NIGHT STALKS THE MANSION
Recently, I published a piece in Quillette on the cultural phenomenon that was The Amityville Horror. In 1975, a young family – George and Kathy Lutz and their three young children – moved into a house on Long Island, New York, whose previous occupants had all been murdered. Well, one of the occupants survived, but only because he was the one who had murdered the other six. The murderer, Ronny DeFeo, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. A year after the murders, the house was sold to the Lutzes and then – well, according to George and Kathy, some evil spirit in the house terrified them and their children so traumatically that, 28 days after moving into the house, they abandoned it for good. The source of this haunting is never fully explained. Could it have been the unquiet ghosts of Ronny DeFeo’s victims? Could it have been the unquiet ghosts of the Indian tribe that once occupied the area? Or could the haunting be explained by the fact that a Catholic priest who was called in by the Lutzes to bless the house never completed the job? Almost certainly, the tale of the haunting was a con job by the Lutzes, who found themselves over their heads financially and decided to try to profit from the loss of their home by making up a horror story. Eventually they found an editor at Prentice-Hall publishing company willing to publish their story. The book itself was written by Jay Anson, a no-name journalist in his mid-fifties with no previous books to his credit. Not exactly promising material for a bestseller. But a bestseller is exactly what Anson (with a big assist from the Lutzes) produced. The novel – oops! – I mean nonfiction book was published in 1977 and became a runaway hit. The book sold roughly eleven million copies, making it one of the biggest bestsellers of the 1970s. A 1979 film version became the second highest-grossing film in America. Dozens of spinoffs have followed that original book and movie. The franchise is still producing new material, including a four-part documentary series about the phenomenon that was released just last year by MGM.
The Amityville Horror remains a well-known intellectual property. Less well known, are some of the similar books that were published at about the same time as Anson’s. Most of these might never have been published at all if Amityville hadn’t created such a huge public appetite for “true” haunted-house stories. The most famous of these is Night Stalks the Mansion, written by Constance Westbie and Harold Cameron. It was published, in March of 1978, in a very small edition, by Stackpole Books, a 90-year-old Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, publishing firm that is still in business but which is not a major publishing house. The book was successful enough to merit one additional hardback printing in May but would probably have remained largely obscure except for an accident of timing. By March of 1978, Prentice-Hall’s hardback edition of The Amityville Horror had already cycled through thirteen reprints and was a massive success. Bantam Books had acquired the paperback rights to Amityville and by now they knew that it would be a big bestseller. The paperback was published in the beginning of August, 1978. It had been reprinted ten times before the end of the month, and would sell out a total of eighteen printings before the end of the year. Understandably, Bantam was eager to find additional titles that might be able to ride the coattails of Amityville to bestsellerdom. The powers that be at Bantam looked around and, lo and behold, they discovered that tiny Stackpole Books had recently published a nonfiction ghost story that bore some similarity to Amityville. Bantam swooped in and purchased the paperback rights and, by December, they had a mass market copy in stores that not only looked a lot like the paperback edition of Amityville, it mentioned Amityville in bright red ink above the title of the book. Night Stalks the Mansion didn’t become the kind of cultural juggernaut that Amityville did, but by December of 1980 Bantam had reprinted its paperback edition ten times. It was a staple on paperback spinner racks in bookstores and grocery stores and other places where pop-fiction was sold back in the late 70s and early 80s.
In almost every way, Night Stalks the Mansion is a better book than The Amityville Horror. It is certainly no literary masterpiece, but it is a solidly written story that, unlike Amityville, doesn’t seem to have been cranked out in a hurry merely for commercial purposes. Its history is an interesting one. When World War II ended, Harold Cameron was working in a Portland, Oregon, branch of the Aluminum Corporation of America, usually referred to simply as Alcoa. He was a valued executive and thus his superiors chose him to be the man to start up a new office and warehouse in the Philadelphia area. Cameron, his wife, and their five children moved across the country and took up temporary lodgings in a motel room. This, obviously, was less than ideal for a family of seven. Harold, therefore, was intrigued when he saw a real-estate listing in a local newspaper which read:
FOR LEASE: Country Manor estate. House dating back to Revolutionary Days. Seventeen rooms. Completely furnished. Antiques. Grounds beautifully landscaped. Convenient location. Rich in historical background and atmosphere. A home for gracious entertaining. Reasonable terms for right tenant.
This seemed almost too good to be true. Harold’s wife, Dorothy, pointed out that they didn’t need seventeen rooms. “Neither does anyone else,” Harold responded. “That’s why we’ll probably get it.” The house was located seventeen miles outside of Philadelphia, in a rural area called Wynne, on a street called Plum Tree Lane. It was available for lease at $3,600 a year ($300 per month) but the owners were demanding that the lease be for two years. Even if the Camerons moved out before their two years were up, they’d still be on the hook for the rest of the lease payments. Undaunted, the Camerons signed the lease. The house – mansion, actually – was massive. It had seven fireplaces. The driveway from the road to the front of the mansion was three-hundred-yards long and bracketed by rustic stone walls. The mansion was located in an area of small farms, wealthy manors, and lots of open spaces. “Constructed of gray Philadelphia granite,” the authors write, “the mansion could have been used as an illustration for The Fall of the House of Usher.”
