Who wants to buy a little piece of hell in Amityville, New York? The large Dutch Colonial house that inspired the book The Amityville Horror, and the subsequent films, is currently back on the market. The owners are even giving it a price cut to a meager $955,000 for those looking for a bargain.
The 10-room house had an original asking price of $1.45 million last year, then dropped to $1.35 million. The current owners say they are going through a divorce, and selling the property; it has nothing to do with the structure being haunted.
“It’s not that the house is haunted or anything,” said current owner Odalys Fragoso. “We had wonderful times in that house. I never felt anything, nothing whatsoever. I was just happy that we were buying the house because we saw the potential of it.”
She adds: “It’s not haunted, not at all.”
The selling agent, Donna Walesiewicz, agrees, “‘If there were a curse on it, I wouldn’t be in it. It is what it is, a nice old stately home.”
If you’re a horror movie fan or just a fan of the paranormal, you have probably heard of this house located at 112 Ocean Avenue (now 108). It was the site of the mass murder carried out by Ronald DeFeo Jr. against his entire family back in 1974.
A year later George and Kathy Lutz bought the property but infamously only lived there for 28 days before abandoning the house, claiming it was violently haunted.
A best-selling book by Jay Anson was released in 1977 which chronicled the “true story” of the Lutz family’s nearly month-long ordeal. They claimed swarms of flies would appear, ooze would seep from the walls and toilet, their young daughter was stalked by a pig-like entity, and, at one point, Kathy became possessed.
There was a movie based on the book that was released in 1979 and became a box office hit. Since then many sequels and other cinematic works, 28 in all, have used the famous house as inspiration.
Walesiewicz insists that the lower asking price has nothing to do with it being haunted. Instead, she says the housing market has, “dropped tremendously. That’s why people are coming down and buying homes in cash. They aren’t making money in other investments. They are putting it in real estate.”
That being said, remember that the Lutzs bought the house at a drastically discounted price in the beginning as well.