Winter Book Club: The Amityville Horror Part 2 with Jamie Loftus

Sarah continues telling guest host Jamie Loftus about the Amityville Horror, and the two touch on ghosts, fallen angels, poltergeists, the space race and intimidating pictures of Mandy Moore.
 
Here's where to find Jamie:

The Bechdel Cast [podcast] My Year in Mensa [podcast] and Aack Cast [podcast] 

Support us:

Bonus Episodes on Patreon

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Where else to find us:

Sarah's other show, You Are Good 

[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase

Links:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-the-bechdel-cast-30089535/
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-my-year-in-mensa-55379945/
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-aack-cast-by-jamie-loftus-83922273/
http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com

Transcript

Sarah: If I were a fallen angel, like would I appear as a giant pig, I don't know. If I have been around for millennia, sure.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we tell you about bestsellers that you read the first 13 pages of and then got bored. 

Jamie: I feel like the Amityville Horror specifically is a book you would see underneath the leg of a table. 

Sarah: Yes. 

Jamie: It serves multiple functions. I think that's an honor. If you can write a book that can hold up someone's auntie's table, you're doing something right.

Sarah: I mean, if you find an early paperback copy of The Amityville Horror, the copyright page is often really funny in those. Because it's, “First printing September 1977, second printing November 1977, third printing January 1978.” I'm making this up because I don't have one of these in front of me, but I've seen copies where it goes through 8 or 10 printings in about a year. Because the way the public gobbled this book up just means that there's so many copies of it floating around in the world with us all the time. 

Jamie: When there is a huge cultural motherload like that, I think it's going to be so easy to get an early addition of something, but it's not, they've kind of all like disappeared and scattered to the winds. 

Sarah: Right. They disintegrate. With me today is my ghost guest, Jamie Loftus. 

Jamie: Hello, it's good to be back. 

Sarah: You are not a ghost to yourself that you like to talk about ghosts, and you've talked on this show before about shady ghost hunters. 

Jamie: Now we're talking about shady ghost victims.

Sarah: That sounds harsh, but you know, some listeners may draw that conclusion. 

Jamie: I have certainly drawn that conclusion so far. 

Sarah: Shady ghost media perhaps and we're exploring, I think, a larger trend that I've always been talking about on this show, which is why was there so much credulous nonfiction in the 1970s about the existence of scary supernatural forces and the Catholic church specifically being the way to deal with that? How did these stories influence the culture we ended up in today? 

Jamie: The gorgeous symbiotic friendship between the Catholic church and the American policing system. Chef's kiss, incredible corruption match made in heaven. 

Sarah: So, we're talking about The Amityville Horror today, which inspired a movie, which is not the safest in the world and inspired many sequels and a remake starring Ryan Reynolds. It's one of our modern-day folktales, basically. Jamie, I was wondering if you would be interested in doing a bonus episode for January where we talk about the two main Amityville adaptations, James Brolin one and the Ryan Reynolds one. 

Jamie: Really? Yes, I would love that. 

Sarah: Yay. 

Jamie: Woo hoo. Oh good. I was wanting to watch; I've never seen the Ryan Reynolds one and it looks like it takes itself really seriously. I am excited. 

Sarah: I remember watching it probably while baking something one time and I just remember feeling like, well, Ryan Reynolds is playing a scary dad and he's doing a good job and that's the movie. 

Jamie: I love Ryan Reynolds’ serious guy era. 

Sarah: So happy about that. Yeah, I feel like there's so much to talk about with these movies. If you want to hear bonus episodes, you can support us on patreon.com/ you're wrong about, or you can spend your money on a neat pen. It's none of my business. 

Jamie: I love that. Ultimately, it's none of our business. 

Sarah: We got through the first week of occupancy at the scary house. Will you bring us up to speed as where we are as we're starting off today?

Jamie: Okay. So, I don't remember the exact date we're at right now, but I do know that it is Christmas time. The couple being terrorized by The Amityville Horror. They've been recently married. They have just bought a house on the water that is very much out of their price range. But the reason that they're able to get this house in the first place is because there was a horrific, full family homicide there the year before. So they move into this house. They're constantly like it's cold because of ghosts, but it's actually cold because it's December and they're only heating the whole house with what sounds like one log, but there's three kids.

They immediately start to have difficult experiences. They are also sleeping in the murdered peoples’ beds, which I can't stop thinking about. I remember from when I watched the seventies movie a long time ago that you see the families die in the beds. The Amityville Horror is kind of like taking place in the aftermath of this crime, but then to the point where it almost kind of downplays how horrific the original crime was. It is very sad. It sounds like this whole family is sleeping on top of evidence. 

Sarah: Right. 

Jamie: Is that wrong? 

Sarah: I imagine, I mean, I know that some things were more loosey goosey in the seventies than they are, at least are supposed to be today. Missy, the five-year-old daughter has some of the bedroom furniture from the murdered family. So, the oldest son of the family, Ronnie DeFeo has been found guilty of murdering all of his other family members who were in the house that night. I guess we can say, well, they've already solved the crime, so they don't need to preserve stuff, but that's like a very, I think 1910s kind of viewpoint. I mean you can't necessarily preserve an entire house full of furniture, but you do need to preserve at least things that are relevant to the crime and could be retested forensically for an appeal or something like that. 

Jamie: It just seems like all the furniture should be in a storage unit. But that's a part of their problem right, George and Kathleen's problem is they can't afford enough furniture to fill up this big, scary house that they've bought. Then George is not being nice to anyone and they're making it seem like, or the way that the book tells the story. The book is like the house is making George so hostile to his wife and his new children. It seems like maybe he might just be a hostile person, unclear, but he's at a bar deciding if he wants to buy a second boat, even though he just put his whole new family into debt. So, where we leave off, I'm mad at him.

Sarah: I'm mad at him also and there's a description of George and Kathy disciplining their children with a wooden spoon and a strap, including Missy who's five, which is like, okay, wow, that's beating with intent to cause pain. 

Jamie: Based on what you were telling me it sounds like the book is presenting it in a very matter of fact way of like needing you to go with the idea that they're only doing this because they're in the house and this isn't something they would normally do. This isn't behavior George would normally display, but the book also doesn't give you a ton of information about what they were like before this happened. You know, I'm not trying to cancel George Lutz, but maybe I am.

Sarah: I mean, we know nothing about them before. It's like they spring into existence at the moment that they start having these problems and I think these fit well with the style of a lot of true crime, I've read where the victims are supposed to just be as relatable as possible. Which I think is also one of the historic problems with the genre where it's like, you care about this crime because you relate to these people, which is, if you're trying to make people relatable, then they can't be specific or themselves really. 

Jamie: They are presented as this couple that is very normie, idyllic, just scrappy enough to be rooting for them for the seventies. 

Sarah: Oh, but I wanted to clarify because I'm persnickety about this kind of thing. I feel like there's some ambiguity in the wording around the furniture that the Lutz’s buy, from the murdered family, the DeFeos. I'll read again, they got the dining room set, a girl's bedroom set, which I assume includes a bed, but that's ambiguous. It could just be dressers and stuff. A TV chair and Ronald DeFeo’s bedroom furniture and then it says the DeFeo’s bed. So, without a doubt, apparently the bed in which the elder DeFeos were sleeping when they were murdered, I just can't get around. I mean this same sensational, but I can't get around the suggestion that maybe they don't have the murderer's bed, but instead they have the murdered couple's bed, which is worse. 

Jamie: Would you rather?

Sarah: Oh boy.

Jamie: Would you rather sleep in the murderer's bed or the murdered bed?

Sarah: If I couldn't look at the beds beforehand.

Jamie: Right. 

Sarah: I think I would choose the murderer's bed because I think that the moment of the murder would be such an intense and terrible moment for the victim, whatever specifically happened. I would imagine that being more attached to the bed in my own personal superstition, then this scary person or this person who did the scary thing slept here.

Jamie: I feel the same way. I would ultimately throw it away and sleep on a mattress on the floor, which I've done for years at a time.

Sarah: I'm on a mattress on the floor right now. 

Jamie: We're very consistent, but I would feel like I would be more sensitive to the sudden terror and trauma trapped in the furniture of someone who died, who wasn't expecting to. That sounds very unpleasant. 

Sarah: Right. The last thing that happened before we wrapped up last time is that George sees a giant pig in his daughter's window with little red eyes. 

Jamie: Jodie, Jodie. 

Sarah: So, he runs into the house. He finds her lying on her stomach. There's this whole motif of people lying on their stomachs or seeing the kids lay on their stomachs, because that's how the victims were found the year before, important lore. He runs in her room, the pig ghost is gone and then he sees that her little rocking chair is slowly rocking back and forth, which is pretty creepy. That's a good one. 

