donnerpartyofone:

congenitaldisease:

The Amityville Ghost

In the early morning hours of 13 November, 1974, 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr systematically shot and killed his father, mother, and his four siblings, as they slept in their beds of their Amityville, Long Island, New York home.

During his trial, he claimed that he had killed his family in self-defence because he had heard their voices plotting to kill him. But the story doesn’t end there: In December 1975, the Lutz family purchased the house and over the course of 28 days, they claimed they were plagued and terrorised by paranormal phenomena while living there, before fleeing the property. Some such claims included green slime running from the walls, hidden rooms, images of half headed demons, a demonic pig, as well as mysterious welts and wounds appearing out of nowhere.

After the family fled the macabre home, they called in investigators which was when the photograph above was snapped, apparently showing a ghost of a little boy peering out from behind the door; many believe it to be the ghost of 9-year-old John Matthew DeFeo. Whether the truth in this haunting case was stretched or even a hoax all together, it still remains one of the most sensationalised ghost stories worldwide, even inspiring multiple books and movies.

there are no fewer than 15 amityville movies–16 if you count the documentary MY AMITYVILLE HORROR, and i may even be missing some–but my ultimate fantasy is that someone will make a film that directly addresses the great likelihood that the legend was wholly fabricated out of pure desperation by the lutzes in conjunction with jay anson and whomever else. i’d love to see like a really tense bitter drama about how those choices were made away from the public eye. this is partly because i have really strong feelings about how certain kinds of lies are told. obviously many lies are told with very formal deliberation, to achieve specific gains, but some are told on instinct; they develop intuitively, often with the aid of some sort of preexisting groupthink that is primed to accept particular kinds of stories. i think about this a lot when i’m studying cults–i ask myself, did this abuse situation develop as a result of one or a small group of authority figures conspiring in a boardroom style situation, or was it born organically in the fertile social soil created by the leaders’ instinctive predatory behavior and the followers’ inveterate willingness to listen and obey? the unknowable-ness of this question haunts me literally every time i consider any case where a group of people insisted on their supernatural experience or on the supernatural power of another individual.