Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from HowStuffWorks dot com.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w No nonsense, let's get down to business. Bryant, there's Jerry. What's going on with this thing? Rolling? And again it's me Josh. Put the three of us together, you get Stuff you should know. The late twenty eighteen edition, which is tense.
It's Josh doctor nonsense. Clark. You have a degree in nonsense.
That's true, and a little I have a minor. And Tomfoolery.
Oh man, how you doing. I'm well, how are you good?
So I had to clear my throat. I had a little garlic chicken in it really kind of attacked my mucus memory just fall chuck. Yeah, Halloween's almost here.
Man, It's finally like cooling off a little bit.
Yeah, I know. It's been a hot one.
Although the sun is still blazing hot.
Yeah in the sun, if it's in the shade, maybe after sundown and the wind's blowing big, you're you're in there. It's fall time.
Yeah for real.
I'm wearing my boots. Oh nice, got a flannel shirt on. I might as well be on a hay.
Ride wearing my pumas my my favorite murder shirt.
Nice. Yeah, that's a great shirt. The toxic masculinity ruins the party again. What a great shirt.
Yeah, they actually follow through with great show quotes. Put them on T shirts. Smart and sell a ton of them.
That's smart. Yeah, that's the way to do it.
We try.
The key is selling a ton of them, that's right, and having the good quotes.
I feel like we ran out of good quotes seven years ago.
That is not true. Chuck, watch this you ready?
Huh?
It's showtime?
What do you think that's good? How about this? There's no business like show business.
Oh that's a good one too. You could write a song out of something like that.
It's not show friends, it's show business.
Right. Well look, wait, waite, before we start, I want to address the ten people who are still listening at this point, I would like to announce the birth of my new website. Yeah, it's called the Josh Clarkway dot com.
How much did it weigh?
It weighed nothing because it's a website. But there was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears put into its gestation and delivery. And our friend Brandon Reid who's such a great guy and a listener on the podcast, put it together through his business Innovate with an E. Built this awesome website. It's super eighties, super poppy. I'm very proud of it. And I'm starting a newsletter just to celebrate the whole thing.
And it's called The Josh Clarkway.
Did you look it up? Just now?
I'm trying but it's not loading.
Oh what else? We're cutting all this part out? Anyway?
Oh?
Wait, here we go.
Isn't it beautiful?
Well? Still loading? It's because of my old phone, it's not because of your I appreciate that my phone just can't handle your website.
There's so much to my website.
It's like, oh, there you are, Yeah, the Josh Clarkway dot com.
And I also want to say you me help me with the site too, so big ups and thank you to you me and Brandon for helping me put this thing together. So anyway, I just wanted to say, welcome website.
Oh, I got a new fun thing to do to.
Hang out on my website. Sure, sign up for the newsletter too. While you're there. Oh this is great, Okay, you're ready.
I'm glad I have this in my life.
Now you ready to get started.
Maybe I'll get a website one day.
You should get a website. It's like the new thing. Everybody's it once. Yeah, So chuck, we're talking fall here, which means there's only one word that comes to mind every fall.
Pumpkins.
No.
The other word candy corn, no, diarrhea.
No. Amityville. Oh, and specifically two words, the Amityville Horror, which is, for my money, one of the greatest horror movies of all time.
Yeah, one of the great ones. And uh being a kid in the nineteen seventies when this stuff was going on and famous, yeah, Like, even as a little youngster, I remember being terrified at that paperback. Oh yeah, in the drug store when I would go by the paperbacks and the look of that house just terrified me.
If the house looked any different, it be the story would have had fifteen percent less spread.
Or did the house end up looking creepy because of the lore it's just a colonial.
No, that house looked creepy. Well, yeah, if somebody, if somebody didn't say this house is haunted and by the way, look at it, right, you'd probably be like, oh, that's an interesting looking house. But yeah, you put just even the hint of a haunting to it, and that house was.
Well, it looked like it had eyes, right, which was one of the key things. It's a colonial, but it's one of those colonials that is situated sideways on the lot. So from the street you saw the side of the house, the chimney running down the side of the house, and those two eye like windows on the top floor on either side of the chimney.
Just amazing. Yeah, it was a Dutch colonial to be specific.
Yeah, and if you Google maps that thing. Now, first of all, it is not any longer one twelve Ocean Avenue. It is now one oh eight Ocean Avenue because the owners, at some point, whoever owned it, I think two or three years ago, successfully lobbied to have the address officially changed. It took them that long too, well I don't know how long they had to battle, but they changed it by four digits, like they'll never find a side exactly.
So I went and looked on the Google images, and of course now it looks it's bright and sunny and has a lovely yard, and it's in the middle of a lovely neighborhood and there's a Chevy in the driveway and an SUV and it just looks like any other house. But it's still you know, if you monkey around with Google you can see that image, right, And there are big signs all over like no trespassing.
Sure, and they need them, believe me.
Yeah, people, just I feel sorry for homeowners since the letzes. Yes, I don't feel sorry for them though. No, I don't know either because they made up a bunch of malarkey.