Jamie: That is. 

Sarah: So, Christmas day is basically fine, except that Missy is talking about Jodie, who's her imaginary friend, a pig. She doesn't mention it to George, crucially. They don't connect that with the vision of the pig from last night. 

Jamie: Wonder why that is. The kids don't like George because George is mean. 

Sarah: She's sitting in her little rocking chair, watching the snow fall and talking to Jodie, which honestly sounds pretty nice and nothing really sinister happens on Christmas day, except that Father Mancuso who blessed the house and who the scary voice said get out to, has the flu and is very sick. That's supposed to be very scary. The day after Christmas, Kathy notices the way she sees it, Danny and Chris have changed since they moved in. They become more rebellious and less obedient, and the book says, “But Kathy was not yet aware of her own personality changes, her impatience and crankiness. That's enough out of both of you, she yelled at her sons. I see you're asking for another beating. Now shut your mouths and get up to your room like I said and stay there until I call you.” Which is just really depressing.

Jamie: The day after Christmas Kathy, Jesus Christ. 

Sarah: Baby Jesus hasn't dropped his umbilical cord yet.

Jamie: I never thought about the baby Jesus having an umbilical cord. There is still an umbilical cord, even if it's a virgin birth, right? 

Sarah: Yeah. I assume so. 

Jamie: Bible heads sound off in the comments. 

Sarah: He wouldn't have a belly button if he hadn't been born, which I think is why people argue that Taylor Swift was made in a lab or something. Then Kathy feels the spirit of a woman embracing her in the kitchen and its initially kind of nice. Then this sweet perfume smell starts making her dizzy and then she shouts, “no leave me alone.” The ghost departs, which is very polite. 

Jamie: I think I remember this scene from the movie and it being pretty scary.

Sarah: It's funny, I don't remember the scene from the movie, and I watched it about a week and a half ago. 

Jamie: The more we talk about this, the more I'm like, oh, I think that I am at times mixing this up with other seventies ghost stories because there's just simply so many of them.

Sarah: Right. I'm just going to be spit calling on this the whole way through. But was that a response to the Space Race partly?

Jamie: Ooh. 

Sarah: I mean, I've been watching The Twilight Zone because it's the holidays and that's what you do. I find it really interesting how many Twilight Zone episodes are directly about either Americans going out into space and bothering people on other planets or about people coming to earth from space and bothering us. 

Jamie: To bother Americans.

Sarah: Just this conviction that the near future was going to be all about extraterrestrial communication and space colonization, and that we were no longer alone in the universe. I don't know I feel like that would create a big response in a lot of directions. One being fear of what we're going to become if we go out and be space botherders. Then also, how do we make space for the spiritual when we are learning so much about the world and is this challenging, the old ways and how can religion prove itself to still be relevant? 

Jamie: The fact that Americans were going to be space pests was this like necessity. It was an inevitability, and it couldn't be avoided. We have to be a space pest because we can.

Sarah: We're going to go into space, and we will be annoying if we do it. We know this about ourselves. 

Jamie: Our colonial instincts, simply take over. Okay, so we're connecting ghosts, Christianity, and the Space Race.

Sarah: That's my goal today. 

Jamie: I'm down to snack off that charcuterie board. 

Sarah: We also know that the sixties have brought in, you know, age of Aquarius vibe, which we've seen various Christian thinkers be really freaked out by Hal Lindsey, Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth is one of my big examples of this. It's like a fun title, but the jist there is that if you do something like transcendental meditation, which the Lutz’s do, or if you think that you have witch powers you're playing yourself because that's actually Satan working his magic through you. Now you're just like falling into Satan's hand, like in that scary part at the end of Fantasia. 

Jamie: Ooh, whoa.

Sarah: But then there are always really good scare tactics in the world. So what is it that lets them have such success across the board? Kathy's brother and what strikes me is truly a boss move is getting married the day after Christmas, the absolute balls.

Jamie: I know that it happens in Hallmark movies all the time, but you really should not do that.

Sarah: Jimmy comes over before his wedding, they're going to head over to the venue. He's brought $1,500 in cash to pay for the remainder of the wedding expenses and the money disappears into the house. I think it's very funny that these ghosts want money, but they do.  

Jamie: Is that explored further in the book, what the ghosts plan to do with the money?

Sarah: We never get into it, and I feel like I'm actually going to spoil very ending conclusions because there's an afterword where they're like, here are the ghosts that we think were there and they break it down. Basically, there's a nice lady ghost. There's a little boy ghost. There's a fallen angel, who is manifesting as Jodie and there's a poltergeist. So, there's at least four different spirits in this house. 

Jamie: Where are the other ghosts at? So not all of the people who were killed by DeFeo stayed in the houses ghost only like a couple of hung out and then also a fallen angel and a poltergeist. This has like a walk into a bar joke. 

Sarah: Isn't that weird and they never explore that?

Jamie: What are the rules of a poltergeist again? 

Sarah: I'll read them to you. 

Jamie: Okay, this is fascinating to me. I so assumed that they were like it's being haunted by the dead family. 

Sarah: Well, right. That's the obvious answer and yet they went elsewhere with it. 

Jamie: Twist. This is thrilling.

Sarah: Okay. The afterword says most poltergeist manifestations are said to occur in the presence of a child usually a girl approaching puberty. Here none of the Lutz children seems to have been old enough to serve as the trigger. Moreover, most poltergeist antics seem childishly malicious rather than vicious or physically harmful. But on the other hand, Father Nicola who wrote the foreword, points out in his demonical possession and exorcism, a book that is out of print, but which I really want to read. Poltergeist sometimes serve as the first manifestation of an entity ultimately bent on demonic possession. 

Jamie: Okay. Based on that description, I think the poltergeist wants the money just to have it. That qualifier that this poltergeist only appears to young girls on the crest of womanhood. You're like, well, that's setting up some red flags for me. Who said that the first time?

Sarah: It's a really good question. Who did?

Jamie: I don't love that at all. 

Sarah: Then, so maybe the poltergeist becomes, or is a manifestation of the fallen angel. This is a quote from quote, an experienced researcher into paranormal phenomena who chooses to remain nameless. My friend from Canada writes, “It seems logical that this entity together with the voices that ordered Father Mancuso to depart and George and Kathy to stop their impromptu exorcism, which is coming up. May have been invited in during the course of a cult ceremony performed in the basement or on the house as a regional site.”

Jamie: Oh, okay. 

Sarah: Somebody in the past invited a malevolent fallen angel who has just been hanging out for who knows how long. 

Jamie: This fallen angel just been like Airbnb at this murder house. So, wait, so the implication there is that by the time these murders took place, the fallen angel was already a resident.

Sarah: Yes. For a long time. It's interesting because it turns from like a ghost of the victims are haunting us story into a, we almost suffered the same fate as the people who lived here before us, because we were afflicted by the same fallen angel. 

Jamie: We're to believe the fallen angel had some negative influence on Ronnie DeFeo and has something to do with the murder, the fallen angel.

Sarah: Yeah. That's what develops. It may be easier to talk about demonic entities because you don't have to talk about motivation. 

Jamie: Also, it's just a way of avoiding and discussing mental illness in any way shape or form by being like, well, it couldn't have been mental illness. It was demons.

Sarah: That's a really good point, too. This is a time also when, as a country, we're clinging to not those things are hunky-dory today, but I do feel like compared to where we were in 1975, 76, when these events take place. Our understanding of mental illness is like something that exists and that we should talk about and hope for managing as opposed to let's ignore it as hard as possible. It does feel like we've progressed from there. 

Jamie: I mean, even the way that George and Kathy's meditating, very innocently meditating is treated as an affront to God by the storytelling is like, okay. This story would basically disappear if there was a more public mental illness discussion in the seventies, but lucky for Amityville horror heads there wasn't so it's demons. 

Sarah: Slipped in under the door. Okay, so here's what the entity was trying to do according to the experienced researcher. George and Kathy's explicable trances, mood changes, odd dreams and physical transformations can all be read as symptoms of incipient possession. Some who believe in reincarnation say that we pay for past errors by being reborn in a new body and experiencing the consequences of our actions. But any entity as resolutely malevolent, as the ones who tormented the Lutz’s would have realized that a returned to the flesh might entail retribution in the shape of physical deformity illness suffering, oh boy, and other quote, bad karma. Thus, a particularly nasty spirit might avoid rebirth entirely instead seizing the bodies of the living in order to experience food, sex, alcohol, and other earthly pleasure.

Jamie: It is a horny little devil. 

Sarah: Yeah. It also wants food and alcohol apparently. It wants to go to a bar on Long Island and drink light beer. 

Jamie: This fallen angel should hang out with my mom's friend. They'll go, they'll get mudslides. It'll be fun. 

