[eerie music]
[mellow jazz music]
[announcer] This is suburbia,
America's newest lifestyle.
Home to more than half the nation's population.
America has a lot to learn about this new lifestyle
called suburbia,
this booming new phenomenon
that is happening across the breadth of our land.
One place to look for some of the answers
is to America's first and largest suburb,
Long Island, USA.
[gentle acoustic guitar music]
[Tommy] Amityville's an old town,
and it was one of the major towns, you know.
There was bootlegging in the '30s and '40s.
That's pretty much what Amityville was known for.
I mean, Al Capone lived there.
He had a house down there on the water.
And my family moved from Brooklyn
out to Long Island in 1952.
It was after the war, when everybody was
migrating out of the city onto the Island.
And I grew up there in Amityville.
[Hit Crew Big Band's "High Hopes"]
[singers] ♪ Next time you're found
♪ With your chin On the ground ♪
[Tommy] A few years later, a family I knew
called the DeFeos also moved from Brooklyn to Amityville.
They bought a house on 112 Ocean Avenue.
In the front yard,
which would be the side that the windows,
the famous windows,
they had a sign with a pole,
and it looked like a big, white shingle,
but it was a piece of wood.
And it said in black letters, "High hopes."
[singers] ♪ High hopes He's got high hopes ♪
♪ He's got...
[Tommy] I took it as being cool, you know?
Like, who does that? Why are you doing it, you know?
You know, for... hey, they must have high hopes.
And I also took it as, like, wherever they moved from,
maybe they were starting over, and this was
gonna be the new thing, and it was a good thing.
It was a good sign, to me.
[singers] ♪ Oops, there goes Another problem, kerplop ♪
♪ Kerplop
But after what happened, I kinda wondered
why it was "high hopes."
I don't know.
[eerie synth music]
♪
[crickets chirping]
[screaming, explosions on TV]
[muffled chatter on TV]
- [channel clicks] - [static droning]
[eerie tone]
♪
[gunshots]
[dogs barking]
[gunshots continue]
[gunshot]
[door opens]
[gunshot]
[dogs barking]
[ominous music]
♪
[sirens wailing in distance]
[creaking]
[crowd chattering]
[indistinct radio chatter]
[Joel] I was the first reporter on the scene.
Not because of any miracle or because
I'm any magical person.
I lived the closest.
And we get there, and there's a crowd of people.
And you could see police cars
and emergency vehicles, lights flashing.
And I just asked, "What's happening?"
They said, "A whole family has been murdered."
I said, "Oh, my God."
[tense music]
♪
It was a very surreal scene.
It almost was like you were in some kind of
science fiction horror movie,
and everybody was very quiet.
People were dead silent, watching.
And as I'm standing there, dear God,
I see them bringing out one of the dead children.
They accidentally dropped him.
They dropped him on the ground.
And when they put him back on the tarp,
before they covered him again, for a moment,
you could see the bullet hole.
People all went... [gasps]
all gasped, because it was just heartbreaking.
[Patrick] What can I tell you about the case?
I can tell you that we have six bodies.
We know that.
They were found last night in bed, shot and killed.
[reporter 1] Do these people appear to have
been shot at very close range?
[Patrick] They have been shot,
and I would say it had to be at close range
because you can't get at a long range within a house.
[reporter 2] Chief, how unusual is it
to have six members of a family
on two separate floors killed,
and nobody moving from their bed?
It's not the experience that I've ever had in that line.
[Joel] And so I speak to some kids who lived,
you know, in the neighborhood, right around.
I said, "Listen, my name is Joel Martin."
"I'm the news director at BAB here in Babylon."
"BAB?" He said, "Are you the crazy guy
who does the shows about the flying saucers?"
I swear that was the conversation.
I said, "Yeah."
Sure as heck, they tell me the dog started to bark
between 3:00 and 3:30 sometime.
They have a hound or one of those dogs that
they don't bark so much as they bay.
It was baying.
[imitates baying dog] Crying.
Six members of the DeFeo family are killed.
I said, "So everybody in the whole family?"
