George Lutz, born with a fatal skull fracture yet surviving, bought the infamous Amityville Horror house for $80K in November 1975 after Father Ralph Pecoraro’s blessing, only to flee 28 days later amid levitations, foul odors, and his children’s beds violently shaking—mirroring the DeFeo family’s murder positions. His wife Kathy’s unexplained transformations and respiratory disorder (valley fever) during a History Channel interview underscored the trauma, though Lutz denies financial motives, clarifying his family earned just $300K after taxes. Skepticism over the case’s authenticity persists, but Lutz insists the house’s malevolence lingered, even after failed cleansing attempts by Dr. Heffernan and Ed Warren’s exorcist advice, leaving a legacy of fear and ethical debates about exposing supernatural phenomena without exploitation. [Automatically generated summary]
Last week when I was getting off the air Friday night, Saturday morning, I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't figure out why Sunday I knew, you know, sore throat.
Typical stuff, right?
Real sore throat.
Then the sneezing begins.
Then the spigots open and you're drowning in a sea snot.
And it's been that way, and then of course it went to my chest, and that's where it is now, residing in my chest.
And I've been drinking abnormally large amounts of spectrum, you know, and coughing up what appeared to be small, hopefully irrelevant organs and stuff.
And so that's my condition tonight.
I've got a hell of a cold.
In a moment, Richard C. Hoagland in the next hour.
George Lutz, the Amityville George Lutz, somebody I have always wanted to interview since I've been doing this program, the original real George Lutz from the Amityville house.
He's the family that moved in after the DeFeo murders, the Lutz family, and they're the ones that the movie was about in the book and everything.
And so tonight we'll get the real story.
A couple of things that are going on that are noteworthy, certainly.
In North Korea, I wonder if Ed Dames could be right, huh?
A defiant North Korea ordered UN nuclear inspectors out of the country Friday, said it would restart a lab capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons, so they're not even hiding.
But the UN nuclear watchdog said, its inspectors are going to stay right where they are.
The White House denounced the expulsions, but said that military action was not being contemplated.
I mean, here we have a country that has the means to build nuclear weapons, and they have just announced they're going to do it, and they're throwing out the UN inspectors to build nuclear weapons, and we are not contemplating military action.
Whereas in Iraq, we're doing more than contemplation.
We've ordered a major military force to the Persian Gulf in prep for a possible war with Iraq.
Why?
Because of perceived weapons of mass destruction building and storing and stuff, right?
So case A, Korea, we do nothing.
We don't even contemplate doing anything when they say they're doing it.
Case B, where we're not sure they're even doing it, we're going to have a war.
And then this.
Ushering in either a brave new world or a spectacular hoax, a company founded by a religious sect that believes in space aliens announced Friday, it in fact has produced the world's first cloned baby.
Caesarean section, they say.
Bridget Mulsier, that little French pixie that heads up that organization that I've interviewed in the past when they said she conceived, not Bridget, but the American, came on.
I did an interview with Bridget, and she talked about why they were doing what they were doing, what they expected.
There is one important thing that I announce, and that is this is your final opportunity.
As you know, this Akith Rowland and the website, www.arpel.com, where there are some new ghost photographs tonight, Christmas-type ghosts.
Akeith has been with me for years and years and years and years and years.
And on Tuesday, with the ending of the current year and the beginning of the next year, which we will ring in with predictions and a review of predictions made last year at the same time.
But Keith, who's been with me all this time, and the Art Bell website go down forevermore.
Oh, who knows?
Maybe someday I'll bring it back up as a ham radio website or something.
I don't know.
You know, I own the domain.
So it's going down forever, and the new website takes over.
Now, you can get a commemorative set of CDs that memorialize this website and a lot of the stuff that was on it over so many years.
And this is about your last chance to do so.
Now, the way to do it is to go to artbell.com.
You can't miss it.
You know, it's your last chance.
These will not be for sale after the stroke of midnight or after the show.
Actually, at midnight on January 1st, they will go off sale.
You will not be able to get them.
Come hook or crook or whatever.
You can't get them.
So this is your last chance.
I suggest you go to artbell.com and scarf them up between now and the beginning of the new year.
Rushing toward us now, I might add.
Well, okay, here comes Richard C. Hoagland, a good friend for a lot of years on this program, a whole lot of years.
And he was at one time advisor to Walter C. Cronkheit, and he was an advisor to NASA, and he won the Instrum Science Award.
And he's been invaluable as a part of this program.
He will continue to be a part of this program.
And he was the man who watched with Walter as the U.S. went to the moon.
So we've been to the moon, and we're contemplating a trip to Mars to find out if so many things that Richard has talked about are true or not.
And we've done all this, and Still, we haven't conquered the damn common cold.
Like, you've been at this now in this incarnation of coast to coast dealing with the edgy stuff, the things at the edge of perception, the unknowns, the things we haven't nailed down, the things the mainstream says are crazy and kooky and other people know are not for at least 10, 15 years.
Well, that's because I realize there's more to life than the latest political squabble in Washington.
I mean, every other talk show host around the country has all they do.
The latest bull coming out of Washington.
Well, there's other things to talk about.
There's other things to life.
Yeah, that's what moved me to do this program.
You asked me what I've learned.
I've learned a lot, but how much do I know?
I don't have the answer to that one.
A lot of what I had thought would begin to happen, Richard, because of all the interviews and everybody I was exposed to, you and many others, a lot of that has begun to come true now.
So I'm seeing a lot of what I concluded through what I learned beginning to manifest itself now in the world.
But what I really know, absolutely, very little still.
What I really know, I just see a lot coming true that I thought would occur.
I think a lot of the things that I learned led me to believe that certain things would begin to occur in the world, and they are well underway, Richard.
Now, in terms of things you've learned, you and I have discussed endlessly the Mars data that we've been probing and the physics that we think we have discerned from that data and the predictions that physics makes.
And we've talked on this program many times about the connection between the physics and the global climate models that you and Whitley wrote about.
Well, what's fascinating to me is to tie in the climate change that Malin is reporting on Mars with the melting of the CO2 ice caps at the South Pole at a rate which is phenomenal.
I mean, in a few hundred years, if the melting that they're seeing in these images from year to year keeps going, there'll be no ice cap left, no solid carbon dioxide ice cap.
Well, a few years ago, the only way they can really discern climate on Pluto is by watching it pass in front of a star.
And what they do is they send teams to various islands or little tiny parts of continents where the shadow of the star, it's basically a spectral eclipse.
What you're doing is you're watching how the star disappears as the planet overtakes it, and then watch what happens when it reappears.
