You're Wrong About
You're Wrong About
Winter Book Club: The Amityville Horror Part 1 with Jamie Loftus
Sarah tells guest host Jamie Loftus about the Amityville Horror, how it’s a Christmas story, and why buying murder furniture might not be such a great idea.
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The Bechdel Cast [podcast] My Year in Mensa [podcast] and Aack Cast [podcast]
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Jamie: God. Okay. Well now I'm all fired up.
Sarah: Welcome to You’re Wrong About. I'm your host Sarah Marshall. So, this episode is a return to the classic format of the You’re Wrong About book club, where we go gradually through, I think in the past it's always been a weird 1970s claiming to be non-fiction book, because that's my comfort zone apparently. It's where I think a lot of important issues surface and then are forgotten because they're in weird bestsellers that turn up in cottages for the next 50 years. I am talking with Jamie Loftus about The Amityville Horror. I'm so happy to be talking to Jamie about this. I'm so happy to be doing something that dovetails with the episode that we just did on Ed and Lorraine Warren, who are two other greats based on a true story, people of the 20th century. And perhaps we will find the story to be as factual as many of theirs ended up being. If you listened to that episode, and if you haven't, you should check it out. This is multi-part, so we are going to discuss what this book is and what it represents culturally, and then get about as far as things starting to get very serious for this family.
I also want to share with the world that The Amityville Horror is a Christmas story. It is very appropriate, seasonal viewing and reading and so we are going to get up to Christmas Eve and the events of this book, which is maybe a third of the way into this family is one month tenure. In their scary, scary house because that's what the show is really all about is the spirit of Christmas. We have a Patreon for the show where we do bonus episodes. We did one last month with Jamie talking about the Pinkerton Detectives. We have one this month with Eric Michael Garcia, who was a previous guest in a wonderful episode. We're going to be talking about the film Music by Sia and as you can imagine that's going to rise to quite a dramatic pitch from that conversation and what can be learned from such a disaster.
I was really excited to talk about this book because I initially started researching it for an episode and then got profoundly sucked into and fascinated by the story, which I think has to happen for me to do good work with anything. I think this story is meaningful to me to explore because anything that has this profound of an impact on the people who consumed it, anything this bad that people love this much has to mean something. There has to be a reason beyond the quality of the writing. It has a quality of a certain kind, but there's something else that's drawing people in. There's something else that was so compelling to people that made this such an unbelievably profitable story in the late seventies, and then has allowed it to stay famous and to remain a drawn, to keep ruining the lives of whoever lives on the same street as this house. I'm very curious about what's happening there. Why can't we move on? Why are we haunted by this haunted house story? So that is what we're going to try to find out, Merry Christmas.
Welcome to You’re Wrong About the show where we talk about ghost stories and stories where the ghosts are stand-ins for men being jerks. I don't feel like that's a spoiler.
Jamie: I don't think so.
Sarah: With me today is Jamie Loftus.
Jamie: Hi.
Sarah: I feel like you are the show is ghost correspondent at this point.
Jamie: I'm happy to take on that role.
Sarah: That's awesome.
Jamie: I'm excited to find out if you think any of that ghost are real here, that should be one of the 36 questions to fall in love, do you remember those?
Sarah: Yes, I do remember that.
Jamie: Do you believe in ghosts should be one of them because it is a kind of an intimate question that people hesitate before the answer usually?
Sarah: I mean, it's a risk either way because you could be like, I do believe in ghosts to some extent someone could be like, huh, that's pretty silly. Or you could be like, I don't believe in ghosts, and someone could be like, how can you not believe in ghosts when there are so clearly ghosts?
Jamie: I feel like I have heard people answer that question and it is slightly changed how I thought of them. I think mostly when someone I wouldn't expect to believe in ghost does and it really endears me to them.
Sarah: I think it is vulnerable in many ways to believe in ghosts and then it's also something that you can use to exploit vulnerable people, a profess belief in ghosts.
Jamie: Ohhh, she's transitioning, wow.
Sarah: This is an historic recording event. You and I are in the same place. This has never happened in the making of an episode of You're Wrong About ever.
Jamie: Wait, ever, ever?
Sarah: Ever, ever.
Jamie: How do you feel?
Sarah: The goal of Skype or Zoom or any of the programs that we've all been using incessantly for the past two years, if not for years before that also, is to trick the mind if only for a moment and to thinking that someone is really with you. I feel as if like I've been working this spell for years and it finally worked and I'm like, ha.
Jamie: You have conjured a person.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jamie: This is so nice.
Sarah: I will tell the story because I think it's nice. I had this plan and then I executed it successfully. I came back to my house in Portland, and I have a live event this week at Livewire, which will already exist in the world by the time you hear this and you can go hear a recording of that. Hopefully I was funny.
Jamie: You killed it.
Sarah: I look back fondly on that thing that's about to happen. I wish I could do it all over again. You came to town to visit, and you arrived before me and then my friend, Alex Steed, who I call my brother, who I found on the internet and Carolyn who produces this show. You were all here in my house waiting for me when I arrived and so I opened the door and went ‘my little women.’
Jamie: Which you had foreshadowed by a full two days, and it really delivered.
Sarah: I'm so happy.
Jamie: You're like, that's the full Odenkirk on that one.
Sarah: It felt like, oh, we've got to do some podcast stuff while we're in the house of podcasts.
Jamie: This is the business portion of the visit.
