought that was a good alibi or whatever. Yeah, it wasn't so good. No, and he killed them with a 35 caliber Marlin rifle, which did you look this thing up? No.

It's like the old West like lever action. Oh, really? Riding on a horse, you know, cowboys and Indians kind of gun. I expected the side bolt action carbide. Oh, like a Lee Harvey Oswald? Yes, that's what I would have thought. No, this is like a boom, boom, boom. That explains a lot because one of the big mysteries

that still remains is why didn't the other family members wake up? Well, that's a big, I mean I read a little bit into the case and that's definitely one of these sticking points is, because it's not like they were all like three years old and fast asleep or something. Right.

One of them was 18 and so this, there are a lot of variations of the story because of that that one of the sisters helped kill the father and then the mother freaked out. So Ronald killed her and like everyone was waking up and I don't know. I mean, it sounds like he just, he did it all himself. I also saw that he had said years like a year after

while he was being questioned that he had drug them all with barbiturates, but I only saw that once. That would make a little more sense at least because you can't silence to this kind of, I mean, maybe you could have wrapped a pillow around it, but it's not like a handgun, you know. Right. So he said it was the mob first

and then he said that he did it, but there was a really big caveat to that. He said that he had been hearing voices that were urging him to kill his family and even during the murders, something was telling him to continue and just keep killing, kill them all. And he said he looked around and there was no one there.

So I just assumed it was God telling me to kill. So I did. And he killed, again, his whole family. And I read this article in Vice Magazine from like 2014 from some guy who said he spent like five years in prison with Ronnie DeFeo and said finally, after befriending him over a couple of years, he finally got to the truth.

And the truth was he felt like his parents treated his brothers and sisters better than him. His parents didn't like the fact that he liked PCP and LSD and heroin. Imagine that. So they got what was coming to him basically and he'd do it again. I mean, he, I don't know.

This is an armchair diagnosis, but clearly if his reason is he liked my brothers and sisters more, like he has some sort of serious mental issues going on. For sure. But he did not want, apparently his attorney talked him into talking about God and voices because he was like, we can get you a plea of insanity.

And he was like, I don't want to do that. He's like, oh, but you really should. And he goes, no, I don't want to do that. He goes, well, there may be a book deal in your future. If you claim this, he goes, ooh, I like books. And he went, what are books again? And he went, they're things that make you money. And he went, oh.

He's like, you know how you like carve out the middle of those things and you keep your heroin and PCP in there? That's a book. So a real crime happened there in this house. Let's just say, it was a fateful decision for him to say publicly that a voice had urged him to kill his whole family, okay? That would come into play pretty soon after that.

After Ronnie DeFeo, I believe two weeks after he was sentenced, a year after the murders, and he got sentenced to six consecutive life sentences. Yeah, he's still in jail. Oh yeah, he will be forever, I would guess. Like he's alive, that was my point. Right, right, you're right. About a year after that,

just like a year and a month after the murders, a couple named George and Kathy Lutz bought this place and they bought it for a song. It was 80 grand at a time when 80 grand was a pretty good deal for a six bedroom Dutch colonial in Amityville, New York. Yeah, and so there were a couple, well they were a couple with a couple of kids, well three, I think, nine-year-old Daniel,

seven-year-old Christopher at the time, five-year-old Missy. We'll get to their financial situation a little bit in more detail later, but the thought was that George could run his, even though it was kind of a lot of money for them, it was a good deal on the house and George could run his business out of the house, so save on office space, he had a couple of boats.

This house came with a dock, he's like, I don't have to pay Marina storage fees, like, they almost had to buy the house, it sounded like, financially speaking. Right, it was just too good of a deal to pass on, sure. So they bought the house, did you say they were looking in the 30 to 50 range originally?

I don't think so. So it was a stretch for them, but again, that's how good the deal was. So they buy the house and they move in and apparently almost immediately, things started to get weird, right? So Kathy was a Catholic and what do you do when you're a Catholic

and you buy a new house? You invite your priest over to come bless the house. Do you really? I guess in the 70s in New York you did. Well, I didn't know if that had anything to do with the, I mean, did they know that the murders had occurred there and just sort of didn't care? Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, yes.

