The House
The 1927 Dutch Colonial sits on an idyllic tree-lined street, right where South Ireland Place meets Ocean Avenue. The sprawling estate consists of 5 bedrooms, 31/2 bathrooms and a boathouse, and sits sideways on a 0.27-acre lot overlooking the Amityville River.
Perhaps the biggest horror in all of this is that the house sold for 200K below its asking price last week.
There is no way anyone could live at High Hopes without feeling the weight of all that has happened inside its walls - even at a bargain-basement price. Who could sleep in those bedrooms or climb the staircase to the attic bathroom Ronald Jr. casually showered, trimmed his beard and dressed for work in minutes after the murders?
Whoever the new homeowners are, I hope they’re prepared for the gawkers and tourists who will inevitably continue to drop by. But even more so, I hope they live a long and peaceful life at High Hopes in honor of the DeFeos.
For more on the subject, check out High Hopes: The Amityville Murders by Gerard Sullivan and Harvey Aronson.
by Cynthia Gunnells
Just a mention of High Hopes – the house at 112 Ocean Avenue with the jack-o-lantern windows in Amityville, New York – can cause the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up. As a kid, I loved to stay up all night reading stories about houses with names – especially ones said to be swarming with files, demons and apparitions. Not until I moved to Long Island in the early 90’s did I find that the Amityville Horror house was actually real – even though the ghost story was not.
Yet the house does have a tragic tale to tell. In the early morning hours of November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo, Jr., 23, shot and killed his entire family as they slept in their beds – father, Ronald Sr., 43; mother, Louise, 42; his sisters, Dawn, 18, and Alison, 13; and his brothers, Mark, 12, and John Matthew, 7. He is still in prison today. That was the beginning of one of the most popular ghost stories in American folklore. Read all about it, here.