Sarah: Right, so it can be a tax write-off when we got hot dogs later, but it also feels appropriate because I feel like the pandemic was really hard for me socially. I really lacked the energy to either maintain friendships or make friends the way that I had before. Alex and I were extremely close for a long time before pandemic stuff hit and Carolyn and I were newly close and I feel like we were able to maintain this pod reality, being in touch all the time, because we started doing a different podcast together called You Are Good. Then you did one of the first new episodes of You're Wrong About, of You're Wrong About too, podcasts and the making of them have kept and brought these people into my life and now it makes sense to practice that thing while we're all here together.
I guess what I'm saying is every so often somebody is like, should I make a podcast, or should people make more podcasts? I bet you think there are too many podcasts and I'm like, no, there should be like eternally more podcasts until the ratio of podcast to human beings is like one-to-one if not more. Yes, a lot of people have said a lot of things, but you haven't yet probably, so many things happen through it and one of them is relationships and friendships and that's so important.
Jamie: It is like a huge bonding exercise. I think I've come all the way around on that because I also struggle with like the social aspect of anything. So, to be put in a controlled environment where you are going to get to know someone better, you are going to like ideally to listen to each other and actually like communicate. I do not know; it is just a very gentle social bootcamp sometimes in a way that I am like, I like this. It's just been so nice podcast friendships truly the best friendships.
Sarah: Yeah. So Merry Christmas, God bless us everyone. Thank you for being a podcast listener and supporting this new and weird art form that I'm so happy to be a part of. I want to return a little bit to the format of yield, You're Wrong About book club, Satanic Panic book clubs. This is the Satanic Panic book, surprise, because we're talking about The Amityville Horror today. The first things about that I feel like is important to remember given the evidence we have for ghosts in this book is that the movie, which was incredibly successful. One of the top earners of 1979, people don't sit around watching it now, but it was giant at the time.
The story takes place in what looks like late summer into early fall and in reality, whatever happened was basically right before Christmas, right to the first days of the new year and one of the ghostly manifestations. It is a light motif in this book, which I just find so wonderful is like, it was so cold and the giant house they just bought. How could it be? It's like it is December, it's a giant house, it is on the ocean.
Jamie: I knew it was actually in December, but it never occurred to me why you would make that logic shift to make that, wow. When I was putting my Warren's episode together, I just skipped over The Amityville Horror entirely. But it was hard to because I'm so curious about it.
Sarah: Yeah. There are certain books that have been special to me that I go through and experience with and at first I’m like, okay, I'm going to read this book. Then I'm like, oh, this isn't very good. Then I'm like, oh my God, this is terrible, I can't believe I'm reading this goddamn thing and I can't believe I'm spending so much time looking at it and thinking about it. Then at a certain point, you break through a wall and you're like, this book is incredible.
Jamie: Are you on the side of book good?
Sarah: Here's what I think, I've been thinking about this since we did the True Crime episode. What does it mean that I grew up reading true crime and why did I find it comforting? I think for me the writing style is always the same, very competent, not a lot of flair. There's usually some kind of template detailing of like the lives of the very normal victims before something terrible happens to them. It always emphasizes how nice things are for them and it's like Becky Sue was a great A-student and a runner up for homecoming queen, whose boyfriend, Kirk, was detailing a motorcycle that he built from parts. They were planning a trip to Cape Cod that summer.
Jamie: He was going to tell her he was in love with her three days after the event. You set up the Hallmark movie and then something terrible happens.
Sarah: Yeah. That's like a style that I'm very familiar with and I think I sought out when I was a teenage girl because I think there was less reality TV and reality social media content. Any time before 10 years ago and I think there's this thing where people want to just watch other people do normal things.
Jamie: I don’t know, sometimes I get afraid of books because I'm going to have to really give my entire brain over to this and you don't need to be firing on all sign ups to enjoy true crime.
Sarah: Yeah. It really has that going for it. This is just a weird book kind of in the way Michelle Remembers is weird where it's presented very credulously as factual. Then by the time you're done with it, you're like really, and the publisher published it as non-fiction and you're like really though. The disclaimer is like, these events are true to the extent that we can verify them and it's like, well, if someone tells you that, green slime suddenly appeared on his wall and he didn't save anything, you can't really verify it. You just have to be like, who knows, he says it happened.
Jamie: It was really cold in that house, wasn’t it?
Sarah: Pretty scary.
Jamie: But for some reason, I feel like it was culturally accepted as being pretty real in a way that people didn't really examine, which I don't hate it, it is just weird.
Sarah: Exactly. Then also this book was incredibly successful. This movie was incredibly successful. It created a franchise that's still putting out sequels by the way, Amityville is extremely popular.
Jamie: Really?
Sarah: Yeah. I did not know this but there's like 8 billion Amityville sequels and franchise reboots still.
Jamie: I just knew there's a Ryan Reynolds one, right?
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Jamie: Oh, I want to watch that.
Sarah: It's like a bonafide phenomenon. It's up there with Friday the 13th for sure and I feel like we've probably always tried to commune with spirits of the dead, but then in the seventies we have definitely a haunted house boom in the media. Also, as this show has been about a lot of the time, the kind of precursor orchestra tuning up for the Satanic Panic, The Exorcist, The Omen, the consumer demand related increase in the supply of exorcists available to give you an exorcism in the 1970s. This interesting number of narratives and I don't have conclusions about this, but I have a lot of questions, where the Catholic church is right and they're the only ones who can save you.
