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March 22, 2004

Yet another reason why my

Yet another reason why my friend Chris Czajka is the best storyteller EVER:

So this past Saturday we had a work event which necessitated being up and active at the crack of dawn on beautiful Long Island. Rather than come in to the station and haul everything out on Saturday morning, we decided to leave Friday afternoon and spend the night out there.

Thankfully, early last week, I went on the World Wide Web, the Information Superhighway, and confirmed my suspicions: our Long Island event was taking us dangerously close to a major literary and cinematic landmark. I prepared my boss and assistant for a "must-see" driving adventure on Friday night.

At about 8:30 Friday night, we proceeded down beautiful and scenic Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island. Much to our delight and terror, we drove directly past the three-story Dutch colonial made famous by the AMITYVILLE HORROR! (Actually, we drove by it four times.) To heighten the drama of the situation, I brought along the soundtrack to the film, with its wailing ghosts, and made everyone listen to it. That was probably the scariest thing about the whole night.

Couple things to point out: a) the Amityville Horror house is in a VERY ritzy neighborhood. It is surrounded by very large, very nice houses. And someone has spent a lot of time and cash fixing it up and making it appear very un-haunted. Also, the little half-moon windows have been removed and replaced with less demonic square windows. B) The houses in Amityville are VERY close together. It is REALLY hard to believe that none of the neighbors heard the screams or saw anything odd going on during the supposed haunting. C) Much to my chagrin, I did not see any red glowing modem lights staring out of the upstairs window. D) The only spooky thing. . .and I had read about this in books from the 70s. . .is that the houses on either side have all of their shades/blinds pulled in the windows which face the Horror House. And none of the others.

Also interesting to note is that there were other lunatics very obviously driving down Ocean Avenue to look at the house. . . 30 years after the movie.

We found out the next day that people in the town call the gawkers "Amityville Horribles." Ha.

I did want to knock on the front door and say, "Good evening. I've heard tell that you have a passage to hell in your basement. May I see it?"

But I didn't.

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Posted by nikl at 01:18 PM | Comments (0)