And I don't know that they didn't care. Supposedly George Lutz later said that like after, they said we're interested in this one, the realtor was like, well, let me just tell you one little detail. Just six big horrific murders. Right, yeah, just a year ago. Yeah.

Sorry, we haven't cleaned up the blood yet. Yeah, seriously. So they apparently took a second to think about it and talk amongst themselves, like is that really bothers us? This is such a good deal. And they said, no, the deal wins out over any superstitions we have.

So yes, they knew. And I don't know if they hired or brought the priest in because of that or just to bless the house, but they brought the priest in to bless the house. Like you can burn a little sage. Yeah. Or you can call in a priest. I think they had to ramp it up.

They called in Father Ralph Pecoraro. And he came in and this is how the story goes. And we'll just sort of tell it as it happens, supposedly. I think that's a great idea. Before we start pooping all over it. So he comes in, blesses the house. Supposedly he feels, in one room in particular, a very cold chill.

He said, even though it was winter, it shouldn't have been this kind of cold. And he hears a strong voice, a masculine voice, shout, get out. Get out. And then his car started acting weird. Apparently the hood flew open and smashed the windshield. Doors are unlocking and opening.

His horn went arruga. And he didn't even have one of those kinds of horns. The car stalled. And this is just the very beginning of, and if you've seen the movie, a lot of the stuff that we're talking about is portrayed in the film. Right.

And it's Rod Steiger getting shouted at. He's great. Like flies, where there shouldn't be flies. Yeah. Crucifix is spinning. What a pig. Well, smell of rotten eggs in this hidden room that wasn't on any blueprint.

The red room. The pigs. So there was a phantom like pig beast with glowing red eyes that would look in on the family from the outside and leave cloven hoof prints in the snow. And little five year old missy would be like, oh, that's just my friend Jody. Which makes it 10 times scarier.

Way scarier. Like I would rather have my kid say, I don't know what that is. I'm scared rather than, that's just Jody, you know. Jody's been suggesting things. What else? They claimed, I think the dad claimed to see Butch DeFeo's face in a wall.

He would wake up every night or a lot of nights at 3.15 in the morning, supposedly when these murders took place. The kids started acting funny. Classic movie haunting stuff. Yeah, it was a very weird situation for them. Things were tense. They were all like, they had like hair trigger tempers.

They were all yelling at each other. Apparently very uncharacteristically. And supposedly George Lutz I've seen him described as a ex-marine who was an expert in karate. Which again, this was a 70s. So everybody was into karate back then. Sure, Elvis had a black belt. Sure.

And he was like a no nonsense kind of guy. No nonsense, right? Yeah, like me. So he's like, what's going on? And he goes to the local Amityville Historical Society and says, I wanna know everything you have on 112 Ocean Avenue. And it got quiet in the room.

And the guy was like, come with me. So he, George finds out that their house is probably built on Shinnecock Indian land. That was a big one. Yeah, not only that, but supposedly where this Native American tribe used as a sick bay for the mentally insane is how they put it.

Right. And this is where they would just keep all of those people where they were just sort of left to die there. So it was haunted by them. It was the kind of place where they just get dropped off and the people would kind of back slowly away. Like, okay, take care. Right.

See you later. And they would die. And no one wants to be treated like that. So of course anyone who is left to die right there on that land like that would obviously haunt the land. There were some other legends about what was behind it too. There was like a abandoned cemetery,

pretty straight up on the nose. Yeah, there was a Salem witch guy that supposedly sacrificed animals. John Ketchum. Yeah. And there actually was a John Ketchum who lived somewhat in the area around that time, but. He lived at 108 Ocean Avenue.

Right. He's never been accused of being a witch. And then I saw an interview with a guy named Hans Holzer, who's a bona fide parapsychologist. And Dr. Holzer says that it all started in 1928 or 1905 when the original house, there was a house that was built in the 1720s that was moved. When that house was moved in 1905,

it disturbed an Indian chief's grave, Native American chief's grave, and somebody played with his skull like it was a soccer ball, and he's been mad about it ever since. And that is what drove Ronnie DeFeo to kill, and that is what terrorized the Lutz's. And that's the whole problem.