"Oh, well, there's one... One person left alive."
I said, "Who's that?"
"Ronnie... Ronnie DeFeo, the sole surviving son."
Ronald is being safeguarded by Suffolk County Police
- at this time. - [reporter 1] Why safeguarded?
Why? Because there's six members of the family dead,
and we don't know why,
and he's the sole remaining member.
Is he also a suspect?
[Patrick] He's not a suspect at this time.
[reporter 2] And the dog was found
in the basement of this house?
Not in the basement, but in the house.
- [reporter 2] Alive? - Yes, he's still alive.
And I don't know... Where is the dog at this time,
do you know?
[reporter 3] Anybody know the name of the dog too?
No, I don't.
[interviewer] Mrs. Gangitano, you knew the DeFeo family.
What sort of people were they?
I think they were just very sweet,
very religious people, very family-minded people.
And that's about all I could say.
Very good, very generous, this type.
Very close with their children.
[interviewer] How was their relationship
with the oldest boy, Ron?
[Gloria] The phone rang.
We were having supper or finishing.
For some reason, I said, "I wonder what's wrong now?"
I don't know why.
And someone said all the DeFeos were killed,
or were gone.
And I thought, "Oh, was there an explosion in the house?"
What could I think of that the whole family...
And then they told me, "No, they were shot."
And then I think I said, "Butchy."
[eerie music]
♪
[interviewer] What kind of a guy was Ron DeFeo?
He didn't look for trouble, you know?
He was that type of fellow, you know?
He was all right.
Like, he seemed a nice guy to me, you know?
[indistinct chatter]
[Tommy] It was November 13th, 1974, in Henry's,
was the last time I saw him.
We were playing craps on the pool table.
He was in and out three or four different times,
which was totally normal for him.
And, um, Ronnie had come back to the bar
and said that, "The mob just killed my father."
I was thinking, this poor guy.
Especially, you know, being with him that day,
you know, seeing him all day long.
Then I had gone home,
and then I saw it on the news later that night.
I was stunned.
It wasn't real.
It was not real.
[Gloria] Ronnie Sr. Was a very caring,
very protective father,
and he wanted to have his wife admire him.
And Louise was sweet.
And the kids were adorable.
And I just think it's just a heartbreaking,
unbelievable situation.
♪
[Paula] My sister and I came home from school that day,
got off the school bus, came home.
I probably was watching Dark Shadows on television.
And then the 5 o'clock news came on,
and I remember when we saw it.
I said, "Mom, Mom, there was a murder in Amityville."
And then when we saw the whole thing unfolding, and then
every day when we got home from school,
we would rush home to see what was on the news,
because there was no other way to find out.
My mom, she volunteered at the church in various ways,
and so she would talk to the other mothers
and they would try to find out from the police
what was happening.
So that was how we all found out what was going on.
The rumors were so crazy.
You know, "I bet it was the mafia."
You know, there was all this kind of speculation.
There was a sense of tension.
I remember thinking at the time,
"Well, what family is left to be with them
when they go to the cemetery?"
[somber music]
♪
I just remember just the warmth whenever I walked in,
and they had their portraits up on the wall
going up the stairs.
There was Allison, and then there was Dawn.
And then there was Marc and John Matthew.
Her mother, Louise...
and Ronnie with his dad.
Dawn was in my class in eighth grade.
She really had a special place in my heart.
I had a instance where I fell down the stairs in the school,
and she was the only person that came to my aid.
So we became fast friends.
♪
[church bells chiming]
[Paula] The day of the funeral,
we were sitting in the choir loft.
You could hear a pin drop.
I mean, there was not a sound in the place.
There was no murmuring.
It was just absolute silence.
The doors open, and then they bring in six coffins.
[bells ringing]
And it's just this procession...
One after the other after the other.
And I remember it was the first time
that I actually thought,
"Dawn is in one of those boxes."
Somebody that I knew.
It was... there was something... Again,
it was so, um, unreal to watch.
[Carol] I do remember
when they were all in their caskets,
and my parents had to basically carry me through.
It was just devastating.