Jamie: Right. The Catholic church and the police are going to, the more heavily you fuck with them, the safer you will be in the more, you know, not having an inherent trust in either of those institutions will leave you extremely vulnerable.
Sarah: Yeah. It's totally like no atheists in a foxhole type of story. People in these stories, they either become more Catholic or get possessed or whatever.
Jamie: Does this family become more Catholic?
Sarah: Umm hmmm.
Jamie: Okay, okay.
Sarah: A little spoiler, but totally. Yeah, let's just jump in.
Jamie: Let's do it.
Sarah: We have a preface by Reverend John Nicola basically explaining, you know, it's pretty silly to take ghosts entirely as a matter of faith and not do any scientific inquiry. But on the other hand, it's pretty silly to take science as a matter of faith and not assume that science will someday explain ghosts.
Jamie: Now that's the spicy take.
Sarah: If you don't believe in ghosts, categorically, then like it's a prejudice on your part.
Jamie: Okay. He does sound like me at a party.
Sarah: Intro by man of the cloth, and then the prologue by author Jay Anson who died in 1980s. There are so many questions we can't answer about him.
Jamie: Such as, “Was their goo?”
Sarah: But yeah, Jay Anson is writing in that sort of dispassionate, true crime style that I guess over the course of this book, the events get harder and harder to believe. It gets more and more weird for its dispassionateness.
Jamie: But it stays that way?
Sarah: Well, it does use a lot of exclamation points, but then this thing totally happened and you're like, oh, and yet other parts of it are so rooted in boring reality that it's just like, I do not know. I think that's probably part of why it's scary because it feels believable and its ability to make this story somehow also dull. The prologue just gives us the basics of the story, which is that George and Kathleen Lutz bought and moved into a large colonial house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. That one year before, little over a year, had been the site of a mass murder.
Jamie: Triple homicide, right?
Sarah: A guy killed his parents and his four siblings. This makes me feel sad about today, but I'm like, you know, in the seventies, that was a lot of people to get shot all at once. Not like today where that barely makes regional news.
Jamie: Oh boy.
Sarah: It happened in an affluent community, and I think those stories always hit people harder. The people who live in the affluent communities anyway.
Jamie: Media loves to push stories like that. They're like it could happen anywhere.
Sarah: Rich people can shoot each other.
Jamie: Absolutely they can.
Sarah: Our confusion about that idea is there's a lot being expressed, and this is the kind of rich person crime story where maybe there were problems that people would have been less prone to overlook if they hadn't been in this really beautiful house and successful. To me, a really telling detail is that they had two washing machines and two dryers.
Jamie: I still feel like if you have a washer and dryer in your home, wow. You're really living.
Sarah: Yeah. You know, for comparison, the Menendez brothers were accused of shooting their parents to death and not any siblings. I think the death of children is even harder for a community to wrap their heads around a lot of the time. That case was all anyone could talk about for a couple of years. The house was on the market for a reduced rate because of the murders, it sold for $80,000.
Jamie: Oh my God. Wait, hearing old time real estate prices is so upsetting. $80,000 for that big ass house.
Sarah: I feel like if you don't pay a speeding ticket it racks up $80,000 worth of debt in a couple of years.
Jamie: I have $80,000 in library fees. So, wait, that house costs like half college education costs. God, okay, well now I'm all fired up. That is such a large house, $80,000, I mean, what do you think it should it have cost?
Sarah: Well, it says when they're describing their reactions to the price that it seemed like maybe it should have been priced at $180,000.
Jamie: Would you live in a house where people had been brutally murdered?
Sarah: Probably not.
Jamie: I feel the same way.
Sarah: Yeah. I feel like if it happened 80 years ago, I would think about it.
Jamie: Sure.
Sarah: To me, there's something about moving into a house where this family annihilation took place about a year before. It just feels, this is me revealing myself as a superstitious person, but I'm like that's too soon. That family is barely not there anymore.
Jamie: There is something that like hangs around in a home, but if you moved a family into that house and they had no idea that anything bad had happened there. How much of it is just like cognitive and how much of it is real ghosts? I don't know. I bet it's a little bit of both.
Sarah: If your neighbors were instructed to not tell you, you would pick up on the way they reacted to the house and you being in it. We know it's the American dream to own property and there's good things about it, but like a lot of the time it feels like college. I know this is what is supposed to help me, but like, is it.
Jamie: Why does it feel so bad?
Sarah: Why do you have to like bleed yourself dry to be able to afford it?
Jamie: How many life compromises do you need to make in order to have access to it?
Sarah: How many lifetimes do you have to work to be able to pay for? They bought this house for $80,000. They moved in and 28 days later they moved out and as the prologue says, soon after they moved in, they had become aware that the place was inhabited by some psychic force and feared for their lives. They flee the house and then they just basically start talking to the media. They have a press conference, they come up with a couple of articles saying we're afraid to go back to our house. Here's a quote, they say that there's some kind of unnatural, evil that is growing stronger every day that they stay there, feeding on their energy or something like that. So out of that interest, this book is born and then sells a billion copies.
Jamie: Oh, I feel like there's a copy of this book in every public library I've ever been to.
Sarah: I'm just going to read you the very opening of the book proper and this will give you really a sense of what the style is like the whole time.
Jamie: Okay.