Yeah, that's one way to put it. But we'll get to that part later, all right, Sure, let's set the scene here.
Yeah, true, horrific thing did occur there.
Yeah, and I think that kind of gets swept under the rug a little bit overlooked, you know.
I agree.
On November thirteenth, nineteen seventy four, Ronnie Butch di Feo Junior killed the other six members of his family. His own family, his mother, his father, sure, his two sisters Alison and Dawn, and his two younger brothers, Mark and John. He's the older brother, killed his whole family.
Yeah, nine, twelve, thirteen, and eighteen ages. Yep, that is just I mean, this is one of those crimes that rightfully has gone down in American history is one of the worst.
Yeah, and yeah, like you said, rightfully, this guy was a bad, bad dude from the outset. He denied doing anything when he ran into a bar called Henry's Bar in the little town of Amityville. I bet that place is great, and I'll bet too, you know, And he said, somebody just killed my family, and all the barb patrons were like, I got to see this. And they ran to one twelve Ocean Avenue with Ronnie to Fayo, and they found all six members laying his face down on
their beds dead. I think their heads their faces resting in their hands. And Ronnie de Feo said it was the mafia.
Yeah, which I think his family had some tie somehow to the mafia.
H had an uncle named Carmine, and that's that's all you need right there.
Yeah, but there was one, like a legit crime family that had some tie to his family, so maybe he just thought that was a good an alibi or whatever. Yeah, it wasn't so good, No, And he killed them with a thirty five caliber Marlin rifle, which did you look this thing up? No, it's like the the Old West, like lever action. Oh really, riding on a horse, you know, cowboys and Indians kind of gun.
I expected the side bolt action carbo like a Lee Harvey Oswald. Yes, that's what I would know.
This is like a boom boom.
That explains a lot, because one of the big mysteries that still remains is why didn't the other family members wake up?
Well, that's a big I mean I read a little bit into the case, and that's definitely one of these sticking points is because it's not like they were all like three years old and fast asleep or something. I mean one of them was eighteen, and so there were a lot of variations of the story because of that that one of the sisters helped kill the father, and
then the mother freaked out, so Ronald killed her. Yeah, and like everyone was waking up, and I don't know, I mean, it sounds like he just he did it all himself.
I also saw that he had said years, like a year after while he was being questioned, that he had drugged them all with barbituates. But I only saw that once.
That would make a little more sense at least, right, because you can't silence to this kind of I mean, maybe you could have wrapped a pillow around it. But it's not like a handgun, you know, right.
So he said it was the mob first, and then he said that he did it, but there was a really big caveat to that. He said that he had been hearing voices that were urging him to kill his family, and even during the murder, something was telling him to continue and just keep killing, kill them all. And he said he looked around and there was no one there. So I just assumed it was God telling me to kill so I and he killed again his whole family.
And I read this article in Vice magazine from like twenty fourteen from some guy who said he spent like five years in prison with Ronnie to Fayo and said, finally, after befriending him over a couple of years, he finally got to the truth. And the truth was he felt like his parents treated his brothers and sisters better than him. His parents didn't like the fact that he liked PCP and LSD and heroin. Imagine that, so they got what was coming to him basically, and he'd do it again.
I mean he I don't know, this is an armchair diagnosis, but clearly if his reason is he liked my brothers and sisters more. Yeah, Like he's has some sort of serious mental issues going on for sure, but he did not want Apparently his attorney talked him into talking about God and voices because he was like, we can get you a plea of insanity and he was like, I don't want to do that. He's like, but you really should.
And he goes, no, I don't want to do that. He goes, well, there may be a book deal in your future if you claim this. He goes, oh, I like books anyway.
What are books again? There are things that make you money.
And he's like, you know how you like carve out the middle of those things and you keep your heroin and PCP in there. That's a book.
So a real crime happened there.
Yeah, it was. Let's just say it was a fateful decision for him to say publicly that a voice had urged him to kill his whole family. M m okay. That would come into play pretty soon after that. Yeah, after Ronnie de Fayo, I believe two weeks after he was sentenced a year after the murders, and he got sentenced to six consecutive life sentences.
Yeah, he's still in jail.
Oh yeah, he will be forever.
I would guess, like he's alive though.
It is my point, right, right, you're right. About a year after that, just like a year and a month after the murders, a couple named George and Kathy bought this place. And they bought it for a song. It was eighty grand at a time when eighty grand was a pretty good deal for a six bedroom Dutch colonial in Amityville, New York.
Yeah, and so there were a couple, well, they were a couple with a couple of kids, well three, I think nine year old Daniel, seven year ol Christopher at the time, five year old Missy. We'll get to their financial situation a little bit in more detail later, but the thought was that George could run his even though it was kind of a lot of money for them, it was a good deal on the house and George could run his business out of the house so save on office space. He had a couple of boats. This
house came with a doc. He's like, I don't have to pay marina storage fees, like you almost they almost had to buy the house. It sounded like financially speaking, right.