Sarah: Yeah. Just possess someone more fun than George Lutz and then he can like go spend the day mall walking and going to TGI-Friday. 

Jamie: Yes.

Sarah: So, that's the idea of what's happening here, which I think maybe is more interesting to have in mind from the beginning. 

Jamie: I wish I knew that at the beginning. Yeah, that's such fun sitcom set up. Two murdered ghosts, a fallen angel, what's the last one? A poltergeist. 

Sarah: A poltergeist who might be a stage of the fallen angel, we're not sure. It's like the Sex in the City cast probably. You can figure out who is who. 

Sarah: They go to the wedding. George is going to cover for the missing $1,500 that the ghost took. While taking communion he becomes violently nauseated. Now that you know that there's a fallen angel trying to possess him, I'm sure that makes sense in a different way than it would have. 

Jamie: Sure. 

Sarah: Okay, so he covers the missing $1,500 with two checks. One of them is from his personal account, which he knows he doesn't have the money in, but he's going to cover the draft as quick as he can. The other is from his surveying company. So that's not great. 

Jamie: IRS wise, certainly not. 

Sarah: Yes. He will get audited later in this book which is sweet.

Jamie: Wait really? 

Sarah: Yeah. The IRS is bothering him at the same time as the ghosts. 

Jamie: Oh God. 

Sarah: I guess maybe the ghosts wanted him to get in trouble and that's why they took the money. I don't know what their plan is.

Jamie: Who is telling these ghosts about the American taxation system? 

Sarah: It's a stressful wedding. Also, their guard dog is drowsy. This is a major plot point. They're like it was 6:00 PM and Harry was asleep and it's like, maybe because it's cold as balls. 

Jamie: All this stuff with Harry is not working for me whatsoever. They're just describing dog behavior and then saying, it's the devil. You're like, no, all dogs are angels and I'm not falling for it. 

Sarah: Yeah. Just angels who want to bark through the night. You remember this from the movie, Kathy's aunt Theresa, former nun comes to visit, and, in the movie, they just made her still fully a nun. She stepped in really freaked out and then left and threw up because this story loves to have people experience nausea as proof of demons. 

Jamie: Am I remembering that correctly, where she comes in and she's like, oh, it is very goofy and the scenes over so quickly. 

Sarah: Dealing with nausea, you have to wonder is this like gas? Are they living mirror large refinery or something like that? It kind of points to environmental sickness. 

Jamie: I would say definitely by that, especially because they just moved into this house. They don't know how it works. I feel like the first couple of months of living anywhere, you're still learning the quirks of the house of what is the correct amount of heat to have in the house? What are the levels?  But no, she was sick because of ghosts. 

Sarah: I guess something like mental illness manifesting in someone you've just married or in one of your children is something that is scary and blameless and kind of scary for maybe the same reason that goes through scary. Or moving into a house that is killing you financially and also maybe contains or is near something that's making you sick is scary because this supposed to be where the troubles are not. 

Jamie: A lot of this house is like, what you know when you enter it, would you feel physically ill if you didn't know that a horrific bazillion homicide took place here very recently, maybe not, but we're assuming that auntie does know that when she comes over? Can you really blame someone for feeling deeply uncomfortable in a house where they know that's happened? Like very recently, not everyone's going to be comfortable with that. 

Sarah: Yeah, and so in this one, she gets out of there as fast as she can. She says there's something bad in here Kathy, I must go now. 

Jamie: I'm going to start saying that every time I leave someone house. 

Sarah: I must go now. 

Jamie: I must go now. 

Sarah: If you don't want to be at a party you just pretend you suddenly realize there's a malevolent spirit there.

Jamie: There are two ghosts, a poltergeist and a fallen angel in here. I have to go home. It's not that I'm socially anxious.

Sarah: I must go now. Being socially anxious feels like there's a poltergeist and a fallen angel at the party. 

Jamie: Let's just say it is that. 

Sarah: Yeah, this is my favorite line of dialogue. Kathy says, “George, I'll finish up downstairs later. I want to transfer some of the canned goods into a closet I found down there. We can use it as a pantry.”  I just love the idea of any human being saying, I want to transfer some of the canned goods. It just fills me with delight. The kids bring over a boy named Bobby, who they met on the street. He refuses to come in past the entryway, which freaks Kathy out, which is like, he's a kid. He lives here, he knows what happens. I think that makes sense especially if you're a kid. 

Jamie: Especially if you're a kid who lived locally, when this horrific murder took place last year Kathy, use your head. Everyone in this community was here for it. 

Sarah: If we're in Christmas and the events of the story, it happened around Thanksgiving of the year before.

Jamie: There were children in the DeFeo family, it is possible that these new kids would have known these kids. The Lutz’s, they're awfully self-centered, I'll say that. 

Sarah: I feel like in a way the people who made it maybe didn't see it coming or intend to at all that the story struck many nerves. I think one of them was this idea that we really can't build over tragedy and expect the slate to be totally wiped clean. But so, if we're to believe the way this chapter talks about the day they're having, it's been a pretty scary afternoon and Theresa came freaked out. She left, little Bobby came by, he wouldn't come in the house. Then Kathy goes to transfer the canned goods to the closet in the basement and there's a secret room behind the closet painted solid red.

Jamie: That is pretty scary. I would be afraid of that.

Sarah: I actually find that creepy. 

Jamie: I would be terrified if I found that in my new murder house. 

Sarah: Secret rooms are always scary. I feel like it's the stuff of dreams to find an extra room in your house that you didn't know was there before and a secret room painted red, that is sinister.

Jamie: I wonder if there's like pictures of this anywhere. 

Sarah: So, if you search Amityville red room, I think it'll come up. 

Jamie: Interesting. Okay, I'll do that right now. Amityville red room, oh, wow, okay. That’s actually very scary. 

Sarah: What do you see? 

Jamie: It looks a little different than I was expecting. It's actually scarier. The room is like cement. It looks like a little cell. There's a formal floor, but the walls are cement and covered in this red paint that's like flaking off in this kind of freaky pattern. But the paint is so bright. Oh, this is actually very scary. I'm scared. Sarah it is very creepy. 

Sarah: That is the thing about like scary stuff in your house. It's often something you can't really do anything about. It's not like a spirit you can communicate with, or that's going to ramp things up or be like, I'm a fallen angel. Get the fuck out of here. It's going to be some kind of remainder that you don't know where it came from or why it's there and you're just sort of live with it under you.

Jamie: So, this room is discovered?

Sarah: Yeah, and George responds in this book’s version of the events and kind of classic horror movie idiot form, George removed the four wooden shelves, then shoved hard against the plywood. It's swung all the way open. It was a secret door. The room was small, about four by five feet, Kathy gasped from the ceiling to the floor. It was painted solid red. “What is it, George? I don't know. He answered feeling the three solid concrete block walls. It seems to be an extra room, maybe a bomb shelter. Everyone was building them back in the late fifties, but it sure doesn't show up in the house plans the broker gave us. Do you think that a DeFeos built it, Kathy asked, holding nervously onto George’s arm? I don't know that either. I guess so he said steering Kathy out of the secret room. I wonder what it was used for. He pulled the panel closed. Do you think there are any more rooms like that behind the closets Kathy asked? I don't know Kathy, George answered, I'll have to check out each wall. Did you notice the funny smell in there? Yeah, I smelled it George said that's how blood smells.”

Jamie: George. 

Sarah: Oh, George.

Jamie: Sweetie. That interaction alone fictional or not. Kathy is the only one asking the questions and he's like, I also noticed that, and it was actually my idea.

Sarah: Then she's like, George, I'm worried, freaky stuff is going on. This is stressing me out basically. George patted his wife on the head. “Don't worry, baby. I'll find out what the hell that room is all about. We can use it as an extra pantry.” 

Jamie: George. 

Sarah: He turned out the light in the closet, shutting out the side of the rear wall panel, but not obscuring the fleeting vision of a face glimpsed against the plywood. In a few days George would realize it was the bearded face of Ronnie DeFeo. 

Jamie: No. At this point, is George being a doofus or is this the fallen angel talking? Has the fallen angel made entry?

Sarah: I think this is the fallen angels. 

Jamie: I will suspend my disbelief and be like, no, George’s inability to read the room is actually a fallen angel. It's not just how he is. 

Sarah: The key to how this story works is that like George is progressively more inattentive, aggressive, uncaring, refusing to work, completely out of touch with his family's needs and emotions. Then after the fact, they're like, oh, that was the entity that wasn't George, it was the entity. It took us a really long time to tell the difference. 

Jamie: Is it not a red flag if you can't tell whether someone's being regular abusive or ghost abusive?

