Writing prompts about an infamous haunted house
This week in 1977, Jay Anson published The Amityville Horror, and a launched a whole new generation of haunted house stories.
But before the movies, before the book, before the revelation that it was all a hoax, the house at 112 Ocean Ave, Amityville, Long Island, New York, was the scene of a real horror: the murder of six people.
Ronald DeFeo, Jr., 23, killed his parents, two brothers, and two sisters with a rifle on Nov 13, 1974. If you’re familiar with the Amityville Horror story, you know of claims DeFeo was hearing voices that told him to kill his family. This part is surprisingly real— at least, according to his defense. The jury was unmoved, however, and DeFeo was convicted of mass murder. He died in prison in 2021. It is also true that motive remains elusive: DeFeo might have been after life insurance, and there was tension between him and his father. But nothing was ever said about evil spirits before the murders.
Of course, living in a house where six people were murdered by someone they loved has got to be a little freaky. But one family claimed there was a lot more horror going on. George and Kathy Lutz and their three children lived 28 days in the house at 112 Ocean Ave, starting in Dec, 1975. Interviews and a 1977 book by Jay Anson told the story of a terrified family who barely escaped with their lives. However, later fact-checkers found, well, no facts at all.
So we’re left with an odd contradiction: a false tale that got a lot of publicity for being “true,” but which remains, at its heart, a really good ghost story (which is why it led to many more books and movies). And here on Weird Wednesday, writing good ghost stories is our aim, so let’s see how horrifying the tale really gets!
Check out my Weird Wednesday blog post for the whole story and some horrific writing prompts, such as:
This House is Unclean
Enter the psychics! In the Amityville case, celebrity demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren (yup, the ones from the Conjuring cinematic universe) were the heavy hitters. Their investigation produced the famous ghost boy photo, said to be the spirit of John DeFeo, who was nine when he died in the house. Psychics are a big part of many ghost stories, because they’re a good way of getting information on what seems to the protagonists like a lot of confusing occurrences. (Another common way to get info is to have a character do some historical research.)
A prescient prompt:
Here’s one of my favorite bits: the walking dead zone. If some people are magnets for psychic activity, there must also be people on the other end of the spectrum, who inhibit paranormal phenomena. Imagine setting up all your equipment in a haunted house, ready to capture evidence of ghosts, and this guy walks in, and suddenly everything goes dead. No temperature changes, EVP answers, knocking on the walls, ghostly hair-pulling, or chairs sliding across the floor. There’s just nothing. This is the kind of guy who has the ghost hunters yelling at him to get out of a haunted house, instead of the ghosts.
DannyeChase.com ~ AO3 ~ Linktree ~ Weird Wednesday writing prompts blog ~ Resources for Writers