Sarah: Chapter one, “December 18th, 1975, George and Kathy Lutz moved into 112 Ocean Avenue on December 18th. 28 days later, they fled in terror. George Lee Lutz, 28, of Deer Park, Long Island had a pretty good idea of land and home values. The owner of a land surveying company, William E. Parry Inc, he probably let everyone know that the business was a third-generation operation. His grandfather's, his father's and now his.” This is where it's like someone who used to teach writing, I would be like, you know, if something's like a second paragraph of your book, you're implying that it's important.
Jamie: Also, that is making me think there's a word count and he has to meet it, if he's like third generation, you know, a grandfather, father and you're like, no, I know what a third generation is.
Sarah: It's beautiful. The writing style is perfect for making what it's claiming sort of weirdly buyable, because it's like, you seem totally free of guile or skill. So, you must be at least thinking you're telling the truth. Okay. “Between July and November, he and his wife, Kathleen 30 had looked at over 50 homes on the island South Shore before deciding to investigate Amityville. None of the 30 to $50,000 range had yet met their requirements that the house must be on the water and then it must be one to which they could move George’s business.” We will move forward, important to note that they have bought a house $30,000 higher than their max price.
Jamie: Yes, it is. My instinct with them is they realized that they were $30,000 in debt and needed to manufacture something more profitable than Georges, what is George's business?
Sarah: Land surveying. It's funny because they talk about the financial picture. It comes up every so often in the book, and then it's like, well, anyway, this other scary thing happened. Don't worry about it. Another thing I love about this book is that it has a map of the property and then floor plans of the entire house. I'm going to give this to you because you're actually here in front of me and you can look at the next few pages of maps.
Jamie: Okay. I'll describe what I'm looking at a little bit here. They're right on the Amityville River. Okay. There's like a big deck out here in the back it looks like. There's an in-ground swimming pool. Oh my God, okay. Two and a half story frame wood shingled dwelling. They've got, these people have property. Now we're inside. This is the ground floor. We got a big old porch, living room, dining room, kitchen, and breakfast dinette, sounds like a second dining room to me. Oh, there's three floors, you sickos. Okay, second floor, there's a large empty space. There's dressing room, sewing room, fun, Missy's room, great, master bedroom, great. We're going up a floor, third floor attic, Danny and Chris's room. I think it's funny that there's a dressing room, but Danny and Chris can't have their own rooms, interesting. Storage space, playroom, bathroom hall, stairs, storage space. That's a big old house. Plenty of room for ghosts, ghosts can have their own room.
Sarah: Yeah. I think this is such a smart choice because it makes the whole thing feel more real, the same way that when you're reading the Lord of the Rings, you're like, well, there is a map of middle earth. It feels like a real place. They also have a boat house. George has two boats and he's like, we're going to save so much money on mortgage fees that this will make sense and it's like, where are you paying $30,000 a year for your boats?
Jamie: How much are you using these boats? Are you using them to survey land? Which I know that is a real job, but I don't understand it, so I'm being dismissive.
Sarah: There's something too about how true crime will set men up, especially as like not seeming to be serial killers because they're doing well financially. Well, he had an RV and a boat, so everyone thought he was normal. We're like people who are like, well, look, we're normal, look at all this stuff that we have and gaining. The realtor takes them to the house. It's not even a dream house because a dream house is, wow, there's plenty of room for everyone. This is amazing, as opposed to like, wow, there's more space than we honestly know what to do with.
Jamie: Right. It's like, who has the stuff to fill a house of that size if they're moving from a much smaller house.
Sarah: Yeah. They look at it, they're like, we're in love. We're going to take it. We know about the murders. We're not stressed about that. It's fine.
Jamie: Are you ever so in love that you don't care about six tuffle homicide that took place less than a year ago?
Sarah: Yeah. Like how fun is it if you have to tell your friends, I don't even care about the murders.
Jamie: About the child murders because George is so amazing. Even when I was watching like the movie back in the day, I'm like, it's really hard to root for these people.
Sarah: Right. You're like, there's having a ghost show up in a place you wouldn't expect and then there's like, honestly, bringing it on yourself.
Jamie: You are living outside your means George and Kathleen and you're putting a psychic weight on your very young children to do it.
Sarah: This is what Stephen King thinks, this book so resonated with people because it's an economic horror story, which whenever someone is like, this is scary because of economics I'm like, say more. They're like, yes, we're fine with the mass murder and also once they decide to buy it, they're like, you know, we have a dining room now, but we don't have any dining room furniture. There are some other furniture essentials that we don't have, or we do not really have time to get, but the murdered family has them and we can get them for a pretty good deal.
Jamie: Whoa.
Sarah: Yeah. Which the book totally dead pans.
Jamie: That's brutal.
Sarah: I don't want to judge anybody and it's like, you know, you're on a budget. Dining room sets are expensive. If you've done this, you know.
Jamie: Just buy a house for $50,000 and buy a table. What are you doing?
Sarah: I think that is a good idea. I think that's what their accountant would say if they had bother to ask.
Jamie: I'm just like, wow, Kathleen didn't have enough female friends because I would have been, Kathleen you're out of your mind. I cannot even drink coffee with you there.
Sarah: Here's where it says this, I love how little the book makes of this. “Downstairs on the main floor, the Lutz has had a slight problem. They didn't own any dining room furniture. They finally decided that before the closing, George would tell the broker they'd like to purchase the dining room set left in storage by the DeFeos, along with the girl's bedroom set for Missy, a TV chair and Ronald DeFeo the murderers, bedroom furniture. These things and other furnishings left in the house like the DeFeo’s bed were not included in the purchase price. George paid on an additional $400 for these items. He also got for free seven air conditioners, two washers, two dryers, and a new refrigerator and a freezer.”