Sarah: I really love that his last line in this chapter is we can use it as an extra pantry and so now I'm going to imagine him saying that and smelling her hair in a comforting fashion. Okay, chapter 10, December 28th, Father Mancuso talks to Sergeant Gionfriddo whose name I hope I'm saying right, if he is indeed a real person, I don't think he is. Basically, Father Mancuso tells him that he's stressed out about the experience that he had at the Amityville house, and he wants the Sergeant to tell him about the murders. He says, I understand the boy Ronnie DeFeo said he heard voices. So he's starting to kind of do a little bit of detective work. Sergeant Gionfriddo doesn't think much of this, but then he leaves, and he throws up, so the demons. 

Jamie: Demons. 

Sarah: This entity just makes everyone barf once and then they'll let you go after that. 

Jamie: It's kind of like taking Azo, so funny. Mancuso, especially because I'm going off the assumption that he's not even real. I just think it's so funny that things they attribute to him. They're like this sweaty barfing priest, this guy is a mess. He's lucky he is not real.

Sarah: They should be an Amityville spin-off called Mancuso and then it is just a sweaty barfing priest, that's the movie. So, Gionfriddo when he was talking to Mancuso mentions that Ronnie DeFeo first reported the murders when he ran into the Witch's Brew, which is a bar near the house where all of this is happening. 

Jamie: Oh yeah. Excellent name for a bar.

Sarah: I do think that's a great name for a bar. I want to have a local bar called The Witch's Brew. 

Jamie: Yes, absolutely. 

Sarah: So, he runs in and tells the bartender, everyone is dead. He initially in real life claimed that he was not the killer and then confessed pretty quickly and then changed his story many times until his death.

Jamie: When did he die? Do we know?

Sarah: He died earlier this year. 

Jamie: No kidding, okay. 

Sarah: As you can imagine immediately after that conversation, George walks into the Witch's Brew and the bartender does a double take. Why do you think that's happening? 

Jamie: No, oh wait. I remember, I know it's coming. I know it's coming. I'm excited.

Sarah: “Excuse me mister said the bartender, you passing through? No answered George, I live here in Amityville, we just moved in. The bartender nodded. Well, you're a dead ringer for a young fellow from around here. For a moment I thought you was him. He rang up George’s money, he's away now, won't be back for a while. He put the change on the bar, maybe never.” You like my accent? 

Jamie: I feel like I'm there. I feel like I am at the Witch's Brew right now. 

Sarah: George took the money and shrugged, people were always mistaking him for someone else they knew, oh my God George. Maybe it was the beard. A lot of guys wore them these days. “Well, see you around.” He heads for the entrance to the Witch's Brew, the bartender nodded again, “yeah, drop in again. George was at the door, hey, ask the bartender. By the way, where did you move into? George stopped, looked back and pointed toward the general direction of the west. Oh, just a couple streets from here on Ocean. The bartender felt George’s used beer glass slipping from his hand when he heard George's final remark, 112 Ocean Avenue, it dropped from his hand and crashed to the floor.”

Jamie: Yes. Everything slows down and it goes pssshhh, and the foam goes everywhere, and the music gets all weird. Oh, this is great. 

Sarah: Then he looks like Paul Giamatti in the Illusionist. 

Jamie: Oh my God. That rocks. Okay, this is the most fun I've had with this story in a bit.

Sarah: It's like the moment when you go to the door and you're like, where's Jessica and the old lady is like Jessica has been dead for 15 years.

Jamie: I love it. Also, the logic of this scene demands that it's like the bartender is like, hey, you look like that guy that murdered his whole family last year. But he only gets it unsettled when he finds out that George also lives in the house. It's like, well, it was unsettling from the beginning of the conversation.

Sarah: Right. He is already in the neighborhood and in the first location the killer went to after the crime.

Jamie: In this story, I wish that you got more insight into the kind of townies nearby because those are the fun parts. Like when that guy last time came over with a six pack and was like, hey, will you guys want to chill out? You guys want to hang? And they were like, no, ah come on. It seems like the locals here are lovely. 

Sarah: Yeah. I like that someone came and then took a six pack back home with him because he just didn't like what he found. 

Jamie: I mean, he has his pride after all.

Sarah: He does and then Kathy bought George a ceramic lion posed as if it was like crouching to pounce for Christmas. The same Christmas where there weren't that many gifts for the children, by the way. She thought that the lion moved when she turned her back and was kind of spooked by that. But then it was like, whatever. But then when George comes home from the bar, there's a crash and he thinks that someone has left the lion in the middle of the floor because he tripped over it. No one left the lion in the middle of the floor. It moved by itself and then. 

Jamie: We're back to nothing burgers. 

Sarah: Then in the next chapter, Kathy sees teeth marks in George’s ankle. 

Jamie: He got attacked by the ceramic lion she bought him. 

Sarah: I believe about your closet. I believe that it's cold. I even believe that you thought you saw pig ghost, but like what? 

Jamie: You thought you were attacked by your shitty Christmas present. It sounds like you're projecting. I used to have a poster of Mandy Moore that I thought was going to kill me. 

Sarah: Oh, how come? 

Jamie: Well, her eyes moved when I did. 

Sarah: That is like with all the great paintings. 

Jamie: Yeah, I think it was just such an artful photo that was in J-14, and I really thought it was out to get me.

Sarah: Okay, next day, Kathy's feeling a little depressed. I think we're also meant to assume this is based on ghost. George rushes to work finally to cover the check that he wrote for the wedding. He finds that an IRS inspector is there to look at the company's tax returns, hooray. 

Jamie: Did the poltergeist bring the IRS to George's door?

Sarah: Yeah. The poltergeist found a payphone put in a quarter and it was like I would like to report George Lutz. I think he has been siphoning company funds to pay for weddings. 

Jamie: That's why he needs all the money. He took $1,500 in quarters so he can make his freaky little IRS calls.

Sarah: George goes to Newsday to research the history of the house because he's not spending a whole day at work, fuck that. 

Jamie: What would that do? Fix the problem. He's not going to do that.

Sarah: He sees his first picture of Ronnie DeFeo and realizes that the face staring back at him could have been his own. There's a record of the trial which happened between September and November of that year, so the month before. 

Jamie: Wow. I think it's so bizarre that the book is deflecting how fresh this would be for this whole community.

Sarah: Right. It's like things that you're just constantly noticing when it mentions a date or something, but that the book itself isn't reflecting on. So, in the microfilm that George is reading, there's a mention of police brutality, enforcing a confession from Ronnie DeFeo which we never returned to again, and went on to attorney William Weber’s parading psychiatrist to the stand, to substantiate his plea of Ronnie's insanity. 

Jamie: Does the book make any value statement on the validity of that?

Sarah: The book doesn't, but its origin story connects to that in an interesting way and that's all I will say about that for the moment. George is driving home from Newsday now, he has car trouble again, obviously demons. Father Mancuso has read palms, demons and oh sorry, George doesn't go home. Why would he do that to help his wife? That would be ridiculous. He goes to the Amityville Historical Society and here we have two entirely fabricated things that I'm just going to read to you. 

Jamie: Neat.

Sarah: This part will be racist. 

Jamie: Oh, not neat. 

Sarah: It seems the Shinnecock Indians use land on the Amityville River as an enclosure for the sick, mad, and dying. These unfortunates were penned up until they died of exposure. However, the record noted that the Shinnecock’s did not use this track as a consecrated burial mound because they believed it to be infested with demons. Which like A, the Shinnecock’s weren't by the Amityville River, I think they were about 15 miles away. B they didn't pen up the sick, mad, and dying to die cruelly of exposure. C if they did so I don't understand why they would use a piece of land the size of a single home residence for it. I haven't looked into this, but I do feel like demons as we're understanding them in this book are a Christian and specifically a Catholic concept.

Jamie: If A through C is true, which it isn't, D doesn't even reflect the beliefs of the Shinnecock’s. So, God, that is the laziest seventies, bullshit racism available. I didn't know if that was going to come up in this story in particular because it seems like the image and the idea of like the haunted burial ground comes up so often in this era. I haven't done enough research to feel like I could intelligently unpack it to any degree, but it's so everywhere and so clearly wrong and racist and fucked in the way that it's presented. Honestly, in upstate New York historical society, quote unquote in the seventies, I fully believe that they would say something like this, especially in the Northeast. It feels like how intensely pro colonial local historical societies were until like pretty recently.

Sarah: Yeah. This based specifically on the idea that this land was rescued from indigenous people who were using it to commit murders. No, it's like with colonialism means it is used from thence fourth and ever since for murders, but it's not really saving it from being used as the site of murders.

Jamie: Interesting intellectual backbend to justify murder.

Sarah: It's very telling. What's really surprising to me because I think of this book as being kind of like a coleslaw of recent media and being like powerful partly because it's so derivative and is able to be kind of a like Cuisinart- arted salad of things that people have been liking recently in the seventies.

