A Dutch Colonial house at 112 Ocean Avenue, Long Island. 13 November 1974. Ronald "Butch" DeFeo Jr. shot his parents and four siblings there as they slept. The Lutz family haunting that followed became a book selling about 10 million copies and a 1979 film starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder. Joe Nickell called it a hoax, or at best not proven. The name became a yardstick. Paul Kurtz of CSICOP compared the Smurl case in West Pittston to it, and Nickell later likened the flies in the Ammons house in Gary, Indiana, to Amityville.
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