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October 14, 2014: The Amityville Horror
When I made my last trip to my hometown of Lindenhurst, NY a few weeks ago, I took my usual route through the town of Amityville so I could go past Brunswick Hospital, where I was born. I knew the hospital closed years ago but was still shocked to see an empty lot where it once stood. It got me thinking about birthplace, where we come from and how those locations impact the rest of our lives.

Amityville is not only where I came into the world, it's where I spent many childhood and adolescent hours. One town west of Copiague, where my grandmother lived, Amityville had my mother's favorite movie theater, pharmacy (Phanemiller's), office supply store and Stride-Rite Shoes location.

When Peter Benchley fictionalized Amityville as Amity in his 1974 book Jaws, the town got an inkling of the attention it would receive nine months later when mass murder occurred at 112 Ocean Avenue. Six members of the DeFeo family were found shot to death in their beds. The one surviving family member, Ronald "Butch" DeFeo Jr., pinned the murders on a mob hit man (his uncle had some connection to the Mafia) but inconsistencies in his story soon unraveled and he confessed to acting alone.

On this day in 1975 Ronald DeFeo Jr. went on trial for the murders, mounting an insanity defense. He was quickly found guilty and sentenced to six concurrent sentences of twenty-five years to life.

Two years later, the book The Amitiyville Horror climbed to the top of the bestseller lists. Written by Jay Anson and subtitled A True Story, the recounting of the Lutz family's twenty-eight day ordeal at the hands of unseen, demonic forces haunting 112 Ocean Avenue (supposedly built on an Indian burial ground) exploited an appetite for scary stories established a few years prior by The Exorcist. Like that book, The Amityville Horror became a hit movie that led to several sequels. But it also spawned a cottage industry of rampant speculation about what actually went on in that infamous house.

For me, the only thing we know that actually happened there - Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered his entire family - is the real horror. Though the murders are exploited in The Amityville Horror, I didn't know the TRUE true story until I read the book High Hopes, written by Gerald Sullivan, the prosecutor in the DeFeo case. The "horror" story wants you to believe that DeFeo Jr. was driven crazy by the same demonic forces that drove out the Lutz family years later. The truth is far more tragic and banal. Ronald DeFeo Jr. was a junkie who stole $10,000 in cash (kept in a tackle box, stashed beneath the floorboards of his parent's bedroom) from his father and then decided to cover it up by methodically shooting to death his mother, father, two brothers and two sister as they slept.

The Cromartys, a prominent local family - the patriarch of which was Judge Arthur Cromarty (whom my mother knew growing up) - bought the house after the murders because it was a bargain. They couldn't know how many sensation-seekers would make their way down Ocean Avenue to gawk and take pictures. I was one of those assholes. When I hit drinking age (back then it was eighteen), I'd head over to the Silver Dollar Saloon in Amityville with friends for live music and cheap beer. On the way, I'd always make a detour down Ocean Avenue, pop in my "Night on Bald Mountain" cassette and try to scare the crap out of my pals by driving them past "that house".

In my early twenties I found myself working for one of the Cromarty sons, raising money for the First Marine Division and the Vietnam Veterans of America. Halloween was rolling around and I was invited to a party at 112 Ocean Avenue. I turned the invitation down. My co-workers kidded me, asking me if I was afraid of ghosts and saying "GET OUT!" in imitation of the film. I told them I had just read High Hopes and did not want to go in a house where so many people had been murdered.

What's stayed with me from the place I was born, Amityville, is an object lesson in the distance between truth and fiction. Maybe it's why I've never been a believer in the supernatural. The natural world is frightening enough for me. We are our own demons.

What about you? How did your birthplace shape your views of the world, if at all? And where do you stand on the supernatural? Have you ever seen anything to convince you there are other dimensions? Ever felt haunted by more than your own past? Call 201-209-WFMU tonight and let's discuss the horror of it all.

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