“A fascinating and frightening book” (Los Angeles Times)—the bestselling true story about a house possessed by evil spirits, haunted by psychic phenomena almost too terrible to describe. In December 1975, the Lutz family moved into their new home on suburban Long Island. George and Kathleen Lutz knew that, one year earlier, Ronald DeFeo had murdered his parents, brothers, and sisters in the house, but the property—complete with boathouse and swimming pool—and the price had been too good to pass up. Twenty-eight days later, the entire Lutz family fled in terror. This is the spellbinding, shocking true story that gripped the nation about an American dream that turned into a nightmare beyond imagining—“this book will scare the hell out of you” (Kansas City Star).

Was it horror or was it hoax? For years, the question went unanswered while everyone who ever glanced at the tabloids in a supermarket knew about the Amityville Horror -- a house haunted by the remembered evil of mass murder. For 20 years, parapsychologist Stephen Kaplan and his wife Roxanne investigated the phenomenon, keeping a detailed diary of everything that happened. This book is the result of that diary.

In November 1974, 23-year-old Ronnie DeFeo was convicted of murdering his entire family. Decades later, he was haunted by a terrifying demon from his past. But no one wanted to listen. Except one woman. For years, as the legend of the Amityville Horror murders were retold in print and film, DeFeo withdrew, growing more bitter as his twisted celebrity status increased. Then he received a note from Brooklyn psychic Jackie Barrett, saying she had been made aware of his presence by an unknown force. She didn't know if he was guilty, innocent, or insane--but she sensed that he was besieged by a fearsome evil. As Jackie began to talk to Ronnie DeFeo and discover the truth, she realized something startling: She hadn't been guided toward him merely to help him find salvation. There was someone else whose soul needed saving. Someone much closer. Here, in her own words, Jackie Barrett reveals the details of her astonishing relationship with Ronnie DeFeo, and, for the first time, his revelation of what really happened in that terrible night. Includes Photos

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice A comprehensive, authoritative and readable history of the evolution of the ghost in the west, examining the behavior of the subject in its preferred environment: the stories we tell each other. "Roger Clarke tells this [the story that inspired Henry James' The Turn of the Screw] and many other gloriously weird stories with real verve, and also a kind of narrative authority that tends to constrain the skeptical voice within... [An] erudite and richly entertaining book." —New York Times Book Review No matter how rationally we order our lives, few of us are completely immune to the suggestion of the uncanny and the fear of the dark. What explains sightings of ghosts? Why do they fascinate us? What exactly do those who have been haunted see? What did they believe? And what proof is there? Taking us through the key hauntings that have obsessed the world, from the true events that inspired Henry James's classic The Turn of the Screw right up to the present day, Roger Clarke unfolds a story of class conflict, charlatans, and true believers. The cast list includes royalty and prime ministers, Samuel Johnson, John Wesley, Harry Houdini, and Adolf Hitler. The chapters cover everything from religious beliefs to modern developments in neuroscience, the medicine of ghosts, and the technology of ghosthunting. There are haunted WWI submarines, houses so blighted by phantoms they are demolished, a seventeenth-century Ghost Hunter General, and the emergence of the Victorian flash mob, where hundreds would stand outside rumored sites all night waiting to catch sight of a dead face at a window. Written as grippingly as the best ghost fiction, A Natural History of Ghosts takes us on an unforgettable hunt through the most haunted places of the last five hundred years and our longing to believe.