[bell ringing]
♪
When they had the wake,
they had these six coffins open,
and some of them were, like, deformed.
Because... like, my father said, "I don't recognize Louise,"
you know?
Such a sad time.
Like, it was unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
Mrs. DeFeo's father was at the wake
with a gun,
'cause he maybe was involved in something
and didn't know if anyone was gonna come.
I don't know what he expected.
[church bells tolling]
[Carol] And I had... For a very long time,
I was having dreams that they were still alive.
And that was really strange,
because I would dream that I would see
the kids outside of the house.
[camera shutter clicks]
And then I would follow them into the house,
and the mother and father were there, alive.
And I'm like, "What's going on?"
"You guys shouldn't be here."
And they were like, "Well, it was just a way to get
Ronnie committed, you know?"
"It was a ruse."
"You know, it was a fake murder."
I mean, I think it was my mind
trying to make it not real.
I had that dream quite a few times.
It's been a few years, though.
[Ronnie] I would never fight with my father,
because I had no win, you know?
I would run. He would do all the hitting.
I would run.
I never raised my hands at my father.
He was the best friend I ever had.
No matter what I did,
he was always there for me to bail me out.
Mr. DeFeo's physical size
and his manner matched perfectly.
I remember asking my mother,
"Is Mr. DeFeo... Is he in the mafia?"
You watch movies, you're aware of things.
And, you know, my mother said,
"I don't... I don't know, I don't know."
He was definitely a presence when he stepped into a space,
like a made guy.
He looked like a big, imposing guy,
and Ronnie did not.
Mr. DeFeo, he worked at the Buick dealer in Brooklyn.
[tense music]
The grandfather owned it.
Ronnie, he worked with his family,
he's making a lot of money.
Ronnie and his dad were at a constant battle
between each other.
Because Ronnie wanted to do whatever he wanted to do.
He didn't think there was any rules for him.
He was a wise-ass.
He didn't listen. He didn't play by the rules.
You know, he did what he wanted,
went where he wanted, came home when he wanted.
[Laura] He had attempted, Ronnie Jr.,
to shoot his father a year before.
He claimed it was when he saw his father hitting his mother,
and he grabbed a gun and put the gun
to his father's temple,
but it jammed in the chamber.
After that, Big Ronnie got religion in a big way.
He felt it was a miracle.
His life had been spared.
[church choir singing]
♪
[eerie music]
[Ronnie] My mother and me, we were very, very close.
Me and my two sisters, we got along excellently.
My two younger brothers, Marc and John,
we were very close, too, you know.
We used to go fishing.
We were really a close family, you know?
It's a shame what happened, but it happened, you know?
[Carol] Ronnie... Butch...
He was crazy man.
Dawn would tell me from time to time about his drugs,
about his over-excessive drinking.
She would witness, you know, the fights
between her father and Ronnie.
I never saw him work hard a day in his life.
He was just living off the folks
and the grandparents.
It was well known that Michael Brigante,
the grandfather, bought the house for them.
But Dawn was very private about it.
The DeFeos were involved in mob activity,
but it was... you know,
you didn't really talk about it.
They were very guarded.
That's not something you play with.
I don't wanna know nothing.
The least you know, the better off you are.
[tense music]
[indistinct chatter]
[reporter] Today, police combed the DeFeos'
handsome three-story house for clues
while divers explored the backyard swimming pool
for the still unfound murder weapon.
Police have been questioning the son, Ronald.
Investigators say, without explanation,
that they now feel young DeFeo was in the house
at the time of the murders.
[Dennis] I was called in the next morning
to interview Ronald DeFeo.
He continued to change his story.
At that time, I had investigated about 50
other murder cases, and in talking to DeFeo,
it was obvious that he was deceiving us.
[dramatic music]
[Ronnie] I got high. I used heroin.
I was using a lot of heroin back then.
I was getting blackouts but didn't realize it.
I went upstairs, and what happened...
It was like a nightmare.
I'm looking at my mother and father dead, and my sister.
I said, "My God." I got scared.
I ran out of the house, jumped in my car,
ran down the street, got my friends,
and came back to the house.