It was just too good of a deal to pass up. Yeah, sure, so they bought the house. Did you say they were looking in the thirty to fifty range originally?
I don't think so.
So it was a stretch for him. But again, that's how good the deal was. So they buy the house and they move in, and apparently almost immediately things started to get weird. Right, So Kathy was a Catholic, And what do you do when you're a Catholic and you buy a new house. You invite your priests over to come bless the house. See you really, I guess in the seventies in New York you did well.
I didn't know if that had anything to do with the uh. I mean, did they know that the murders had occurred there and just sort of didn't care?
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Yes, And I don't know that they didn't care. Supposedly, George Lutz later said that, like after they said we're interested in this, when the realtor was like, well, let me just tell you one little detail. Just six big horrific murders, all right, yeah, just a year ago. Yeah, sorry, we haven't cleaned up the blood yet. Seriously, So they apparently took his second to think about it and talk amongst themselves, like, is
it really botherus? This is such a good deal, and they said not, the deal wins out over any superstitions we have. So yes, they knew. And I don't know if they hired them, brought the priest in because of that or just to bless the house, but they brought the priest in to bless the house.
You can burn a little sage, ye, or you can call in a priest. I think they had to ramp it up. They called in father Ralph Peccarero, and he came in, and this is how the story goes, and we'll just sort of tell it as it happens supposedly.
I think that's a great idea before we.
Start pooping all of it. So he comes in blesses the house. Supposedly, he feels in one room in particular, a very cold chill. He said, even though it was winter, it was shouldn't have been this kind of cold. And he hears a strong voice, a masculine voice, shout, get out, kid, And then his car started acting weird. Apparently the hood flew open and smashed the windshield, doors are unlocking and opening his horn.
Went auga and he didn't even have one of those kinds of horns.
The car stalled. And this is just the very beginning of And if you've seen the movie, a lot of this stuff that we're talking about is portrayed in the film.
Right, And it's Rod Steiger getting shouted at.
He's great, like flies where there shouldn't be flies. Yeah, Crucifix, Crucifix is spinning what a pig well, smell of rotten eggs in this hidden room that wasn't on any blueprint.
The red room the pigs. So there was a pantom like pig beast with glowing red eyes that would look in on the family from the outside and leave cloven hoof prints in the snow, and little five year old miss You would be like, oh, that's just my friend Jody.
Which makes it ten times way scarier, Like I would rather have my kid say I don't know what that is, I'm scared, rather than that's just Jodie.
Right, you know, Jody's been suggesting things.
What else they claimed? I think the dad claimed to see Butch Dafeyo's face in a wall. He would wake up every every night or a lot of nights at three point fifteen in the morning, supposedly when these murders took place. Yeah, the kids started acting funny classic movie haunting stuff.
Yeah, it was a very weird situation for him. Things were tense. They were all like they had like hair triggered tempers. They were all yelling at each other, apparently very uncharacteristically. And supposedly George Lotts, I've seen him described as a ex marine who was an expert in karate, which again, this is a seventies so everybody was into karate back then.
Sure, Elvis had a black belt.
Sure, and he he was like a no nonsense kind of guy. No nonsense right, yeah, like me. So he's like, what's going on? And he goes to the local Amityville Historical Society and says, I want to know everything you have on one twelve Ocean Avenue.
And it got quiet in the room and.
The guy was like, come with me. So he George finds out that their house is probably built on Shinnacock Indian land. That was a big one.
Yeah, not only that, but supposedly where this Native American tribe used as a sick bay for the for the mentally insane. That's how they put it right. And this is where they would just keep all of those people where they were just sort of left to die there, so it was haunted by them.
It was the kind of place where they just get dropped off and the people would kind of back slowly away like okay, take care, see you later, and they would die. And no one wants to be treated like that, So of course anyone who's left to die right there on that land like that would obviously haunt the land. There was some other there were some other legends about what was behind it too. There was like an abandoned cemetery pretty straight up on the nose.
Yeah, there was a Salem witch guy that supposedly sacrificed animals.
John Ketchum. And there actually was a John Ketchum who lived somewhat in the area around that time, but he'd never been accused of being a witch. And then I saw an interview with a guy named Hans Holzer, who's a bonafide parapsychologist and doctor. Holzer says that it all started in nineteen twenty eight or nineteen oh five, when the original house there was a house that was built
in the seventeen twenties that was moved. When that house was moved in nineteen oh five, it disturbed an Indian chief's grave, a Native American chief's grave, and somebody played with his skull like a soccer ball, and he's been mad about it ever since. And that is what drove Ronnie to Fayo to kill and that is what terrorized the lutz Is, And that's the whole problem. Everybody just calmed down. That's it. So there's a little bit of a little bit of peace falling into the puzzle. They're
figuring it out, but it's not making anything better. In fact, everything's getting worse, Like this stuff's getting worse and worse and worse. And finally everything culminates on this one stormy night when their door blows open, blows off of the hinges outward into the street I believe, or no, into the house. I can't remember which way, but blown off of the hinges. It's like a two hundred and fifty pound door, and the windows, the iconic eyeball or eye
windows blow out. Some of the glass somehow blows in. It's just an enormous explosion of energy, and the family leaves. They just left the house after like twenty eight days supposedly. Yeah, well no, they definitely, they definitely left the house.