Jamie: Oh, that's nice. I would have taken those, honestly.
Sarah: They live in the basement.
Jamie: Yeah. I'm definitely projecting superstition. I know that there's like class reasons why you would have this furniture, but seeking as a superstitious person, the beds.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jamie: That is so gross.
Sarah: The killer's bed.
Jamie: No.
Sarah: Right. Isn't there something wonderfully, unthoughtful about that paragraph that almost feels like I'm having this whole Iocane powder experience with Jay Anson, where I will never get to ask anything. I'm just like, do you think so little of these decisions that you're just tossing this off casually or do you know that the reader is going to be like, oh my God, and that's why you're saying it like this?
Jamie: I kind of hope it's the last one. What was his writing history before doing this? Was he a known writer? Did he have any?
Sarah: He wasn't known the way he got known for writing this.
Jamie: Was he just a journalist?
Sarah: Yes, his bio says, “Jay Anson began as a copy boy on the New York Evening Journal in 1937 and later worked in advertising and publicity with more than 500 documentary scripts for television to his credit. He was associated with professional films incorporated. He died in 1980.”
Jamie: Oh, no kidding. He was a publicity guy. Okay, well, that's all you need to know, interesting.
Sarah: Then there's the slight issue of the fact that Ronald DeFeo as the sole survivor of the mass murder that he was convicted of committing is quote, “Entitled to inherit his parents' estate, regardless of the fact that he had been convicted of murdering them.” So, they must deal with that, but it all works. George is like, we can do it, we'll figure it out. It'll be great. We learn about their move, which again, is wonderfully disarmingly boring.
Jamie: Where are they moving? Do they just like live in a different, a smaller house?
Sarah: Yeah. They're moving from Deer Park, Long Island. One of the temperature things here is that they're not used to being by the ocean and now they are by the ocean. Neither of these characters have character really like they're both like a typical All-American family. You know, very relatable, very normal, which is interesting to see what you can safely consider normal at any time. But also, it means that these characters become increasingly interesting and confusing as the book goes on. You're like, I wish that we could have some of this explained to us, what their like.
Jamie: Well, I would imagine that they had a pretty strong say in how they were portrayed in the book as well. That's such a Warren's thing where I feel like they presented this kind of like charcutier board of types of families that were considering normal. There's the low-income version of that family and then this is the middle-class version of that family. They're all kind of featureless and it's like doting mother, hardworking father, children that are sensitive to ghosts.
Sarah: Right. You're like, what's the dad like? You're like, he does this job and he's doing pretty well, and you're like, but what's he like? He's fine.
Jamie: He's surveying land right now; I can't tell you what he's like.
Sarah: This is mentioned very in passing, probably about halfway through, but it's like, oh, by the way, the Lutz’s got married in July of that year. There's all this stuff about, George had never acted like that before, he had never talked to the children like this. Honestly, how much do you know about how he talks to the children?
Jamie: Because they're her kids from a previous marriage, am I remembering that right?
Sarah: The way they allude to that as also weird, but you're just like, the book is like he was their stepfather, whatever, don't worry. I am worried about it actually. So, they move in, there's all these little things that go slightly wrong that I feel like we're meant to think that were a little scary, oh no, the realtor is the only one with the key. He has to go to the realtors to get to the key, how inconvenient. Then we get our next main character and some of the controversy around that this character is he based on a person at all? Or is he just totally invented?
Jamie: Oh, I vote that one.
Sarah: This is our priest character, Father Mancuso. He comes to bless the house, and this might be the most iconic thing the house does. He comes to bless the house and he hears a voice say, get out.
Jamie: Classic Mancuso.
Sarah: I love how much time the book spends on this guy. I love how, as far as I can tell the implication is like, well, all this bad stuff happened to a priest. So, that makes it seem real right and how people were apparently like it does make it seem real.
Jamie: I remember that character in the seventies movie very clearly because whoever the actor is that is playing him is really given it, he is at an 11.
Sarah: The get out voice happens. He knows the Lutz’s already a little bit because he helped counsel them before they got married. Kathy is Catholic. We're also dealing with a Catholic woman who got divorced, which is something that I think can affect you negatively if your religion has previously told you that you're not allowed to do that.
Jamie: They are in the Northeast and experiencing Catholic shame and it's a little cold. It's almost Christmas and oh my God, wait, I think I married a really mean guy.
Sarah: That is the real horror story and that's a really scary story. I wouldn't want I do that.
Jamie: I wonder how much of a say she had in we're getting this house, you know.
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Jamie: Whatever in the space of a couple of weeks, she could be in a marriage that maybe isn't as good as she thought, all of her kids are there. She's living way outside of her means and seems to know it and she's in a murder house.
Sarah: Also, then you're like geographically separated from your community before. I didn't think of this, but I mean, this is also how The Stepford Wives begins not for nothing. The priest comes, he hears a scary voice. He gets in his car and as he's saying goodbye, he's like, “By the way George, I had lunch with some friends over in Lindenhurst before coming here. They told me that this was the DeFeo home. Did you know that?” George says, “Oh sure, I think that's why it's such a bargain. Yeah, I think it was on the market for a long time, but it doesn't bother us at all. It's got the best of everything.” “Wasn't that a tragedy, Father?” said Kathy, “That poor family. Imagine all six murdered in their sleep?” Then we get the evidence, and this recurs throughout the entire book, it's like the largest overarching plot of anything, is that the priest because of his exposure to the house apparently gets sick.