They all went in the house. I stood outside it.
♪
[Dennis] As a suspect, initially he denied
any involvement in the case.
But as we continued to talk to him,
he displayed angry feelings toward his parents
and toward his family and his family situation.
He told us that when he saw his brother get shot,
he could see the leg twitching.
And it was at that point that we realized
that he was definitely at the scene of the crime
and finally did admit
that he hated his mother and father.
In fact, when we started to interrogate him,
he told us that he had thrown the gun
in the Great South Bay.
And with the assistance of the Marine Division,
they recovered the murder weapon,
a 0.35 caliber Marlin.
[gun clicks]
[radio chatter]
[gun clicks]
And he also told us he buried some bloody clothing
in a street sewer in Queens County in New York City,
that only the killer would have known where it was.
♪
We recovered that bloody evidence.
[camera shutter clicking]
[distant sirens wailing]
Eventually, he admitted to killing his two brothers,
two sisters, and his parents.
[reporter] Police in Suffolk County, New York,
have charged 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr.
With the execution-style murders of his parents,
two brothers, and two sisters.
The bodies were discovered Wednesday night
at the family home in Amityville, Long Island.
[Carol] I remember seeing it in the newspaper
that he was charged.
I wasn't surprised.
I didn't believe it.
I mean, two weeks before that,
he was telling me how proud he was of his younger brother
making the Massapequa Mustangs football team.
And then you go shoot him in his back
while he's sleeping in a bed?
It just seemed impossible.
Why would Ronnie confess to that?
There's only a couple possibilities in your mind...
That he's scared to death,
or the cops beat it out of him,
or he was threatened.
That's the only three I can come up with.
[Ronnie] I was really, uh...
Really, really out of it, mentally out of it.
I remember the lever on the rifle.
I hit the lever on the rifle.
A live round of ammunition jumped out of the rifle...
You know, ejected from the rifle.
And when it ejected, you know, another one went in.
I shot her... I thought I had shot her in the neck,
but I had shot her in the head.
And then when I realized what I did, you know,
I said, "My God," you know?
I mean, it happened so fast.
I never even knew what I did.
[gunshots]
[gunshot]
[gunshots continue]
[dramatic music]
[reporter] ...one major question about this crime
which still hasn't been answered:
the question of motive.
It's reported that Ronald DeFeo Jr. stood
to gain about $200,000 in life insurance
from the death of his family.
Police say they're not ruling that out as a possibility.
No doubt, it's one of the questions
which will be considered by the grand jury this week.
In Amityville, Long Island, Phil Barno, News Center 4.
[Laura] Michael Brigante Sr., Ronnie's maternal grandfather,
was a very emotional-type man,
and the Brooklyn DA's office was investigating
the suspected ties to Joe Colombo
that the Brigante family had.
They were being bugged.
There were tapes.
What you heard on the tapes
was Michael Brigante Sr. saying,
"What are we gonna do?"
"If that kid gets off,
if he's acquitted, we got problems."
"He knows too much about what's going on
in our business."
After the verdict, at the trials,
he embraced his grandson, kissed him,
spoke to him in Italian and English.
I think this was more a case of,
keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
[Herman] On your left, you have the DeFeo house,
where the six murders took place in November '74.
And of course, as you know, I got
involved in this murder case.
[Michael] My father was Herman Henry Race.
He became a police officer, detective, sergeant.
Did you ever hear the expression "crime pays"?
Pays very well.
So he became a private investigator,
did a lot of criminal work.
One of the cases he got involved with
was with the Colombo family.
Michael Brigante, who is the grandfather, the father
of the deceased Louise DeFeo,
personally asked me to conduct an investigation to determine
what really took place on the night of the murders.
"Where were you?"
"What's the actual cause of this?"
"See... if you can, find out what the motive was."
And that's what Mike Brigante was trying to do.
One person killing your entire family?
It wasn't normal.
There's a time frame involved.
Did he have clarity in what he was doing?
I think he did.
He went from room to room
and executed his entire family.
Here, you have people spread out in different rooms
on different floors.
