Here I was, wondering what to write about, when I asked my wife if she would like to see the Amityville Horror house in the flesh? It was a warm day and there wasn't much to do, which is unusual for us, so we decided to take the ride. There is one thing that you should know, a few things have been done to hide this house. I can't blame the owners, after all, they must get a constant stream of sight seers. Before we left I decided to do my home work. I knew that the house numbers were all mixed up in the area of where the house was. I also knew that the house had work done on it so it looked different. I decided to take a photo with me of the house as it looks now. It wasn't hard to find one, they are right there on the internet. There were photos of how the house used to look and how it looked now.

Unfortunately a small tree seemed to always be in the way. The front entrance is on the driveway side.

I put the address into Mapquest and got great directions. The ride is mostly on the highway from my home with about 10 minutes of street driving. Amityville is a town on the southern part of Long Island. The town itself is very picturesque with the town center being jammed with traffic and hardly anywhere to park. I decided to get some photographs of the town. I had just bought a new camera, the Canon SD500 and was anxious to try it out. It is tiny, yet powerful, being 7.1 megapixels with a 12X total zoom. I figured this would be great for enlarging photos and giving me a more detailed photograph of the house. The town is very quaint and the stores are busy.

The town of Amityville, NY

We got back into the car and drove the last 5 minutes and started to look for the house. I passed a house that I thought might be it and it had no address on it. Better than that, there was a car with a New York Inspection Sticker on the windshield but no front plate, in the driveway. I decided to keep going and see if any other homes on this street fit the bill. As I was riding along, a car with some young people stopped and asked me if I knew where the Amityville Horror house was. I laughed and told them that I was also looking for it and was about to head back to the house where I saw the car without a plate. They followed me.

One thing about the horror house that is distinctive is the roof. When you look at it from the side, it's sort of like a barn roof in that it folds down in three angles, not triangular like most roofs. A young girl of about 17 walked over to me from the car that had followed me and said to me and my wife that she wouldn't live in that house no matter what she got it for. This is not an ordinary house folks. We are talking about a very large home that has a canal in the rear and is in a neighborhood where all the homes must be worth millions.

I fumbled with my new camera case and took out my camera and began to take photos. This was definitely the house, it matched the photo that I had brought with me. The things that settled this in my mind were the distinctive roof, the pattern of the railings on the second floor and the addition that had been added to the side of the house facing the road. As I took the photos I tried to get the windows. I had this strange idea that maybe I might get lucky and get some weird photo. My young friends from the car behind me were busy with their video camera. I snapped several photos and wished that I could get photos of the back of the house or even better ones of the side, but I didn't want to trespass. Some of the neighbors saw me and they looked a little annoyed. I guess I can't blame them, they must be sick of people coming over here. Then someone came out of the house and slowly walked down the driveway. I figured it was time to go and I left.

I got a few blocks and realized that I had lost my spare camera battery. These batteries are expensive, so as much as I hated to do it, I went back to the house. My young friends were still there video taping, so I guess no one gave them a hard time. When I got out of the car and started looking on the ground for the battery they helped. Just then, my wife who was still in the car, blew the horn. She found the battery in the car. I had went back for nothing. Oh well it was time to go home.

Something caused me to reexamine the photos again and to my surprise I saw something unusual in one of them. It only appeared in one photo even though I had taken several of the same view from the same spot. Below is the photo:

Look at the top right window pane. Notice what appears to be face like? I can guarantee you that this photo was not retouched and is exactly as it came out of my camera except it has been enlarged. Why is it this never came out on other photos of the same view taken with the same camera, from the same place at the same time?

The image on the left is an even more extreme close up of the strange image and the image on the right is the same image in a negative view.

The next thing I did was to do a horizontal flip on the extreme close up photo using IrfanView a good free graphic program. To my surprise the photo now looked like a little girl with long hair over her shoulder. Well this is what it looks like to me anyway. Well so much for my trip to Amityville.