Do you guys believe it?

Hell no. (Pardon the pun).

yes

"Touchdoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooown Auburn"

I definitely believe something happened. The public has just gotten so twisted around on this case because things in Jay Anson's book have been proven fabrications, which means nothing. The Lutzes always admitted he embellished their original account for dramatic purposes. His book was never a 100% accurate account, and the Lutzes never claimed it was. Things were added to it, and people need to make the distinction between what was said to have occurred and what Anson exaggerated to sell his book. Because the actual story was not as cinematic, so it makes complete sense that he, as an author, would embellish things to make a better story.

But some facts remain:

- The Lutzes maintained their story (their more subtle story, not the overly dramatic one Anson published) until they died, despite false claims they admitted making it up.

- The Lutz children continue to support the story, despite all being adults no longer under the sway of their parents. One of them had a bad relationship with George and would have no reason to continue lying for him when he could come out and completely discredit the entire thing.

- If nothing happened in the house, the memories the kids have to this day would be the result of coaching by the parents, which sounds ridiculously far-fetched. They are the same memories the Lutz parents shared, so if none of them actually occurred, that means that entire family sat down together and rehearsed this story and the children were compelled to back it up. Not only is this ludicrous, no one can expect children to continue maintaining the lies well into adulthood, especially when the parents are now long gone.

- For the "they made it up because they couldn't afford the house" group, a month's time is not long enough to ruin your finances enough to consider fleeing your house and leaving everything you own behind on the hope a fabricated story about a haunting will eventually pay off. Your finances don't reach an irredeemable level of suckage in 28 days when you were just financially stable enough to buy a house less than a month ago.

- Completely flying in the face of the "financial trouble" crowd, they have proven the Lutzes continued making payments on the house until that following summer, despite not even living in the same state any more. If they were "broke" or "couldn't afford it", how did they continue making payments? If the house never was haunted, you're basically saying they decided they'd rather flee a perfectly fine house they could actually afford all on the long shot that some story they made up and coached their kids on, no less, would take off with the public. Come on, people. This is ridiculous and you know it. If they weren't actually in financial trouble, which I'm guessing they weren't considering they could continue making payments, what on earth was their motive to do all of this and disrupt their lives in such a way?

- The Lutzes left everything they owned behind, which makes the "financial crisis" story even more implausible. People in that dire straits don't just relinquish everything they own when they can sell the stuff. If you claim they did it to make their story more believable, you're saying the Lutzes had no emotional attachment to anything they owned and were just fine letting it all go, which flies in the face of human behavior. If your house went up in a fire, you would be devastated at seeing everything you loved go up in flames.

- The Lutzes both passed lie detector tests, both administered by a top polygraph expert. Polygraphs are not admissable in court, but they do serve as a tool to help investigators narrow down a suspect. It would be difficult to fool one, yet somehow both of them passed.

- No explanation has ever been given for the extremely odd circumstances regarding the DeFeo murders and why no one in the family got out of bed when the shooting began. This doesn't necessarily have to be included with the Lutz story to make it believable, but it does indicate there was already something wrong with the house before they moved in.

- The Lutzes had to move in with Kathy's mother after fleeing the home. If they knew such a stressful living situation was their only backup plan before fleeing, it lends even more credence to the idea something definitely drove them from the house. You don't uproot your family, leave everything behind, and enter into a stressful situation such as that for the crapshoot idea your haunting story will garner any attention.

- Despite what you may believe regarding their morals or credibility, the Warrens backed up their story (and Lorraine continues to do so).

- The original news crew from the time backs up the story that they experienced something as well.

- As for the fact no other family living in the home has had issues, as has already been stated, the house was exorcised (or "cleansed") before another family moved in. Also, according to paranormal experts, not everyone is susceptible to paranormal activity in the first place, and some forces can move and follow the families, which, according to the Lutzes, is exactly what happened when they fled. If the Lutz family was the problem to begin with, it makes sense that no one else would have any issues.

Until someone can address all of these issues with rational explanations, I'll stick with my opinion that something did indeed happen to the Lutz family in that house that winter. Something terrible enough to cause them to flee a nice house they could actually afford and disrupt their lives enough to cause them to flee the state, leaving behind everything they owned. Over the years, authors and movie writers embellished details and things got convoluted, but the original account is what we should focus on.

My personal theory is that George was involved in the occult before moving into the house (this has been backed up by several family members and doesn't get the attention it deserves). Whether or not that secretly had anything to do with motivating him to purchase the home, only George (and maybe Kathy) knew. He never admitted to such a thing, as I imagine he wouldn't. His dabbling in the occult and the internal dynamics of the Lutz family at the time (which weren't good) created the "perfect storm", so to speak, for whatever was in the house to feed on and whatever "it" was, it attached itself to that family and continued to exert an influence even across the country. The surviving children still clearly suffer some psychological issues from the events that took place in 1975-1976. George probably had a lot more to hide than he let on, and from the accounts his children have given, he was not the nice family man he came off as in interviews. I think many things about that period of their lives will never be known and George obviously never took any personal responsibility for the role he might have played in stirring things up.

Bottom line: it's all too much to dismiss.

I'm on the fence. The story has been explored to death and we will never know for sure. I grew up in a house that had some weird stuff happening where people had died etc, so I won't pass judgment on the Lutzes. However, I've never tried to make my experiences into a book or movie either. I've never followed up with the people who lived in my old house since, nor want to.

That all being said, whether you believe it or not, it makes for good legend and ghost stories. And the real house is quite beautiful on the inside, with all subsequent owners living quite peacefully by all accounts.

So who knows....

I think the Putz's, I mean Lutz's, realized they were in over their head with the mortgage payments, property taxes, etc and faked the whole story about the haunting to unload the house and to make money from the book and movie. That's my theory.