Everybody just calmed down, that's it. So there's a little bit of peace falling into the puzzle. They're figuring it out, but it's not making anything better. In fact, everything's getting worse. Like the stuff's getting worse and worse and worse. And finally, everything culminates on this one stormy night when their door blows open,

blows off of the hinges, outward, into the street, I believe, or no, into the house. I can't remember which way, but blown off of the hinges is like a 250 pound door. And the windows, the iconic eyeball or eye windows, blow out, some of the glass somehow blows in. It's just an enormous explosion of energy, and the family leaves.

They just left the house after like 28 days. Supposedly. Yeah, well, no, they definitely left the house. Yeah, but neighbors say they left in 10 days. Okay, yeah, one of the two. But they still left. But that's the whole point is there are discrepancies all over the place in these stories.

We'll get to those, we'll get to those. But they left, and this is true, they left all of their possessions in this house and just fled. And that part is true. Never went back. Yeah, unless they had a sneaky little moving team with a U-Haul on the dead of night.

They said, go back and get our stuff. We got to stick to our story. Their stuff got auctioned off. Yeah, it did. I mean, they left it. They had, they grabbed some clothes and they took off into the night. And.

Which will go on later to be one of the key selling points that this really happened, because people that were on their side were like, why would they do that? Yeah. And that's the gambit of this being a hoax that would eventually make them money. Right.

Would they really leave all their stuff behind? Could anybody be that foolish? Let's take a break and we'll find out right after this. Let's. Let's. Let's. Let's. Let's.

Let's. Let's. Let's. Let's. Let's. Let's. Let's. Let's.

Let's. Let's. Let's. Let's. Let's. Let's. Let's. Cold classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["Stuff You Should Know"] Stuff you should know. Jerry, you got good shots, though. Listen to what you said, and watch out for what's coming. Stuff you should know. Stuff you should know.

All right, so they get the heck out of Dodge. They leave. They contact an author named Jay Anson. Oh, even before that. Well, I was gonna get to the attorney. Is that where you're going? All right, go ahead. So, Prentice Hall, as the publisher in 1977

released The Amity of a Horror, was a huge bestseller. 42 weeks on the bestseller list. By 1981, sold six and a half million copies. They were all over the country, plugging this book. And the Lutz's were household names. They were like on every talk show you could imagine. I wanna underscore that. In 1977, there was a family from New York

who claimed to have been driven from their home by a supernatural evil force. And they were international celebrities for it. Yeah. Reason number 5 million and 80, why the 70s were just awesome. Yeah. Like, that's what you could be famous for,

was saying like ghosts chased us out of our house. And everybody'd be like, that's a great story. Should we jump ahead and talk about that attorney? Yes. Great, so. What was the guy's name? Bill Weber. Yeah, this is where things get really hinky,

is that Bill Weber is an attorney, and he's the one that sort of gets every, I think he's the one that saw dollar signs initially, and gets a team together for this book. And starts saying to everybody, including DeFeo, hey, we can all make some money if we do a book here. DeFeo's gotta get a cut though. Sure.

The Lutz's were like, what? You're gonna pay the murderer? Yeah. And he was like, yeah. It's my client. And they said, we're not down with that plan. Yes, but this came after they had formed basically a business relationship,

but not even an attorney-client relationship, a straight-up business relationship with William Weber. Yeah, like how can we make money off of this? The way that the world heard about these things going on at 112 Ocean Avenue for the first time ever was at a press conference that the Lutz's held at William Weber's office. That was when the world was introduced

to the idea of this Amityville horror even before the book ever came out. Yeah. Or anyone, at least not locally. Right, right. So Bill Weber and the Lutz's, they had kind of like a tentative, tenuous relationship. And when Prentice Hall came along

and Jay Anson came along, I don't know if Jay Anson poached them or Prentice Hall poached them, but whoever was involved with the Amityville horror book got the Lutz's away from William Weber and his book idea and proposal, and he got cut out of the deal. Just put that in your bonnet and smoke it

and save it for later, okay? Yeah, and supposedly left because again, they didn't want to give DeFeo a cut or they just wanted a bigger cut themselves. Yeah. At this point, it's all about money. Right. But jumping back or forward,

can't remember where we are in time, but they're all over the country, all over the news. This would have been about 1977, 78. Yeah, they're on Merve Griffin. They had a ghost team of ghost hunters come by from Channel Five in New York. Yeah, WPIX. And had people posted in the house overnight

taking all these photographs. There's one now very famous photograph of, and it's creepy looking, but you take a picture of anyone in black and white in the dark poking their head around a corner and it'll look creepy. So let me, I want to comment on that picture. Have you seen it?