It's not one person.
It's impossible to do this all by yourself.
I mean, even with a split personality,
you can't be on two different floors.
Someone had to help him.
The question is, is who?
[William] You're talking about the crime of the century,
as far as I'm concerned.
I have no explanation why Ronnie
killed his whole family, if at all he did.
How a boy who loved his mother,
who adored and idolized his two younger brothers,
could possibly do such a thing, you know,
to me, it was an act of insanity.
♪
[Ellen] I'm Ellen Stark, and I'm the daughter
of Judge Thomas Stark, who was the judge
in the DeFeo murder trial.
It just really caught my attention
when he talked about the manner of people being killed.
I do remember him talking about DeFeo going from room to room
and shooting everybody.
I mean, that sort of stuck in my memory.
That was just horrifying, that an entire family
had been murdered.
The DeFeo trial took place in the fall of 1975.
My father thought it was a strong legal team
on both sides.
William Weber was
a very accomplished defense lawyer,
and Gerry Sullivan was an accomplished prosecutor,
so I think my father had respect for both lawyers.
Ronnie DeFeo, in my view, is evil incarnate.
Um...
prosecuted cases for ten years,
and many murderers among them.
There has never been, in my experience,
and from what I know,
certainly in the metropolitan New York area,
the history of crime in recent years,
there has never been anybody to achieve
the dimensions of evil as Ronnie DeFeo.
You're talking about eight expertly-placed bullets
by an individual who has been described by an optometrist
as being almost legally blind.
About halfway through his direct examination
his attorney, Mr. Weber, asked him
point blank, "Ronnie, did you kill your father?"
And Ronnie answered, "Yes, sir, I killed them all."
"And I killed them before they could kill me."
♪
There were two psychiatrists, both of whom examined DeFeo.
One was for the prosecution, one was for the defense,
and both psychiatrists actually testified
that they believed that Ronald DeFeo
had shot his entire family.
It was just a question of the psychiatrists' opinions
on to what degree he understood what he was doing.
The psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution
was a man named Dr. Harold Zolan,
and he argued that DeFeo had an antisocial personality,
and that the fact that he collected evidence afterwards
and went and threw it in a storm drain in Brooklyn
was evidence that he knew perfectly well
what he was doing.
Ronald DeFeo's psychiatrist, Dr. Schwartz,
argued that he was...
I think he called it paranoid psychosis.
His argument was that the murder was actually
triggered by a movie
that Ronald DeFeo was watching that night,
an old World War II movie called Castle Keep.
[playing organ]
♪
I believe that he was so psychotic at the time
of the murders that he was not criminally responsible.
This is a young man who, from all we know,
never really learned to control his emotions
in a reasonable way.
He was filled with murderous thoughts
and paranoid ideas that he was meant to be killed.
And there came a time in his life
when he felt that he had to kill others,
lest he be killed.
[Thomas] He apparently, right from the beginning,
decided to employ an insanity defense upon trial.
And he started a concerted action
in the jail to appear that he was insane
and insisted that the correction officers
write down in the log his allegedly insane conduct.
Of course, within 15 minutes, they came in
and rendered their six guilty as charged verdicts.
In your mind, you're trying to unwind this puzzle.
It didn't make sense. A lot of it didn't make sense.
[camera shutter clicks]
How does all these people sleep,
one person shot and murdered, and no one wakes up?
I used to go deer hunting with that same rifle.
Not the same rifle... that rifle.
It's loud.
And I believe it only holds six.
So if you fire more than six, you, as the suspect,
have to reload it.
[rifle chamber clicking]
On the side is where you put the cartridge in,
and it goes into this tube.
So when you pull the lever down,
it ejects the shell casing.
You close the lever and raise it up.
Another round goes into the chamber.
[eerie music]
♪
It's a lever action.
It's not like a pistol, where you can
just keep pulling the trigger.
You're shooting that rifle inside of a house.
The echo effect is tremendous.
[gunshot echoing]
No one wakes up.
So what does that tell you?
It wasn't Ron Jr. by himself.
So you're taking time.
