The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (5 page)

And then he mentioned the Surf Hotel.

Most children are
taught to read and write, ride a bike, throw a ball, do fractions. Not me. My parents’ interests for me lay outside most children’s scope of the normal.

Mary recognized my abilities as early as I did. She would watch me paying close attention to the stream of socialites and entertainers who flocked to our back door hoping to be assured of fame and fortune. By the time I was five, she saw my gift, and she would have me participate in her séances, eventually assigning me the role of medium. But the responsibility came with stern warnings. This was not child’s play; it was serious business. There is no God without the devil, she would tell me. You can’t be on both sides.

It wasn’t long before she and I both realized that my powers surpassed even hers. I was able to do something other mediums couldn’t: I could absorb and pass along the spirit of the dead into the person yearning for connection. I was able, for a period, to become the person whom the other had lost. My mother made me her partner before I knew how to tie my shoes. I was able to witness her grimmest rites and the severity with which she warned people not to treat the spirits lightly.

One day, when I was ten, I heard a solemn hymn begin to flow through the house. I knew a ritual had begun. Mary, dressed completely in black, left through the back door and drove down the road.

Half an hour later, she returned, her face thoroughly bandaged, barely visible through the black veil. She wore
small black gloves and carried a straw suitcase. Tears were rolling down her cheeks.

My grandmother opened the back door. “Joanie,” she called to my mother. “Please come in.” I didn’t understand why she’d called her by a different name. She made tea and sat at the table, trying to offer words of comfort to the woman who, I now saw, my mother had become. It’s going to be okay, my grandmother said. I sat there, quietly, and observed. A few days before, Mary had traveled to meet with a woman, Joanie, looking to escape an abusive marriage. And now she had turned into her.

My mother looked up at me, though it wasn’t her face. Out of her mouth, in an uncharacteristically soft tone, came the words, “Who is this sweet child?” Then she began to remove the bandages, and I sat horrified. Her face was a map of black and blue, and her nose looked like it had decided to follow a different direction halfway down.

I knew what it meant. Mary had absorbed the woman utterly, in order to try to free her. She had taken on her pain with as much fullness as she could handle. The tears continued to roll, my grandmother continued to soothe, and I continued to watch, saying nothing.

Four days later, a headline on the front page of the newspaper reported a terrible car accident. The woman’s husband was the victim. My mother, again returned to herself, read the story over her morning coffee with my grandmother. “Silly man,” she said, shaking her head.
“Too bad nothing was left of the body. We could have done his wake, too.” They shared a laugh.

On November 12, 1974,
a séance was held in my house in Nola, and I, at the appointment of my mother, was the medium. She had been preparing for several days—placing candles on the altar, blessing the tablecloth in a ritual of music and dance, and preparing offerings for the spirit like liquor, cigars, coffee, money, and fruit. I had my own way of preparing: listening to Jim Morrison.

For a few nights before the séance, I couldn’t sleep. News of my talents had spread quickly, and many people had come to our door curious about the young medium with the power to conduct the dead. But it wasn’t the pressure of my odd rising stardom that was keeping me up. It was the nightmares.

I would constantly feel myself running from a creature that made hideous animal sounds. I would run down a series of endless steps toward a constantly receding hiding place, the wind stinging my face as I struggled to reach it. The ground shifted from concrete to mud to sand, and with every step I felt myself sinking as the creature gained. Soon I could feel a claw swiping at my legs, accompanied by the sound of howls coming from faces that were nearby but shrouded.

Finally, I would reach the shelter, a windowless space with the sensation of a tomb. Through the thick walls I could still hear the painful moans, which now merged with the animalistic growls that had pursued me.

I crouched in the corner of the room and began to sob. As one will in dreams, I tried to break out of it, wish myself back into reality. But something was pulling me back. I saw myself look up. My face was somewhat my own, but not completely. “Mommy, I’m scared,” I said. I couldn’t know it then, but it wasn’t my face at all. It was Joanne’s.

I tried to leap into the dream from that outside place, tried to break down the walls of logic and consciousness to rescue the crying little girl in the corner of the room. I didn’t reach her, but something else did, and began to drag her down. Down she went, through the floor, into darkness. The last thing I would see was her face vanishing downward, followed by an upward spurt of blood. I screamed.

The nightmares alone were not the source of my anxiety. It was exhausting for a twelve-year-old girl to have to regularly invite, hold, and deliver the spirits of the dead. “It’s your cross to bear, Jackie,” Mary would say. “Learn both sides of the Bible. Those who want and those who need.”

The sensation is hard to describe. Plus, I was only starting to become familiar with it. The spirit would enter me like a sudden wind, a kind of rush containing the adrenaline but not the pleasure. A flip-book of snapshots would roll through my head, a lightning series of images of a life I didn’t know.

At some point—I couldn’t predict whether it would be quick or slow—I would experience their deaths. To be their proper conduit, I needed to open myself fully. I would face their last moments, suffer their last breaths. If
it had been a murder, I became both victim and killer, feeling fear and bloodlust together.

I was a powerhouse of energy, sometimes conducting energy among three people at once. When the spirit had been fully taken in, it could then be released and passed along. I would have answers, and the spirit would have solace. Hopefully.

That night, a family of five quietly filed into the room and took their seats. I didn’t know any of their names, and I preferred it that way. I had learned not to interact any earlier than I had to. It wasn’t yet dark out, but that didn’t matter, since the room had no windows.