Yeah, but neighbors say they left in ten days.
Okay, yeah, one of the two.
But they's still The point is there are discrepancies all over the place.
Oh we'll get to those. Yeah, we'll get to those. But they left, and this is true. They left all of their possessions in this house and just fled.
And that part is true.
Never went back.
Uh yeah, unless they had a sneaky little moving team with a uhaul in the dead of night from go back and get our stuff from under story.
There's stuff got auctioned off.
Yeah it did.
I mean they left it. They had, They grabbed some clothes, and they took off into the night.
And which will go on later to be one of the key selling points that this really happened, because people that were on their side were like, why would they do that? Yeah, on just the gambit of this being a hoax that would eventually make the money, Right, would they really leave all their stuff behind?
Could anybody be.
That Foolish's take a break and we'll find out right after this.
Stop you should know, stop.
You should I should know all right, So they get the heck out of Dodge, they leave, they contact an author named Jay Anson.
Oh even before that.
Well, I was going to get to the attorney. Is that really so? Princess Hall as the publisher, in nineteen seventy seven released The Amity of a Horror was a huge bestseller, forty two weeks on the bestseller list by nineteen eighty one, six and a half million copies. They were all over the country plugging this book, right, and where the letses were household names. They're like on every talk show you could imagine.
I want to underscore that. In nineteen seventy seven there was a family from New York who claimed to have been driven from their home by a supernatural evil force. And they were international celebrities for it. Yeah, reason number five million and eighty Why the seventies were just awesome. Yeah, Like that's what you could be famous for, was saying like, ghosts chased us out of our house. And everybody'd be like, that's a great story.
Should we jump ahead and talk about that attorney?
Yes?
Great?
So what was the guy's name, Bill Weber?
Yeah, this is where things get really hinky, is that Bill Weber is an attorney, and he's the one that sort of gets every I think he's the one that saw dollar signs initially and gets a team together for this book and starts saying to everybody, including Dafao, Hey, we can all make some money if we do a book here. Dafeo's got to get a cut though.
Sure.
The Lutzes were like, what are you're going to pay the murderer?
Yeah, and he was like, yeah, it's my client.
And they said, we're not We're not down with that plan.
Yes, but this came after they had formed basically a business relationship, but not even in an attorney client relationship, straight up business relationship with William Webber.
Yeah, like, how can we make money off of this?
So the way that the world heard about these things going on at one twelve Ocean Avenue for the first time ever was at a press conference that the lts Is held at William Weber's office. That was when the world was introduced to the idea of this Amityville horror, even before the book ever.
Came out for anyone, at least not locally.
Right, right, So, so Bill Weber and the LUTs says they they had Yeah, they had kind of like a tentative, tenuous relationship. And when Prentis Hall came along and Jay Anson came along. I don't know if Jay Anson poached them or Prentis Hall poached them, but whoever was involved with the Amityville Horror book got the Lutzes away from William Weber and his book Ida and Proposal, and he got cut out of the deal. Just put that in your bonnet and smoke it and save it for later, Okay.
Yeah, and supposedly left because again they didn't want to give DeFeo a cut or they just wanted a bigger cut themselves. Yeah, at this point, it's a it's all about money, right, But jumping back or forward, can't remember where we are in time, but they're all over the country, all over the news.
This would have been about nineteen seventy seven to seventy eight.
Yeah, they're on MERV Griffin. There's they had a ghost team of ghosts TNS come by from Channel five in New York. Yeah, WPIX and had people posted in the house overnight taking all these photographs. There's one now very famous photograph of uh and it's creepy looking, but you take a picture of anyone in black and white in the dark, poking their head around a corner, and it looked creepy.
So let me I want to comment on that picture. Have you seen it?
Sure?
Oh creepy.
It is creepy. The the it's chalked up to some of the paranormal investigators, one of like one of the men who was at that WPIX seance fest at the house getting in front of the camera.
Yeah, they're saying that one of the uh Paul Bart's that it was just one of the ghost hunters.
So that was a grown man. Whoever's in the picture is a kid, just plain as day. There's no there's no confusing that for a grown man.
I think so. So unless he was had a boyish face.
I think it's a very bizarre picture.
I mean no, I think it's bizarre.
And supposedly it was taken with infrared film in the dark, and again it doesn't look like a man.
Which is that's why the eyes are glowing, right.
That explains that. It's the fact that it's clearly the face of a boy. Are you going under the Josh clarkway dot com again?
I'm trying to find that picture again.
It's clearly the face of a boy that's not a man's face. That's the thing that sticks out to me.
Yeah, I mean it certainly looks like a boy. Man, it is creepy and also so it's got to be a boy.
And that's what it looks like to me, and it's got to be. This picture was debuted in the nineteen seventy seven seventy eight by George Lutz on the MERV Griffin Show.
But they could have set that up. Could have been.