Jamie: Right.
Sarah: They really let go whole-hog with it, no pun intended because in the movie I think he goes blind.
Jamie: He goes blind, but I don't know why the thing that stuck with me is just the actor is so sweaty.
Sarah: Yeah. It's uncomfortable. He's wearing probably a pretty heavy garment. Another one of the more mundane, creepy things in the book that I think they cranked up higher in a great way in the movie is in the book. They're like, oh no, there's so many flies in the scary room in the house, but it's winter, but there's a lot of flies, that's weird. Then in the movie, they have them swarm Rod Steiger.
Jamie: His face, yes. Which room map wise is the scary room?
Sarah: Oh, thank you for asking it is the sewing room here.
Jamie: Oh, the sewing room, okay.
Sarah: Which we can see as next to Missy's room. This also feels very 1970s that they're like, yeah, we moved into a new house that has a scary room. We have our five-year-old daughter in the room next to her. She'll be fine.
Jamie: She's sleeping in a murdered child’s bed, and we feel fine about that.
Sarah: Then in the morning, she'll put on her flammable clothes and play with some lawn darts. Yeah, and so in this, we don't go as far as Father Mancuso getting blind. Basically, he gets terrible fevers, he gets the flu several times, he gets blisters on his hands that are gross and suppurating. Oh, and also, he has car trouble a couple of times.
Jamie: Oh no.
Sarah: They almost get in an accident, but then they don't.
Jamie: Every time I'm in a fender bender, that's ghosts.
Sarah: The next allegedly scary things that happen are that their guard dog, Harry, we're going to get a lot of Harry in this book. He is barking but there is no one there.
Jamie: I've never known a dog to do that.
Sarah: They don't, it's not what they do. Or, you know, there is something going on, but a human ear can't detect it.
Jamie: Or this dog just moved to this huge ass property that it has never been to.
Sarah: So, Harry's barking, who knows what at, and then George tries to go back to sleep, but his mind is racing, and we got a little bit of him reflecting on finances, which again, it's interesting. You would think they would either include it or not include it, but it's here in a minimal way, but he's thinking the taxes in Amityville were three times higher than in Deer Park. Did he really need that new speed boat? How the hell was he going to pay for all of this? The construction business was lousy on Long Island because of the tight mortgage money. It didn't look like it would get better until the banks loosened up. If they aren't building houses and buying property, who the hell needs a land surveyor.
Jamie: I love that this is presented as a problem that is so unavoidable when it's like, yeah, maybe if he had thought any of this through before buying this house.
Sarah: I don't think he's going to do anything that's going to make you like him anymore for the next 200 pages.
Jamie: What a loser. Oh my God, can I get a speedboat, if my business is failing and I'm living wildly outside? Ugh.
Sarah: Yeah, I love this. Kathy shifted in her sleep so that her arm fell across George’s neck, her face burrow deep into his chest. He sniffed her hair. She certainly smelled clean, he thought, he liked that. The first time I read this, I heard it in my head as he certainly smelled clean and she kept children the same way, spotless. Her kids, George’s now, whatever the trouble she and the children were worth it. Okay.
Jamie: I love, God heterosexual people are so sick. Rollover, now that's a clean wife.
Sarah: Makes me think of her clean kids, love how clean she keeps him. First thing I think of those are some clean ass children.
Jamie: Back to bed in this fucking murderer’s bed that I have been sleeping in. Oh, my God, these people are so weird.
Sarah: The seventies families we're so scared, but what are we scared of? It is that you guys are scary.
Jamie: The call is coming from inside the house just as with The Amityville Horror except the calls coming from inside George, because he can't stop sniffing his clean ass wife. Oh, it so gross.
Sarah: He is now reflecting on the kids. Danny was now beginning to call his stepfather dad no more George. In a way, he was glad he never got to meet Kathy's ex-husband, this way he felt Danny was all his, which I'm just like an alarm in my starts going, berp berp berp. Kathy said that Chris looked just like his father, had the same ways about him, the same dark curly hair and eyes. George would reprimand the boy for something, and Chris's face would fall, and he'd look up at him with those soulful eyes. The kid sure knew how to use them.
Jamie: Why are they trying to make the kids sound hot?
Sarah: He's like, boy, that child sure is trying to emotionally manipulate me and the book is like, yes.
Jamie: This book is very pro George’s POV. He doesn't trust these kids.
Sarah: The insidious things about it.
Jamie: Yeah.
Sarah: The way the kids are presented, they're like barely there and when they are, the book is like, they were misbehaving a lot more than usual. It is like, are they?
Jamie: Are they not going undergoing a huge life change?
Sarah: Also, are they perhaps picking up on their parents being stressed about things?
Jamie: Chris better turn off those soulful eyes right now.
Sarah: Next morning, Kathy wakes up. She decides to let George sleep in because there's so much to do. She has to make breakfast for everybody. It mentions her lighting her first cigarette of the day, which is just one of those seventies’ kinds of sentences. It referenced her and George practicing transcendental meditation, which doesn't really come back that much.
Jamie: Really?
Sarah: Yeah. The implication later from Father Mancuso, who we have to trust on these matters because he's probably fictional, you know, I wouldn't do your transcendental meditation anymore.