Jamie: Sure. 

Sarah: This actually appears to be where the trend of the quote built on an Indian burial ground story comes from. Colin Dickey writes that this is where this first shows up and then of course, we're going to see it very soon after in the movie version of The Shining, not the book. Then in Poltergeist and then in Pet Cemetery, it becomes like an instant cliche, but this seems to be where that pop culture trend of this moment originates. I would not have guessed. 

Jamie: I wouldn't have guessed that either by a long shot. I sort of thought that this story would have come in the middle of a wave of those stories.

Sarah: That's what I really thought was going on. It's one of those things that feels like it's been a hacky fiction for a really long time. It's funny too, to compare this to Poltergeist where the idea that this development is haunted because the developers lied, and they said they moved to burial site, and they really just moved the headstones. The idea is this has come up since you shouldn't have built your dream house on a place where there was a complicated history, and you were disturbing the spirits of everyone who's buried there.

You're the aggressor and you're the invader and you shouldn't be here and that's kind of how I always, what I've taken to be the cursedness of the sight of this idea of like you were disturbing the blameless dead. They're going to get upset with you about that, don't build on burial grounds, but now I feel like seeing it in its original format, it's more along the lines of like these burial grounds are full of evil spirits. The people who use them were bad and they're going to get you.

Jamie: Right, it’s tied to, oh evil has always been happening here and this is a continuation of that evil instead of any empathy or understanding of how colonialism works. I mean, I think the darkest area of its legacy we've talked about so far. 

Sarah: Again, it's always fascinating to me when something this hacky affects a nation this deeply, what is it touching on that matters so much to us and this idea of where the curse originates. Is it in the violent and murderous act of colonization, which creates ghosts or in this book, is it the curse comes from the land that the colonizers innocently settled on? It's a big divide. 

Jamie: Is this a thread that goes through the rest of the book or is it yet another kind of dropped thread? 

Sarah: Yeah, it's not a trend like Father Mancuso’s flu as a trend and here's another made up thing. One of the more notorious settlers who came to the newly named Amityville was a John Ketcham or Ketchum who had been forced out of Salem, Massachusetts for practicing witchcraft and in the margin, I wrote why didn't they just execute him?

Jamie: A valid question.

Sarah: He doesn't appear to have been a real person and also, okay, you guys, do you realize that the whole reason we study the Salem witch trials is because they weren't actually witches and that's why it's problematic that they were executed for being witches. The point of that story is that you should not execute people for being witches. 

Jamie: Well, that's why Hocus Pocus is so fun. Because Hocus Pocus is like, no, they were witches, but aren't they funny? 

Sarah: They were, and they sing songs and they're funny. So, it's the night before Christmas Eve, George comes out from his adventures and his research trips that he's been doing while Kathy has been cleaning, presumably. They finally say the G word for the first time. “Kathy says, George, do you think it's haunted? George says no way, I don't believe in ghosts besides everything that's happened around here must have a logical and scientific explanation to it. I'm not so sure. What about the lion? What about it, he asked? Kathy looked around the kitchen where they were sitting. Well, what about what I felt those two times? I told you, I know somebody touched me, George. George stood up stretching, oh, come on, honey, I think it's just your imagination. He reached for her hand.” George, why have you spent the entire day verifying your concerns about the haunted house you live in and then you're coming home and telling your wife you don't think it's haunted.

Jamie: Right. George has this inability to take his own wife seriously in a way that I find so frustrating because clearly, I mean, he's just such a horrible communicator. They are having the exact same concerns and he feels that he's confirmed some of them, but he's just refusing to communicate with her about that because reasons. The real G word here is George. 

Sarah: There's so many things in here that go nowhere and one of them is at George keeps feeling himself drawn out to the boathouse, but why? Apparently after he read about the murders, he decided that maybe the elder Ronald DeFeo hid a bunch of money out there and his ghost wants to tell George where the hidden money is. Then all of his money problems will be over. 

Jamie: George sweetie. 

Sarah: It's almost seven and the heat is not on even though it's supposed to come on at six. 

Jamie: Demons.

Sarah: Demons. The boys threatened to run away and then relent. 

Jamie: What are they threatening to run away over just being afraid of the house?

Sarah: According to the book, it is because George takes away their TV rights. 

Jamie: Okay. I used to respond to losing my TV rights like that. 

Sarah: If you lose TV, you have no rights at all as a child. 

Jamie: I know. 

Sarah: But again, it's framed as the kids being like misbehaving as they never had before and it's like, I don't know. They're fighting with each other, which they never used to do. Kathy sees a demon face in the fireplace, just like how George saw a scary face in the scary closet. 

Jamie: Wow.

Sarah: Father Mancuso has blisters.  

Jamie: The ailments of this man, no end. He has blisters.

Sarah: Every four pages we got a health update on this priest. 

Jamie: Now I feel like I know the answer to this question already but is Father Mancuso ever described his seeking medical attention.

Sarah: Not really, he really feels that the best route is to get away from the demons. At this point, Kathy tries to call him, he picks up and then he hears the same static he heard when he was talking to George before. He hangs up and he's like, no, stop calling me demons. A lot of his story is feeling conflicted, he knows that he should help this family, but he really doesn't want to. It is at this point that he first starts thinking about demonology and that demons might be in the mix and mentions that he's never met an Exorcist. Although every priest is empowered to perform the rights of exorcism, but the Catholic church prefers that this dangerous ceremony be restricted to those clerics who have become specialists in dealing with obsession and possession which are different things. 

Jamie: Oh yeah, no, of course, I knew that.  

Sarah: Then the family has a nice night in the house. They have burgers and fries, and just start in a good mood and then that evening, Kathy sees glowing red eyes out the window. They go out to investigate and what should they find in the snow, the footprints of enormous cloven hooves, those of an enormous pig. 

Jamie: No, wait so Jodie, I don't know why this took me out of it, but Jodie is big. 

Sarah: Yeah. Jodie is a big pig. 

Jamie: She's like a wild feral hog. She's not like Wilbur.

Sarah: Yeah, exactly like a feral hog. So yeah, there's a giant feral hog stalking their house and befriending their daughter and when you put it that way, it is pretty scary. 

Jamie: Yeah. I was picturing Ariana Grande's pig. 

Sarah: I also find it interesting that Jodie can apparently fly, but like chooses not to, or was like, I'm going to leave some hoof prints because I know that'll freak people out. 

Jamie: Is that not powerful? 

Sarah: I will walk today.

Jamie: Today I walk.

Sarah: I will oink down the street and if I were a fallen angel, would I appear as a giant pig, I don't know if I've been around for millennia, sure? Anyway, so Kathy's in the kitchen, she gets another hug from the friendly and yet overbearing cheap perfume mom type ghost. Then she senses a struggle going on over possession of her body but somehow, she had been trapped between two powerful forces and then she passes out. It's meaningful to me that also the evidence of this affliction is like, Kathy's depressed. Kathy's not getting anything done. Kathy doesn't want to leave the house. I mean, that's how I would feel. 

Jamie: But like circumstantially, yeah, of course, you're depressed. What reason do you have to feel good at this time?

Sarah: It's getting dark at 3:30 and you're married to George. It's too much. 

Jamie: Yay and you're married to George and George spent the whole day researching ghosts, but we'll engage with you about it 0%. I mean, of all the things that bothered me about this marriage, that really bothers me. I'm like, you've just spent your whole day and you can't have a single second of emotional honesty with your wife because you need to be right about everything. It's just sad. It makes me sad. 

Sarah: I hate to be a broken record, but I have to bring up that the real villain of Rosemary's Baby is Rosemary's shitty husband, who the neighbors only have to talk to on two occasions. Before he's like, sure, I’ll drag my wife and have Satan impregnate her to help my career. Sounds good. How haunting these stories is some level of awareness that American husbands are doing a terrible job. They're useless at best and actually terrifying at worst. 

Jamie: Yeah. The masculine ego is demons much like American colonialism, which is also demons.

Sarah: Yeah, and he can't get a house without a demon. I feel like in so much 20th century scary stories, folklore or fiction, there's this awareness of the dad is scary alongside the supernatural or the supernatural thing is scary as a way of expressing the inexpressible. Which is the dad being scary and having maybe I'll marry a nice guy and then my kid will be provided for financially is like not a good way to run an economy.

Jamie: Perhaps there's some dead ends there.

Sarah: Oh, and speaking of which, Kathy passes out, and then she asked Danny to call daddy at his office and Danny does, but of course, George isn't there because he's already on the road and he's supposed to be back soon. But instead, he goes to the Witch's Brew. 

Jamie: No kidding. 

Sarah: Orders a Millers this ghost demon wants to inhabit his body and drink Miller.