They could have and we we say, whatever, have you seen the conjuring?
I think I've seen parts of it. But that's the real life couple.
Yeah, Ed and Lorraine Warren.
Yeah, who hooked up with these I mean this is where they got their start kind.
Of right, kind of They basically had like an occult museum. They were like a psychic and psychic investigators in Connecticut
like you do. And the guy Marvin Scott who was the anchor who investigated the Amityville Horror for the WPIX local Channel five station, Yeah, he invited them to come out to this seance and it was like a series of siances that they filmed and you can actually see this look up WPIX News eleven Marvin Scott Part one, and it's like a nineteen ninety eight retrospective of this case, and it has some of the footage from the seance, but it also has an interview with George and Lorraine
Warren and they're basically like, this was real. This is obviously real. And during these seances, supposedly the psychics started to feel sick. Lorrain Warren said she felt an evil presence from the bowels of the earth in the house. And then that picture, that famous photograph was taken.
So I think the Warrens are the ones too that said why would they leave all of their stuff behind? Sure, and they also said, well, we would not be involved, that this was some sort of a hoax.
Right exactly.
Don't you know who we are proof positive?
Right?
Yeah?
But the yeah, the real life Warrens were. They did investigate the Sanityville House in the early seventies or mid seventies, early on after the story broke.
You also know it was the seventies because they were featured on Leonard de Mooy's Great show in Search of Love, which we both used to love, and of course they covered that in nineteen seventy nine, supposedly got the priest on there, even though he wanted to be kept anonymous, and he or whoever it was, kind of reinforced this cold room get out scream.
Yeah, it just went just double down on it. His face was hidden in the book, I think the jaynsm book. There were three source materials that came out about this story, all within a couple of years of each other. There was a Good Housekeeping article which is hilarious. Yeah, there was the JAYANSM.
Book, and then there was a book, and then there.
Was a movie. Yes, and those three are like the source material for what everybody knows about the Amityville legend. But what Leonard Nimoy pointed out is that you know, this movie was it's huge, everybody loves it. But what a lot of people don't know is that it's a true story. He says, it's a true story.
The book said it was a true story. But Leonard on.
The cover, I just I just I expected more from Leonard Neimoy than that. He says, unequivocally, it's a true story.
That's because that's what the script, the teleprompter said.
Well, anyway, that was a great episode of In Search of anyway.
Yeah, So in nineteen seventy nine, the very famous film adaptation of this book comes out, starring James Berlin and Margo Kidder as the Lutzes, and it was a big, big hit, eighty million dollars in domestic release, which was I didn't do the conversion, but a very good haul for nineteen seventy nine, one of the smash hits. Yeah of that year, for sure.
I think it was close to three hundred million probably.
Oh yeah, yeah, good money.
Yeah, I mean this is back in the time when like movies didn't routinely make a billion dollars in an opening weekend, right, that was a ton of cash.
Yeah.
There were a lot of really bad sequels that, no doubt, just kind of threw out the whole legend of the house and just did whatever they want with that name.
Have you seen any of them? I haven't.
I haven't seen any of the sequels, Nor did I see the remake recently.
With Ryan Reynolds.
Yeah, did you see that?
No?
I don't remember the original movie that much, and to be honest, I don't know if ever saw it all the way through. I mean I was way too young to see anything like this. So it would have been.
It's still around. They didn't burn a whole copy.
I know. That's the whole point though, is I would have had to have seen this years and years later. I don't know that I ever did.
It's worth seeing. It's a great horror film.
Like I've seen a lot of the parts.
James James Beard, Little Miss for Jodie's Friend is a little creep show.
And who played Jody. I don't know.
Who played her, but like, yeah, the kids did good. Rod Steiger was the priest. He was great.
I remember seeing that scene, so I've definitely seen parts of it.
Yule Brenner was the good voice.
Was he really.
Sorry that.
They actually didn't shoot at that Ocean Avenue house? Though, of course, you know with a movie like this, the law is kind of usually not true, and the law was that they the crew was too scared to shoot there. It's not true. They couldn't get a permit. So they shot at eighteen Brooks Road, Tom's River in New Jersey and built a superstructure around the house to make it look like the other house, which was just like a couple hours from there.
Right the town of Amityville said no, we don't want anything like this, no publicity like this. Please. This was a tragedy. We like our quiet, sleepy town the way it is. No, we're not giving you a permit to shoot here.
Yes, so, but Tom's River was like bring it.
Yeah, nobody knows about us. Who's Tom anyway? We don't know does a river? So the movie, like you said, it was a huge smash hit, And it's just like the Lutzes were already kind of household names. That changed everything that that the Amityville Hohrror became part of American popular culture. Like yeah, it was cemented into it. And it was also cemented in that this is based on
a true story. Maybe the movie blew at a little labor abortion, as movies will do, but the Lutzes were driven from their house by an evil spirit and a lot of this stuff was true. Isn't that nuts?
Yeah? And it was that period in the late seventies where, like we talked about it with the Bermuda Triangle was a big deal.