On Earth, more familiarly, when you watch a bright star go behind the moon, there are some scientific things that you can discern about the moon.
For instance, this was one of the early ways that astronomers realized that the moon had essentially no atmosphere.
If the moon had an atmosphere and a star went behind it, you would see the star twinkle just before it disappeared because of the heat burblings of the lower atmosphere, even on a relatively low gravity world like the moon.
Well, there's basically no twinkle, so we know there's an upper limit on the atmosphere of the moon, which is like one millionth or something of the Earth's atmosphere.
Well, when Pluto a few years ago went in front of a fairly bright star, they got a good look at the twinkle of the star going in and coming out, you know, ingressing and egressing.
But it was inside the orbit of Neptune, so it was expected because it was closer than the eighth planet.
And its atmosphere is mostly, you know, carbon monoxide and nitrogen and methane, things that warm up at very, very cold temperatures and are still gaseous.
Well, a few weeks ago, there was another opportunity.
And Pluto went in front of another set of stars.
And they recorded those observations.
Now, Pluto has been receding from the Sun.
It is now beyond Neptune, moving out to its farthest point from the Sun.
And when a planet moves that far away from the Sun, it gets a lot colder.
Because out there, the Sun is almost like a bright star.
good old soul it was brilliant star but it would it would actually What was bizarre about the observations is that even though Pluto is moving away and should be a lot colder, it's warmer.
The occultation of this star showed the atmosphere was fluffier.
The sun is doing exactly, except for the sunspot cycle, which is very, very minor, the sun is radiating exactly as much heat and light as it always has.
It's not getting brighter.
It's not being an expanding variable.
It's not doing any of the weird stuff that would cause these progressive changes, warming, all over the solar system, from Earth all the way out to Pluto.
That instead of global warming on Earth being due to civilization and technology and burning of fossil fuels, there may be long-term intrinsic changes in climate.
But that's really not answering the question.
It merely says it's nature, but it doesn't explain what nature does.
What we've been trying to do is to apply this physics to these changes and predict that, in fact, these changes are due to a general change in the energy pass-through, if I can use that word,
of the whole solar system, and that this is being triggered by the movements in the model of unseen planets far beyond Pluto that have not been generally discovered or acknowledged yet.
Because in our model, there has to be at least one, probably two more big guys out beyond Pluto orbiting the sun to account for a lot of other factors that we've published on our website, EnterpriseMission.com.
From several years of observations, they've looked at comets.
There's this peculiar pattern of comets that appear to be triggered to come into the inner solar system on a periodic basis, and they're attributing that to some relatively massive object out there.
Well, we're saying that there are two.
And the way the physics works is that when you get planets in phase, meaning at certain angles, the energy goes up.
When planets are out of phase, meaning at other angles, the energy goes down.
The planets that we're not even seeing are getting in phase, which changes the amount of energy that comes through the solar system.
Hey, there's another one on the way, and I understand they had, you know, like 70 mile-an-hour winds up on the coast of Oregon, California, up there, Washington, I don't know.
If even one is inexplicably bizarre to the point where it demands more answers, we have done our job.
Do you know that that set of images, that infrared image that was released to us under the most bizarre circumstances this summer, has elicited more over-the-top reaction from our enemies probably than anything that we've been involved in since 1998 when you and I went through this summer?
And oddly enough, I think in a strange way, and I'm going to move into the next area of this with a segue that I hope you'll appreciate.
I think it can potentially begin to help us understand why we are moving hell-bent for leather toward war with one nation on this planet when, as you pointed out a moment ago, there's another nation half a world away which has got them, is making them and bragging about them.
The Egypt connection to me is striking and was totally surprising, not to the extent that the resemblance of the stuff on Mars looks like the stuff in Egypt, but that there appears to be a group of folks, guys, who are ritualistically following an ancient religion that was attached to the stuff in Egypt.
That, to me, that has surprised the hell out of me.
And the more I have burrowed into this, the more I probed, the more surprised and astonished I have become because this is supposed to be the 21st century.
This is supposed to be, you know, people looking at things and behaving scientifically not according to an ancient, ancient religion.
And yet that's what the pattern, we talked about pattern recognition early in the program, that's what it's all about.
Well, Richard, with regard to ancient religion, yes, there probably was one.
I think the Egyptians knew things, perhaps through some sort of religion that may have been formed around it or may have been the basis of it, who knows, that we still don't know.
Things that we have not yet learned again, things that may be contained in a library under the Sphinx or somewhere else on the planet, I'll be damned if I know.
But yeah, they knew something that we don't know again yet.
I mean, obviously it's here somewhere, but Richard, in the years that I've been in this wonderful home with my beautiful wife, we have accumulated...
It is now to the point where the cars, you have to manipulate them extremely carefully while going into the garage lest you hit what is now occupying the garage, which is almost half of everything we've had.
I mean, it's unbelievable how much we've accumulated.
I cannot bring myself to throw things away.
It is here, Richard, but I don't know where.
And when I'm retired and I have time to go through all of this stuff, I'll find it.
Anyway, back to the Egypt thing, because if there is a piece of technology that's inexplicable, and we've described what that piece did with a radium watch and all that.
In fact, after we did our last show, some folks emailed me and offered me pieces of what they've got.
And that is in process, and obviously we will report what happens in future programs.
But getting back to the Egypt thing, were you aware that Egypt, you know, ancient Egypt had a major enemy in the same time frame, circa, you know, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 years ago?
And he has been doing an extraordinary program of restoring ancient sites and temples, funding archaeology, rebuilding palaces And esplanades, and you know, they used to talk about the glory that was Rome.
Well, this is much, much more ancient.
This is almost to the dawn of written civilization.
You know, Richard, I hope that you bring up a very interesting point, and I hope that somehow Saddam has not uncovered some information about a physics that we have yet to understand and don't want to be surprised by when our bombers head over Baghdad.
Well, this is one of the reasons I raise this, because when you begin to look at the record, and I had a very interesting thing happen over the holidays.
I got a book for Christmas.
Mike, you know, Robin's son, gave me a book, a book I've actually wanted to read, and I've had time to read it, and I've actually taken the last week off, you know, and done a few other things, Christmas stuff and family stuff, and had time to read this book.
It's called Bush's War by Bob Woodward.
It was published this fall, and it was supposed to be the first 100 days of the Bush administration.
Well, after 9-11, he changed, Woodward changed the theme to look at what happened after 9-11 and the preparations for Afghanistan, etc., etc.
And when going through this book, I have seen the most remarkable pattern, more dots, which may not answer the question, why are we hell-bent for leather to go to war with Iraq, but I'm hoping it will raise questions.
