Authors: Jackie Barrett
I reached out and took his hands. The guards clutched their guns a little tighter.
“Ronnie,” I said, “I’m going to let your spirit come into me and mine into you. But you need to let yourself go.”
He squeezed. I closed my eyes and immediately felt a jolt, as though my body had been plugged into a battery. I surged with a foreign energy as my spirit flew away, allowing room for something else.
I felt a sensation of intense heat from my feet upward, like running across hot sand. It skimmed through me like a broken current, flaring one moment, dying the next, but eventually spreading its way across the entire circuitry. Psychic energy is like water following a sluice. It will fill the channel it can find. The strength with which it rushes in depends on both the size of the opening and the degree to which it was pinched before.
Voices came into my head, low at first and then wild, like the sound of a siren starting at a distance but quickly becoming a bone-rattling wail. I couldn’t tell how many voices there were. They shouted over each other, livid,
feral. My insides started to throb with the effort to contain this ferocity, but I held it. The spirit thrashed inside me, an animalistic force let loose. The voices climbed.
There were moments when the energy abated, breaks in the current, before it would course through me again. One wave would burst forth, the voices delirious, the heat intense, and then, like a wave exploding against the shore, pause briefly before the next one followed. I held on, calling upon all of my strength to give it temporary shelter.
And then Ronnie and I were standing together at the front door of 112 Ocean Avenue. From inside the house I heard growls. Before my eyes, grisly images swirled, forming an appalling mosaic. Eyes appeared as dark pools. Teeth, blackened and stained. The ground opened and we fell, plummeting down a hole with no bottom. My father’s words rang in my ears, echoing the warden’s:
Don’t show fear, Jackie. Strength will always be in your heart.
I grabbed Ronnie’s hand and held it tightly as we endlessly fell. Voices screamed, six or seven of them at once. In Green Haven, my eyes opened and fixed on the cross dangling from Ronnie’s solid gold necklace. In possession, this cross plunged from the sky on a silver chain. Then, in reality, the cross rose above the chain, as though lifted by an unseen hand, and detached itself violently, tumbling downward and landing on the desk with a sound as loud as a car crash.
Ronnie was a conduit with no memory; he was merely a hapless channel. If the spirit wants more, it will continue to use the conduit like a parasite hungrily attached to its host.
I came back, him alongside me. We were still in the
strangely prosaic visiting room of a maximum-security prison, separated by the two-foot length of a school desk. I let go of his hands. Ever so slightly, the guards relaxed the grips on their guns. Ronnie looked terrified. He said to me, “I’m so sorry. Jackie, if I die right here and now, I’ll die knowing I’m human. I know I’m still inside somewhere. Thank you.” Later, he would tell me that he’d seen my face change. “I’m scared I’ll lose this feeling,” he said. “I saw hate in your eyes. My hate. What happened? Did we trade places?”
“It’s a common feeling,” I told him. “You feel like you’re falling backward. Try not to worry. It’s going to be fine. We’re on a mission, Ronnie,” I said. I knew now what had to be done. He begged me to help him be free of what was inside him. He’d had visions of someone who looked like me, he said. He told me I held the keys to hell. Well, I said, I suppose you’re right.
I’d felt the chaos in Ronnie, and I had shared with him the peace inside me—peace, or, by another name,
amity
—so he could feel it, hold on to it while I pulled from him, and temporarily housed, the sinister essence.
His eyes welled up, and he begged me again to free him of the dark weight holding him prisoner. I had him sign the release form allowing the cameras to start rolling. But the crew wanted to film Ronnie in his cell. I began to stand up from the desk, but as I did, Ronnie said, “You know, Jackie, if I ever get out, the first thing I’m going to get is a big-screen TV.”
It was no longer his voice. It was a more sinister one, coming through from a different place.
“And then I’m going to get a French red-leather couch,
plus a bear rug with all of the claws still intact. Don’t you think that would be nice?”
I stood silent. He was describing my living room. I’d never sent Ronnie any pictures of my house or my things. I’d kept that part of my life completely off-limits to him. Or so I’d thought. The devil, with his shiny hair and black eyes, was grinning at me now through Ronnie, turning his face back into the one I’d seen for an instant when he’d first walked into the room.
