American Hauntings · The True Stories behind Hollywood's Scariest Movies—from The Exorcist to The Conjuring by Bartholomew Robert & Nickell Joe

Author:Bartholomew, Robert & Nickell, Joe [Bartholomew, Robert & Nickell, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality
ISBN: 9781440839689
Amazon: 1440839689
Goodreads: 26450727
Publisher: Praeger
Published: 2015-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

The purchase of this home was less than logical when one considers not only the cost of taxes, but also the cost of fuel to heat a three-story Dutch colonial that sits on the windward side of a river not half a mile from the Great South Bay of Long Island. All in all, the logic of such a move would escape anyone who thought about it for more than five minutes, unless other considerations were to enter into the argument, a profit motive perhaps, that would not be readily obvious to the casual observer.75

By their own admission, the Lutzes were in a financial bind. As Jay Anson observed, soon after buying the house, they had “a very serious payroll deficit” at the survey business and faced “mounting bills.”76 The Lutzes’ scheme to create a haunted house—and profit from the story—worked, and by September 1979, George Lutz testified under oath to a federal judge that he had received $100,000 for the book and another $100,000 from the first movie that opened that summer.77 He revealed that by 2000, they had made over a quarter of a million dollars from the original book and $160,000 from the movie. Ironically, he said that about one third of this went to lawyers to either initiate or fend off lawsuits over various claims about the case.78

Some of the Lutz children have also tried to profit from the Amityville cash cow. One of those is Christopher Quarantino, who was seven years old when he lived in the house with his mother, Kathy, and stepdad, George. In 2011, he gave an interview to Fate magazine’s Rosemary Guiley. He said he was trying to raise money by organizing an online pay-per-view webcast “fireside chat” where he would talk about his Amityville experiences and the haunting at his home in Phoenix, Arizona, where he was living at the time. He claimed that the haunting had followed him there. In discussing her interview with Chris, one gets the distinct impression that the Amityville “haunting” was genuine, as there is no mention of it being a hoax. To its credit, Fate did publish the original exposé on the case, by Peter Jordan and Rick Moran, in 1977. But of course, negative articles are not good for business for a magazine whose core audience is made up of believers in the paranormal. Guiley ends her piece by noting, “FATE has not contacted others originally involved in the case, pending further disclosures from Quarantino.”79 Reminding readers that the Amityville case is a hoax would seem to be pertinent information, but it is conveniently left out!

Then there is writer Jay Anson. In the years after the publication of the book and until his death in 1980, Rick Morgan made numerous TV and radio appearances during which he would debate Anson. Despite his skeptical perspective, Moran says that the pair became friends off the air. As it turns out, privately Anson was a skeptic. Moran writes, “Did he believe it? No! He didn’t believe in the ‘paranormal,’ but that didn’t stop him from writing the book.

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