Do you imagine that it could be possible, Richard, that we understand that they might have uncovered or be close to uncovering something in Iraq that we must have and or slash must keep out of their hands?
Given the secretive nature of all of this, I could not say no to that proposition.
What I think is more likely is that in this coming year, I mean, you have been doing a commercial now for several months regarding the upcoming Mars opposition in August of 2003.
Well, the reason that that is important is because that number is referenced in some bizarre channelings that were done in Kentucky some 25 or 30 years ago in connection with Mars.
That 75,000 years and this cyclic apparition of Mars, when it comes closer than it is at any other time, and we're not talking by a lot, we're talking by maybe half a million miles, but it's literally symbolically closer than it has been for an immense period of time.
75,000 years is three processional cycles.
That's an immense amount of time.
If there was a group following these rituals, following the symbolism, following their connection with them.
This would be very important.
And what I find inexplicable in terms of mainstream reactions is how we can have a country like North Korea, which is obviously led by a madman, obviously very destabilizing, obviously intent on doing some very nasty things, obviously has the technology to do it, is starting reactors to process more fuel so they can basically begin to build an assembly line for weapons.
And we have absolute unequivocal proof this is going on, whereas on the other direction, in Sumer, all we have is the Shira and Kimra, Kimara and Mirrors of he's the bad guy, he's the bad guy, we must take him out.
And we now know from the meetings that McNamara and others have had with the Russians that if Kennedy had caved in to the Joint Chiefs and had invaded, the Russians had, I forget how many thousand tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba already armed and waiting.
Not the ones sitting on those missiles that we were worried about, but other nukes that we didn't know about.
The warheads had already been sent.
What would have happened is we would have triggered World War III instantly.
So it was only Kennedy's careful forethought and understanding of the scope of what was at hand that forestalled the most horrible tragedy that could have befallen mankind.
Contrast that with what we're doing now, where on no evidence at all, I mean, Kennedy had Stevenson go to the UN and lay out before the world the evidence of those missiles.
We have zero evidence laid out in public that Saddam Hussein, nasty bad guy that he is, rotten father that he is, has anything sending our young people in to die for him that would ask us to poise the world on the brink of oblivion when you have a billion Muslims who will look at this as basically the crusades all over again.
I'm saying we have to look at the symbolism and this deep trail we have found that even if you don't believe all the pieces, and I will give you one stunning example, you know that We have connected this with the numbers.
There are numbers that keep coming up over and over and over again.
I'm reading Bob Woodward's book, and I'm reading about the meeting between Bush and Putin in Crawford, Texas last fall.
When Putin came over and they spent two or three days at the ranch, and Bush decided to sign a nuclear de-escalation treaty where we reduced to X number of warheads.
Well, I was looking at the numbers and I could not believe what I saw because against all his key advisors, particularly Rumsfeld, Don Rumsfeld, who's the head of the Defense Department, was arguing strenuously in these NSC meetings that Woodward got the minutes of it.
And I don't know how he did it, but he got some astonishing first-hand information as to what was going on in this critical period of history.
Rumsfeld is arguing against going to the Soviets and writing a treaty.
Bush says we're going to do it, and he did it.
In the treaty, it says that by 2012, I thought was a fascinating date to choose.
the other part of it maybe genius because they're sure as hell is no explanation viable explanation for what we're about to do with our young men and women uh...
putting them at risk for god knows what when we've got another nation doing what we claim we're going into cure over there when we don't even So I alternate, and I have all these years, between thinking you're full of it and you're a genius, and you're probably both, just like me.
I'm full of it, and, you know, maybe I have my moments.
Well, my friend, it has been a lot of fun going over this stuff with you all these years.
I look forward on special occasions to doing it again.
I'm glad to hear that you're not totally retiring from the field because my gut tells me, in terms of prediction, that 2003 is going to be one hell of a year that's going to make a lot more dots come together.
Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to like the shape of some of the dots.
Well, this is an interview that during the course of my career, I'm really quite surprised I've never done before.
It's almost odd that I've never done it.
Fortuitous that I'm about to.
I saw, like everybody else, the movie The Amityville Horror.
And isn't it odd that the man involved in that happens to be just over the hill from me in Las Vegas?
George Lee Lutz was born and raised on Long Island.
His birth, was any indication, was meant to be different from the beginning.
Seconds after delivery, doctors raced him into surgery and mended a large crack in his skull, one that should have killed him.
His mother often said that she thought his miraculous recovery was a sign that he was destined for something special.
At a very young age, George displayed a remarkable mechanical aptitude.
At the age of 12, he modified a hobby kit hydroplane, adding his own custom-designed water ski jets.
That was only the beginning of a lasting love for boats, canoes, rollboats, runabouts, sailboats, almost anything that would float on the water.
Later, the fascination grew to include cars, and today George can remember the color, interior, design, make model of every car he's ever owned.
That's a bunch.
At 19, he volunteered for the Marines.
My parents were Marines, so he volunteered.
And later went on to earn two degrees with honors at an FAA course that led then to a job in Boston as an air traffic controller, one of the high-stress jobs in the world.
His father's death, a short time later, took him back to New York to run W.H. Parry, Inc., the family's land surveying business.
George, who was born and raised Methodist, who always considered himself more of a devout realist, married for the first time in 1972, divorced in 73.
Short marriage.
During the process of his annulment from his first marriage, George met Father Ralph J. I believe it's Pegrero, Pegrero, we'll get it, a Catholic priest, an ecclesiastical judge within the archdiocese of the church with whom he quickly forged a strong and lasting friendship.
In 1974, after years of profitable business management and years of enthusiasm and training in the martial arts, George met Kathy Connors, who had three children from a previous marriage.
A year after George and Kathy's first date, they were married.
And soon they began searching for a house of their own.
A nest, right?
By the summer of 75, they thought they had found their dream home, which happened to turn out to be a two-and-one-half-story Dutch colonial in the quaint Long Island community of Amityville.
Little did they know that a legend was about to be born.
In a moment, the truth, the real truth, behind that legend.
All right, here from Las Vegas, Nevada, just over the hill, is George Alotz.
All right, let me try this and reset this and see if that helped.
All right, anyway, George, it's hard to even know where to start, except all my life.
You know, I saw the movie, and all my life I've been hearing about Amityville.
And in fact, a man that I interviewed, who's now passed away, of course, Father Malachi Martin, said to me in the course of an interview that the Amityville house was one of the most haunted places in all of America.
And so I'm not sure where to begin all of this with you, except, I guess, you know, in the bio there it said that you and Kathy had just married and you were looking for a brand new house to live in and it's the nesting thing.