It's almost, and I say almost, inconceivable
that the sounds wouldn't wake somebody.
However, if somebody was there to pacify the children
and say, "Go back to sleep"...
"Lie down on your stomach."
"I don't want to see your face."
It probably happened that way, that they did go back to sleep
until they, too, met their demise.
Proving it is a whole different ball game.
You can't, 'cause it was never brought up.
Once they made the arrest, the case was over.
[dark music]
♪
[Hans] Dr. Daniel Schwartz,
what do you feel is the underlying cause
that made DeFeo commit these crimes?
[Daniel] Uh, he grew up as a violent man
in a house of violence.
Or do you think he might be the recipient
of some extraordinary influences in the house?
I don't know.
I have an open mind about things like this.
I just don't know.
The questions in the DeFeo case
need more than conventional explanations.
Perhaps Ronnie may have acted under the influence
of unknown forces beyond his control or understanding.
Six people died on Ocean Avenue.
Was Ronnie, in fact, the seventh victim?
[beeping]
[suspenseful music]
My name is Hans Holzer.
I'm a parapsychologist,
but most people know me as the Ghost Hunter.
And I'm about to take you along on a tour of haunted places,
so get set to come along on my ghost hunt.
And remember, friends, this isn't fiction.
What you're about to see and hear is the real thing.
♪
What did you see?
I saw a woman standing in the aisle.
So I said to her, "Wait, lady, turn the lights on."
"You'll fall."
And uh, I turned away and was going to the light switch.
And when I turned to look at her again,
she disappeared right into thin air.
I understand you've also heard some strange noises.
[Alexandra] My father,
famed ghost hunter Dr. Hans Holzer,
was born in Vienna, Austria.
He became a skeptic journalist on his own.
I think that we have to relieve somebody here.
And this is something from the past?
Oh, yes. Well past.
I mean, not yesterday or... Or this century.
- Yes, yes. - Going back.
- Another century. - Another century.
And you feel it is still lingering on
here in the atmosphere?
He started to report
on people's experiences
of odd occurrences and happenings.
The first book he wrote was called The Ghost Hunter.
When that book became very successful,
that really was the pinnacle moment for him,
and that became the work.
He published over 145 titles.
♪
Have you any tangible proof of having seen a ghost?
I've developed a photography technique
to take photographs in haunted houses.
- [interviewer] You got 'em? - Oh, I sure have 'em.
But I must tell you, my film has been examined
before and after by experts,
and no artificial light sources are used.
[interviewer] Where is the ghost, though?
[Hans] On the left side, and you can see
what looks like transparent figures
of hooded monks.
- [scattered laughter] - [interviewer] Ooh, boy.
I really think this is a subject
that should not be made light of.
[Alexandra] My father was a very serious man.
What happens with spirit photography,
something is entering your frame
and clogging it up.
[Hans] What is strange about this picture
is that there seems to be a triple exposure
when only one was made by me.
[Alexandra] So we know when there's a murder,
a trapped ghost will step inside your frame.
For my father, it was important
because there's a science to everything.
[Erik] Part of our condition as human beings
is that there are anomalous experiences,
whether we want to acknowledge them or not.
They just keep on happening.
And what we see in the '70s, paranormal investigators,
they all have good technology, they're recording things.
I was... I was laughing at a clown in a big red suit.
Uh, he was making me laugh.
He was very jolly.
And uh, he was holding these three big, red balloons.
They approach it as a kind of science,
because this idea that you could connect with something
that would give you messages,
that's pretty fantastical for a lot of people.
So then they turn to science to prove the paranormal.
Is it truth or is it a hoax?
Even though it's very powerful just as a story,
it has to be more than that, more than just myth.
One might suppose that in this modern age
dominated by the remarkable accomplishments of science,
the ancient world of the occult would be dying out.
Instead, many occult beliefs and practices
seem to be thriving.
The Committee for the Scientific Investigation
of Claims of the Paranormal.
It is made up of scientists, writers, even magicians,
who are worried that too many people these days
are believing in too many things.
