The years flew by swiftly. What was once Indian land became the white man’s land, forcing the Indians to move farther and farther inland and eventually to congregate in small areas that became known as reservations. The people who moved into the area where the chief was buried did not know they were living close to the Indians’ sacred burial ground. There was no way the Indians could take their honored dead with them, of course; and to tell the white settlers what it meant for them to have that particular piece of land was useless. But in their hearts the Indians knew only trouble could result from any attempt to touch the sacred soil, to build on it, to disturb the peace of those buried in this land. Nevertheless, none of the departing Indians ever told the settlers who came after them what this particular piece of land had meant to them, and so it became more and more a memory shared only by those who had once lived there, but totally unknown to those who settled on the land in later years.
Among the white settlers was a group of people originally from France who had found their new world both hospitable and friendly. When they settled in the area they decided to call their village the town of friendship, or Amityville. At first there were just a few hundred of them, but as time went on, the little village grew until it became a sizeable township, right at the water’s edge and extending quite far inland. The people who came after the original settlers made their living as fishermen and in agriculture. By and large, they lived peaceful lives, devoid of much excitement and change. No longer were there Indians in the immediate vicinity, and life became more and more similar to that of other towns and villages in the area of Long Island. The years rolled on, and the people of Amityville took part in the development of New York State along with others. Very few inquired into the history of that particular piece of land.
The year was 1902. Long gone was the open space of the fishing village. Instead there were tree-lined avenues, neat houses and an overall sense of orderliness. The track near the burial ground was now a street with numbered houses. On one corner stood a house made of wood which had been built long before the street itself was created. The people who lived in it knew that the house dated back to 1792. This was not particularly surprising in this part of Long Island, where old houses abounded. Naturally it had been renovated since then, and certain changes and embellishments had taken place, but the original house was still there, and the people who owned it treasured it very much.
The number outside read 112 Ocean Avenue, for the ocean was but a stone’s throw away. Mr. and Mrs. John Peterson, who owned the house, loved every moment they spent in it. He had a little store in town where he sold fishing tackle, and she was a schoolteacher. They had one child, a boy, now twelve years old. But something about their boy had troubled them for years. There was a certain nervousness about him that did not quite match the tranquility of the little town where they lived. In school, Peter was a good student, but even there the teachers complained about his nervousness and restlessness; he had occasional bouts of what they could only describe in those days as a form of anxiety. For no reason at all, he would bolt from the classroom, run out into the hallway and not reappear until summoned sternly by one of the teachers. When the distraught parents took young Peter to a doctor he shook his head, finding absolutely nothing wrong with the boy. That of course was a time when Sigmund Freud had yet to be universally accepted. All the good doctor could do was to give the boy a cursory examination which indicated that there was nothing particularly wrong with him.
When Peter’s thirteen birthday approached, his parents decided to throw him a party. They invited his best friends and some of the neighbors to come and celebrate the day, and they looked forward to a happy occasion. Lately the boy had been much calmer than before and they assumed that it was just a question of growing up that had troubled him.
Unfortunately, the week before the birthday was filled with heavy rains which did not seem to want to let up. For days on end the rains came down on Long Island, causing Amityville to be flooded and leaving the streets awash with sand and dirt. Nevertheless, Mr. and Mrs. Peterson decided to go ahead with the planned party, even if it should rain on the day. As luck would have it, the rain stopped the night before. As the waters gradually receded, a great deal of mud was left behind in the streets and houses of Amityville. Some basements were nearly filled with it.
The morning of the birthday party came. The sky was still overcast and gray but at least the rains had stopped, and young Peter rose early to play in the yard. His parents were still asleep, for they had a day of work and much activity in front of them. As Peter played in the yard behind the house, his shoes became covered with mud; but this did not stop him from continuing with his game of football. He was playing with a small ball which he had had in his possession since the age of six and which was to him a very precious object. Peter was used to playing alone, being an only child, and this ball had become, in a sense, his faithful companion.
It was difficult to control the ball on the soft, wet soil of the backyard. He miscalculated one kick completely: the ball bounced away towards the rear of the yard. Peter ran after it.