I turned away quickly and nodded toward Warden Lee. The guards cuffed Ronnie’s hands again and led him across the room toward the steel doors. As he walked toward the door and out of the room, I could hear a song coming out of him in a soft whistle: “I Remember You.” The song my mother used to sing to me.
I wasn’t allowed to leave until Ronnie was secured again in his cell. As I waited, the air in the room became thick, and a smell of rotting meat emerged. Bile rose in my mouth as the smell of old blood and decaying bodies saturated the space. The guards twisted up their noses, as did the warden. The stench of decay can quickly transform the toughest of people into shrinking children. I didn’t know whether Ronnie had been secured in his cell or not, but Warden Lee abruptly gave authorization to release me.
I was directed through another mini maze of passageways and steel doors and placed in a holding cell with steel blue walls, which felt more like a cage than a room. I looked up at the clock, which read 11:15
A.M.
One guard after another passed by, paying me no attention. I felt anxious and claustrophobic. The toxic spirit had entered
me. It was seeking channels to fill. From this moment on, time would be vital.
I looked up and saw, peering through the window of a door, staring at me, Father Fernando. His hands were resting on a black pushcart, and his collar was hanging unevenly from his habit. As I caught his gaze, he looked away, fixed his collar, and cleared his throat. He was then buzzed into a different cell. Different guards passed back and forth in front of the cell and whispered to each other while sneaking glances at me.
Forty-five minutes later, the door opened, and the warden came to escort me, along with the crew, out of Green Haven. I would learn later that the camera batteries, which should have been good for ten to fourteen hours, had kept running out of juice, so they’d stopped and started multiple times. It was reminiscent of the way Adam’s air tank had depleted itself so quickly on the canal.
But before leaving, the crew wanted to take some shots of me and Ronnie together. I was taken back in, and Ronnie and I were photographed in a room using a backdrop of flowers for the special. It would give things a slightly less menacing feel, the crew said. Those were the only flowers Ronnie had seen since being sent to prison. Other than the inmates, there’s nothing alive in prison. Even using the term
alive
for some of them isn’t quite right. Many are more like the walking dead.
Ronnie had repeated his story of the murders for the cameras just as he’d told it to me a few days before. When the special aired a few months later, some people would see a sixty-year-old man finally coming clean about his
sins after years of fabrication. Others would see a permanently stunted sociopath continuing to twist the story at his whim. I would see what I’d seen from the beginning: a man whose soul was still in the grips of evil.
I went back through the broader maze the way I’d come in, the enclosures and entryways this time widening with each individual passage until I emerged into the normal world again, Will and his gentle strength holding me up. As we walked outside, a swarm of bees, to which I’m allergic, surrounded me. Will and the crew members were trying to swat them away while hurrying me to the van for safety. Though the day was warm, I was freezing inside. They found sweaters and blankets to cover me with. I knew the real Jackie was inside somewhere, but for now she was missing. You have to pass through the darkness to reach the light.
There was one
more thing we had to do for the special, my producers told me. They had to film me going through the house at 112 Ocean Avenue—or at least a comparable-looking imitation, since it was unlikely we’d get permission to shoot inside—and reporting on what I felt or saw. I agreed, though to be honest, I wasn’t sure what I’d gotten myself into.
The four-thousand-square-foot Dutch Colonial at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville had, like any house, experienced its own history. The land had once been owned by the Coleman family (ancestors of the ones who’d lived next door to the DeFeos), and in 1924, that family had sold the quarter acre to John and Catherine Moynahan, who built the house
at 112 the following year. When John and Catherine died, their daughter Eileen had moved in with her family and lived there until October 1960, when another John—Riley—purchased the house with his wife, Mary. Ronald DeFeo Sr. had purchased it in July of 1964 from the Rileys.
After the Lutzes had moved in, and then back out, the house had changed hands numerous times. First they’d handed it back to Columbia Savings and Loan without ever making a mortgage payment. In March 1977, it was purchased from the bank by Jim and Barbara Cromarty, who changed the address to 108 to dissuade the constant hordes of tourists.