I could sense their fear as they passed me. A woman dressed in black handed my mother a picture. With tears in her eyes, she said, “Please, Momma, I need to feel him and see him.” Though I wasn’t allowed to call Mary “Mommy,” she was “Momma” to everyone else.

My mother looked at me and said, “When you’re ready, Jackie. Bring this young man through.” She put the picture down at the head of the table, where I sat, then took her own spot off to the side. She lit three black candles and three white, and I started moving around the room. I picked up the picture. Soon I felt my body leaving as a vision of the woman’s son, who had died from an overdose, visited me. His life had passed too quickly. I was falling now. I went to reach for the boy’s mother. The ground below my feet seemed to disappear. I felt as though I was suspended in air. The family members all got up from their chairs and stumbled into a protective huddle.

My mother stepped between me and the family and commanded the entity, “Leave my child!” The candles lifted and smashed into the wall. I felt myself unable to respond as Jackie. Through the barrier of this other consciousness, I sensed my father trying to open the door of the séance room from the other side. It was splintering inward with his blows but not breaking. And I could feel my mother still standing before me, yelling commands.

I sensed that I was no longer inside my house or the séance room. I had been transported to a darker place, where I was now trying to get my bearings. I saw a wasteland of smoking trees burned to the stumps. Yet it was cold, my breath visible in front of me. I sensed many pairs of eyes peering at me, blurred faces, sobbing. I couldn’t make a sound.

From opposite ends of the billowing smoke, two men walked toward me. One wore a jumpsuit; the other, gleaming-eyed, wore a dark business suit and had his hair slicked back into a short ponytail. He handed the man in the jumpsuit a piece of paper and a pen. I could see their mouths move but couldn’t hear their words. As the man in the jumpsuit turned to walk away, the pen he’d used turned into a shotgun.

I turned, and the bright-eyed man suddenly grabbed me by my throat. “Remember me,” he said. He threw me across the room, and I staggered several times trying to get up. Then he disappeared, and I was in a different room, where everything was upturned and broken. It was a different house, unfamiliar. I grabbed for a banister to right myself, but my hands only slipped off. A streak of
blood stained the banister where my hands had been. The walls began to shake, jarring pictures from their hooks and a chandelier from its mounting.

As the crystals of the chandelier shattered against the floor, I heard laughter from the top of the steps. The man in the jumpsuit was there, yelling down to me.

“You’re too late!” he shouted. “I’ll be back!”

I felt the house was going to cave in. Gun blasts echoed off the walls. I covered my ears, then my eyes. When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the séance, crumpled on the floor. The members of the family were no longer there. They had all run out screaming.

My father ran over and picked me up. I saw my mother standing in the corner of the room, a fevered expression on her face. She was rambling, spouting words I didn’t recognize. My father took me to my room and lay me down in bed.

There was a
room in our house that usually stayed padlocked. It was opened only when Mary felt an exorcism needed to be carried out. The room had a small pull-out bed, lots of religious relics, a large Sicilian Bible, a wooden chair whose straps made it look eerily like an electric chair, and a chalked circle around the bottom of the chair lined with candles, open jars, and mirrors.

I wasn’t supposed to see the exorcisms at that age, but like any child, I was often too curious for my own good. I knew when they happened because the special door would be unlocked, the atmosphere in the house would
change, and my mother would sit alone for hours, preparing.

One day, I sneaked over and watched. A man was brought in, along with a priest and the local doctor. The man was strapped to the chair, terror stamped on his face. My mother, calm but intense, began the rite, chanting, moaning, growing in fervor and volume. This lasted until the following morning, when she finally declared the spirit cast off. I wasn’t frightened by my mother’s behavior or by the presence of the priest and the doctor. What I still carry with me, however, is the terrible look on the man’s face.

Mary knew I had watched. Had probably meant for it to happen. She took me aside the next day. “Respect both sides, Jackie,” she told me. “The dead warrant the same respect as the living.”

As I got older, she insisted that I graduate from séances to exorcisms. Prepare to endure, she would say. The spirit or the demon rushes through you before it is expelled, and you must house that evil. Some of us are vessels; we don’t choose it. Spirituality is a two-sided coin, Jackie. Never forget that. Doors open, and we must choose whether to walk through them.

She died walking through one of those doors. During the storm. Katrina. Both of them, I always said, she and my dad. Both passed in the storm.

At least, that’s what I’ve always told people.

She didn’t, of course.

Sometimes I’m pulled into a situation for reasons I’m
not aware of, and all I can do under such circumstances is arm myself with information. That’s where Joanne comes in. There are people who research because they have to do it for their jobs, and there are people who do it because they love it. Joanne is the second type, and I’m grateful every day.

The energy drawing me toward Ronnie DeFeo was powerful, but it was also frightening, setting me on edge somewhere deep down in my bones. Before I pursued the conversation with him any further, I wanted facts.

Joanne had jumped in with both feet, as she always does. The good news was that there was no shortage of information on the Amityville murders; the bad news was that it was from a great variety of sources, most of them unreliable.

But that’s another thing she’s good at: separating the
wheat from the chaff. Her bullshit meter is at least as keen as mine, if not more so. Much of the information she came across, she discarded immediately. Instead, she assembled as much information as she could that she felt passed the test of trustworthiness, then laid it all out and fused the different parts into the most consistent story she could. It would at least give me some context.

This much seemed clear: Ronnie DeFeo had been a spoiled young man who used drugs regularly and got in trouble often, probably for lack of a better idea. He worked a vague job at the family’s car dealership in Brooklyn, cruised the Amityville River in a personal speedboat his parents had given him, and got abused regularly by his hotheaded father.