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Although it has long been known that The Amityville Horror: A True Story was a fraud, until now, no assessment of the extent of the fraud or account of how it was planned has been published. In this book, The Amityville Horror: An Inquest into Paranormal Claims, investigator Frank Zindler reveals how the story was concocted by the Lutzes (the protagonists of the horror-house tale) in collusion with the lawyers for Ronald DeFeo, Jr.—the man who murdered six members of his family in the house at 112 Ocean Avenue prior to its purchase by the financially strapped Lutzes.
Zindler’s day-by-day investigation of the infamous 28-day “ordeal” is a textbook example of how to investigate claims of demonic possession and other supernatural yarns. It draws upon everything from weather records for the demonic days to court records of a trial in which the Lutzes and the lawyers sued each other for fraud; from polygraph reports to interviews with priests, police, and other Amityville persons mentioned in the original book to the auction inventory of possessions provided by the realtor who sold the house to the Lutzes. Demonstrating extensive plagiarism from the novel The Exorcist, Zindler’s deconstruction of Jay Anson’s “True Story” is the definitive critique of a hoax that since 1977 has grown into a half-billion-dollar industry that feeds upon public ignorance and superstition.
Finally, Zindler reveals the lasting effects of the abuse suffered by the Lutz children, and a straight line is drawn from the New Testament belief in demons to the beliefs of the Q-Anon insurrectionists who invaded the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
"Zindler’s book is precisely the kind of thorough and proper investigation into the paranormal that pop culture has repeatedly failed to conduct in their complicit furtherance of hoaxes and frauds. Those who are adamant in their belief in the paranormal need to read this formidable work by a true master of skepticism so as to see a brilliant example of critical thinking at play."
—Darren M. Slade, PhD
Author of “Properly Investigating Miracle Claims”
in The Case Against Miracles
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Tell your readers a little about yourself.
When World War II broke out in 1939, I was a bit over three months old. I was reared as a farm boy on an Austrian-style fruit farm outside Benton Harbor, Michigan. The farm was owned by my namesake and maternal grandfather, Frank Somogi. I even tried (unsuccessfully) to plow with a horse. (We didn’t get a tractor until my Sophomore year of high school.)
When I was eight years old, my mother bought me a tiny accordion, and my musical career had begun. The accordion was soon followed by piano and organ, and at twelve I became the assistant organist at an ultra-conservative Wisconsin-Synod Lutheran Church. Wind instruments followed in high school and college, and I began cello studies at the ripe old age of twenty-one. I began composing at the age of thirteen.
Until I was four years old, I was bilingual in English and German. Although childhood German was forgotten, I credit the early linguistic experience to my later ability to learn to speak many languages with minimal accent. In 1950, when I was eleven years old, my father was killed in an electrical accident. He was only 33 years old. I became fanatically religious, so that when I was twelve and had completed Lutheran confirmation and had graduated from eighth grade at a two-room country school the ultra-conservative Wisconsin-Synod church awarded me an eight-year, all-expenses scholarship to become a Lutheran minister. I would have had four years of parochial high school in Saginaw Michigan (several hundred miles away) and four years at Concordia Lutheran Seminary in Milwaukee, WI. My mother (already having serious doubts about religion and alarmed by my religiosity) nixed the deal, under the pretext that with my father gone I was needed to help on the farm.
At the age of thirteen, I rejected the Christian “Old Testament” on moral grounds, and I cast off the creationism of my Lutheran Church after reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Ultimately, I became a major debater of professional creationists during the last quarter of the twentieth century. (Annotated transcripts of several of those debates can be found in Volume III of my four-volume Through Atheist Eyes: Scenes from a World That Won’t Reason (American Atheist Press, 2011).
The story of my sudden “de-conversion” to atheism at the age of eighteen (during my sophomore year at Kalamazoo College) can be read in full in my memoirs, Confessions of a Born-Again Atheist.
I never met a science I didn’t like, and I ultimately gained reasonable mastery of biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology, psychology, and neuroscience.
My B.S. (University of Michigan) was in biology (I lacked only one course to have had a major in psychology as well). My M.A. (Indiana University) was in geology (specializing in glacial geology and paleontology), and my doctoral studies (SUNY-Albany) were in neurophysiology. In my career as a high school teacher, I taught courses in biology, chemistry, and earth science. As a community college professor for seventeen years, I taught numerous courses, including:
general biology, molecular biology, botany, zoology
psychobiology, “Science and its Imitators,” Greek and Latin
general astronomy, and physical and historical geology.