And waterbeds were huge.
Waterbeds were big, But I feel like there was just there wasn't as much stuff. There wasn't as much content, a bigger deal. Yeah, like Amityville, like you said, it was part of it wasn't just oh that horror movie, like it was spoofed on Johnny Carson and it was like it was all over the place.
Uh huh.
It was like part of the fabric of America.
But I wonder if people bought into and thought about this stuff like you were saying, because there was like nothing was grabbing their attention every thirty seconds over over here, look over here, we're here, Like it could like really kind of ruminate on something and let it like stew.
Yeah, like now a show can win Best Show Emmy Award and you're like, I've never even heard of that.
Yeah.
Too much stuff, A lot of stuff out there, But is that better or worse?
Like I feel like it's it is true that things can just change and they're not necessarily worse or better. But I also believe that it is possible for things to get objectively worse now, whether like they are or not right now, who knows. I don't think anybody's ever lived long enough to be like, I'm a thousan years old and it is way worse these days than it was five hundred years ago.
Now, are you talking about entertainment content or.
Just general culture everything being alive.
See, I think entertainment wise, it's better because yeah, yeah, I mean back then it was just like everyone got obsessed with Amyville because it was the only thing around obsessed with and it wasn't even great, you know, but it was here. Just take this schlocky thing and obsess over it.
But you're saying it wasn't great compared to today's standards, but back then, like it was great. It was something that like you could maybe you could basically put on like a cloak and wear around for a year and really really be into the Amityville or rather than you know, like the cameraman missed that shot by like an eighth of an angela. That's the critical detail that people have today, and I think it keeps us from enjoying stuff like
they used to be able to in the seventies. That's but I think that's my point.
Plus, we were all doped up.
Yeah, there's a lot of grass, but really terrible grass. That's one thing that's gotten better is the grass from what I understand.
All Right, so maybe we maybe we can take a break now and then we can start poking holes in this thing. Start, Does that sound good?
Yeah?
Stop?
Should I should know? All right? So I insists we have not poked any holes yet.
There's some dents in there that we've kind of put our fingers in.
I've just been snidely laughing at everything we say, like yeah, right, yeah, but here's some of the holes and there are quite a few. Yeah, I kind of mentioned before. Neighbors say that they left like a week and a half enter their stay in this house. The let's just said twenty eight days.
So right out of the gate, you've got a discrepancy.
Yeah. And the.
Kind of what the thinking was and still is to some people is that they couldn't afford this house. Didn't take them long to realize it, and so they cooked up this story.
Yeah, but imagine figuring that out in ten days. That's a little weird.
Well, and I also don't know how that would get them out of their mortgage, just defaulting on it, yeah, because it's haunted.
Yeah, just walking away like can't get blood from a stone. Go take the house if you want it back.
Yeah, but could they claim that it wasn't disclosed? If it was disclosed, like, how could they literally get out of the mortgage.
I don't know, man, I think like I think, if you if you stop making payments, if you don't care about your credit and I'm not sure what it was like in the seventies, but if you're like, I'll take this hit for seven years on my.
Credit, right, just walk away.
And just walk away, like then you don't have to make payments anymore. Yeah, that's what I think happened. But I don't think that they were able to do that because they started making money from their story, and everyone knew that they were making money from their story, so people wanted their money from them.
Right, that's incredible. The great show from nineteen eighties. You just watch that.
Yeah, I watched the episode that this was on.
But did you watch it as a kid? U A great, great show and on this show.
Sorry, it was really positive. Do you remember it seemed pretty upbeat.
Well, it's called that's incredible, not like that's crappy.
The cameraman missed that shot and it was.
I think it even had an exclamation point, didn't it. Yeah, at the end of the title. Yeah, so that's incredible. Barbara Camardi owned the house at the time of this episode, walks them through and shows like close up. So the hinges of that front door. Yeah, and these windows that are still sealed. It was like these things didn't blow.
No, she went out of her way to make sure that everyone knew that this stuff hadn't happened, and ironically she exaggerated the facts that the skeptics pointed to. So everybody was exaggerating their case on either side of this.
But Leut's also said though, that no, no, no, there were pictures in the newspaper of that front door blown out.
Have you seen the picture?
Well, no, I didn't think anyone could find it.
It's a screen door that's kind of like hanging open. Yeah, I'm not kidding. That's the picture from what I understand.
All right, so it's all falling apart, then.
Right, oh yeah, it's all falling apart. For it has fallen apart big time. Apparently. George Lotts died in two thousand and six and to his dying day said that all of this is true. He said, yeah, man, the book got a bunch of stuff wrong. The movie got a ton of stuff wrong. Because I think the Ryan Reynolds remake of the movie was supposedly build is this
is way more true to the book. Oh really, the original movie kind of created its own stuff, which is why it's viewed as one of an additional source rather than just part and parcel with the book. So George Lets would say, all these people got all these details wrong, but this this stuff we said happen really happened. Part of the problem is some of the stuff that they said happened was like levitating off the bed and looking at each other going, can you believe we're levitating?
