The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (30 page)

The following week, the producers found a lookalike house in the Hamptons. It had been built according to the same model as 112. They agreed to pay the few thousand to rent it for a day, and that’s where we filmed me at the Amityville house. I didn’t have a problem with that. None of us wanted to cross the threshold any more than the next person did. The spirit still stirred. One of the crew voiced concerns that, if we faked this part of the documentary, it might call into question the other parts we taped. I understood his concern, but I didn’t want to subject anyone to the spirit living inside that house. Plus, I had a feeling I’d be returning to it.

Days later, the post-production supervisor for the special, a hearty soul named Emyr Graciano, called me. You could put Emyr in the middle of a graveyard and he’d yawn.
He’s respectful of people like me but doesn’t buy any of it. While working on the tapes, he said, he’d repeatedly encountered a certain technical problem that he couldn’t fix. He wouldn’t tell me what it was—only that his efforts to solve it were coming up short, and he was annoyed, because usually there weren’t any glitches he couldn’t resolve. He’d called Jude Weng, the producer, and said, tentatively, “Maybe Jackie can help out.” It was his way of acknowledging what he didn’t want to acknowledge.

I called Emyr. “You’re going to laugh at this or think it’s crazy,” I told him, “but you need to take a photo of me and put it beside whatever machine is breaking down. Then get a big black candle, not a white one, and light it. Don’t blow it out. Let it burn all the way down.”

He laughed, as I expected him to. But he went and did it. He texted Jude an image of my photo taped next to a machine called the unity—it’s the machine that holds all the footage—and a black candle burning beside it.

I called him later that evening. He said the problem had been rectified but only temporarily. I was surprised. I asked what had happened.

“After I did what you told me to,” Emyr said, “the unit was working fine again.” He sounded nervous.

“So?”

“Then this assistant editor was heading out to lunch, and he blew out the candle. The fucking thing crashed again.”

The feeling of holding a wicked spirit inside you isn’t
that different from having the flu. It comes down to a battle between your own internal resources and an alien entity that has found its way in. There are, in most cases, two important similarities between the flu bug and the spirit of the devil. First, both go blindly, and constantly, in search of a host. They hunt again and again for targets, infiltrating any candidate who displays the right degree of weakness. Second, both enter their hosts uninvited and unknown. With a flu, the person afflicted only realizes it once his or her symptoms appear. With the spirit of the demon, most never realize it at all.

Since early in my life, I had held spirits inside me, passed them from one side to the other, communed with the dead and the cursed. I had stood by my mother’s side as her special conduit, the child who stood out not by throwing a ball the farthest or looking the prettiest in a
dress but because of her ability to liaise with both sides of the spiritual world. Sometimes I had contained them for seconds, sometimes minutes. They passed through me like lava: slow, powerful rivers of fire that surged and bubbled, cramming the space available to them and settling temporarily until melting away into a different place.

Most of the time, I had opened myself by design, admitting the spirits willingly. I was doing right by someone, helping people connect to something lost or to understand something never understood. Once helped, they were gone from my life, and I was gone from theirs. And the spirits, having passed through, would retreat, vanishing again to the mysterious realm they occupied.

This time, I had invited a spirit more hostile than any to which I’d ever offered a temporary home before. I had taken from Ronnie the poison within him, welcomed it fully. Now it was in me. Some people are more susceptible than others to venomous spirits. I had spent my life oddly impervious, a way station that showed the countless marks of its visitors but that still stood strong. Now the inner wall I had built up over the years started showing cracks. I was a fortress holding something in while at the same time holding it back. If I didn’t do something about it, the walls would soon crumble.

Following the visit to Green Haven, my calls with Ronnie resumed as normal. They were occupied mostly by his rambling agitatedly and my trying to interject with questions that would keep him more or less on track. His stories were like nonlinear films that jump back and forth, repeating certain scenes, providing one important bit of
information here and then, much later, another bit that you eventually figure out is related to the first. It had gone this way for months, the enigma revealing itself slowly and erratically, until the true mission became clear to me. There was only one path toward closing the circle, and it involved two acts. One would have to be done by Ronnie, the other by me.

But before that, I had to put something in its proper place. It was midmorning when Ronnie called, as predictably as the sun. And for the first time, I stopped the conversation before it even had a chance to start, telling him he’d have to call back later in the day. At first he was stunned; then, following a pause, he asked me why.

“There’s something I have to do,” I told him.

Ronald DeFeo Sr.’s
grave, part of the family plot Ronnie spoke of, sits in Saint Charles Cemetery, an unassuming burial ground just north of Amityville. Will drove me there on a warm day at the beginning of September. I’d woken up in a cold sweat the night before, the result of a memory I’d tried to forget pushing its way to the surface: my mother standing at her altar, Christ on one side, Lucifer on the other, a line drawn down the middle and covered with coins. The give-and-take. I was sweating, as I had been since leaving Green Haven, and coughing great heaving coughs.

I pulled the small velvet pouch from my pocket and stared at the headstone. Without taking my gaze from the name Ronald DeFeo Sr., I reached into the pouch and
pulled out the Indian-head coin a demented father had given to his untamed son nearly four decades before.

Say less and do more, Jackie,
my mother would tell me.
Communicate with your actions.

This wasn’t a peace offering, nor was it an attempt to soothe. Quite the opposite. The Indian-head coin was a symbol. Returning it to Ronald DeFeo on behalf of his ill-fated namesake was a statement, the first strike in what I hoped would be the final showdown. Ronald DeFeo couldn’t be brought back to this world to be dealt with by his son, but perhaps the dark spirit that had ruled his soul could be incited. I was provoking the bully deliberately. I was trying to fling open the gate and have at it.