As an adjunct professor for Elmira College, I taught an evening course in Human Ecology. At SUNY-Albany I conducted seminars in Behavioral Genetics and Human Neuroanatomy.
In 1976, I met the founder of American Atheists and "the most hated woman in America," Madalyn Murray O’Hair, and I immediately joined her organization. I pretty much dedicated my life then and there to combatting religious superstition, defending the “Wall of Separation between Church and State,” and fighting for the rights not only of religious dissenters but also of women and the LGBTQ+ community.
When Madalyn Murray O’Hair (along with her son Jon Murray and her granddaughter Robin Murray-O’Hair) was brutally murdered in Texas in 1995, my wife Ann and I took over management of American Atheist Press. All told, I published, reprinted, edited, or wrote nearly fifty books from then until now. When my wife died of cancer in 2013 after forty-eight years of happy marriage, my daughter Catherine took over her job as typesetter and layout artist for American Atheist Press.
When I turned eighty in 2019, I decided to throw an enormous dinner party for 103 friends and close acquaintances. Guests were forbidden to bring gifts. Instead, their “payment” would be listening for more than an hour to my reading of the “Confessions” chapter of my memoirs. At the age of eighty, in front of over a hundred people, I came out of the closet as a gay man. Shortly after my birthday party, my Confessions of a Born-Again Atheist was released from the American Atheists Press. A blurb on the back cover asked the following question:
QUESTION: What do Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elvis Presley, J.F.K., George H.W. Bush, Larry Flynt, John DeLorean, Isaac Asimov, Aldous Huxley, Leonard Bernstein, and Madalyn Murray O’Hair have in common?
ANSWER: All their lives intersect the life of Frank R. Zindler in the pages of this book.
For the past forty years I have lived in Columbus, OH, and have been (still!) working as a linguist and analyst of medical and chemical patents for a scientific society. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, I have been responsible for analysis of all patents written in European languages, and I have processed approximately a third of all such patents written in English.
I have one daughter, three grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
"The Amityville Horror: An Inquest into Paranormal Claims is Frank Zindler at the height of his creative and analytical powers, a skillset honed over six decades of using science and logic to challenge supernatural claims. Using an investigative methodology that utilizes both scientific inquiry and historical analysis, Zindler systematically exposes the paranormal claims in Jay Anson’s 1977 bestseller, The Amityville Horror: A True Story, as a fraud."
—Dustin Lawson
Author of The Ghost of Democracy
and The Firing of Doctor Democracy
What inspired you to author your book?
I had just begun to teach a new course at Fulton-Montgomery Community College (SUNY) called "Science and Its Imitators." As a laboratory course, its purpose was to teach students how to investigate claims of paranormal phenomena. I devote a whole chapter in my memoirs to explaining how and why the research was done and how it was carried out.
Where did you get the inspiration for your book’s cover?
Back in the mid-1980s, after my publishing agreement for “The Amityville Humbug” fell through, I decided to serialize several chapters in the journal American Atheist. Chris Dunne was one of the artists working for the journal and I commissioned him to do a cartoon of the pig-possessed horror house. An artist at GCRR Press adapted it for the wonderful cover design now in print.
Who has been the most significant influence on you personally?
My high school Latin teacher, Mr. John Bridgham, made me a professional linguist. My physics teacher, Mr. Hugh Kahler, and my chemistry teacher, Mr. Donald Harrod, made me a physical scientist. My advanced biology teacher, Miss Mary Kathryn (“Kasey”) Hartz, made me an ecologist and organismal biologist. My childhood music teacher, Mrs. Ruby Glover-Cady, made me a professional musician and composer. My American Literature teacher, Miss Mary-Louise Williams, made me a writer, debater, and public speaker. I devote a major chapter to her influence in my memoirs, Confessions of a Born-Again Atheist.
What were the obstacles you had to overcome to get this book written?
The research began as an example in method for the students in my new course “Science and Its Imitators.” When Ed and Lorraine Warren (a demonologist and light-trance medium, respectively) visited my college campus in order to publicize the Amityville horror story, I just had to deliver a lecture entitled, “The Amityville Folly.” In collecting evidence for that lecture, I had accumulated almost enough material for a book.