Yeah?
I saw an interview where he said that in public on camera.
Yeah, he really like, kudos to him for sticking to it. Yeah. I would say deathbed is a perfect time to be like, guess what everybody isn't Everyone would be like yeah, no, no, like you guys knew.
No, s I love that this is a family show.
Yeah.
So George Lets went to his grave saying, no, this is this is for real. William Webber, Bill Webber, the attorney, did quite the opposite of that.
Well, he said, and of course LUTs will paint. This is probably painted. This is sour grapes. Sure, because Weber was cut out of the money deal, but as soon as they left and made their own book deal, he started barking that this is all bs, this is a hoax that we made up.
He totally did that. He said that over about three bottles of wine, he and George and Kathy Lutz concocted the story out of whole cloth.
And then had a smoking night of love making the three of them.
On their waterbed. Geez took a sexy turn all of a sudden. Sure, so yeah, Bill Weber, he said that. He said, Hey, I was just looking to get another trial from my client, who I think was innocent and insane. What the Lutzes were doing was going after money. But you can also look at it like running to fay was the greatest thing that ever happened to Bill Weber's career.
He even said at the time, like, I'm giving Ronnie to Fayo a cut rate because the publicity from this case is worth more than anything Ronnie to Fao could ever give me. Yeah, so the idea of reviving interest in the case would probably help his case load as well. Who knows the point is? William Weber hired a guy named Paul Hoffman I think his name was, and he wrote the Good Housekeeping article. And when that Good Housekeeping article came out. The Lesses were like, you're gonna scoop us.
We're gonna sue you for invasion of privacy because you stole our story. Which is pretty rich because they were using the courts. Like if you have a life story and some lawyer comes along and hires somebody to write that story, Yeah, that's invasion to privacy if you make that story up with said lawyer and then screw that lawyer over and he goes off his own way. Yeah, using the courts for that is pretty I don't want to say ballsy gutsy.
Yeah. And speaking of lawsuits, I mean, we won't go through the merriad lawsuits, but there were it felt like more than a dozen lawsuits over the years.
Yeah, they sued Weber sued them.
People were suing everyone. People were suing cops. Cops were suing the family, The.
Cro Marty's were suing the Lutzes for even making the thing up in the first place.
And to me, this is what is sort of proof positive that the whole thing is rotten to begin with.
Sure, when the lawsuits start flying.
Yeah, everyone had their hand out. This father of Peccerero in court documents said that you know what, I never went there and blessed the house right and heard this voice. I actually kind of just had a phone call with them. Yeah, and maybe and the guy one of their daughters yelled get out right in the background.
Because she was talking to a doll I think had a dog, Harry.
But it creaked me out.
Nonetheless, I always wanted to be played by Rod Steiger, so I went for it.
But yeah, I mean, it just it all sort of fell apart.
So there's you know, in cases like this, people are like, well, the Catholic Church is shutting that guy up. They don't want to talk about the truth if there are some demons here. But the priest really confounds things. Not because it's like it was a Catholic church really trying to keep this quiet, more like why did this priest lie so overtly on in search.
Of Well, he may have had some skin in the game.
Maybe maybe, so maybe you're right.
I don't know.
But the Warren said, in addition to him, you know, experiencing that in the house, it followed him throughout his life, and that he was once in a hotel room with a rabbi in Florida and a lizard demon from the house appeared to him. There. That's the quality of quotes you can expect when you have the Warrens on your interview show.
I love it. I love that we're treating In Search Of as if it was this you know, no, no, highly regarded. I mean it was, it was great, but it was schlocky TV for ten and twelve year old boys in the eighties. Sure, like I'm sure, I mean that probably wasn't even the priest. He probably just hired a guy.
No, No, it was the guy who in court documents that was the guy on in.
Search Of But they blacked his face out right, But.
I mean, like they that's the guy. That's the guy. He was revealed later on. The guy on in Search Of was revealed later on to be father Pecqerero, and he was on in search Of back before anyone ever knew the name Pecquerero. He was called in the book father man q Soo. All right, But as far as I know, that is the same guy.
And that he was just on TV lying through.
His teeth, that's what I saw.
Or he could have been just handed a script by Nimoy's team.
It's possible it was the seventies and America went we'll believe anything you say.
A couple of years ago, actually just last year, in twenty seventeen, it was sold for about six hundred grand the house, which is a couple one hundred less than they were asking for it. They're asking around eight.
Isn't that crazy?
And apparently it's not had nothing that the only had to do with the price ring was because of the pain and the rump to live there and have people constantly coming by. It wasn't like, forget that there were six people murdered here, forget that this house has green ooze and flies and devil pigs coming out of you know, looking through the window. It's the real problem is Google Earth and now people can just say, oh, let's go by there and take some photos.
There it is. It's at one.
Oh wait, they must have moved it. That still cracks me up.
Yeah, but yeah, that's the thing. That's why the house is still selling for less than it ever was before.
And the Lutz has claimed that they didn't make much money on this and that you know, like we never got rich and what little money we made kind of went out the door with court fees and legal fees.