It roiled inside me as the headstone doubled and tripled in my vision. My head throbbed and my muscles cried, but I stood, as stalwart as I could be. Rocks were piled on top of Ronald’s grave, along with those of the other DeFeos. In some religions, rocks are meant to keep the spirit at peace; in others, to hold them down.

I noticed, along the top of Ronald’s headstone, someone had lined up six pennies: three heads up, three heads down, the eternal balance simply expressed. Will stood nearby, watching me closely. He would tell me later that I had not in fact been as steady as I thought. I had been swaying, he would say. He spent the entire time worrying that I was going to faint and preparing to catch me and take me home. As far as he was concerned, it would be fine to just put me in bed and keep me there until I got better. My sweet, practical Will.

As we’d approached the cemetery, something had
forced me to get out of the car while it was still moving. Will had slowed down driving along the inner roads, and the car was going at a crawl, but in motion nonetheless. The darkness inside me, concentrated already, was intensifying, making me feel like a prisoner in the seat, as though the windows and doors were being sealed. Before either Will or I were aware of the fact, I had opened the door and walked out, somehow without falling or getting injured. Will had yelled after me while driving with one hand and leaning over to close the open door with the other. I had ignored him, walking forward. Though I had never visited the DeFeo family plot, I knew I was heading directly for it.

Now I knelt at Ronald DeFeo’s tombstone and removed the rocks and pennies piled atop it. Our interaction needed to be clean. The entity was black inside me, ink seeping through the ocean of my soul. I began chanting an old ritual of protection, but I could feel myself flying away and couldn’t stop it. Dim images started to make their collective assault. Joanne, that day on the canal, standing on the dock and waving at me, smiling, as an icy wind traveled quickly through all of us and across the water. Ronnie in the master bedroom of 112 Ocean Avenue, buckshot flying, deafening sounds, blood. Screaming, crying. More blood, inside the rims of perfect black circles, themselves inside surfaces of otherwise undamaged skin.

I closed my eyes. I was hanging on to the tombstone, holding it off. The entity beside my mother as she lay in bed in the Surf Hotel. The house at 112. Joanne on the dock. The hotel again. The blood and the screaming. I
let my arm slide off the tombstone. In the dirt beside it, I began feverishly to dig. The evil spirit would not overpower me. Not today.

The hole dug deep, I placed the coin at the bottom. But I didn’t start filling the dirt back in yet. I had dug the hole extra deep because there was something else I wanted to bury along with the coin: a medicine bag with recipes of peace and protection. There are no judgments of bad or good in a battle against demons. Either everyone defeats it or everyone becomes its lawful prey. The goal wasn’t to forgive Ronald DeFeo Sr. his sins; it was to keep his soul at bay.

I struggled to come back into my body. This act is seldom conscious, but, as one occasionally will have the presence to do in a horrifying dream, I was trying to will myself back. Or out. I was one spirit fighting among the dark souls of an entire family. It was the one place Ronnie feared most, not because of what it represented but because of who he knew he’d meet there.

Tremors shook my insides. Steadfastly I poured dirt into that hole. The coin was covered, but still I filled it in, filled it in faster and faster until sweat and tears mixed together and dripped from my jaw. I reached up and held on to the tombstone again with one hand, the other pushing dirt into the hole and tamping it down. My breaths came harder and faster. Tiny insects buzzed around me—gnats, or baby flies. A sprinkler clicked to life and started shooting water in circular arcs over a nearby plot.

The coin was buried. The images had begun to recede, and I could feel myself returning. In a different plot, to
my east, a caretaker was planting flowers at a grave. I stood up and, with a bit of renewed strength, approached him. He looked up at me, saying nothing. I asked him if I could have some of his flowers.

“For who?” he asked.

“For my mother,” I said.

He stumbled backward and dropped the flowers, a look of shock and repulsion on his face. He kept looking at me in fright while trying to scramble backward on his hands and feet.

“Take them!” he said. “Take the flowers! Leave me alone!”

He was looking past me, over my shoulder, toward Will. The man looked as though he feared for his life. When I reached out to help him, he covered his face and started to sob and pray at the same time.

“Please,” he said. “Get away from me. Take your black eyes and just get away.”

My eyes have always been my most distinct feature. They’re light blue.

I turned away from the caretaker and staggered across the DeFeo plot toward the fuzzy shape of Will. Delirious, I collapsed into his arms.

The next thing I knew I was back in the car demanding that Will give me the phone. He had his palm on top of my hand and was urging me to just calm down and rest. I jerked my hand away and reached into his pocket, grabbing for the phone.

“Hold on,” he said. “I’ll get it.” He handed it to me and I called home. There was no answer.

I tried Joanne’s cell phone. Nothing.

I tried the business line and got only the outgoing message.

I told Will to drive faster.

It was now, suddenly, that I understood. The demon wasn’t after me. He was after my daughter.

He knew, by now, that I was resilient. I had faced it at the Surf Hotel—a dark entity telling me we shall meet again. I saw my mother carted away with nothing original left inside her, and I knew then a warrior doesn’t become a warrior without bloodshed. He’d watched me rise from the depths again and again, from the time I was small, building my strength.

But Joanne was the weaker of us, the more vulnerable. He had waited for the right opportunity and claimed my mother. He knew he couldn’t get me. Now he wanted Joanne.

You can’t run from it, Jackie, any more than you can change who you are. You have a skill and a duty. It’s part of you.

Joanne, the only one not touched by evil, would be a prize indeed. If I let my soul be overtaken, the devil’s path to her would be unencumbered. It was time to put the other spirits to rest and fight the true war.