Sure, it's creepy. It is creepy. It's chalked up to some of the paranormal investigators, one of the men who was at that WPIX seance fest at the house getting in front of the camera. Yeah, they're saying that one of Paul Bart's that it was just one of the ghost hunters. So that was a grown man.

Whoever's in the picture is a kid, just plain as day. There's no confusing that for a grown man. I think so. Unless he had a boyish face. I think it's a very bizarre picture. I mean, no, I think it's bizarre. And supposedly it was taken with infrared film in the dark. And again, it doesn't look like a man.

Which is that's why the eyes are glowing. Right, that explains that. It's the fact that it's clearly the face of a boy. Are you going under the joshclarkway.com again? I'm trying to find that picture again. It's clearly the face of a boy that's not a man's face. That's the thing that sticks out to me. Yeah, I mean, it certainly looks like a boy.

Man, it is creepy. And also, so. It's gotta be a boy. And that's what it looks like to me. And again, this picture was debuted in the 1977, 78 by George Lutz on the Merv Griffin show. But they could have set that up, could have been. They could have.

And we should say, have you seen the Conjuring? I think I've seen parts of it, but that's the real life couple. Yeah, Ed and Lorraine Warren. Yeah, who hooked up with these. I mean, this is where they got their start kind of, right? Kind of. They basically had like an occult museum.

They were like a psychic and psychic investigators in Connecticut. Like you do. And the guy, Marvin Scott, who was the anchor who investigated the Amityville horror for the WPIX local channel five station. He invited them to come out to the seance. And it was like a series of seances that they filmed.

And you can actually see this. Look up WPIX News 11, Marvin Scott, part one. And it's like a 1998 retrospective of this case. And it has some of the footage from the seance, but it also has an interview with George and Lorraine Warren. And they're basically like, this was real. This is obviously real. And during these seances, supposedly the psychic started

to feel sick. Lorraine Warren said she felt an evil presence from the bowels of the earth in the house. And then that picture, that famous photograph was taken. So. I think the Warrens are the ones too that said, why would they leave all of their stuff behind? Sure.

And they also said, well, we would not be involved if this was some sort of a hoax. Right, exactly. Don't you know who we are? Proof positive. Right. Yeah. But yeah, the real life Warrens were,

they did investigate the Amityville house in the early 70s or mid 70s, early on after the story broke. You also know it was the 70s because they were featured on Leonard Des Mois' great show in search of. Love that show. Which we both used to love.

And of course they covered that in 1979. Supposedly got the priest on there, even though he wanted to be kept anonymous. And he, or whoever it was, kind of reinforced this cold room, get out, scream. Yeah, just went, just doubled down on it. Pretty much. His face was hidden.

In the book, I think, the Jay Anson book, there were three source materials that came out about this story, all within a couple of years of each other. There was a Good Housekeeping article, which is hilarious. There was the Jay Anson book. And then there was a coloring book.

And then there was the movie. And those three are like the source material for what everybody knows about the Amityville legend. But what Leonard Des Mois pointed out is that, this movie was, it's huge, everybody loves it. But what a lot of people don't know is that it's a true story. He says it's a true story.

Well, the book said it was a true story. But Leonard Des Mois, I just, I expected more from Leonard Des Mois than that. He says unequivocally, it's a true story. That's cause that's what the script, the teleprompter said. Well, anyway, that was a great episode of In Search of Anyway.

Yeah, so in 1979, the very famous film adaptation of this book comes out, starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder as the Lutz's. And it was a big, big hit. $80 million in domestic release, which was, I didn't do the conversion, but a very good haul for 1979. One of the smash hits of that year, for sure.

I think it was close to 300 million probably. Oh yeah. Yeah. Good money. Yeah, I mean, this was back in the time when like movies didn't routinely make a billion dollars in an opening weekend. This is like, that was a ton of cash.

Yeah, there were a lot of really bad sequels that no doubt just kind of threw out the whole legend of the house and just did whatever they want with that name. Have you seen any of them? I haven't. I haven't seen any of the sequels, nor did I see the remake recently. With Ryan Reynolds?