I don't know that maybe utterly true.
Who knows it says that they did. He did admit to getting about one hundred grand from the book and another hundred from the film.
That's not that much money, No, but this is nineteen seventies money. Those some money.
Yeah, but it's not like kickback and retire money. Sure, you know.
Sure. One of the probably the most telling thing about the Luts's story being a hoax, the whole thing being just one big hoax, is that no one, no other person owner, anybody who was associated with that house after the Lutz family left, ever reported anything even remotely supernatural like this nothing. Yeah, And of course Lorraine Warren had
a pretty good explanation for that, which is what she said. Well, then, obviously one of the exorcisms was successful, because that's the only way job, that's the only way to explain why the hauntings went away. Yeah, and like it, that's the only way to explain it. Huh.
The LUTs is also never called the which was a big hole people poke into it. Like if all this stuff was going on, like at some point you're going to go to the police, right, and even if it's ten days and not the twenty eight You're not just gonna just quietly be haunted by the demons of hell, right and not not sweat it with the cops.
Sure, at least call them once and be like, you guys do anything about demons?
No, okay, even if it's a crank call. Sure, what do you think? I mean? This is getting a little philosophical, I guess, But do you think what do you think about bad juju in a in a home where six people were murdered? Like I'm a I'm a totally agnostic non believer in any thing like that, But part of me also thinks that, like, if you brutally murder six people, there's got to be some change in the energy in the air, which sounds hokier than anything I've made fun of.
I think, so you know, what's the Josh clarkway dot com?
What's the what's the word? Oh, placebo? I think it's a placebo effect.
Okay, so you know that something happened here. If you didn't know anything, you would never notice anything.
Probably not. Yeah, I don't think that there is a change to the energy or the air or anything like that. I think there are cues that we can find where even if you didn't know. You could be like, well there's a shadow over there something like that. You can freak yourself out, even in a house like that that you didn't know was haunted or said to be haunted.
But I think if you know a house is said to be haunted, if you are just your brain's working overtime and you're going to produce those things that you think you see, well that's why I create that. But my my imagination is just dead and gone. So who knows. If you do believe stuff like that, then that's that's fine with me. I mean, sure you're not hurting anybody with that. If you're taking money from people to exercise stuff like that, then I have a problem with you.
But I don't think a lot of people are out there doing it. I think most people just believe one way or another.
You know, yeah, interesting, Yeah, I want to know that boy.
Is in the picture, it's Jody the pig Demon. If you want to know more about the Amityville horror, you can type those words into the Internet. Actually, you can type it into how stuff works and it will bring up an article by our own former own Matt Hunt.
I remember that guy.
He wrote the Amityville article on the website.
What's he up to now? Any idea?
I don't know, and he's continuing his investigation into the Amityville horror.
He was never heard from again.
Right since I said that it's time for the listener mail.
I'm gonna call this follow up on the homelessness episode we re ran that one for selects. Got a better response this time.
Yeah, I was really looking out for somebody, but I guess they learned their lesson or ell stop listening to us by now.
Yeah. Well, and I set it up too, because it was my pick with like, hey, this is what happened last time. Oh right, so you know I dare you it right in this time?
That's exactly right.
So this is how this is from a woman who said that a homeless man saved her dog. It's a pretty great story. My sister and I were taking our three dogs for a walk down main Street in our city one day and we stopped dress on a bench for heading for home. That realizing it, I had accidentally let one of the leashes slip out of my hand. Unfortunately, Sophia noticed her leash was free at about the same time I did decided to up and chase after something.
My sister and I jumped to grab her, but the speed of two clumsy humans is no match for a spry young dog. She ran down the sidewalk. This is like a nightmare for me. As she ran down the sidewalk, a few pedestrians reached down to try and grab her, which frightened her enough that she ran from the sidewalk into the busy street, four lanes of traffic going in both directions, Sprinting to try and catch up. I watched in horror as she ran out into the street chore.
I was about to see my dog get killed by an oncoming car. It was right about then that a homeless man that we had previously seen around town rode up on his bicycle right in the middle of the road, keeping himself between my dog and the cars flying by. Weren't for him doing that, she would surely have been run over. Finally caught up, was able to catch her attention call her. Thankfully. She ran right into my arms, and I looked up to thank the hero would save
my dog, and he was nowhere to be seen. What was it a dream? That's me talking? He had put himself in harms way to save my dog's life and then just quietly ridden away when he saw that she was safe. Don't know his name, never saw him again to thank him. Sophia is now ten years old. It's because of that nameless man that she has lived to see that old age. And that is Ali from New Hampshire.
That was a great story.
Love it.
Thanks a lot, Ali, thanks for sharing that one. See everybody we told you. If you want to send us an email like Ali did or get in touch with this, you can go to our website stuffyshouldo dot com. I also have a website called the Josh Clarkway dot com if you want to check it out, and you can send an email to Chuck, Jerry and Me plus Frank the chair, guests producer Roll everybody. Send that email to Stuff Podcasts at HowStuffWorks dot com.
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