31 Days of Halloween | Day 20: The Amityville Horror — The True Story Behind the Haunting
Haunted American HistoryShow Notes
On November 13, 1974, a young man ran into a bar in Amityville, New York, shouting that his parents had been shot.
When police arrived at his family's waterfront home, they discovered six bodies.
Ronald DeFeo Jr. had murdered his parents and four younger siblings while they slept.
Just over a year later, another family moved into the house.
George and Kathy Lutz knew about the murders, but they believed they could make a new life there. Within twenty-eight days, they had abandoned the property, claiming something terrifying had happened inside.
They described mysterious voices, unexplained noises, strange substances appearing throughout the house, and a supernatural presence that seemed determined to drive them away.
Their story became *The Amityville Horror*, one of the bestselling haunted-house books of its time and the inspiration for a horror franchise that continues to this day.
But how much of it actually happened?
Tonight, we're investigating the real murders behind the Amityville Horror, the twenty-eight days that supposedly transformed an ordinary family home into a supernatural nightmare, the lawsuits and conflicting testimony that followed, and the people who spent decades living in the shadow of America's most famous haunted house.
Welcome to Day Twenty of 31 Days of Halloween
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