Yeah, did you see that? No. I don't remember the original movie that much. And to be honest, I don't know if I ever saw it all the way through. I mean, I was way too young to see anything like this. So it would have been. It's still around.

They didn't burn every copy of it. I know that's the whole point though, is I would have had to have seen this years and years later. I don't know that I ever did. It's worth seeing. It's a great horror film. Like I've seen a lot of the parts. James Brolin's great in it.

Margot Kidder's wonderful in it. That beard. Little Missy for Jody's friend is a little creep show. And who played Jody? I don't know who played her, but yeah, the kids did good, Rod Steiger was the priest. He was great. I remember seeing that scene.

So I've definitely seen parts of it. Yule Brenner was the good out voice. Was he really? No. Oh. Sorry, that was kind of believable. They actually didn't shoot at that Ocean Avenue house though. Of course, with a movie like this,

the lore is kind of usually not true. And the lore was that the crew was too scared to shoot there. It's not true. They couldn't get a permit. They shot at 18 Brooks Road, Tom's River, New Jersey, and built a superstructure around the house to make it look like the other house,

which was just like a couple of hours from there. Right. The town of Amityville said, no, we don't want anything like this. No publicity like this, please. This was a tragedy. We like our quiet sleepy town the way it is. No, we're not giving you a permit to shoot here.

Yes. But Tom's River was like, bring it. Yeah. Nobody knows about us. Who's Tom anyway? We don't know. Well, it's the River River. So the movie, like you said, it was a huge smash hit.

And it's just like the Lettas were already kind of household names. That changed everything. And that the Amityville horror became part of American popular culture. Like it was cemented into it. And it was also cemented in that, this is based on a true story.

Maybe the movie blew at a little elaborate portion as movies will do. But the Lutzes were driven from their house by an evil spirit. And a lot of this stuff was true. Isn't that nuts? Yeah. And it was that period in the late 70s

where like we talked about it with the Bermuda Triangle was a big deal and- Water beds were huge. Water beds were big. But I feel like there was just, there wasn't as much stuff. There wasn't as much content. I wonder if that's what it was.

So like things were just a bigger deal. Yeah. Like Amityville, like you said, it was part of, it wasn't just, oh, that horror movie. Like it was spoofed on Johnny Carson and it was like, it was all over the place. It was like part of the fabric of America. But I wonder if people bought into

and thought about this stuff like you were saying because there was like, nothing was grabbing their attention every 30 seconds. Oh, over here. Look over here, over here. Like you could like really kind of ruminate on something and let it like stew. Yeah, like now a show can win Best Show Emmy Award.

You're like, I've never even heard of that. Yeah. Too much stuff. A lot of stuff out there. But is that better or worse? Like I feel like it is true that things can just change and they're not necessarily worse or better. But I also believe that it is possible

for things to get objectively worse. Now whether like they are or not right now, who knows? I don't think anybody's ever lived long enough to be like, I'm a thousand years old and it is way worse these days than it was 500 years ago. Now, are you talking about entertainment content or just everything? Just general culture, everything, being alive.

See, I think entertainment wise, it's better because. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, back then it was just like everyone got obsessed with Emmy Deville because it was the only thing around to be obsessed with and it wasn't even great. You know? Here, just take this schlocky thing and obsess over it. But you're saying it wasn't great compared

to today's standards, but back then like it was great. It was something that like you could. Maybe. You could basically put on like a cloak and wear around for a year and really, really be into the Emmy Deville horror rather than, you know, like the cameraman missed that shot by like an eighth of an inch.

Like that's the critical detail that people have today. And I think it keeps us from enjoying stuff like they used to be able to in the seventies. That's what I think. That's my point. Plus we were all doped up. Yeah, there's a lot of grass, but really terrible grass. That's one thing that's gotten better

is the grass from what I understand. All right, so maybe we can take a break now and then we can start poking holes in this thing. Start. Does this sound good? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. On the podcast Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

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each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so I insist we have not booked any holds yet. But there's some dents in there that we've kind of put our fingers in. I've just been snidely laughing at everything we say. Like, yeah, right.

Yeah. But here's some of the holds, and there are quite a few. Oh, yeah. I kind of mentioned before, neighbors say that they left like a week and a half into their stay in this house. The Lutzis said 28 days. So right out of the gate, you've got a discrepancy.