Jamie: I was wondering that they're like, oh, you don't get into this crunchy bullshit. Come back to the cloth.
Sarah: Flea the demons and return to the safety of the Catholic church and, you're running away from the house, but you're still with George. Maybe you should run away from George.
Jamie: Because I do think Kathy should also get out of the house, but also get away from George.
Sarah: Maybe the voice was like, oh get out, oh sorry, I thought you were Kathy. You are someone else.
Jamie: Get out of this marriage. You can't be a double divorced Catholic woman in the seventies, you can't. She is stuck with him. It's a nightmare.
Sarah: Yeah. Also, you've got three kids, that's a lot of kids to support. You have to find a guy who has a business that you can at least trust is doing well, even if it's not apparently though.
Jamie: Sounds like he sucks at it though.
Sarah: Right. The house is a bad investment and it's also about gradually finding out your husband is a bad investment. That's really a double whammy. Here we been the wonderful light motif of the house being cold. George wakes up and comes down and he's like, it's cold in here. Don't you have the heat on? George, it's a fucking gigantic house, you are on the ocean. It's the week before Christmas and the temperatures are in single digits this week, I would certainly think so. It seems like you're whining and allegedly scary thing, but maybe just a scary George thing. The boys ran past the kitchen door yelling at Harry, George looked up.
What's the matter with those two, can't you keep them quiet, Kathy? She turned from the sink, well, don't bark at me, you're their father, you know, you do it. George slapped his open palm down on the table. The sharp sound made Kathy jump. Right, he shouted. George opened the kitchen door and leaned out Danny, Chris and Harry whooping it up ran by again. Okay, the three of you knock it off. Kathy was speechless. This was the first time he had really lost his temper with the children and for so little.
Jamie: That just sounds like a being a short-tempered parent.
Sarah: It's like a lot to trust someone with, let's get married. I have three kids.
Jamie: I want you to be their father.
Sarah: You haven't been introduced to this gradually. It's just suddenly we're going to be a family now and I trust you to handle that.
Jamie: I understand that's a huge adjustment for George, but it's like, don't scream at your new wife being like, why can't you keep these kids under control? I hate George.
Sarah: Yeah, so basically George’s problems begin now. He stopped shaving and showering, which he always used to do. In the book is like, the house was being very scary. He wasn't working and he always worked normally and it's like, wow, okay. The house it's cold and he keeps waking up at 3:15, which according to this book is when the murders took place.
Jamie: I remember this clearly.
Sarah: He keeps going out to look at the boathouse, but he doesn't know why and then, this to me is the scariest part of the book, a corporal punishment event that both parents take pardon in as the close of this chapter says, “Kathy was tense from her strained relationship with George and from the efforts of trying to put her house in shape before Christmas. On their fourth night in the house, she exploded and together with her husband beat Danny, Chris, and Missy, with a strap and a large heavy wooden spoon. The children had accidentally cracked a pane of glass in the playrooms half-moon window.” End of chapter, no reflection on that.
Jamie: End of chapter.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jamie: Brutal. Oh my God.
Sarah: It's really awful. The book could have just not told us that, but it does and then it moves straight.
Jamie: Is the implication there and they wouldn't normally do that, but all of a sudden, they are living in this evil house that makes beat their kids up.
Sarah: I think so.
Jamie: That's absurd.
Sarah: You know, maybe you're a worst parent than usual if you're married to someone who's being a bad parent and you're fighting with them.
Jamie: There's an immense amount of pressure on you make this work, which it's not going to, and you know that.
Sarah: Now the pressure is financial.
Jamie: Cool. Take that out on in your kids, see what happens.
Sarah: Kathy does reflect on it for one sentence in the next chapter. So, Kathy is up, she's thinking about Christmas, and we read, “As she worked over a list of things to buy for Christmas, her concentration wandered. She was upset about having hit the children, particularly about the way George and she had gone about. There were many gifts that the Lutz family still hadn't bought.” It's like, okay, we're done, it's fine.
Jamie: It's like, oh man, I really wish I hadn't beaten my kids up. Anyways, I have errands to do today. Yeah, the way that Jay Anson presents this information, again, I feel like overshare is that I know that they're intentional, but they don't age well. I also am like, maybe I'm just projecting, but I think he's trying to reach a word count. I think he's including weird stuff that doesn't really connect with what the story is really about.
Sarah: I wonder about the kind of haste this book was written in because the Lutz left the house in January of 1976 and this book came out around the end of 1977. I think The Shining came out early in 1977 and there are some things that are very reminiscent of The Shining, where I'm like this is a coincidence because similar things are scary for people sharing a culture. Or also The Shining came out and Jay Anson read it really quick. He was like filler, filler, filler, okay cool. Some of these scares I'm just going to list because I think if you support the theory that a lot of this book is completely made up, then the process by which people would do that would seem to be brainstorming a list of 50 scary things and then just using all of them. Kathy has the experience of being embraced by a nice mom ghost who she gets a comforting feeling from. The inside of the toilet bowl is black. This is black stuff in it. She accuses the kids, but they say they didn't do it, so she has to scrub out the toilet. There is a stench, of course.
Jamie: There's always a stench.
Sarah: We find literally hundreds of buzzing flies, even though it is winter. This guy comes to their door and has a six pack in hand, and he says, everybody wants to come over to welcome you to the neighborhood, you don't mind, do you? George is like that's fine.
Jamie: Did that happen in the seventies, where people just show up at your house? They're like, I'm coming in.