Jamie: Get a six pack and go home. Why are you at The Witch's Brew? 

Sarah: Yeah, go hang out with six pack guy, you can each get your own six pack and drink them by the sound. So, but he's quizzing the bartender. So, we get to have another bartender scene, hooray. The bartender tells George that he actually was inside 112 Ocean Avenue once, because he tended bar at a party they threw. He says “I was down in the basement, a lot of booze and beer float that night. It was their anniversary. He looked around the bar again, did you know you got a secret room down there? George pretended ignorance, no.” George, why lie to all these people? 

Jamie: What do you gain by lying? You're just making the book longer George.

Sarah: That's the goal here, so, yeah. “Uh, huh, the bartender said, you take a look behind those closets, and you'll find something that'll really shake you. George leaned over the bar, what was it? A room, a little room. I found it that night I was down in the basement. There's this plywood closet built up beside the stairs. I'm using it to ice beer in, see, when I bumped a keg against one end of the closet, it seems the whole wall was loose. You know, like a secret panel, something out of an old movie.”

Jamie: Okay. I'm sorry the bartender is in possession of a staggering amount of knowledge, and I know the frustrating thing is I know that he's going to disappear from the narrative, and we'll never hear of him again.

Sarah: He's probably entirely made up, which is a shame because he's the most likable character.

Jamie: I know it's difficult because I'm falling in love with them. 

Sarah: We're going to have to say goodbye so soon and he should marry Kathy. 

Jamie: He should marry Kathy. I mean, it looks like he is down to have an honest conversation, unlike some people at The Witch's Brew right now. 

Sarah: Hey, you want to hear about a thing I saw. 

Jamie: He's playing maybe irresponsibly fast and loose with Intel. He'll tell anyone anything. 

Sarah: He's great. He's like a Law and Order character before that existed. He tells about how he lit a match and could see that it was all red and then George pays him and is about to go and the bartender says, “you want to know something really flaky about that little room, I used to have nightmares about it. Nightmares, like what? Oh, sometimes I dream that people, I don't know who they were, killing dogs and pigs in there and using their blood for some kind of ceremony.”

Jamie: Oh, that was just an idea that he had. 

Sarah: George says, “dogs and pigs.”

Jamie: The only two animals.

Sarah: That exists in this book. 

Jamie: Oh my God. This plot bartender is killing me. I love him.

Sarah: I love it also went in a kind of a satanic panic, adjacent texts. Someone is like, oh, I didn't know. It was a sacrificing baby on an altar with an inverted cross and chanting. 

Jamie: Is that unusual?

Sarah: I guess, figured they were fancy. So of course, the implication is that somebody, and we're not foreclosing the idea that the DeFeos did this, which would then be blaming them for their murder. But that somebody was using this red room basically to do witchcraft in and chant and sacrifice dogs and pigs and that's why they have a pig angel demon, I guess. 

Jamie: Is Jodie independent of these other four or is Jodie one of them? 

Sarah: Well, I think Jodie is a manifestation of the fallen angel. 

Jamie: Got it. 

Sarah: You can have your own interpretation of this. You know, what if Jodie is like a whole other thing just hanging out or just an actual pig ghost. 

Jamie: Or just an actual pig, okay. 

Sarah: Okay, and then in a wonderful scene, Kathy's like George, you got a call Father Mancuso. He gets home she's fainted. He's been like, you know, interviewing the bartender and she asked him to call the priest and he asked the priest to come bless the house again. The priest is like, hell no, but he does do a remote blessing in a church. Then after that his quarters are haunted by the smell of human excrement, which is always associated with the devil, according to this book, which is the first time I've heard that in my life. 

Jamie: That's saying something coming from you. 

Sarah: I read about the devil all the time. 

Jamie: Quite a bit. This is your first time saying that the devil smells like poopoo.

Sarah: Yeah. It just, it's not that sinister because toddlers smell like that while they are trying to kill us, but not on purpose. 

Jamie: I thought the devil would smell enticing, right. 

Sarah: He smells like brimstone. This has been established. 

Jamie: Ah, well, I mean, some find the scent of brimstone to be very enticing. 

Sarah: You know, it's just a little bit on the neck.

Jamie: Jay Anson is coming in here like as we all know, the devil smells like shit, okay.

Sarah: The red room also smells like devil poop and so that's rough. 

Jamie: That can't be fun. 

Sarah: Kathy says, “I just had a thought, George, do you think our transcendental meditation had anything to do with all of this? George shook his head, nah, nothing at all. But what I do know is that we've got to get help somewhere, it might as well be. As they entered the living and Kathy scream cut off the rest of George's words. He looked to where she was pointing. The ceramic lion that George had carried out to the sewing room was on the table next to Kathy's chair. Its jaws bared at George and Kathy.”

Jamie: Noooo. 

Sarah: Why didn't you take a picture? You're like jaws closed, jaws opened, jaws closed, jaws opened, haunted, not haunted, haunted, not haunted.

Jamie: I like picturing Jay Anson finishing a chapter with the exclamation point and then like pulling it out of his typewriter and being like, damn Manson, you're good. 

Sarah: Then cracking open a Miller. That sounds nice. 

Jamie: It's Miller time. 

Sarah: It does feel like he had fun writing this book and maybe that helped make it successful. I hope that's true. 

Jamie: There's a long tail, but it does seem like he's having a blast.

Sarah: George the asshole in a conversation with Kathy the next day, after their haunted statue, after they throw their haunted statue into a garbage can outside the house like that ever does anything. Kathy says, “how can you fight what you can't see? This thing can do anything at once. No, honey George said, there's no way you can convince me a lot of this is not just our imagination. I just don't believe in spooks. No way, no how, no time,” which I believe is a quote from the Wizard of Oz. Finally, he talked Kathy into going to bed with a promise that if he couldn't get help by the next day, they would get out of the house for a while.

Jamie: Oh, okay. 

Sarah: It begins the trend of Kathy being like this house is fucking haunted AF. Let's leave and George being like nah and then they're just stuck there. 

Jamie: I feel like he's so many levels of having screwed his family over that I wonder how much is just like him clinging to this delusion of if this doesn't work out, I am the world's biggest fuck up. Although I don't know that he's that self-aware so maybe I'm giving him too much credit. 

Sarah: Yeah. But I think if you're unwilling to admit to making a mistake that negatively affected people then you can keep digging deeper and deeper in an intense way.

Jamie: People love to do that. I've seen it.

Sarah: It's the past time that's sweeping the nation and then George dozes off and he wakes up because he hears marching band music downstairs. He's going to hear a marching band. It will sound to him as if there is a marching band downstairs until they flee. 

Jamie: A marching band. 

Sarah: A marching band. Like that scene in the Wolf of Wall Street, the marching band. 

Jamie: You know, the one, okay. There's some Sousa coming from the basement. 

Sarah: Right. It's just like dirdirdirdir. I mean, it would be very jolly, really.

Jamie: I'm in a better mood, yeah.

Sarah: Oh my God. So that's all delightful. It sounds to him like there's 50 musicians. He runs downstairs. He can't see anything. The sound stops immediately and then he goes back upstairs, and Kathy is levitating, two feet above the bed. 

Jamie: Oh, this sounds like the work of the Warrens if you ask me, that's the first thing that's really hit me as that sounds like a Warren punch up.

Sarah: Oh, talk about that. 

Jamie: I think that the nature of Warren stories based on the research I did for the other episode, there's often just these like wild unverifiable claims that include levitating that includes slamming against a wall, that include just kind of these tacitly agreed upon lies. I would need to like sit down with my notes and actually verify this but seems like the stories in which those like levitating claims come up usually are with families in on the scam. Which it sounds like the Amityville Horror may be an example of, because it's like the Amityville Horror family and many Warren families stood to gain something by the PR and the book deal money and movie rights A, B and C by being like, yeah, for sure I was levitating, why not? How much money are you going to give me? Yeah, I was levitating. That's striking me as a Warren Hallmark. 

Sarah: In the afterward, they give a list of things that happened in this house that line up with other ghost stories and so I wonder if levitating gives it kind of a paranormal pedigree.

Jamie: It's a great Dua Lipa song that is for sure with the Warrens. 

Sarah: What are the classic ghost things that we're looking for here that tend to show up?

Jamie: With the Warrens there's always a little bit of levitation. There's always a girl child that's in touch with the great beyond, which I feel like is a super media trope that kind of takes off out of these stories as well. There's a lot of young girls that are in touch with the supernatural or children in general, but usually girls, which is true of this story as well with Jodie. Also, another thing that I think you alluded to earlier is this whole, the wrong person is doing the seance. That's why the demons are getting in. For some reason, something that was huge with Ed Warren was he was constantly making the distinction of like, well, a certain kind of person can do a seance, but only a priest can do an exorcism. If someone who's not qualified to do an exorcism, tries to do an exorcism, you're triple fucked and that is often something. Where someone with good intentions or someone, very desperate mistakenly invites and even worse demon into the home and makes their situation worse.