Yeah, and kind of what the thinking was, and still is to some people, is that they couldn't afford this house, didn't take them long to realize it, and so they cooked up this story. Yeah, but imagine figuring that out in 10 days. That's a little weird. Well, and I also don't know

how that would get them out of their mortgage, just defaulting on it. Yeah. Because it's haunted. Yeah, just walking away. Like, can't get blood from a stone. Go take the house if you want it back. Yeah, but could they claim that it wasn't disclosed

if it was disclosed? Like, how could they literally get out of the mortgage? I don't know, man. I think if you stop making payments, if you don't care about your credit, and I'm not sure what it was like in the 70s, but if you're like, I'll take this hit for seven years on my credit.

Right, just walk away. And just walk away, like then you don't have to make payments anymore. Yeah. That's what I think happened, but I don't think that they were able to do that because they started making money from their story, and everyone knew that they were making money

from their story, so people wanted their money from them. Right. That's incredible. The great show from 1980s. Did you used to watch that? Yeah, I watched the episode that this was on. But did you watch it as a kid?

Great, great show, and on this show. Sorry, it was really positive. Do you remember? It seemed pretty upbeat. Well, it was called That's Incredible, not like That's Crappy. The cameraman missed that shot. And it was, I think it even had an exclamation point,

didn't it? Yeah. At the end of the title. Yeah. So that's incredible. Barbara Camardi owned the house at the time of this episode, walks them through and shows like closeups

of the hinges of that front door, and these windows that are still sealed. It was like, these things didn't blow. No, she went out of her way to make sure that everyone knew that this stuff hadn't happened. And ironically, she exaggerated the facts that the skeptics pointed to. So everybody was exaggerating their case

on either side of this. But let's also said though that, no, no, there were pictures in the newspaper of that front door blown out. Have you seen the picture? Well, no, like I didn't think anyone could find it. It's a screen door that's kind of like hanging open. I'm not kidding.

That's the picture from what I understand. All right, so it's all falling apart then. Right. Oh yeah, it's all falling apart. For the let'ses. It is falling apart big time. Apparently George Lutz died in 2006 and to his dying day said that all of this is true.

He said, yeah, man, the book got a bunch of stuff wrong. The movie got a ton of stuff wrong. Cause I think the Ryan Reynolds remake of the movie was supposedly billed as, this is way more true to the book. Oh, really? The original movie kind of created its own stuff, which is why it's viewed as one of an additional source

rather than just part and parcel with the book. So George Lutz would say all these people got all these details wrong. But this stuff we said happened really happened. Part of the problem is some of the stuff that they said happened was like levitating off the bed. Right. And looking at each other going,

can you believe we're levitating? Yeah. I saw an interview where he said that in public on camera. Yeah, he really like kudos to him for. Sticking to it? Yeah, I would say a death bed is a perfect time to be like, guess what everybody? Cause then everyone would be like, yeah, no.

No S. You guys knew? No S. I love that this is a family show. Yeah. So George Lutz went to his grave saying, no, this is, this is for real. William Weber, Bill Weber, the attorney

did quite the opposite of that. Well, he said, and of course Lutz will paint this, probably painted this as sour grapes because Weber was cut out of the money deal. But as soon as they left and made their own book deal, he started barking that this is all BS. This is a hoax that we made up. He totally did that.

He said that over about three bottles of wine, he and George and Kathy Lutz concocted the story out of whole cloth. And then had a smoking night of love making between the three of them. On their water bed. Geez, took a sexy turn all of a sudden. Sure.

So yeah, Bill Weber, he said that, he said, hey, I was just looking to get another trial for my client who I think was innocent and insane. What the Lutz's were doing was going after money, but you can also look at it like Ronnie DeFeo was the greatest thing that ever happened to Bill Weber's career. Sure.

