Updates on some Infamous Haunted Properties

DEAR DAVE: Is the house that was the setting for “The Amityville Horror” movie still standing?

ANSWER: Yes, the three-story Dutch Colonial is still standing in the village of Amityville in the southern part of New York’s Long Island.

The Amityville House, of course, is known as the home where 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr. went on his renowned killing spree in 1974 after claiming he was urged to commit the murders of his six family members by disembodied voices.

The really strange stuff, though, supposedly happened when the next owners moved in. The new buyers fled the property just 28 days later, after reporting startling paranormal activities that included beatings by unseen hands, walls that inexplicitly oozed with green slime, and occasional visits from a demon like pig that could grow as large as the house itself.

The resulting movie about their alleged ordeal was released in 1979 and is still considered one of the scariest motion pictures in history.

Subsequent owners have remodeled the property several times over the years, so it looks little like it did when the murders and alleged hauntings occurred in the 1970s. None of those owners have reported any major events that experts would consider paranormal in nature.

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REAL ESTATE TRIVIA: A Gallup Poll conducted a few years ago found that 37 percent of Americans believe that a home can be haunted, compared to the 36 percent who believed that global warming is real.

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DEAR MR. MYERS: Is it true that Jeffrey Dahmer’s former apartment in Wisconsin is haunted?

ANSWER: No. That’s because the entire apartment building where he once lived on North 25th Street in Milwaukee, Wisc., was demolished in 1992 and remains a vacant lot.

Known as the “Milwaukee Cannibal” or the “Milwaukee Monster,” Dahmer pleaded guilty in 1992 to having killed at least 17 boys and young men over a 13-year span that started in 1978. He admitted that he was fond of eating various body parts of his victims or storing their organs and skulls in his freezer to snack on them later.

Dahmer was beaten to death by another inmate in a Wisconsin prison in 1994.

Though the vacant lot where Dahmer’s rental apartment once stood hasn’t had many reports of “hauntings,” the dormitory building where he rented a room while he briefly attended Ohio State University has.

Current students and university alumni tell tales of a ghostly figure—looking much like the handsome young man that Dahmer was in college—lurking about OSU’s Morrill Tower dorms where Dahmer once lived.

One student even swore that he saw Dahmer’s ghost walking down the dorm’s hallway, “Eating a pumping, bleeding heart in his hand, just like he was eating a slice of pizza.”

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DEAR MR. MYERS: Does Ted Bundy haunt the Florida prison where he was put to death?

ANSWER: Some current prisoners and even correctional officers at the facility say “yes.”

Bundy admitted to brutally killing at least 30 women in a five-year, cross-country spree shortly before he was strapped into Florida’s electric chair in 1989. Not surprisingly, many of the reported sightings involve “Old Sparky.”

In 2001, a guard from the Florida State Prison where Bundy spent his final days told a reporter that shortly after Bundy was put to death, several guards saw his smirking ghost sitting casually on the electric chair. If a guard tried to approach him, though, the smug-looking spirit would disappear.

The guard added that there were so many sightings that, at one point, the warden couldn’t find anyone willing to enter the execution chamber alone.

Most experts on the paranormal say that--except in cases of sudden death--ghosts and other spirits tend to haunt the places where they spent some of the happiest times of their mortal lives, not the most morose. For Bundy, that was likely Washington State, where he attended three different colleges in the 1970s and began his grizzly string of murders.

The student newspaper at the University of Puget Sound, one of those schools, reports that Bundy’s ghost is often seen walking about campus. Some students even claim that he has accompanied them on late-evening strolls.

Bundy’s body was cremated and his ashes scattered, per his request, over the mountainous wilderness of Washington. Yet his re-embodied ghost is said to have been seen in those forested mountains, where he admitted to sitting there for countless hours to fondly reminisce over the decomposing corpses of his victims.

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