You know, you get married and you get a family and you want to go and you want to find a place, you know, to have that family and then that's what you were doing.
It's tough to do anything when you're in the middle of one of these monsters.
How we've gone to the moon, done all this other stuff, now even cloned the first human, according to the Raelians, and we still can't cure the common cold, George, doesn't make sense to me.
All right, then, so at some point, you must have asked yourself or the realtor, hey, how come, maybe after you consummated the deal, how come it's so cheap?
Or when did you find out six people had been murdered there?
After she showed it to us, and it was obvious that Kathy had fallen in love with it, and I liked it very much, she said, I don't know if I should have told you this before I showed it to you or after, but this is the house the DeFeos were murdered in.
And we kind of looked at it like, what do you mean?
And then she reminded us of the news stories that had been a year earlier and the trial that was just, I guess, in the process of starting or was going on.
Oh, yeah, we weren't looking for an $80,000 or $90,000 or $100,000 house, but we were certainly in the $60,000 to $70,000 range when we considered we had two homes that sold for over $40,000 each.
and the just the fees on keeping our boat and a marina back then sure really made that the difference uh...
very well as far as money went and i had a successful business that have been my grandfather's and my father's so wasn't something that uh...
We went to one bank, got qualified there, and got the mortgage right away.
Didn't have to go around and shop for a mortgage or apply anywhere else.
We asked the kids if this was going to bother them, because if it was going to be an issue with them, then we would have certainly walked on considering the house.
I believed in the Lord's Prayer, that kind of thing.
I was a non-practicing Methodist.
But today, what I believe is my own personal beliefs, and there are some things that I believe are pretty unshakable and have been proven to be so over the last 25 years.
He sat in the diocesan office for the Catholic Church there in Rockville Center as a judge, ruling on various cases that came subject to church law for the Catholic Church.
My first wife that she had applied for an annulment meant that I had the opportunity to go in and be interviewed if I wished about that annulment process.
And I didn't understand it at the time, and so I went down and met with him.
He called me and invited me in to do that.
I really didn't think it was a necessary thing.
I really didn't care whether she got an annulment or not.
I wasn't really sure that an annulment was proper, but the end result is that's how I met him.
He read and spoke nine languages, had an equivalent degree from, a law degree from Oxford.
He met you on your terms.
You didn't have to go to him.
He was friendly and smart, and he took his time to explain things to me why it was important that this annulment be granted and once the conditions the church considered it to be proper, properly so.
But more than that, he I didn't realize at the time that there was something unusual about him in the sense that he's an ecclesiastical judge.
I just forget that was his job.
I realized the kind of degrees he had or the intellect involved in doing such a job or how you get to do that.
We were a little bit behind because after we'd closed on the finances, in New York, you do real estate a different way than you do out here.
You go to a closing, and they have their attorney, and the bank has an attorney or a representative, and you have your own attorney, and they all sit there, and they write everything up right then and there.
And the title company has someone.
It's a different process than it is anywhere else that I've seen.
Well, we had forgotten to get the key at the closing, so we had to go back and find the realtor and go back and get the key so we could actually get in the house.
And there are all these people waiting around to help us move in.
So he showed up, and we were quite behind time.
You know, it's starting to get dark.
It's November.
And so I waved at him, and he went on in, found Kathy, and went about blessing the house.
He's the man, along with his family, who lived the real Amityville horror.
And as the night progresses, we're going to get that story as it really occurred with the time necessary, which you have with the luxury of radio to extract that kind of information.
So that's what we're up to this night.
George Lux is here.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
Coast AM
Thank you.
If you could read my mind, love, what a tale my thoughts could tell.
Just like an old-time movie about a ghost from a wishing well in a castle dark or a fortress strong with chains upon my feet.
You know that ghost is me.
And I will never be set free.
As long as I'm a ghost, you can see.
If I could read your mind, love, what a tale your thoughts could tell.
Just like a paperback in the hole, the time the drugstore sells.
When you reach the part where the heartaches come, the hero would be hero of the day.
You won't be that but the game because the ending just too hard to take.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with our bell on the Premier Radio Networks.
But because children were involved, and I'm a proverbial mother, I was only interested in doing the house because there were children involved in the house.
Of course.
So I looked up and I saw the face in the window.
It later became, it was the sewing room, I believe, that was the upstairs window looking out.
When I first went into the house, I said to, Ed, these people are really weird.
We're not even going to think about this.
This house is beautiful.
And the house was beautiful.
The Lutzes had decorated the house, so you walked in and it was a beautiful home.
It gave you no feeling, no sensation of anything other than a house.
That comes much later.
All right, but at some point.
When I went upstairs to the first thing that we did when we went in is there's a dining room to the right-hand side, and that had a table that had dishes and things.
Later, we cleared some of that.
When you go, there's a stairwell as you enter, and then when you go down, there's another stairwell that goes down to a basement area.
When you get into the basement area, there's a little laundry room off to your right-hand side of the stairs.
And then I looked to the left, and there was this large game room, and the game room had a pool table and family things where a family would enjoy themselves.
In front of you, there was a little door, and it was into a small, like a cold cellar.
You know, the old houses that had like a little root cellar.
So you open the door and you go into a root cellar.
I never could really go into that room because it had an odor to it.
Now, you have to understand that I was under the impression that the house had nothing there.
But I investigate the house to see, because I walk time, to see what possibly could have affected it to cause people to be affected by the house.
And so we got to, the laundry room had some clothes that were on the floor.
So I'm Mrs. Queen by nature, and I picked up the clothes and threw them in and washing them, figuring maybe if there was an odor there, it might be the clothing themselves.
Because it was definitely like a dirty sock smell or something that had soiled.
And I'm one of these people that is very fussy and very clean.
And if there's a smell, I'll either find the source.
And as a psychic, if you say a refrigerator is in the air, I better be able to put my hand under it, or otherwise I'm not going to believe that there's a refrigerator in the air.
Well, I know the finances of all this, and the people who say this is some kind of farce or hoax are full of it because the money thing doesn't add up in any way you look at it, either before, during, or after.
None of it makes any sense unless.
unidentified
Oh, no, because that house had to have his possessions alone when you walked in.
You knew you were walking out.
I thought they were very affluent because they had collections of coins and things.
I don't think many of us have confronted pure evil directly.
Father Malachi Martin spoke of it many times, and I still even the concept of evil as an entity, as a pure thing, it will stay on the hair on the back of my neck straight up.
And I have a sense, but that's all.
I've never confronted it directly, nor do I wish to.
unidentified
Neither had I. And I had a group of friends.
I worked for the Diastenian Bridge Board at that time.
And I had a school.