Sarah: Makes a lot of sense as a story for professional demon hunters to be telling because it's like a plumber going around being like, now here is a scary story about somebody who tried to put in his own bathtub, and he is dead now. Call me A1 Plumbers. 

Jamie: I like to think of the Warrens as the plumbers of ghosts for sure. 

Sarah: They come in and they're like, oh, I see what your problem is. Kathy is levitating. She is slowly drifting away from him to where the windows exclamation point. “Kathy,” George yelled jumping up on the bed to grab his wife. She was as stiff as a board in his hands, but her drifting stopped. George felt a resistance to his pull and then a sudden release of pressure and he and Kathy fell heavily off the bed onto the floor. The fall awakened her. When she saw where she was, Kathy was incoherent for a moment. “Where am I, she cried, what's happened?” George started to help her up. She could hardly stand. “It's nothing, he reassured her. You were having a dream and fell out of bed, that's all.”

Jamie: George! Oh my God.

Sarah: What is this? I think it says so much about marriage in the seventies that are relatable hero. It makes sense for him to be like, I'm going to keep my wife in the dark about the fact that she levitates now.

Jamie: I mean, it sounds like it's just connected to that. I feel like this is how it was like characterized in the James Brolin movie too, of like, oh, he's trying to protect her from what's happening by deceiving her because he's the man of the house. He has to protect everyone, even though he's demonstrated, he is not capable of doing that and he is in way over his head, and he is kind of a fuck up.

Sarah: You know, what else is scary about The Amityville Horror movie that James Brolin got a percentage of profits and it ended up being way more successful than anyone thought. I think he made $17 million in 1979 money. 

Jamie: No way.

Sarah: For being in The Amityville Horror. That's like the ultimate straw into gold of it all. Margot Kidder needed to negotiate harder or have harder negotiators on her team because at the end of the day it's always a horror story about women and finance. 

Jamie: Jesus Christ. 

Sarah: What do you have without Margot Kidder?

Jamie: Nothing. Margot Kidder, you have nothing, you have garbage is what you have.

Sarah: Father Mancuso goes to stay with his mother because he's so stressed out, okay. King? After the levitation incident George goes to deal with his feelings all alone without talking to anyone about it because of course he sits in the kitchen. He thought he had been a fool to mouth off about not believing in spooks. Kathy was right. How the hell can you fight something that can lift you clear off the bed like a stick of wood? George Lutz, ex-Marine admitted he was scared. 

Jamie: Wow. 

Sarah: If you're a Marine and you're not scared a lot, then maybe you don't take your job seriously enough. That's all I have to say about that. George here's the marching band strike up again. He looks about wildly, you sons of bitches. Where are you? He screamed and then he sees that all the living room furniture has been moved as if to make space for a marching band. 

Jamie: I love this menacing marching band from hell.

Sarah: Does the entity manifests as a whole marching band or does the entity go to hell briefly to be like, hey, I need like 50 demons to come do a marching band? Tryouts today for the marching band in George Lutz’s living room. 

Jamie: We're doing a flash mob in George Lutz's basement. We're really going to freak him out, come on over.

Sarah: It's a TikTok trend on demon talk. 

Jamie: I feel like if they were really committing to demonizing what are supposed to be the ills of the seventies, it would have been like a rock band, right? Like a marching band is so innocuous. 

Sarah: I know and it's like really hometown uncanny sweet Americana, right? I don't know what they're going for. 

Jamie: I guess I see where they're going with it, but it's just such a funny idea. 

Sarah: Okay. Father Mancuso visits the chancellor, and they explained the difference between infestation, obsession and possession, which like, I really have to tell you about that. I can't cut that. Oh, excuse me infestation has categories that include obsession and possession. There's obsession where the person is affected either internally or externally and possession by which the person temporarily loses control of his faculties and the devil acts in and through him. The devil or a demon I guess, is trying to take over George Lutz and they recommend from a pair of psychologists work in Durham, North Carolina, which there appear to have been a lot of at least in the seventies.

Jamie: In North Carolina specifically like a concentration of them there? 

Sarah: Yeah, I think so. 

Jamie: Okay. 

Sarah: But they're basically saying like, yeah, this could be demons, but stay out of it Father and they forbid him to go back there, which I think is what he was kind of hoping for. He is a fictional character, so it's easy to speculate about that. 

Jamie: What an upsetting fictional dilemma, fictional character has fictionally entered into. 

Sarah: George goes poking around in his basement and he finds an old well, and then he has a call with Francine who is the girlfriend of a guy who works for him and who is psychic. She says, “I think that your spirits may be coming from a well.” George is amazed. 

Jamie: Well-played, Francine. 

Sarah: Yeah, I like Francine. She's the only female character who's allowed to be anything except a ragdoll to be tossed around by demons, so that's good for her. Father Mancuso’s friend who helped him out when he had car trouble early on in the book gets a call from a voice that says, tell the priest not to come back or he'll die. I just want to know what this voice sounded like. Probably like the moth man. 

Jamie: I hope it sounded like the bartender. 

Sarah: Then they have Francine over because they just are bound and determined to infuriate these ghosts apparently. It says, Kathy wasn't too happy about a stranger coming into her house to talk to ghosts particularly a young girl like Francine. 

Jamie: Oh, well, two women in the room and a story that's made up. They have to hate each other. 

Sarah: Oh, that's true. Yeah, this book probably doesn't pass the Bechdel test because also the ghosts appear to be largely male. 

Jamie: Problematic. 

Sarah: We again return to the theme of Kathy telling George she wants to leave and him being like, nah, I'm sure it'll be fine. Francine comes and she is possessed by the spirit of Father Mancuso, which is convenient because he can't come because he has the flu all the time. 

Jamie: She's possessed by the spirit of Father Mancuso but he's alive. 

Sarah: I know, I don't know. But she says, I would like to make one suggestion to you. Most people find out who their spirits are and find they like them. They don't want them to get lost or to go away. But in this case, I feel this house should be cleared or exercised. 

Jamie: She says that as Father Mancuso? 

Sarah: It is just like she's an answering machine because he's alive. He's on Long Island and could drive over and tell them, but it's steady us to possess somebody.

Jamie: The first time we've had two women in the room together and she gets possessed by a living local freak. It's like egregious, I mean. 

Sarah: He just doesn't feel like driving that day. He's like, I couldn't deice the windshield, or I can possess Francine, it's a toss-up.

Jamie: I am like such a broken record on this subject, but that's a fun one, that is a fun one. He's like, I'm having car trouble, so I'm going to possess the only other woman in the story. 

Sarah: Well, the other one is busy levitating. 

Jamie: It's rough out there. 

Sarah: Kathy's brother Jimmy and his new wife Carrie are back from Bermuda. How time flies? It's January 8th and they come over to show them polaroids of their honeymoon and then they stay in one of the bedrooms and Carrie wakes up and sees a little boy ghost, which is really the little boy ghost first entrance. I would like to have more little boy ghosts in this book to be honest. 

Jamie: Okay. The little boy ghost is one of the two ghosts that live in the house. 

Sarah: Then there's the kitchen perfume ghost.

Jamie: Right, the mommy ghost. 

Sarah: He wakes her up and asks where Missy and Jodie were, which is kind of rude, but kids don't have great boundaries about waking up sleeping people. 

Jamie: Sure. But ultimately no harm, no foul. 

Sarah: This spooks George and Kathy that George is like, okay, this priest won't come over. He would rather austerely project than drive up and talk to us or send another priest by the way. Let's just bless this fricking house ourselves and so they go around blessing the house. 

Jamie: That's a classic mistake. You're not supposed to do that. 

Sarah: A Warren no-no. 

Jamie: That's a Warren no-no. Wow, okay, feeling vindicated.

Sarah: Warren joint at heart and so they're going around blessing the house and then they hear this hum of voices that swells and turns into a cacophony. Then George hears a voice saying, will you stop? Which I think is a hilarious thing for a demon to say. 

Jamie: It's also what everyone reading the book is wanting to say to him at this point.

Sarah: Can you stop? Will you stop, please? 

Jamie: Just take a step back from the situation, you look ridiculous. Will you stop?

Sarah: Yes, and then we are going to close on a moment that is kind of a crescendo before we get into the last days in the house and the family fleeing. 

Jamie: Great.

