On a Wednesday evening in November 1974, a twenty-three-year-old man pushed open the door of a bar on Long Island's South Shore and begged the room for help. He had found his parents shot and killed in the family's home. Within the hour, the men who followed him back to the house had found six people in their beds: a mother, a father, two daughters, and two sons. Every single one was dead, and the man who led them there was the only member of the family still alive.
The strangest part of the DeFeo family murders is what happened to the house afterward. A young couple, George and Kathy Lutz, bought it at a discount, but moved out after only a month of living there. They said the house has haunted them. According to George, he woke at 3:15 every morning, around the hour the DeFeos had died. The couple said doors were torn off their hinges by something invisible, swarms of flies filled a closed room in the dead of winter, and their youngest child made a new imaginary friend: a red-eyed pig named Jodie who peered in through the windows.
The Lutzes turned their story into a bestselling book, The Amityville Horror, then a hit 1979 film, then more than thirty movie adaptations, and it turned 112 Ocean Avenue into the most famous haunted house in America. Along the way, the six people who actually died there were mostly forgotten.
So today, I'm going to separate what's real from what's folklore. This is the true story of Ronald and Louise DeFeo and their children, Dawn, Allison, Marc, and John Matthew: the six people who lived, and died, at 112 Ocean Avenue.
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