And I had four priest friends, and whenever I went anywhere, they always gave me holy water and borrowed one of their Bibles and a cross and brought it with me just as a kind of a protection for myself.
Because you never know if you don't.
People don't understand that if there's good, there's evil.
But bottom line, Mary, in your investigation, there was no question in your mind you had encountered in that house pure evil.
unidentified
Pure evil.
We had Channel 5 that was doing a seance, and I was to be the least psychic in that.
We had gotten to the point where the house had began to affect me.
And I had gotten up on the stairs, and I called down to Ed, and I said, Ed, I'm as sick as a dog.
Well, I had this little room upstairs.
I believe it was Missy's bedroom.
And that was my haven.
I could go there and feel perfectly safe.
Perfectly safe.
So I said to Ed, I'm going to lay down in the bed for a little while because it was either that I hadn't slept or whatever.
And so I began to say my prayers and I was saying the Our Father.
And as I was saying the Our Father, I looked out of the door and there was a young man that was with me taping.
And I looked out of the door and as I was saying the Our Father, there was a group of figures standing outside of the door saying the Our Father backward.
I thought, excuse me, but that doesn't sit well with me.
I'm also a stubborn person that says, don't threaten me because I'll stand up and my fists go up.
Mary, is there any question in your mind the DeFeo souls were trapped in that home?
unidentified
I didn't know about the DeFeos at the time, but I did know that in one of the bedrooms I sensed a young man who was crying as though he had done something really bad.
So I knew two things about this house.
I knew, one, that someone was forced into a position to commit something really horrible there.
Didn't know what it was, but did know that it happened.
That there was a force or an energy in that house that was subject to taking hold of somebody.
And I will say this now, and I'll say it till the day I die, that since we don't know what time is, and time in time is only a fraction of a second, that the energy in that house remains.
It may take 100 years of icon, but it will implode again.
And that house is purely evil.
I took the holy water and threw it outside to the figures.
I took the cross and I raised the cross and I said a prayer and I said, God is with me.
And I threw it.
Did you ever throw water on a fire?
And you get this kind of a little hissing sound?
Yes.
Well, that's what the sound was.
And the kid that was swinging, I thought he was going to faint.
But again, that's the house.
The house is deceptive.
It will take an innocent person.
And I believe Kathy was such a sweet and innocent child, a girl, a young woman, and it affected the house.
It affected curious children.
And Lee was the strength in that house, so the house could never really affect him, only make him angry and want to find out what was the matter.
You're very well aware the investigators, the investigators, Mary, caught a photograph when there was no child in the home, an eerie photograph that'll stand the hair on the back of your neck straight up, up at the top of that stairwell, caught a photograph of a child when there was no photograph of any, or no child in there to be photographed.
They got a photograph of what appears to be a ghost child.
I've got that on the website right now, www.arpel.com.
Is there any question in your mind that photograph is one of the Lutz?
I believe that since I was not allowed up on the third floor to where the children were, the boys, I believe, were, that it was probably one of those.
And do I believe they were trapped?
Yes, I do.
I think that the girl escaped into what may have been another room of haven, and that what father felt was a presence without being able to be aware that there was a presence there.
You know, us Catholics are trained in a very different way.
Indeed, so my guest is George Lux, who lived with his family, the Amityville Horror.
Incidentally, I'd like to thank Dan Ferrins for helping to make all of this possible and assisting with some of the material from the History Channel's documentaries, which he did, on the Amityville Horror.
In a moment, we'll get right back to George Lutz.
George, welcome back to the program.
Hi, Archie.
You have described what happened in that house at Amityville, George, as, oh, I don't know, I guess kind of a three-ring circus.
Now, many, many in my audience have either read the book or seen the movie, and the movie, of course, dramatized the heck out of what happened, I suppose.
Well, nobody, no family pays that kind of money for a house, lays their life on the line, especially a place they love, and then flees a house, George.
It doesn't happen without some really serious stuff going on.
Movie or no movie.
Nobody does that.
Nobody flees a house without a significant reason.
By the last week we were there, it was nightly occurrences of noises, things like odors coming and going, or Kathy being touched from behind by some unseen person, or Missy talking to herself and asking questions like, telling us about her imaginary friend that wasn't so imaginary, it turns out.
What happened, Art, was that these things in by themselves, for example, everyone in that house, all my kids and Kathy slept on their stomachs in that house.
After we moved out, we found out that the DeFeo murders, all of the whole family had slept on their stomachs.
They were all murdered in their sleep.
None of them got up.
None of them got out of bed or were awakened, evidently, by the sounds of the rifle going off, killing all six of them.
There were no drugs found in their bodies in the autopsy.
And they were all sleeping face down.
I was the only one that could not sleep face down in that house.
I never slept face down before that, and I sort of couldn't do it there.
And I think Kathy was damaged in a different way than I was.
And I think that for her, in so many ways, it was much harder for her to recover over the years and be able to put it in a place, so to speak, give it some distance.
Even after moving to California and then later on to Arizona, there were times when she was much more sensitive than I was.
One of the things was that I would be laying there in bed on my back, and everyone else would be asleep, and the house would be quiet, and I'd be getting ready to go to sleep, and I would hear, or I would be already asleep, and I would wake up to a sound of musicians tuning up downstairs.
I don't know whether you've ever been asked this, George, but it's a logical question in view of the DeFeo slaughter.
Was there ever a time when you found your mind drifting to an awful place where you were perhaps being urged to or considered doing evil yourself, George?
I understand that you actually began to have some feelings of sorrow or caring about DeFeo, who's going to be in jail for six life sentences.
And the only reason that I could understand that you would begin to get those feelings is because you would understand perhaps a little bit of what he went through.
There's no doubt in our minds, never has been any doubt after living there that a sane person doesn't do this to his family.
And someone with any kind of right thinking or ability to reason, that reason has been taken away or has been obfuscated in such a way, occluded or clouded or they've been separated from their reasoning powers in a way that most of us hopefully will never understand.
And there's no doubt in our mind that he was influenced by that house and that he was controlled, at least for a point.
He provided a service to that, if you will, that was so horrible that he couldn't live with it or realize it himself.
And without extreme long-term psychiatric care, he has no help of redemption of any kind in this life.
I think that a disservice was done to him terribly years ago, that it wasn't a full-blown insanity plea, that it wasn't appealed on that basis, that it wasn't an absolute, that he needed psychiatric care and still does.
I think it's inhumane to think that, okay, they got the guy.
He did it.
Yes, physically he did the murders, but spiritually, emotionally, no.
I don't believe that he's in a pure sense responsible for that as a human being.