Sarah: Father Mancuso and George finally are able to talk on the phone, which is very exciting because that's been tough for them. Father Mancuso says, “please get out, let things cool down for a while. If you got away, maybe we can all talk this thing out with more rationality.” Then he's interrupted because Kathy screams and George has to hang up and runs into the hallway where on every wall in the hall, which is two walls I'm pretty sure, we're green gelatinous spots oozing down from the ceiling to the floor, settling in shimmering pools of green slime.

Jamie: Money shot, amazing. I'm so glad we got to the goo. That's so exciting. 

Sarah: Classically, you need goo in a ghost story, right? 

Jamie: I feel like goo really turns it up to an 11 in a way that you're like, and people believed this. 

Sarah: You got to have goo and speaking of that, “which one of you did this, Kathy fumed? Tell me or I'll break very bone in your body.” Jesus fucking Christ Kathy calm down. 

Jamie: Oh my God. 

Sarah: “We didn't do it Mama, all three children chorused at once,” dodging the slap she was aiming at their heads. 

Jamie: Kathy, didn't just start acting like this last week, sorry, no. 

Sarah: You can blame the goo on the house, but like some of this stuff the demon is going to be like, excuse me, this is defamatory. Wouldn't it be great if the demon sued Jay Anson and a journalist in the murderer kind of a way and was like, listen, this George guy sucked before he moved in here all right? George stepped between his wife and the children, “wait a minute, honey, he said gently, maybe the kids didn't do it, let me take a look.” It's like we live in this extremely haunted house where we think porcelain statues are coming to life, but yeah, let's blame our kids before the ghosts that we now totally believe in at this point on page 171. 

Jamie: You know, it's bad when George is the voice of reason in a scene.

Sarah: Exactly. He went up to one wall and stuck his finger into a green spot. He looked at the substance, smelled it and then put a little against the tip of his tongue. “It sure looks like jello, he said smacking his lips, but it doesn't have any taste at all.” He tasted the goo. 

Jamie: He walked up to the wall and goes lick, lick, lick to the demon goo. 

Sarah: Yeah, I think it's weird enough when cops in movies taste cocaine and they're like that's cocaine all right. That in itself seems weird to me. 

Jamie: That's absurd. That's so funny. 

Sarah: What if there was a ghost hunter who did that and was like, that's a ghost all right. 

Jamie: Well, if you taste it, you're like yep that's battery acid all right, bye-bye.  

Sarah: Right. I know. No, it's a good thing to taste fluids randomly leaking out of your house. We don't use anything toxic in construction. It's fine. 

Jamie: It's not licking a wall a rule that has become societally generally accepted in the last 40 years. 

Sarah: Well, how do people eat all that lead paint? I guess people did used to lick walls. 

Jamie: God, amazing. Well, you know, we've only got 11 years to live anyways, right. 

Sarah: Oh God. Okay, so George who doesn't care if he lives for another 11 minutes, tastes the ectoplasm. Kathy was calming down after her tirade. “Could it be paint, she asked?” George shook his head, nope. He tried to get the feel of the jelly by rolling it against his fingertips. “I don't know what it is, but it sure leaves a mess.” He looked around him as if realizing for the first time where he was. In a rush, he recalled the conversation he had with Father Mancuso a few minutes before. The dreaded word devil almost slipped from his lips. “What did he say George asked Kathy, I didn't hear you?” He looked at his wife and children, “nothing, I was just trying to think.” He began to edge the others to where the staircase, “listen, he said, I'm hungry, let's go down to the kitchen and have a bite. Then the boys and me will come back up here and clean up this goo.” Okay, Kathy cook something. 

Jamie: Kathy I think we should talk about this over a sandwich and then the boys and I will eat this goo for dessert. George is so flaccid. It's stunning. 

Sarah: You just kind of get away from the demons if that's what you're dealing with. We're living in the sunk cost fallacy and so we have a scene next where Father Mancuso tries to call them back. There's no answer because the whole family was out back in the boathouse where the noise of the compressor drowned out the sounds of the rings. George, Danny and Chris were dumping gobs of green jelly into the freezing water beside their boat. The compressor hose kept churning the substance, mixing it with the icy water so that it was swept below the ice. He's like, we must destroy all evidence of the fact that our house is being haunted.

Jamie: Let's take no pictures. 

Sarah: They got in from disposing of the goo and we read by that evening, sitting beside the fireplace, Kathy was all for leaving for her mother's but when she suggested they get out of the house that night, George suddenly went berserk. “God dammit, no, he shouted jumping up from his chair, his face red with rage.” All the pressures that had been building within him finally exploded. “Every goddamn thing we own in the world is in this house, he stormed, I've got too much invested here to give it up just like that.” 

The children who were still up cringed and ran to their mother's side, even Kathy was frightened by a sight of George she had never seen. He had the look of a man possessed, and then he runs around yelling at the ghosts. He yells you sons of bitches, get out of my house, and then he runs upstairs and opens the window and just runs around yelling at ghosts. Then we learned that Sergeant Gionfriddo, the probably fictional is on duty that night and takes a look at the house as all of this is going on. 

Jamie: Oh. 

Sarah: He turned off his headlights, something was holding him back from getting out of his car and going up to that front door. He really didn't want to investigate why the owner was behaving like a lunatic. Gionfriddo sat there and watched as a woman went around and shut all the windows in the house and that's the scariest part in the whole book. Night-night. 

Jamie: Wow. Truly the police officer sits outside of a potential domestic violence situation and is like I don't know, I'm not really in the mood.

Sarah: Some kind of a supernatural force or whatever is holding me back. 

Jamie: Wow. The things that make police intentionally bad at their job is demons. I've been meaning to bring that up. 

Sarah: This has come up before, I think. Demons are just to blame for everything we don't like, which is pretty comforting, I guess. 

Jamie: It's so interesting to me that I feel like there's been three or four different scenes at this point where George has a huge temper blow up, where the book goes out of its way to say, this is the first time you'd ever done that. When even as readers at this point, we're like, that's not true. We've heard him blow up at Kathy and the children many times. 

Sarah: He does this like once every five days we have a timeline in front of us. 

Jamie: No one is looking out for Kathy whatsoever and then also Kathy's kids are clearly kind of scared of her too. This is just so dark.

Sarah: It is it's really; it feels like it's about a family that did go through this really dark time and all the stuff about the family not getting along feels true to me. It feels to me, I wonder how it feels to you, there's such a stark divide between the pretty realist stuff. Like George’s anger and even the cold and things like that and then the fake stuff just feels so fake. The porcelain lion that bites people. 

Jamie: I think it's genre too, but that's so Warren to me where it's like, there's some cases they work on that are absolutely like they really capture the public imagination because it feels real enough. Then you have stories like the time that Lorraine talked to Bigfoot in the woods, you're just like, oh, here is a scale of silly to. Is Jay Anson just trying to hit a word count? What's the strategy there?

Sarah: I think they just have thrown a bunch of stuff out there and seeing what sticks, it feels like. 

Jamie: Things have moved ahead, and George is at the end of his rope. Kathy has so much information being withheld from her. It seems like they're both independently certain that ghosts are real, but they cannot have a conversation about it. 

Sarah: That is such a good point. 

Jamie: I mean, I guess I don't wish that this book was like more emotionally intelligent because then it wouldn't be fun, but it's like, God, that sounds like torture to have reached the exact same conclusion as someone that you love. But you can't talk about it because it's the seventies. It's just so bizarre.  

Sarah: This reminds me of how in Love Story, which was one of the great best sellers of the seventies and one of the great love stories of honestly the 20th century. It's considered this normal thing that near the end, Jenny, the main character gets leukemia, and her doctor tells her husband that she's going to die and not her. Then she's like, what did the doctor tell you? He's like, it's fine, don't worry about it, whatever. She kind of just has to figure it out and be like, listen, preppy, I know I'm going to die. This is like the same thing where you're just like, listen, preppy, I know there are demons. Can you just like level with me? But the idea of equal partnership and marriage seems so foreign, I guess. 

Jamie: It's almost like assumed that's just not going to happen and that makes me sad. Also, you know, I feel for the kids, and I feel like the kids are going be dropped at the climax of the story anyways because the book doesn't seem very concerned with them. So, whatever, and most importantly, there was a breakout star of this episode, and it was the bartender. 

Sarah: What do you think his name is in our personal cannon?

Jamie: I feel like his name is something boring, but he's got a fun nickname that he's been called for 20 years. They are like that is Skunky. 

Sarah: Skunky. Yeah. 

Jamie: They've been calling it that since high school, but no one remembers why, but he's a hoot. 

Sarah: Skunky is a hoot. All right, I think our work has done here. We are going to come back and the final installment of The Amityville Horror book club and talk about how these idiots managed to get out of this house. Then what appears to be the real story behind how this incredible book made it into a world and the effect it has been having ever since, including on the people who we are describing in the story. 

Jamie: Amazing, I can't wait.