He even said at the time, like I'm giving Ronnie DeFeo a cut rate because the publicity from this case is worth more than anything Ronnie DeFeo could ever give me. So the idea of reviving interest in the case would probably help his case load as well. Who knows? The point is William Weber hired a guy named Paul Hoffman I think his name was,

and he wrote the Good Housekeeping article. And when that Good Housekeeping article came out, the Lutz's were like, you gonna scoop us? We're gonna sue you for invasion of privacy because you stole our story, which is pretty rich because they were using the courts. Like if you have a life story and some lawyer comes along and hire somebody to write that story,

yeah, that's an invasion of privacy. If you make that story up with said lawyer and then screw that lawyer over and he goes off his own way, yeah, using the courts for that is pretty, I don't want to say ballsy gutsy. Yeah. And speaking of lawsuits, I mean, we won't go through the myriad lawsuits,

but there were, it felt like more than a dozen lawsuits over the years. Yeah, they sued Weber, Weber sued them. People were suing everyone, people were suing cops, cops were suing the family. The Crow Marty's were suing the Lutz's for even making the thing up in the first place. And to me, this is what is sort of proof positive

that the whole thing is rotten to begin with. Sure, when the lawsuits start flying. Yeah, everyone had their hand out. This father, Pecoraro, in court documents, said that, you know what? I never went there and blessed the house. Right. And heard this voice. I actually kind of just had a phone call with them.

Yeah. And the guy, one of their daughters yelled, get out. Right. In the background. But she was talking to a doll, I think. Yeah. And a dog, Harry. But it creeped me out, nonetheless.

I always wanted to be played by Rod Steiger, so I went for it. But yeah, I mean, it just, it all sort of fell apart. So there's, you know, in cases like this, people are like, well, the Catholic church is shutting that guy up. They don't want to talk about the truth. That's another theory.

If there were some demons here. But the priest really confounds things. Not because it's like, it was a Catholic church really trying to keep this quiet. More like, why did this priest lie so overtly on in search of? Well, he may have had some skin in the game. Maybe, maybe so, maybe you're right.

I don't know. But the Warren said, in addition to him, you know, experiencing that in the house, it followed him throughout his life and that he was once in a hotel room with a rabbi in Florida and a lizard demon from the house appeared to him there. That's the quality of quotes you can expect when you have the Warrens on your interview show.

I love it. I love that we're treating in search of as if it was this, you know, highly regarded. I mean, it was, it was great, but it was schlocky TV for 10 and 12 year old boys in the 80s. Sure. Like I'm sure, I mean, that probably wasn't

even the priest, he probably just hired a guy. No, no, it was. The guy who, in court documents, that was the guy on in search of. But they blacked his face out. Right, but I mean like, that's the guy, that's the guy. He was revealed later on, the guy on in search of was revealed later on to be Father Pecoraro

and he was on in search of, back before anyone ever knew the name Pecoraro, he was called in the book, Father Mankuso. All right. As far as I know, that is the same guy. And that he was just on TV lying through his teeth. That's what I saw. Or he could have been just handed a script

by Nimoy's team. It's possible, it was the 70s. And America will believe anything you say. A couple of years ago, actually just last year, in 2017 it was sold for about 600 grand. The house. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Which is a couple of hundred less than they were asking for it. They're asking around eight. Isn't that crazy? And apparently it's not had nothing that they only had to do with the price lowering was because of the pain and the rump to live there. Yes.

And have people constantly coming by. It wasn't like, forget that there were six people murdered here. Right. Forget that this house has green ooze and flies and devil pigs coming out of, you know, looking through the window. Right.

The real problem is Google Earth. Right. And now people can just say, oh, let's go buy there and take some photos. There it is. It's at 108. They must have moved it. That still cracks me up.

Yeah. But yeah, that's the thing. That's why the house is still selling for less than it ever was before. And the Lutz has claimed that they didn't make much money on this and that, you know, like we never got rich and what little money we made kind of went out the door with court fees and legal fees.

I don't know. That may be utterly true. Who knows? It says that they did, he did admit to getting about a hundred grand from the book and another hundred from the film. That's not that much money. No, but this is 1970s money.

That was some money. Yeah, but it's not like kickback and retire money. Sure. You know. Sure. One of the, probably the most telling thing about the Lutz's story being a hoax, the whole thing being just one big hoax is that

no one, no other person, owner, anybody who was associated with that house after the Lutz family left, ever reported anything even remotely supernatural like this, nothing. Yeah. And of course, Lorraine Warren had a pretty good explanation for that.

Which was what? She said, well then obviously one of the exorcisms was successful because that's the only way, that's the only way to explain why the hauntings went away. Yeah. Like is it, that's the only way to explain it, huh? The Lutz has also never called the cops. That was a big one.