I contacted the editor of a major publishing house that specialized in free-thought and skeptical books. On the phone, he asked if I could quickly write a book on my research. I said that if I were to buy the 500-page court transcript of a fraud trial held in Brooklyn, I would doubtlessly have enough material for a book. He said he’d reimburse me $500 for the transcript and would send me a publisher’s advance along with the contract. He wanted me to write “in a popular, journalistic style,” and I had to work secretly and rapidly in order to scoop the new owners of the haunted house because he suspected they were going to write a debunking book of their own.
I was supposed to teach a mini-course in biology during the long Christmas-New Years holiday. Giving up the $800 take-home I would have received after teaching the course, I passed it on to a friend. I obtained the court transcript and wrote feverishly and fast. Periodically, I tried to reach the publisher by phone, but he was always in a meeting, out of town, or out of the country. Finally, when I did reach him, he feigned ignorance and said he never made publishing offers on the phone. He didn’t know who I was or what I might be talking about! I was out $1,300 of my own money and had two-thirds of the book completed.
I threw all of the manuscript, interview notes, polygraph test results, clippings, and time-line charts into a large cardboard box. There they remained unseen for forty years. In 2019, I packed seventy-nine large totes with books, papers, unpublished manuscripts, records for American Atheist Press, digital media, memorabilia, and atheist ephemera and newsletters to take to the Charles E. Stevens American Atheist Library & Archives in Cranford, NJ. One of the totes contained the un-opened box containing the Amityville material. I decided to open it and was astounded to see once again how much work I had done. I even had access to the auction catalog from the sale held to dispose the Lutz belongings after they had “fled” the haunted house! I decided that I couldn’t let all that fall into oblivion. I put the tote aside and didn’t ship it to Cranford. I thought I would at least finish the book and publish it as an e-book.
Shortly after that, my memoirs came out. I sent a copy of it to one of my best friends, the anthropologist Dr. Jack David Eller. He read the page in the last chapter in which I told of the unfinished book. He showed it to his current editor, Dr. Darren Slade, who reportedly expressed interest in the book. Communications with Dr. Slade led to the publication of The Amityville Horror: An Inquest into Paranormal Claims by GCRR Press.
"Why a book today on a decades-old 'true' supernatural story? First, the original 1977 account has continued to spawn movies as late as 2017. Second, Americans remain susceptible to 'alternative facts,' baloney, and bald-faced lies. In a series of meticulous and short readable chapters analyzing each day of the alleged events, Zindler deftly debunks the Amityville myth. Yet if anything, the abundance of such hoaxes and the nefarious branding of inconvenient facts as hoaxes by certain parties has further eroded the very notion of truth and demonstrated the peril of gullibility and credulity. In this way, Zindler’s project is as timely as ever."
—Jack David Eller, PhD
Author of Trump and Political Theology and Introducing Anthropology of Religion
Who is your target audience, and why?
The book is especially geared for those who saw the movie or read the book Amityville Horror: A True Story and knew it had to be a fabrication but have had no way to prove that their critical instincts were correct.
If you were going to give one reason for anyone looking at your book to read, why should they buy it?
Everyone should read this book if, after reading The Amityville Horror: A True Story or seeing the movie, they had even the twinge of a worry that there might be some truth in the story.
What do you consider your greatest success in life?
There are three things of which I am most proud:
Despite over fifty threats of death received during a long life from religious opponents of science, separation of church and state, and the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community, I have continued to fight publicly for freedom and reason.
I think I have finally discovered a method for studying the origins of Christianity without needing a Historical Jesus. My article, “A New Paradigm for the Study of Christian Origins: Replacing the Dendritic Model,” was recently published SHERM Journal. It describes my method in considerable detail.
While yet nineteen years old, I was the first person to argue publicly for an “RNA World” that must have preceded the DNA world that had just come to light during the 1950s
What one unique thing sets you apart from other writers in your genre?
I’m still alive. Seriously, all the famous “debunkers” of the twentieth century are no longer living. The only exception is Michael Shermer, director of The Skeptics Society. Although he has dealt with The Amityville Horror, he had no opportunity to do the on-site research that I did back in 1979 and thus could not be as exhaustive in his debunking.
Tell your readers anything else you want to share.
I am worried that I might outlive the Constitution of the United States.
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