I think that he needs help, and I don't think that anyone cares enough to try to get it for him anymore.
We did what we could, and we tried a number of different ways, and his attorney, William Weber, wanted to do a book and make money off him and signed Ronald Litheo up for a 5% cut of whatever book that his lawyer did, you know, put together.
So it became obvious that these people were not going to try to help him.
We heard this chorus of voices, as it's been described, asking us to stop blessing the house.
We went around and opened the window in each room.
A friend of ours, and what I'm what I said earlier that you have people over and they hear the same thing, well, in the process of that, a fellow by the name of Bill Newcomb had come over and excuse me for just a moment, I have to cough.
Yeah, and really, if you're buying the house and you're walking into that and you know what happened, then what's the difference between that and the furniture or the whatever?
Well, the mattresses weren't there, not anything like that.
I mean, we had our own beds.
It was one of those things that was decided at the closing.
What happened at the closing was that the people that ran the estate had filled up the oil tank, which was almost another $2,000 in cash that was needed right then and there, too.
So the actual cash out of pocket at the closing, including the furniture and everything, was about $24,000, something like that.
On the last night that we were in there, I wasn't able to get up out of bed.
There was a storm going on as far as we were concerned as a family in the house while we were awake.
Later, it has been said that there was no storm there.
Well, we know what we experienced.
And as far as we're concerned, there was an incredible storm that night.
The boys' beds were being lifted up and slammed down overhead of me, but I could not get up out of bed to go up and deal with that or stop it or see what was going on.
Are you now aware that anybody else in your family was being affected in a particularly negative way, perhaps to the degree that they might have done something awful?
It was different on each of us, Ark, but it wasn't, I don't think of it in those terms.
I haven't ever considered that that was a strong possibility.
One of the things we did, though, going back to your previous question, though, and this will probably help with this, is we tried to talk to Father Ray a number of times.
We got phone static, got hung up on, unable to call him from the house.
I would go to my office and I'd be able to talk to him and tell him what was going on.
We asked him to come back to the house to bless it.
You know, the blessing hadn't worked.
When we got through to him the next morning, after our last night there, and he asked us why we were still there, that's when it was slammed home.
We've got to leave.
He's not coming here.
He's not going to do anything, and we're not going through any more of this.
That they knew that there had been things that had gone on when the Defeos were there.
The Defeos had had masses said there, which may have very well triggered what went on for them, just like having the house blessed did for us.
When I heard, and I never heard the words myself on your show that Father Malachi said, but when I heard that he said the church knew about this, that was not a surprise to me.
It was a surprise that he said it on the air live, because the church has denied and denied and denied the existence of evil in that house at that time.
I considered that truly a heroic act when I heard that, because the church has gone to great lengths in different interviews and at different times to deny that there was any validity to this case.
And for him to say that and know it, and I've heard this from other priests privately over the years, but the church has never said, look, we knew there was a problem with the TeFaos in that house, and we believe that there's something really wrong there.
You know, it's a strange thing, George, when you think about it a little bit.
My wife is a non-practicing Catholic.
I'm not a Catholic, and I think I'm not very strictly in a church-religious way.
That's not me.
I think that I certainly believe in a Creator and so forth and so on.
But I think it's strange, George, that the church itself, which preaches that there is a God and there is a heaven and there is all the rest of it, seems, particularly in modern times, to be in denial about the opposite,
about evil, which so obviously, to even a halfway rationally thinking person ought to be, if you've got good, I mean, there seems to be an opposite to everything, then there's also evil in the world, and the church seems to be in official denial about evil.
At one point, I was a Eucharistic minister in San Diego, at the Mission San Diego de Alcula, which is the basilica in San Diego.
Nothing pleased me more than to be a part of the church.
But when I got divorced from Kathy, that was my ability to partake of the sacraments was gone.
And that hurt, and it still does.
I went to Mass for the first time on Christmas Eve, first time in something like 13, 12 or 13 years, this last week.
And it wasn't the same as going to a Mass that Father Ray said.
When you went to Mass with Father Ray, it was a joyous celebration.
And this was a serious Christmas Eve Mass, and there was nothing wrong with it.
It just, it was like the heart had gone out of some of it.
And I miss that.
And I will always support the church, the Catholic Church.
And if they have, for their reasons, done and said things that they believe are right and they can believe in their heart is true, okay.
But we have pictures Of apparently, what is a very good likeness of Padre Pio, who is now St. Pio, in the house appearing there on the side of a moose head that was my grandfather's.
And at the time that that picture was taken, Lorraine Warren is one of the psyches who was in the house, who's been on your show, was saying a prayer to Padre Pio, asking him to come and be with her in spirit there at the house.
This is during the investigation.
And so I don't, you know, the picture is more important to me than what the church says, what some priest says that wasn't there.
The picture means more to me.
And I hold Padre Pio very dear in my heart and always will.
I don't think we would have left if he had said, as silly as that sounds, I don't think we would have left if he had said to us, no, you're leaving and you're leaving your stuff and you're not coming back and forget it.
I don't think you could have gotten this out.
I think without him choosing the right words, that was one of those things about meeting him that was just so extraordinary about him.
He later went on and got a degree in forensic psychiatry.
He just knew what to say to move you, to get you to do what you needed to do even if you were in denial.
The only other priest I ever found like that was the Archbishop of Canterbury's exorcist, Reverend Neil Smith.
And that was years later when we did a book tour for the original book in London, England.
We met with him through a reporter for the New York Times, I'm sorry, for the London Times.
Her name is Danny Brooke, and she had even published a book on natural childbirth.
She was quite a well-known reporter at the time, and she introduced us, made arrangements to meet with Reverend Neil Smith, and he performed for us what some people would call an exorcism.
I call it more of a blessing.
But it was a rite of separation in the Anglican church, and it was a separation from the house, from the effects of the house.
He looked right at Kathy and said, you're still affected by this.
He with his family lived the Amityville Horror, The Real Thing.
That's what we're talking about tonight.
We'll get right back to it.
Stay right there.
Don't fear the Reaper.
I don't fear death, but I do fear evil.
There's a big difference, I think.
Now, George, I'm going to revisit this again.
And I know you've never really answered this publicly.
When I asked you about your state of mind through this and whether you ever thought that you were perhaps on the edge or even considering, even flitting through your mind that you might do something bad, there was a story that you took your gun.
George, again, with regard to your state of mind, there was a story that you went to the Amityville Police Department and you turned in your gun, saying that you perhaps had an impulse to murder your family.
Kathy and I, when we took the polygyric tests years later with Chris Scugas, one of the things we wanted to make sure that got covered in the test was, is it true that you levitated at Kathy's mom's house after leaving the house inevitably?