A few feet away from where the ball had come to rest, he noticed something white sticking out of the soft soil. His curiosity was aroused, and he approached it. Not sure what he had found, he used his right foot to push away some of the mud clinging to it. As he did so, he discovered to his horror that he was uncovering a skull, a human skull bleached white by age.
Peter gave a little cry of dismay, but then he gathered his courage. He had been reading books dealing with ghosts and skeletons and, like so many children, he loved stories about Hallowe’en and witches. What he had before him now was obviously a human skull, that much he knew. He raced back to the house and looked for his sand shovel, which he had had for years and which was commonly used for playing in the sand at the nearby beach. With the shovel in hand, he returned to the spot where the skull was still sticking out of the soil.
Hastily he started digging around it, hoping to unearth more of what he assumed was a skeleton. But the soil was soft at the top; as yet the rains had not fully penetrated below; perhaps the soil was too heavily packed. At any rate, he was unable to uncover much more than the skull and part of the neck.
Disgusted with his ability to do more than he had done, he hesitated. What was he to do about this? Suddenly he had an inspiration. Why not take the skull as a trophy? With all the power he could muster he kicked the skull with his foot. Brittle from the ravages of time and perhaps further weakened by the flood, the skull broke off. Peter shoveled the loose earth over the hole where it had been, covering up the rest of the skeleton. He then took the skull with him and decided he was going to put it in his room, to point out to his classmates. Perhaps he could put it to good use on Hallowe’en, which was then only a month away.
While he was walking back, he stumbled and the skull fell to the ground. As he bent down to pick it up, he realized that he had left his ball somewhere along the way. He went back to look for it but, try as he might, he could not find it.
Well then, he thought, if my ball is lost in the mud, let this be my new ball; it did not occur to him to be surprised at how little his loss affected him. He drew back his right leg and kicked the skull so hard that it flew across the yard as if it were another ball! As it did so, it seemed to him that he heard an angry shout coming from the direction he had just left. But he paid no attention to it, thinking that it was simply a neighbor yelling at his children. Peter picked up the skull, cleaned it with some water, and then returned to the house. He put the skull on the shelf in his bedroom.
The birthday party took place several hours later. There were altogether fifteen children in the house and everyone had a good time. One of Peter’s classmates, Alfred by name, made his way into Peter’s room and discovered the skull among the books on the shelf.
“What that?” he asked, pointing at the skull.
“Oh that,” Peter replied as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “that is a skull I found.”
“No kidding,” said the other boy. “Where?”
But Peter wouldn’t tell him. He thought that the whole incident was a bit peculiar to begin with, for what was a skeleton doing in the backyard? For a moment, he had had thoughts of communicating his find to his parents, but then changed his mind. They might disapprove of his action and he secretly felt ashamed of having broken off the skull and played football with it. The best thing was to say nothing and, if his parents were to see it, simply say that he had been given the skull by a friend or that he had bought it somewhere, or whatever came to mind. When you are thirteen years old, you don’t think these things through.
But Alfred was not satisfied. Before Peter could say anything he had grabbed the skull and taken it from the shell.
“He’s ugly, isn’t he,” he exclaimed, looking at the skull and sticking his tongue out at it.
“Put it back,” Peter commanded, with perhaps more emphasis than necessary.
Alfred was frightened by the tone of Peter’s voice and obeyed. He turned and started down the stairs to the main floor. As he did so, his foot got caught in the stair carpet. He stumbled and fell headlong down the stairs. His head smashed against the edge of a step and he lay still. Immediately everyone rushed to his aid; but it was of no use, the boy was dead.
Peter got only one quick look at his friend’s face, but it was enough to send him from the room, howling with terror. For what Peter had seen was so horrible, so unearthly, he could not even describe it. His father stepped up immediately to gaze at the poor dead boy’s face, but all Mr. Peterson could see was a face distorted in death, to be sure, but not particularly frightening. What had Peter seen that his elders could not?
When the commotion had died down and the party had been hastily disbanded, Peter’s father wanted to know where the boy had got the skull. He had found it, Peter said, and since his father was preoccupied with the terrible accident that afternoon, nothing further was said about it. The question was not brought up again and Peter was allowed to keep his trophy. But he never touched it again.