So if the doorbell rings in the middle of the night tonight
and a ghost is standing there, simply refer him
to the local paranormal chapter and go back to bed.
When I think about the Amityville murders,
what was so odd about this case
was that nobody heard the guns go off.
If you go out to Long Island, you see the houses,
they're kinda close to each other,
especially on that street.
All the shots went, so it would have been,
bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,
in the middle of the night.
No lights go on in the houses on either side of them.
Nobody hears anything.
My father read about the story in The New York Times,
and he wanted to know what was going on there.
[tense music]
His theory was that in a moment of possession,
no sound will travel beyond the walls in that house.
♪
[static droning]
[muffled gunshots]
♪
He was given access not once but twice to Ronald DeFeo.
He wanted to talk to the murderer himself.
[Hans] I want you to relax, Ronald.
Close your eyes and listen to my voice
coming to you from a distance.
I want you to go back in time now.
[tape scrolling]
[distorted voices]
You are just 20 years old.
Now, when you first moved into 112 Ocean Avenue
in Amityville, did you feel anything at all
about the atmosphere in the house?
[Ronnie] Well, when I first moved in, you know,
you start hearing noises and different things at night.
[Hans] What did you hear?
[Ronnie] You thought that somebody might have been
walking around, pipes banging.
All these, you know, strange noises, you know.
[Hans] Did you tell anyone about it?
[Ronnie] Yeah, they were up walking around too,
the members of my family.
Everybody thought there was somebody in there.
[Hans] And they didn't see anything either?
[Ronnie] No.
Once in a while you'd hear screaming,
but there wasn't nobody screaming.
[Hans] Did you ever see any object move by themselves?
[Ronnie] I never saw anything move,
but there was things moved.
Who moved them, to this day, I don't know.
[Hans] Did your family members report
anything unusual to you in that way?
[Ronnie] I recall my mother or somebody at one time
said they saw something.
[Hans] She said she saw a ghost?
[Ronnie] No, that they felt the devil was in the house.
[Gloria] None of the neighbors associated with them.
They saw some crazy behavior.
Mr. DeFeo said he had a hotline to St. Joseph.
The neighbors told me after, he would run out in his shorts
and pray in front of the statue.
Who knows? I don't know.
[tense music]
♪
One time, we had dinner at his house.
Mr. DeFeo asked us if we knew which side
Jesus was stabbed on.
None of us could answer.
And he said, well, he knows
because he was at the crucifixion.
[eerie choral music]
♪
Nobody was drugged.
Nobody heard any shots.
And to this day, all the clever lawyers
and all the police officers have no answer to this,
because they just aren't qualified to understand it.
[Alexandra] My father's experiences always were
through the mediums and/or psychics
that he would work with.
They have the ability to see, hear, feel,
to receive a lot of information,
which can be very scary at times.
And it's handed down by generations.
That's the Holzer method.
That's the combination of the science
and then the otherworldly, if you will.
Ethel Johnson-Meyers was one of the mediums
he liked to work with.
She was actually formerly an opera singer,
very quiet and frail.
Then her voice just kind of, you know,
would just drop down an octave.
It's like a male voice coming through.
She's like... [voice deepens] "I'm feeling."
He brought Ethel to the house in Amityville
at 112 Ocean Avenue,
and they started doing a tour of the house.
How my father described it was,
even when they were driving up towards the house,
she immediately felt a very strong presence there.
They started to take the Polaroid photos.
[projector whirring]
And something is entering frame
and clogging it up.
There's other Polaroid shots
where you'll see the bullet holes.
Around the bullet hole is what we call, like, a halo glow,
which is this residual energy that's surrounding them,
and what my father believed was,
your spirit energy is manifesting, showing you,
in this moment, we're still here.
There's no botching it. There's no fakery.
It's... it's heartbreaking, 'cause we know
what those bullets did.
Ethel went into a trance,
so she allows whoever or whatever is there
to take over her body.
Her throat would close up and she would be choking,
because, you know, the spirit was trying
to enter her to communicate.
My father really started to pull
a picture of an angry man
from the past who had certain beliefs
and structures that this was their land they live on.
