Just curious, does anyone know??
The new owners have been living there for years without problems of any kind…at least without supernatural problems of any kind. No cite, I saw a TV report.
You know, that’s really odd… the same thing’s happened to the Exorcist house. Stairs, too. Scary coincidence, eh?
Background link:
Again, like that link, from what I read, it was a complete and total hoax.
I’ve also heard better stories, like the Black Hope Horror, anyone ever hear about that one? About a neighborhood built over a cemetary for poor blacks?
Whether or not the Amityville story was a complete hoax is a matter of intense debate within the paranormal research community. Well, I should say that 95% of the paranormal research community believes it’s a complete hoax, and the other 5% side with Ed and Lorraine Warren, a couple of weirdos who have had a hard time, to put it charitably, gaining acceptance in the community, largely because of their views about the house at 112 Ocean Avenue. FWIW, the house has changed hands a couple of times since the Lutz’s moved out and no subsequent owners have reported anything out of hand.
I’ve read The Black Hope Horror, and it is, indeed, about a neighborhood built over a cemetary for poor blacks. The Warrens were involved in that case, too, although to my knowledge their involvement hasn’t besmirched the case any. I wrote to the New England Society for Paranormal Research asking about this case a coupla weeks ago. I’ll let you know if I hear back from them.
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Olentzero, as a lifelong Exorcist fan, I was thrilled to have moved into the NoVa area, allowing me to fulfill a dream and . . . climb the steps! Wendell Wagner told me at a Doper meet specifically where they were, and I took a moment one weekend when Mrs. pld and I were in Georgetown and checked them out. It’s so nice to have some context for the settings in the movie now.
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pldennison, I hope you asked Satan to go with you!
Did you have an eerie felling of ineffable evil as you climbed up the steps?
pldennison,
The house I told you about (3600 Prospect Street NW in D.C.) is indeed the one that was used for the exterior shots in the film. I presume that the interior shots were done in a studio. Interestingly, it’s also the house that William Peter Blatty intended in his 1971 novel to be the scene of the exorcism. Apparently he saw the house twenty years before when he was a grad student at Georgetown and decided that this would make a good place to set a horror novel.
However, the novel was inspired by an actual exorcism in 1949 that got some play in Washington newspapers at the time. Blatty read these stories and put together his novel, years later, based loosely on them. It was a young boy, not a girl, and it actually happened at 3807 40th Avenue, Cottage City, Maryland. The real location was only discovered a year or so ago. You can read about it at the following URL:
http://www.strangemag.com/exorcistpage1.html
The events in 1949 weren’t nearly as interesting as Blatty’s version of them.
Ahh, the Warrens. I got to see them when I was in college, they did a big paranormal presentation around Halloween every year. They showed this one video of a “ghost walking past the video camera” on a sunny day. Just so happened that the “ghost” in question looked exactly like a reflection of the sun off of the lens. Even moved like one. That along with their “ghost globules” that only appear on film (reflections on camera lenses from lights) left me shaking my head when I left the presentation. Call me a skeptic, but I had a hard time believing those two.
I miss G-Town…
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In another bit of local urban legend, the “Car Barn” which is located right next to the infamous steps is presently an administrative building for Georgetown U. But rumor has it that prior to being bought by GU, it was owned by the CIA. Supposedly, inside that very building, CIA operatives were taught various torture techniques and other assorted nasties.
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From the above website “The stories they told included a demonic levitating pig,…”
deviled ham anyone? 
Come on, you had to have seen that one coming.
It took me eight different sites before I settled on that one to post. Good eye!
Wendell, thanks for posting that URL. Maybe not as dramatic as the movie, but still interesting.
Horror houses are only legal in Nevada. Or am I thinking of something else?
I wrote:
> when he [Blatty] was a grad student at Georgetown
According to the article I referenced, he was an undergrad. I could have sworn I read somewhere that he was a grad student, but I guess not.
Arnold, not so much on the way up, but the way down is another story altogether.
No one has EVER found a haunted house (that stands up to scrutiny). All of the houses that we investigated turned out to be just old houses, with all the squeeks and noises associated with them. As an aside, the famous Borley Rectory (England) was thoroughly debunked several times…it turns out that the alleged haintings were the invention of a newspaper reported over 130 years ago. Yet you still read about it as “the most haunted house in England”.
I have a hard time beliving in these things…a while back, I read that an English newspaper reported on the oldest inhabited house in the UK. Supposedly, it had been continuously inhabited for 800 years! Consider all the people who must have died in that house-it should have spooks galore!
Nobody ever mentioned that this house was haunted!
Did anyone ever come up with a reason for the Lutz’s possible motive for making up the story? Money maybe?
Couldn’t have been money. Only Jan Anson (wrote the book) made any money off the story. There is speculation that the Lutz’s couldn’t pay the mortgage and thus concocted the whole story in order to try to sue the realtor for fraud, but I don’t know much about it and thus won’t comment.