The following week Peter’s father went on a business trip. When he returned to the house a week later, he had contracted a strange fever and subsequently died, even though the family had summoned one of the best medical men from Manhattan.
In his last tortured moments, Peterson, burning with high fever, kept mumbling about The Great Evil One staring at him, a phrase the doctor was quick to dismiss as the ravings of a fever-wracked, dying man. Mrs. Peterson, on the other hand, wondered whether her poor husband was not perhaps being confronted by the devil himself, though she had no firm belief in such things and later dismissed that notion entirely.
Her husband’s sudden passing left her in a state of shock, but it forced her to pull herself together in order to devote her energies to Peter’s education. She was to be both father and mother to him henceforth. In her heart she could not quite divorce herself from the notion that the atmosphere in the house was somehow responsible for the tragedies that had of late come their way. But her rational outlook usually enabled her to overcome this notion, and she never talked about it to anyone, least of all Peter. The boy had enough to cope with in the unexpected loss of his father.
Thus Peter grew up in a fatherless home. By the time he reached fifteen, he had been forced to leave school because of his erratic behavior, and his mother, hard pressed to maintain the house, could no longer do so and sold it. The boy was then placed in what in those days was called a home for difficult children. His mother moved to Manhattan where she took a position with an export-import company that had done business with her late husband.
The house passed into the hands of one Franklin Doorman, who had heard the strange story about the skull and the accident but paid absolutely no attention to such matters. He was not a superstitious man and considered the incidents strictly coincidental. He and his wife, Dora, lived in the house for seven years. Whether they had any strange experiences in it or not we will never know, but at the end of seven years, when everyone thought that the Doormans were happy and content in their house, they suddenly moved out. They put the house up for sale for much less than they had paid for it and left town in a hurry.
A few months after the Doormans had left the house on Ocean Avenue, the Amityville town librarian, Miss Nancy Perkins, came across a tragic newspaper story. The story was from a Milwaukee newspaper, and it described the strange death of a couple named Franklin and Dora Doorman, who had of late come to Milwaukee from Long Island, New York. According to the article, the couple had been walking down one of the city’s main business streets, and had stopped in front of a jewelry store to gaze at the display in the window. This was in the middle of the day when most people were at work, but the Doormans had not yet settled into jobs so they had decided to stroll down the street and look around. At that very moment a piece of heavy masonry had detached itself from one of the high floors of the building, and as it came crashing down upon the sidewalk it hit the couple, killing them both instantly.
Miss Perkins could not help wondering whether there was any connection between this unlikely tragedy and the Doormans’ association with the accursed house in Amityville.
A young couple bought the house next and decided to spend their honeymoon in it. They came from nearby Patchogue but for business reasons had decided to move to Amityville. Robert and Gail Riccardi were only in their late twenties, and in the mood to strike out for greener pastures. He was a doctor and she was a nurse. One day her mother, Mrs. Tina Doremus, came to visit and stayed the weekend. Since the house had been bought and sold with all its contents intact, the skull was still there. The mother-in-law took a strange liking to this trophy and look it off the shelf in what used to be Peter’s room, fondling it and handling it as if it were a relic of some sort. But then, accidentally, or by design, she dropped it to the floor, where it landed with a hollow thud. “Dammit,” she said. “Why do they keep such junk around the house?” Hastily she picked it up and put it back in its place.
When Mrs. Doremus had touched the skull, something akin to an electric shock had gone through her body. It was almost as if she had come into contact with a force from another dimension, a force so powerful it left her momentarily speechless. As she gathered her wits, anxious not to let her daughter and son-in-law see her distress, she had the distinct impression that a pair of piercing eyes were looking down at her from somewhere near the ceiling of the room. But there was no one there. At the same time she felt a strong wave of anger, almost hatred, extended toward her, and it seemed to her that someone very irate was close to her, though of course there was nothing, or no one, visible to her eyes.
When the young couple and the wife’s mother went to the beach the following day to take a swim in the ocean, the mother, known as an excellent swimmer, nevertheless drowned. All efforts to revive her failed. “Funny thing,” the lifeguard remarked, “she looks like she had some kind of struggle out there in the water.”
