Dream Home or Nightmare?

Are you currently house hunting? If so, picture this listing: a beautiful colonial-style home with five bedrooms, four baths, and 3,600 square feet. It’s a waterfront property looking out onto a serene lake, featuring granite countertops, hardwood floors, a two-car garage, and even a boathouse. Sounds perfect, right?

The catch, besides the $850,000 price tag, is that six people were brutally murdered inside, and the house is now arguably one of the most infamously haunted residences in the entire world. I mean, this place is so haunted, you half expect a horror movie villain to be water skiing on that lake.

The Real Estate Reality Check

Checking the real estate ad, maybe on Zillow, the pictures look perfectly sunny and nice. The facts state it’s a single-family home built in 1927, a bit old, but it has central air and is cable-ready (crucial details!). But where is the part about the gruesome murders that took place on November 13, 1974? That’s when Ronald DeFeo Jr. killed his entire family, his father, mother, and four siblings, claiming a voice in his head told him to do it.

Don’t real estate agents have to disclose that kind of history? Maybe it’s saved for the actual property tour. “Here’s the beautiful kitchen; see all the sunshine coming through the window? Oh, and by the way, six people were murdered here, and this house is haunted as heck. Now, let me show you the boathouse!”

That “Voice in Your Head” Argument

This whole “voice in my head told me to” defense is bizarre. A voice in your head is still just a random voice, right? Are you really going to follow every single random command? If I heard voices telling me to do truly dumb things, I’d still probably ignore them.

“Hey, go massacre your whole family with an axe.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to do that, voice. That sounds like a really bad idea.”

Also, isn’t it weird that whenever someone claims to hear voices telling them to do something, it’s always to commit murder? I just don’t buy it. If you’re truly hearing voices, I imagine they’d be asking for all sorts of stuff, like “Stuff ten ghost peppers in your mouth!” or “That cactus looks really cuddly; go give it a hug!” You never hear of someone blaming a cactus-hugging accident on a voice in their head.

The Aftermath and the Question

In all seriousness, DeFeo was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences and is serving time in New York. After the murders, a family moved into the house and claimed to experience intense supernatural phenomena, strange smells, unsettling sounds, and persistent, unexplained freezing temperatures. This experience inspired the book The Amityville Horror and the subsequent 1979 movie.

The property broker, Jerry O’Neill, was aware of the house’s infamous history but reportedly still thought it was a beautiful home.

Now, we have to ask the ultimate question: Would you buy this house? I don’t even feel comfortable living in a house where a pet died, so I can’t imagine wanting to live in a place where six gruesome murders took place, and the house itself seems…demonic.

But what do you think? If you could truly afford it, would you buy the Amityville house? And you can’t just say you’d buy it to turn it into some kind of lucrative tourist attraction. Nope. You have to buy it, and you have to live there with your family.