Which was a big whole people poke into it. Like if all this stuff was going on, like at some point you're going to go to the police. Right. And even if it's 10 days and not the 28, you're not just going to just quietly be haunted by the demons of hell. Right.

And not, not sweat it with a cop. Sure. At least call them once and be like, you guys do anything about demons? No? Okay. Even if it's a crank call. Sure.

What do you think? I mean, this is getting a little philosophical, I guess, but do you think, what do you think about bad juju in a home where six people were murdered? Like I'm a, I'm a totally agnostic non-believer in any thing like that. But part of me also thinks that like,

if you brutally murder six people, there's got to be some change in the energy and the air, which sounds hokey, hokeyer than anything I've made fun of. I think, so, you know... What's the Josh Clark way? Dot com. What's the, what's the word?

Oh, placebo. I think it's a placebo effect. Okay. So you know that something happened here and if you didn't know anything, you would never notice anything. Probably not. Yeah.

I don't think that there is a change to the energy or the air or anything like that. I think there are cues that we can find where even if you didn't know, you could be like, oh, there's a shadow over there, something like that. And you could freak yourself out even in a house like that that you didn't know was haunted or said to be haunted.

But I think if you know a house is said to be haunted, you're just, your brain's working overtime and you're gonna produce those things that you see. Well, I totally agree with that. But my imagination is just dead and gone. So who knows? If you do believe stuff like that, then that's fine with me.

I mean, you're not hurting anybody with that. If you're taking money from people to exercise stuff like that, then I have a problem with you, but I don't think a lot of people are out there doing it. I think most people just believe one way or another, you know? Yeah, interesting.

I wanna know that boy is in the picture. It's Jody, the pig demon. If you wanna know more about the Amityville horror, you can type those words into the internet. Actually, you can type it into how stuff works and it will bring up an article by our own former own Matt Hunt. I remember that guy.

He wrote the Amityville article on the website. What's he up to now? Any idea? I don't know. He's continuing his investigation into the Amityville horror. He was never heard from again. Right. Since I said that, it's time for a listener mail.

I'm gonna call this a follow up on the homelessness episode. We re-ran that one for selects, got a better response this time. Yeah, I was really looking out for somebody, but I guess they learned their lesson or else stopped listening to us by now. Yeah, well, and I set it up too, because it was my pick with like, hey, this is what happened last time.

Oh, right. So, you know, I dare you to write in this time. That's exactly right. So this is how, this is from a woman who said that a homeless man saved her dog. It's a pretty great story. My sister and I were taking our three dogs for a walk down Main Street in our city one day,

and we stopped to rest on a bench for heading for home. That realizing it, I had accidentally let one of the leashes slip out of my hand. Unfortunately, Safira noticed her leash was free at about the same time I did, decided to up and chase after something. My sister and I jumped to grab her, but the speed of two clumsy humans

is no match for a spry young dog. She ran down the sidewalk. This is like a nightmare for me. She ran down the sidewalk, a few pedestrians reached down to try and grab her, which frightened her enough that she ran from the sidewalk into the busy street, four lanes of traffic going in both directions, sprinting to try and catch up.

I watched in horror as she ran out into the street, sure I was about to see my dog get killed by an oncoming car. It was right about then that a homeless man that we had previously seen around town rode up on his bicycle right in the middle of the road, keeping himself between my dog and the cars flying by. If it weren't for him doing that,

she would surely have been a run over. Finally caught up, was able to catch her attention, call her, and thankfully she ran right into my arms, and I looked up to thank the hero who would save my dog, and he was nowhere to be seen. What? Was it a dream? That's me talking.

He had put himself in harm's way to save my dog's life, and then just quietly ridden away when he saw that she was safe. Don't know his name, never saw him again to thank him. Safira is now 10 years old. It's because of that nameless man that she has lived to see that old age, and that is Allie from New Hampshire.

That was a great story. Love it. Thanks a lot, Allie. Thanks for sharing that one. See everybody, we told you. If you wanna send us an email like Allie did, or get in touch with us, you can go to our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

I also have a website called thejoshclarkway.com if you wanna check it out, and you can send an email to Chuck, Jerry, and me, plus Frank the Chair, guest producer and role, everybody. Send that email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. ["House Stuff Works"] For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

["House Stuff Works"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.