A struggle … with whom? The Riccardis could not make sense of it. Somehow they felt responsible for Mrs. Doremus’ death, since they had asked her to stay with them at the house on Ocean Avenue. This guilt weighed heavily on both of them and even a talk with their minister did not dispel it.
Heartbroken by the tragedy, the couple kept to themselves for over a year. When World War I broke out in Europe, the young doctor volunteered to go to England. He never returned. Only much later did Mrs. Riccardi learn what exactly had happened to her husband over there, when a former buddy of the doctor’s, Gary Soletano, paid her a brief visit at another address she had by then moved to. It appeared that Dr. Riccardi had volunteered to go on a rescue mission to get some trapped American soldiers from behind enemy lines. All had gone well for the team of rescuers, and they were on their way back to their own lines when suddenly, so Soletano related, a heavy wind had arisen all around them, and when it had died down just as suddenly, Dr. Riccardi lay dead at Soletano’s feet, killed by a bullet that must have come from their own lines!
On the death of her husband Mrs. Riccardi had sold the house in Amityville to the first person who wanted to buy it. The purchaser happened to be a local builder. He liked the house, but he didn’t much like the location, so he moved it to what he considered a much better spot, at the corner of Carmen Street and South Island Place. There he rented it to a family of five who lived in it for twenty-five happy years. Nothing negative was ever heard about that house again and it still stands on the same corner.
The lot on which it had stood, however, became empty and, in a strangely menacing way, stared people in the face. An empty lot on a built-up street like Ocean Avenue made the tongues wag: why was the lot empty? why wasn’t someone building? But no one came to build. For years, the land remained empty, overgrown with weeds and high grass; and before long people forgot the reason for the site’s disuse.
Finally, in 1928, someone had either sufficient courage or sufficient ignorance of the circumstances to build a new house on the notorious lot at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, Long Island. His name was Monahan, and he decided to build himself the nice wooden colonial Dutch house which still stands on that spot. Mr. Monahan was an elderly man with a family. When he died, he left the house to his daughter and her husband. The son-in-law’s name was Fitzgerald. We do not know whether Mr. Monahan or Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald had any unusual experiences in what was then a new house; perhaps they did, perhaps they did not.
At any rate, some years later the house was sold to a Mr. and Mrs. Riley. Nothing out of the ordinary happened to the Rileys, at least according to their own testimony to the townspeople. But, nevertheless, they decided to sell out relatively soon after they had moved into the house. The reason was simple: they were getting a divorce. This was in the 1950s and the house was on the market for awhile. Then the house was purchased by the notorious DeFeo family.
What was once a happy, middle-class family of Italian background turned into something else again as soon as they had moved into the house. There was something about the atmosphere of that house on Ocean Avenue that changed peoples’ characters and made them do things they would not normally do. The change, of course, was gradual. It didn’t happen overnight. There were indications of trouble to come which were ignored. There were incidents that the DeFeos could live with and there were incidents that seemed threatening; all of this is well-known. A book has been written about it. A motion picture has been made of it.
On one occasion young Ronald DeFeo found himself stepping into the living room of their house just as his mother and father were having a heavy argument. Now arguments occur in the best of families and the DeFeos, being Latin, were perhaps more prone to be vociferous at times than calmer people. But this argument was different, or so it seemed to the boy. His father was about to lay hands on his mother, and young Ronald could not stand by idly and allow him to do it. He rushed upstairs to his room, grabbed his Marlon rifle, ran back downstairs and put the muzzle to his father’s head. Everybody froze: would the boy pull the trigger? After what appeared to DeFeo an eternity, Ronald lowered the rifle and walked out of the room, without so much as a word being spoken by anyone.
Finally the strange influences from beyond the veil reached a climax. In the middle of a cold, foggy night, in November 1974, Ronald, then twenty-two years old, woke from a disturbed sleep. He got out of bed, not really fully awake, or so he says, took down his rifle and went methodically from room to room in his three-story house, killing off every member of his family—six people in all. He doesn’t remember doing it. He denies that he knew what he was doing, but the facts were clear: Ronald DeFeo had killed his family. In the subsequent trial, his attorney, a brilliant lawyer named William Weber, tried to plead insanity for his client, but the Court ruled otherwise. Young Ronald DeFeo was sent up to Dannemora Prison, to serve a sentence of life for the murder of his family.