And yes, we did.
And we levitated together that time, and that was a pleasant experience.
That was not scary or frightening.
We were talking to each other, and we were in the bedroom, and we shared a little single bed there, a little cot.
But that wasn't an unpleasant experience by any means.
When the current owners of that house now say that nothing is going on, that they believe the house is clear and everything's just spiffy and okay, do you buy that?
You know, that's another thing that I think the audience should understand.
There have been allegations over the years that this was a hoax, that some big money-making affair on your part.
So you lost the house.
You had to give the house back to the bank.
And while people have made millions, I guess, on the book and the movie and whatever all else has come out about Amityville, the History Channel, I forget, or ABC, I can't recall which one, said, look, the Lutzes may have made a grand total of $300,000 minus, no doubt, attorneys' fees and a lot of other stuff.
There have been a number of lawsuits about this over the years.
What happened is we moved out in January of 76.
We bought it in November.
So 28 days later when we moved out, which is like a full cycle of the moon, which I don't know whether that matters or not.
But we kept it.
Eventually I sold my business.
I put it up for sale in the New York State Surveyor's Civil Engineering magazine.
And the first buyer bought it.
We wrote up a contract right then and there between the two of us.
A couple days later, his attorney and my attorney put it into a formal language.
Transferred ownership of my grandfather had died during that time and some of his furniture that my mom and my aunts did not want from his house, we got some of that furniture and I had one motorcycle that I managed to hold on to and salvage from the whole thing.
A couple people went in on Easter Sunday for us and got my grandfather's chest back out, which was just about all that we were able to get out of the house.
We donated the food to Salvation Army and that was it for that.
On Mother's Day of 1976, we landed in San Diego on a plane.
We gave the car away.
One of the last office cars that I had gave it to the guy that was at the ticket place where you show up at JFK and said, here, here's the keys, here's the title, you know, dance.
We got rid of the van because it developed a problem that wouldn't go away.
So I had bought a 1973 Thunderbird-eused car that we used, and then I left that at Father Ray's rectory, and we went on out to San Diego.
And we got off the plane there, and we had hotel reservations up in Del Mar, and we stayed at the Del Mar Inn for a couple weeks, and Kathy found a condo for us to rent over in La Jolla, and we stayed there for a while, and then I went back to get the car.
And meanwhile, Kathy had found a house out in Tierra Santa, and we moved there and rented a house for a couple years.
And then eventually we bought a house up in Carlsbad.
I kind of always looked at it like it had a half-life.
I eventually came to believe that the half-life wasn't necessarily the same as it would have been for something radioactive, but that as time went on, it would go away.
It would get less.
It would get less.
There were many times when we really made an effort not to blame everything that went wrong in our lives on the house.
And so we would be asked and we'd say, yeah, you know, it appears to be over.
It's over.
For us, it's gone.
And then so many other things would go wrong.
I'll give you an example.
When we left New York, we didn't have a book contract.
Weber, DeFeo's attorney, had asked us to sign a book contract with him, and we refused because of all the, this was a really thick contract, and it was very disturbing.
This was a guy that was trying to get us to donate the house to his corporation and then take lie detector tests and if we failed the lie detector test then we were going to give him the house anyway and everything else plus he was going to get to say what we did with the rest of our lives with regard to the story and it was just beyond belief.
Plus he was going to pay DeFeo 5% of proceeds for murdering his family.
So a friend of ours hooked us up with Tam Mossman who's the editor for Jane Roberts books, the Seth Speaks books that Prentice Hall had published.
And Tam Mossman knew Jay Anson and had suggested him.
We met with Jay Anson.
We spoke with him.
We gave him research materials we had done on the house and some tapes that Kathy and I had done just to undo this.
We were sitting around talking about it at Kathy's mom's house afterwards, over the weeks after we had left the house.
And we said, look, we're not going to sit down and be interviewed about this.
You can do what you can from the tapes and then we'll try to correct whatever you write or help you out with that, but we're just not going to relive this.
We've done it once and we're not doing it again.
We did it for the tapes.
We went to California and a year and a half later, as the end of August in 1977 is when we actually had a book contract.
Then right after that, Anson sold the rights for the movie rights to CBS.
Without our permission, he just went ahead and did it.
And then AIP found out about American International Pictures, and what they did was they went and got the rights from CBS and came to us and said, we're going to make a movie.
And we said, how are you going to do that?
You don't have our permission to do that, and it's our story.
And so we had to renegotiate all of that.
And in the process of that, then we were finally able to get some control back over what happened with the story in the future.
Not then, but in the future.
So we got what's known as the sequel rights, which is very rare.
You just don't do that.
And it was just one of those things that just haven't to work out right.
Anson did a deal with us that it was about eight, nine years later that we discovered that he and Myron Saland, who he had worked for at the time at Professional Films, they became the producers for the movie.
And so far they've made about $22 million personally between the two of them.
Well, my attitude about it has always been one that not necessarily everyone understands or agrees with, but it's one I came to on my own, and that is that whatever exposes this stuff happens.
And we didn't know that.
And we learned that from the people that we were fortunate enough to meet along the way.
And people don't talk about it.
And we can understand why they don't, because we understood there'd be controversy, and we understood there'd be naysayers.
I've had them all the time I've been doing this program.
Stay right where you are.
We'll be right back.
When we get back, we'll try and pick up a few questions from all of you out there.
You've got the numbers.
We're here.
unidentified
2am, the figure is gone The figure is gone But still warm in my neck It's time to take a chance Yeah, there's a storm on the loose Sirenes in my head That's not the time that's concerned today.
Can I be cold?
My whole life spins into the frantic
Some bell with morning when I'm straight I'm gonna open up your gate And maybe tell you'bout Phaedra And how she gave me light
And how she made it in Some bell with morning when I'm straight Flowers growing on our hill Driving flies and gaffled tears
Learn from us very much Look at us but do not touch Phaedra is my name
To reach our bell in the kingdom of Nye From west of the Rockies dial 1-800-618-8255 East of the Rockies 1-800-825-5033 First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222 Or use the wild card line at 1-775-727-1295 To reach out on the toll free international line Call your AT&T operator
have them dial 800-893-0903 this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Networks.
The part about Father Malachi Martin was very important to me.
I haven't been able to verify it with your archives.
It's just my inability to find the right program when he said that.
And when he exposed it for what it was, and that was very important to me.
But also over the years, there have been some, I don't know another way to put it, real loudmouthed people about calling this a hoax, and it's not a hoax.
And I've gotten to the point where I'm really tired of even hearing that.
