Documentary from the point of view of Daniel Lutz, one of the children in the Lutz family that fled their supposedly haunted house. Over the years, skeptics accused the family of lying, that they had moved into a house that cost too much for them and made up the story to give them a way out or that they misinterpreted ordinary events.
It's a fact that the family fled the house one night, left everything behind and never returned.
I did finally read a plausible explanation for it. That the family moved into a house where a mass murder had taken place. There were young children in the family and children are often afraid of ghosts, afraid to be alone in the basement or certain rooms. Normally, the adults will reassure them that there's nothing to be afraid of, but in this case the parents were already creeped out living in a house where everyone had been murdered a few years earlier and the children were creeping them out even more so the adults and the children were feeding each other's irrational fears. They hear creaking and sounds old houses make and finally made a run for it.
In this documentary, Daniel Lutz tells about the dog barking crazily while tied up in the yard with nothing in view. He tells about things that don't seem scary or terribly unusual. These are things he's remembering from nearly half a century ago. Some of it's just absurd. He remembers his horrible stepfather having the power to levitate objects and move them with his mind.
He was forced to address his step-father as "Sir" or "Mr Lutz". The man was an abusive ape with no parenting skills and with a collection of books on the paranormal.
Nothing Daniel Lutz talks about was really scary. The house was drafty and there were "cold spots". He may have been filling gaps in his memory with scenes from the movies which I assume weren't entirely faithful to the book.
I knew someone who lived in a haunted house. A bloodstain kept reappearing on the wall, they could hear people talking if they lay down on the floor, the cats would sit and turn their heads in unison as if they were watching someone walk past, and they kept seeing an apparition of a guy with a beard. Whenever her husband would yell at her or her step-daughter, something would happen to him---he would trip and fall for no reason. Once, when she was napping, she was awakened by a loud scream that seemed to be in the room with her. She thought it must be from outside so she went out to look and found a neighbor was running toward the house because she had heard it, too.
Oh, and she investigated and learned there had been a murder-suicide about a hundred years earlier in the spot where the house was built.
I think she was telling the truth about it, but I think there were rational explanations for what happened. And anyway, I heard it all second hand from someone who doesn't go for strict accuracy when telling things like this. I myself referred to it as The House on Hell Road when it was actually on Hill Road.
So I don't know why I want to debunk the Lutzes' story.
There was one odd moment. They talk to one of the paranormal investigators who claims to have a fragment of the cross on which Christ was crucified. She didn't have it when she visited the house decades earlier, but she carried a picture of Padre Pio. She didn't tell anyone she had it, and yet the fascist priest (now saint) Padre Pio appeared to her when she went into the Amityville Horror house.
"Were you baptized?" she asked Daniel.
"Yes."
"So you had that protection."