That was very specific,
because we were now getting some information
as to why he was there.
[eerie music]
♪
[Alexandra] Could he have possibly influenced
somebody like Ronald DeFeo out of anger and spite?
And um, my father believed so.
The only, uh, story I've ever heard about any Indian being
buried in that area was south of the house
that you're discussing,
and it was reporting
that they had discovered the skeleton
of an Indian chief.
Um, indicated that was a chief
because he was in a standing position.
[Hans] And what happened to the skeleton?
[Seth] I don't know.
There's a lot to be said about bad happenings on land.
So we have a home or a barn and things keep happening,
somebody keeps dying, or there's a murder,
or death is all around us.
There's something negative going on there.
And I refer to it like a vortex or a portal
of negative energies that are coming in and out
and wreaking havoc in that area.
♪
[birds squawking]
[Hans] I discovered around the turn of the century,
around 1900, a skeleton of an Indian chief on a horse
had partially been exposed during a rainstorm.
And the skeleton's head had been broken off
by a youngster who then played football with it,
and that is when all the trouble started.
He felt that the environment
that Ronnie DeFeo was growing up in,
they move into this house,
the abuse that was going on,
it made them prime suspects to be taken over
by this angry Indian chief.
The area developed over the years.
You know, 100 years later, it's a booming
boating, fishing town.
[ominous music]
You know, if you put in the negative energy
of such a dysfunctional family like the DeFeos, for instance,
yes, these things can happen.
But it's from an... Almost like an ancient energy,
if you will.
Like an ancient evil.
[eerie voices echoing]
[Alexandra] To me, I look at it more like a murder.
And then the aftermath is
the lingering energies that were there
and whoever stayed around,
unfortunately.
[Paula] There was a moment there in the '70s,
early to mid '70s, where there was an awareness
of Native American culture.
I remember when a group of Indigenous people went
and they occupied Alcatraz claiming, you know,
"This is our territory."
No, we're here to stay.
We're, uh... We're with that conviction.
We're gonna stick with it.
And there was, like, this moment of acknowledging
what had happened to the Indigenous people,
particularly on Long Island.
[rhythmic drumming]
They were killed off, run off the land.
All of Long Island is an Indian burial ground.
But I just felt that any of this sort of awareness
gave somebody the idea, "Oh, Indian burial ground."
"You know, that could be a story."
"That's creepy too," and that's something
that got thrown into the mix when they were talking
about all the possible reasons why the house was haunted.
My father had some big pair of balls, I gotta tell you.
He didn't care. He said what he said
because it was the truth, and people don't like people
that speak the truth.
My husband said, "Do you wanna buy the house?"
A boathouse, a pool... It was, like, $55,000.
I said, "With all those people murdered? No."
I don't wanna live in that house with those memories.
[Paula] I wouldn't wanna live there,
you know, after what happened.
And that was my feeling too.
Like, who would want to live there?
And then kinda you forgot about it until we heard the...
The story about the... The Lutz family moving in.
Ronnie had just been convicted when the story broke
with George and Kathy Lutz
moving into and out of the house in 28 days.
Everybody started calling William Weber.
Mr. Weber says, "Listen, these people named
the Lutzes bought your house."
"You do know them through somebody else."
I said, "Oh, yeah?"
"And, uh, we can use them to make money."
I said, "What are you talking about?"
And that's how the haunted house nonsense started.
[singer] ♪ La, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la ♪
♪ La, la, la, la, la La, la, la ♪
♪ I thought a little 'Bout you last night ♪
♪ I thought a little 'Bout you yesterday ♪
♪ I think a little 'Bout you every day ♪
♪ And it works out all right
♪ La, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la ♪
♪ La, la, la, la, la La, la, la ♪
♪ La, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la ♪
♪ La, la, la, la, la La, la, la ♪
♪ I had a little bit Too much to drink ♪
♪ When I woke up It really made me think ♪
♪ It seems you're in Everything I say ♪
♪ And I think that's okay
♪ And I want you to stay
♪ And I think you're okay
[eerie music droning]