Sarah: Let me in.
Jamie: Wild.
Sarah: True crime podcasts haven't been invented yet, so it's not normal for you to not let me in. The guy implies that the neighborhood is going to come and then he just sits with them for a little while, awkwardly. Then he's like, well, I'm going to go, the man held onto the six pack and finally said, I brought it, I'll take it with me and left. George and Kathy never found out his name. They never saw him again and then end of chapter; George wakes up at 3:15 and he sees the 250-pound wooden front door is wrenched wide open hanging from one hinge, exclamation point. It was pushed open from the inside. What spirit could have done that? I'm like, wait, let's talk more about the six-pack man. He seemed nice.
Jamie: Why did they include that? That is so funny.
Sarah: That one I believe is just a thing that really happened because why would you make that up?
Jamie: Why would you include this boring anecdote about someone that you didn't let in your house? I think that he really took it on the chin well though. He was like, well, I'm not just going to give you six beers.
Sarah: You guys can afford your own beers.
Jamie: They never saw him again, ooh.
Sarah: Then we got into George is burning logs in the fireplace all the time and the house is still cold. Then Jodie starts appearing because Missy and classic little kid in scary story fashion asks her mother. Well, first she's sitting in her little rocking chair humming to herself.
Jamie: Murder rocking chair, probably.
Sarah: Then she says, mama do angels talk? That will come back first, we got to hear more about the priest having the flu, fever of 103 which is the ghostliest fever to have.
Jamie: The 3:15 of fevers.
Sarah: Yes. We go into great detail about George's tree topping ornament that he inherited from his grandmother's grandmother. I just was so expecting the kids to break this and it to be a thing and it just doesn't come back. We just have to hear about George's stupid ornament for a whole paragraph.
Jamie: I mean, I appreciate that they keep reminding you that this is a Christmas story.
Sarah: That is true.
Jamie: This is the Christmas story of our time.
Sarah: It’s kind of is because don't let Christmas become such a stressor that you are a worst parent and don't buy a bunch of stuff you can not afford. Merry Christmas.
Jamie: Wow it is the fiscal lessons of Christmas.
Sarah: Yeah, it's the story that the 1970s family doesn't want, but does deserve. Then Father Mancuso is trying to call them to warn them about the scary room, but then he gets disconnected. Something goes wrong with the line.
Jamie: In December.
Sarah: This is the theme now. They can't get in touch.
Jamie: Okay. But the fact that Father Mancuso might not be real is so funny because he is on every page.
Sarah: Yeah, I think it's so telling if it's like, so you made this character up out of nobody, essentially, because there was a real priest named Father Pecoraro.
Jamie: Okay.
Sarah: When pressed, I think the Lutz is an answer and we're like, he's based on this guy. This is the real Father Mancuso and Father Pecoraro was like, no, I'm not. I've never even been to your house.
Jamie: He fully denied it.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jamie: Wow. Oh, there such liars.
Sarah: I think there's something always very impressive when someone can lie in a way where you're like, do you really think people are going to believe that? Then they do, they believe it.
Jamie: Ultimately, I have to keep reminding myself, even though, well, I just don't like George because I think he's just a shitty abusive guy, but if they do scam the worlds and now, we have 500 Amityville horror movies. That is a relatively victimless crime. The real victims were the six murdered people whose furniture.
Sarah: Who had to have their deaths associated with really dumb movies and also the three kids in the house who have to deal with these parents. Because if you're an adult, you can decide to run a scam. You have at least some amounts of agency almost all the time, but not if you're five and also that they use their kids' real names.
Jamie: Right, right. Did you find any information on where the kids are at now?
Sarah: Oh, we will get into.
Jamie: Okay, exciting.
Sarah: There's some interesting material there. I mean, one of the first questions you would ask I assume is, do they say that the house was haunted?
Jamie: Oh, okay, all right.
Sarah: Let's close with a Christmas Eve Amityville story. Harry is barking. We don't know at what and so George goes out to investigate. The orb of the full moon was like a huge flashlight lighting his way. He looked up at the house and stopped short, his heart leaped. From Missy’s second floor, bedroom window, George could see the little girl staring at him, her eyes following his movements, oh God, he whispered aloud. Directly behind his daughter, frighteningly visible to George was the face of a pig. He was sure he could see little red eyes glowing at him.
Jamie: That's scary. Okay. That's the first scary thing that's happened. Jodie is scary, are you scared of Jodie?
Sarah: I think Jodie is like really funny. I do think pigs are kind of scary if you're not expecting them. I think this is the moment when, until this point, I was basically like, okay, you're cold. Okay, George has a bad stepdad. This is the moment when the book crosses over into and then there was a pig.
Jamie: I'm excited.
Sarah: I feel like I grew up watching like nineties cable TV hour long specials about Amityville. I saw at least one of them that scared the bejesus out of me when I was probably 10. It was always, I think, such a great cable TV staple because they could be like some say it was really haunted. Others say it was not haunted. Is it, is it not? We don't know, goodbye, we just wasted an hour.
Jamie: Thank you, E! network, I loved that.
Sarah: Yeah. Or as whoever was the audience for their shows that maybe this is a story that endures because you're free to believe or not believe, but it like is equally interesting either way. Merry Christmas.
Jamie: Merry Christmas from all of us here and The Amityville Horror murder house, Merry Christmas.
Sarah: Merry Christmas. Dick's your stepdad and get a pig angel.