Amityville: An Origin Story

Mary Pascarella was the lead psychic

who investigated the house.

Mary is a professional psychic,

a time walker who picked up on some truly terrifying things.

She said it was the first time

she had ever encountered something

she could only describe as pure evil.

People say this is a hoax.

It's done for money.

But let me tell you, you never sign

a contract with the devil.

This house chooses victims.

We just wanted to get the house fixed

so we could move back in.

I began to say my prayers.

And I was saying the Our Father.

And as I was saying the Our Father,

I looked out at the door,

and I had the impression of a young person.

I hope this is as close to hell as I'll ever get.

George and Kathy,

whatever happened to them in the house,

they got the kids,

they left all their furnishings,

all their clothing, everything in the house

and just ran.

They went to a motel for that first night.

After Kathy and I left the house,

we came to the conclusion that Ronald DeFeo,

physically, he did the murders,

but spiritually, emotionally, no,

I don't believe that he's, in a pure sense, responsible.

There's no doubt in my mind that he was influenced

by that house and that he was controlled,

at least for a point.

It would further the tragedy sitting in jail

for six consecutive life terms.

I didn't like William Weber.

He was writing a book about the DeFeo murder.

Through friends of ours, we met William Weber,

sat down and spoke with him.

He wanted George and Kathy to put their story

along with his story

so that it seemed like Ronald DeFeo

was into devil worship, or there was something

in the house that caused him to kill his whole family.

In the 1970s, the thought that the devil

could possess somebody became a very big deal.

In December of '75, Ronnie DeFeo

had just been convicted,

just two, three years after The Exorcist.

Mr. Weber says, listen, these people named

the Lutzes bought your house.

And we can use them and make money.

I said, what are you talking about?

He tells me, look, we got The Godfather

and The Exorcist all in one hand, Ronnie.

We're gonna make big, big money.

The devil knocks off the mafia.

The old box office champ, The Godfather,

is being flattened by that movie

about diabolical possession, The Exorcist.

Could you give us your reaction to the movie, please?

Could you give us your reaction to the movie?

It's something else.

All glory to God. - Great.

Disgusting.

It was disgusting in what way?

It was just morbid.

Just all the gory, the blood and all.

It was a traumatic experience.

Didn't you like it?

It was-- yeah, it was very interesting.

Why? - Because it might be real.

You know, I get to thinking that, you know,

something like that might transpire,

you know, around here.

I don't know.

People who were agnostic,

people who were atheists

went into that movie and came out

and were sleeping with the lights on

and wearing crucifixes,

whether or not they were religious or not.

Everybody went to see this.

So here's William Weber, a defense attorney,

coaching the Lutzes on what they could say and do

to play up this haunted thing.

But when the Lutzes gave a press conference

in William Weber's office, it was more notable,

that press conference, for everything they didn't say.

The Lutzes did not claim that they saw, heard, or felt

the ghosts of the dead DeFeos.

They didn't say it was something demonic.

In fact, the Lutzes were very ambiguous

about what happened.

So the reporters were left with more questions

than answers, which might be a smart marketing strategy.

Leave them wanting more,

and people will leap to fill the void.

He tries to communicate by psychic force

with the plant world.

The plant in question

is a rather wan split philodendron,

which Vogel has hooked up to a polygraph machine.

Here, Peter Hurkos,

a psychic investigator, is attempting to help

a metropolitan police department

by looking into the past.

He does this by receiving images from the murder weapon,

hoping to reconstruct the crime.

He was hired to help find the Boston Strangler,

did police work on the Charles Manson murders.

Like a suitcase.

She was stabbed to death five times.

What you have just seen is part

of an astounding collection of psychic phenomena,

demonstrations of the powers of the mind.

At the time that the Lutzes held

the joint press conference with William Weber,

I had been assigned to produce a series

on the supernatural and paranormal at Channel 5

by the news director.

So I'm seeing this story

when it was reported in the Long Island Press Newsday.

It was fairly local.

Wow, a real-life haunted house

that we could actually visit?

There was no way that this was not going

to be a big ratings grabber.

So at that point, nobody knew how to reach the Lutzes.

They were not living at Ocean Avenue anymore.

After they left the house,

the Lutzes moved permanently into Kathy's mother's house.

If I hadn't been sitting there and seeing how different

George was, I would have been a little skeptical

about what was going on.

He wasn't the same happy, carefree person

that he was before.

He seemed really broken, totally broken.

Seeing the way he was, I knew something happened,

something had had to have happened to him

for him to change like that.

The way they got it out of their system was,

they made audiotapes of each day of what happened,

every little detail.

They didn't want to retell it again and again.

If they retold it, it was like reliving it,

and they didn't want that to happen.

They just got everything out by putting it on the audiotapes.

We just sat down and did a series

of about 26 cassette tapes,

just talking about what happened

while we were in the house.

On those tapes, nothing was chronological.

We skipped all around.

Our language certainly wasn't the best.

We were drinking at times when we were doing

those recordings.

By the time I left the house, I was drinking pretty heavily,

without a doubt.

Nobody could find George,

so I called George's surveying company.

And I said, "Hi, my name is Laura DiDio,

"and I work for Channel 5 News,

"and I have worked

"with reputable paranormal investigators

like Hans Holzer, Ed and Lorraine Warren."

And I said, "I'd really like to help them."

George wanted the parapsychologists

to have seances in the house to validate

what happened in the house,

that there really were spirits there,

that there really was evil there.

The Warrens have devoted 37 years

to study of the supernatural.

The School of Demonology behind their Connecticut home

houses a collection of what Ed Warren calls unholy things

of historic value.

Laura DiDio convinced the Warrens to come down

and go through the house.

Our special guests tonight

are Ed and Lorraine Warren,

who, in their 32 years as ghost hunters,

have investigated over 3,000 cases of haunted houses

and demonic possession and have been involved

in numerous exorcisms.

Now obviously, you believe in ghosts.

I don't think it's a case of belief.

I think it's a case of the evidence.

So I called them up.

We set the date for March 6th

to go into the house and investigate.

They were giving Channel 5 and myself the exclusive.

George had asked me to go to the airport

and pick up the parapsychologists

that were flying in from Duke

and take them to the Amityville house.

There was a noted psychic with the team.

I felt while we were driving that this psychic