But did he commit the crimes? Was there something in him that made him do it, something stronger than his will power? Young DeFeo thinks so. Unfortunately, possession has no standing in a court of law. There was no question about it: Ronald DeFeo confessed to the shooting. The evidence was clear: it was his rifle with his fingerprints on it, and there was no one else in the house who could have done it—no one, that is, of flesh and blood.
But there were some questions which continued to baffle the police. How was it that six members of the family, each sleeping in a different room, on three floors of one house, would allow themselves to be murdered in cold blood without resisting, without warning each other, without running out to get help, not even crying out? For there were no witnesses who heard an outcry; there was no one who heard the shooting, and yet, the shooting took place. It is a puzzle the police have never solved. A private investigator retained by the family of the murdered DeFeos thought that the young man must have had an accomplice, for he could not have carried out the murders alone. But this was merely an assumption on the part of the investigator who had absolutely no belief in such things as possession. He was unable to give any evidence to the effect that there was in fact an accomplice, nor was there any. So the DeFeo case, as it was called, became one of the famous unresolved mass murders, even though the young man who pulled the trigger had been convicted and put away in the maximum security prison at Dannemora in upstate New York.
Even in a maximum-security prison like Dannemora, however, Ronald DeFeo was not truly alone. The angry spirit of the wronged Indian Chief whose skeleton had been desecrated kept a close watch on his unwilling instrument. Many a time young DeFeo knew the Indian was there with him, but how was he to communicate such a thing to the guards? All he would gain would be another examination by a psychiatrist already committed to the notion the DeFeo was in fact faking his insanity.
As he sat in his cell at Dannemora, Ronald recalled some of the terrible moments of the past, long before he knew what was wrong with their house on Ocean Avenue. Such as the time when his father … whom he had killed … had accepted that the house had a curse on it and had summoned a priest to bless it. Whatever was in the house was more powerful than the priest, who ran from it, terror in his eyes, trying to escape the clutches of an angry spirit. He remembered the time his father had planted lilies around the house because he had read somewhere that they kept evil spirits away. The morning after, all the flowers had been dead …
While young Ronald DeFeo began to serve six consecutive terms of twenty-five years for each of his victims, a total of 125 years in prison, knowing that he was unlikely to see freedom again in this incarnation, the house passed into other hands. Once the terrible news of the tragedy had disappeared from the headlines, a local real estate man offered it for sale again. This time a family of nondescript middle-class people were the buyers. They were attracted by the unusually low price being asked for the property and they knew quite well why it was being sold so cheaply. But as they did not believe in the supernatural, it did not seem to bother them at all. They moved into the house and tried to enjoy it as much as possible, for it was truly a nice house, nicely located, with the water right at the back of it, where one could keep a motorboat, as the DeFeos did.
At first, the curious came and stood in front of house, very much to the annoyance of the family who had purchased it. There was very little they could do about it. So long as the tourists and other curious visitors were not trespassing on the property, they could not very well forbid them to be there. They tried to discourage would-be visitors by altering the number on the house but that didn’t throw anyone off for very long. Visitors came, especially on weekends, and endless streams of cars would slowly pass by the house at 112 Ocean Avenue, trying to look at it as they passed, trying to figure out what it was in this strange house that made young DeFeo commit the six murders. Eventually, the attraction became less and less novel; as the film dealing with the house in Amityville went off the screen, so did the interest of the public at large.
As the years went by, an occasional visitor would come and stare at the house, but the owners no longer had a problem of dealing with mass invasions of their privacy. The weekends became gradually more and more tranquil, as they had always been, long before the DeFeos had occupied the house on Ocean Avenue.
The years went by, and Amityville prospered; it grew and grew, until it was one of the most attractive towns in central Long Island, the goal of many vacationers and those who wanted to buy homes near the water. Some of them remembered that there was something strange about the name Amityville in the past; but as the years went on, fewer and fewer of them knew exactly what it was that reminded them of the name Amityville, and even fewer cared. In time, Amityville had lost its horror, and became just another town on Long Island.