The Amityville Horror — Family Flees Home After 28 Days of Paranormal Terror

On December 18, 1975, George and Kathy Lutz moved into 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York — the house where, just over a year earlier, Ronald DeFeo Jr. had murdered his parents and four siblings in their beds. Twenty-eight days later, the Lutz family fled the house and never returned. The Lutz family reported an extraordinary range of phenomena during their brief occupancy: green slime oozing from walls and ceilings, clouds of flies in a sewing room even in winter, levitation, personality changes in family members, apparitions, strange odors, disembodied voices, and physical manifestations in a basement room they called "the Red Room." Kathy Lutz claimed to have been physically levitated off her bed and to have seen her face transform into that of an old woman when looking in a mirror. George Lutz reportedly awoke each night at 3:15 AM — the approximate time of the DeFeo murders — and frequently found himself in the boathouse on the property. An investigation by parapsychologists Ed and Lorraine Warren is among the most famous in their careers. A priest who blessed the house reported a voice commanding him to get out from an empty room. The case was published as a book in 1977 and became a major motion picture. Subsequent residents have reported little activity, and some investigators have questioned elements of the original account, making Amityville one of the most contested haunting cases in American history.