On August 17, 1987, Peter and Jeanne O’Neil purchased the house from the Cromartys. During their stay, they changed the famed eyeshaped windows to square ones and filled in the pool. Peter died on 9/11. In 1997, a man named Brian Wilson—not the Beach Boy—bought the house for just over $300,000 and renovated it. Thirteen years after that, the infamous property on Ocean Avenue was put on the market for $1.15 million and sold a few months later for just under asking.
As suspected, we didn’t get permission to film inside the house, but outside would be fair game. The crew decided it would be best to shoot whatever parts we could manage on the outside property and then find a decent replica to reenact the inside elements for the A&E special.
As I approached the house, I remembered a conversation I’d had with Ronnie a few months earlier. He’d just been released from the prison’s medical ward after undergoing biopsies on his lungs. He was having trouble
breathing again—but that wasn’t what sounded different about him. There was something brewing in his voice. I asked him what was going on.
“Nothing,” he said.
I told him not to lie to me. I’d spot the lie before it even exited his mouth. He told me he was indeed cooking something up. He was on borrowed time, he told me, and it was time to put an end to it all. This time, he wasn’t talking about himself. He was talking about this house.
“I can run fast even in shackles, you know,” he said. I asked him what the hell he was talking about. And he told me. Ronnie DeFeo always rode the prison bus alone. He was never allowed to travel with other inmates. He would be chained to the back of the bus with a handful of armed guards watching over him. But he could do it, he said. Take them all out, get control of the bus, and then run the thing right into his former house. Evil lived in those walls, he said, and they shouldn’t continue to stand. His plan wasn’t to run for freedom; it was merely to end the nights of torture and fear. He was resigned to his place in hell, he said. They might as well all go together.
I had talked him out of it then, but as I walked toward the house now, I again felt the anger and sadness that had pushed through the phone that day rippling around me. And as I looked up at the windows, there was Ronnie, in his army jacket, staring down at me. In the other window was my mother, slashes across her face, waving me back. She was yelling something I couldn’t hear, but I could see frost coming from her mouth, coating the window glass.
Scott, the lead cameraman, was halfway up the driveway
in his jeep. Suddenly he slammed on the brakes, yanked his hands off the wheel, and shouted something none of us could understand. I ran over to him, asking what had happened.
“I hit a kid!” he yelled. “I hit a kid!”
I rushed around to the front of the jeep. There was no one there. I looked underneath. Nothing.
“What are you talking about? There’s no kid there. You didn’t hit anything.”
Scott jumped out of the jeep and looked in the same spots I had. “But…I saw him. A little kid. A boy.”
A moment later, one of the other crew members, who had approached the side entrance of the house, burst across the lawn, looking as pale as a ghost. He collapsed onto the curb mumbling words that didn’t make sense. Within a few minutes, we calmed him and asked what was wrong. While he’d been scouting around the perimeter for camera angles, he said, a high-pitched, bloodcurdling shriek had startled him, and after that, all his senses had seemed to cave in, like he was in a black hole. He didn’t know where the scream had come from, but it was as though it had suddenly sealed him off from himself. He started to feel disoriented, then dizzy, and that’s when he had simply run. That’s what we do when faced with energies we don’t recognize or understand, isn’t it? We run.
We told him everything was going to be okay. He wasn’t having it. He asked to leave, stumbling as he tried to get up from the curb and make his way back to the truck.
Most of the others were refusing to enter the grounds of 112 at this point, but a few were still keen. One of
them, Alicia, was telling the rest of us we were nuts, and that we needed to just do the job at hand and then get going. She stayed firm in this opinion until she stood on a spot near the doorstep, because that was the moment she felt the spirit of her uncle, who had passed years before, sweeping through her. To say she freaked would be understating the fact. I don’t think a million dollars would have persuaded her out of the truck after that.
Being in the environment of a house like that is like standing at the edge of a volcano that erupted long ago but continues to smolder: the toxic stuff continues to leak. As people continued seeing and hearing things that spooked them and equipment began to break down, including cell phones dying—not losing reception, dying—we all looked at each other and said it with our eyes: screw it. We bolted.