It's the kind of thing that has hurt my family for a long time, and I've gotten to a place mentally or spiritually with it all that just says, you know, bring it on because this is what happens.
This is the truth.
These things happen, and I understand why people don't talk about them when they do happen to them.
In my own opinion, I would do fictional books, fiction books based on fact and factual books, anything at all to expose the existence of this stuff, to get people to read about it and question it.
And as you know, I was the first reporter there that horrible night in November of 1974, and I saw one of the dead bodies and later was questioned by the DA, and then, you know, became involved with the side of the story that called it a hoax, as you just referred to.
And I, you know, had years and years of listening to Stephen Kaplan debate the Webbers and forgive me, the Warrens about whether it was true or not.
And I really have not the same opinion as Steve Kaplan had that it was a hoax, and I don't believe that at all.
What I wanted you to do, I was hopeful, was to clear up some of the questions I had because when I was there the first night in 74, I never thought the story would continue.
Then, five years later, I had that exclusive radio interview with Bill Weber, and he contradicted a lot of what you said, or at least, you know, raised doubts about it.
What I'd like cleared up is what George Woods' opinion is of what Kaplan said, which was counter to what George said, and what Bill Weber said, which took issue with what George said.
And I don't want to argue it.
I would just love to hear George's opinion, simply because we haven't meant to talk about it.
Geraldine's physical appearance today, to be kind, is not anywhere near what it looked like back in the 1970s.
Now, I don't know what her role was back in the 1970s, but if you ask me, do I recognize a girl who looks something like that back around the time when this happened?
Yeah, she does look like her.
But what she did or what her role was, you would know.
And those are the kind of things I was curious about getting answered, since I never believed, I never thought I'd fall into the story so heavily.
There was no, never brought up in the trial, not by Weber, no one.
No.
unidentified
so her all practical verses in the seventies she didn't exist for all practical purposes there was a girl who looked like that but it comes in the story she tells I never heard that story until much, much more recently.
But, you know, I recall the face, but that doesn't necessarily suggest that what she says is exactly what happened.
I mean, do you think something happened in that house that took the Lutzes out of it?
unidentified
Yeah, you know what I think, frankly, I did not have the privilege of interviewing Malachi Martin more than one time, and I know you did many, many times.
They're individuals that came to us in different ways.
We sought out Weber, found out that he was the attorney for DeFayo, and so we contacted him through a friend of ours, Mimi Vetter, who worked as a receptionist, I believe it was, or an assistant of some kind at his dentist's office.
She got a hold of him for us.
We talked with him on the phone, told him that we had lived in the house, that we believed we had information that would help, get him help of some kind, help get DeFeo help, and we agreed to meet with him.
And he came over to Kathy's mom's a couple of Saturdays, and we sat and we talked.
At one time, he introduced to us a fellow who was supposed to be a criminologist who eventually did an article that was unauthorized that was published in Good Housekeeping magazine and another one in the New York Mirror, I think it was, in Sunday News Mirror.
Weber is a slick guy.
He's a guy that will say what he wants to to fit the moment.
It became obvious to him when we left for California and had our attorney, Frank Giorgio, notice him formally that our story was ours and we were not going to do a contract with him about a book and we didn't want anything more to do with that.
We weren't interested in dealing with him.
And they wrote back and acknowledged that and then he goes and he gets Paul Hoffman to do this good housekeeping article and Burness Hall wasn't even going to publish the book after that was done.
It wasn't that the article was inaccurate.
The problem was that that was done without our permission under less than honorable circumstances to say the least.
I mean this guy was represented to us as a criminologist helping Ronald DeFeo get mental help and instead he's a writer trying to make money for Weber.
Yeah still I can't for one second imagine that you would have two seconds of interest in helping in any way or feeling compassion for DeFeo unless you understood a very profound reason why you should feel that compassion.
And that could have only come from your experience in the house.
i want to have to get the proof personal proof of evil in your life he resulted in a a really a personal proof of goodness I think we answered it the other way around.
And first and foremost, I heard a rumor that the property has a history of some kind of Indian burial ground or some kind of that the ground itself was either sacred or it had some kind of Indian connotation.
When we first visited the Amazos Historical Society, we obtained maps and all kinds of information that we turned over to Anson that included that area as having been a place where there were Indians buried and that they were insane.
The ones they didn't know what to do with were, there was even a rumor at the time and printed in some of the stuff in the Historical Society that said they were chained to trees and left to die there.
Not the nicest of circumstances by any means.
When the Amitygo story was published, all of a sudden the Historical Society secreted that information away.
We've, through other people, have been in contact with previous curators that know of this and are willing to talk about it.
But as far as the town is concerned and the Amnibal Historical Society, no, that was never true.
What happened later was, and I was still talking about some of Weber, Weber invited Hans Holzer to come in and investigate the house.
Now, Holzer is on shows like Joel Martin saying, you know, this whole thing's a hoax.
But then he's calling up Hans Holzer to go in and verify that the house is haunted.
Pretty weird stuff when you put the two things together.
Well, they're not going to shut Holzer up, and Holzer says, without a doubt, you know, what happened there with Ethel Johnson-Myers when she went in trance was there's an Indian chief, and he's quite angry, and he's not going to go away until some things are restored back the way he thinks they should be.
Now, I don't know about that.
I wasn't there.
I didn't own the house at the time.
Weber made arrangements to go in with the bank, because we'd given it back to the bank by then.
The Historical Society has basically covered it up, from what I can determine, from what anyone else can determine since then.
Lee, you're obviously right about giving art the respect he's due.
I'm honored that he took my call.
I just want to say, Lee, this whole experience is obviously very personal to you.
But as I heard, and I listened very intently to the art school interview with you, I was kind of shocked when you got to the part that you said you and Kathy weren't together anymore.
and I was wondering if you can say when you divorced and why, if it had anything to do with this, or her turning into an old woman.
And you don't think any of there was any residual effect that I mean, sometimes it's really hard to know what drives something, but you think it had really nothing to do with it.
We disagreed about exposing the house in that my own thoughts are and my own belief is that whatever exposes what went on there, whatever gets people to talk about this as a real problem that exists in the world, that's shoved under the carpet every moment that it possibly can be and in all kinds of ways and with all kinds of confusion, it should be exposed.
As far as Kathy is concerned, her point is that she only wants to deal with the non-fiction part and does not believe that fiction also helps to do that.
So we differ right there, and that wasn't the reason we got divorced, but when it comes to the house and disagreeing about some things afterwards, then that's part of it.
And anyone that's interested in any more that they would like to find out about this, the Lou Gentilly show, LouGentille.com has an archive up for a whole Amityville week that we did earlier this year.