I won’t recap the entire story, but (spoilers abound from here on) after the Camerons move into the house, eerie things begin to happen. They hear footsteps in the hallway at night but when they go to investigate no one appears to be up and about. Over the course of the next several months, inexplicable sounds and smells and sights continue to vex the Cameron family. Doors open and then slam shut in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. None of the governesses the Camerons hire to look after the smaller children will stay for more than a few weeks. These young women are usually scared away by ghostly presences that they can’t ever explain but which frighten them nonetheless. Some ghostly presence seems to walk with a heavy tread on the porch at night. At other times he drags his feet in the gravel of the driveway. At first Harold and Dorothy suspect that the house and grounds are haunted by a single ghost. Eventually, however, it becomes clear that they are hosting two separate ghosts. The house is haunted by a fairly benign ghost while the grounds are haunted by an angrier, more malignant one. But nothing in the book is as sensational as the supernatural stuff that occurs in Amityville. Nobody levitates in their sleep. No invisible brass bands march through the house. No giant, red-eyed pigs form an attachment with any of the Cameron kids. The ghostly goings-on at Plum Lane seem to come from an earlier era of spooky stories. Though frightening, many of these phenomena can be plausibly explained away as the kind of auditory and olfactory quirks that characterize many a creepy old house. Footsteps on the porch could just be an animal. Slamming doors and odd smells may be the result of a draft coming down one of the mansion’s four chimneys. In any case, what happens at Plum Tree Lane certainly isn’t enough to frighten the Camerons away in a mere 28 days. In fact, they remain in the house for nearly the full two-year term of their lease.
Shortly after moving into the house, Harold discovers that an old black man, probably well into his nineties, is living in the barn. His name is Enoch. He is friendly enough but prefers to keep to himself. He has a girlfriend whose house he can stay at if the barn gets too cold at night. Harold makes friends with Enoch and tries to talk to him about the ghosts that haunt the house, but Enoch doesn’t want to discuss the subject. He warns Harold that the Cameron family is at risk of dredging up some sort of demonic nightmare from the past, but he doesn’t elaborate.
Anyway, the years and pages fly by, and soon the lease is nearly up and the Camerons are preparing to move away. As their departure day grows near, Harold confronts Enoch out in the barn and demands that he tell him who the ghosts are that have been haunting the family for all these months. Reluctantly, Enoch tells him of the mansion’s terrible secret. The property was once a large plantation and its owners kept many slaves. Although Pennsylvania lay above the Mason-Dixon line, Enoch says, some plantations in the southern part of the state still kept black slaves all the way up until the end of the Civil War. Sometime around 1849, Enoch was born to a slave at the Plum Tree Lane plantation and eventually became a slave himself. The plantation was owned by a doctor and his southern belle wife. They were high-society people. They had a daughter, Lisa, who was crazy about horses. One night, in 1864, the doctor and his wife went off to some society gathering. After they were gone, Enoch, about fifteen at the time, saw Ben, one of the grooms, go to the front door of the house and summon Miss Lisa, who was fourteen at the time. Enoch thought this was odd, because Ben was a slave and slaves never used the front door of the manor house. Ben told Lisa that one of her horses had been injured and he urged her to come to the barn with him. Later, when the doctor and his wife came home, Lisa was no longer in the house. The doctor called upon all his slaves to search the grounds for Lisa. Eventually her dead body is found. She had been raped and murdered by Ben. The slaves themselves track down Ben and hang him, so as to demonstrate to Lisa’s parents that they are as horrified by the crime as the doctor and his wife are. The rape and murder of Lisa unhinges her poor mother, and eventually she hangs herself from a chandelier inside the house. Thus, for the last century or so, the benign ghost of Lisa’s mother has haunted the mansion while the angry and malevolent ghost of Ben has haunted the grounds.
Nowadays, a denouement like that would never fly in a novel. Turning some tragically enslaved person into the book’s primary villain would be a tone-deaf way of exploring the subject of plantation life in ante-bellum Pennsylvania. In 1978, however, nobody appears to have objected to it. Besides, the book was presented to the public not as a novel but as a memoir. And, indeed, that is what it reads like.
The story is told in the first person by Harold Cameron. He wrote it many years after the events it describes, in the 1970s, after the kids had all grown up, Dorothy had died, and he had switched professions. By that time he was living in Paradise, California, and working as a minister of the Paradise Church of Religious Science. This change of profession didn’t come completely out of the blue, because his father had also been a man of the cloth and the Camerons were a very religious family. Constance Westbie was a freelance writer and an organist at Cameron’s church. After he told her about his family’s experiences at Plum Tree Lane, she offered to help him make a book out of them. Together they produced Night Stalks the Mansion. The pair cannot be accused of trying to capitalize on the popularity of The Amityville Horror because Jay Anson’s book wasn’t published until July of 1977. Even if they had read it on the day of its publication, it seems unlikely that Westbie and Cameron could have written a book and shepherded it through the publishing process in a mere eight months. What’s more the book just doesn’t feel like an exploitive piece of commercial hackwork. It feels sincere and genuine. The ghostly goings-on at Plum Tree Lane are eerie but not terrifying. This isn’t Amityville on steroids. If anything, it’s Amityville on Valium. Oftentimes it just reads like one of those mid-century nonfiction works about raising children in a chaotic household, something like Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages or Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. The Amityville Horror strikes me as a crock of nonsense. Night Stalks the Mansion seems heartfelt and well-intentioned. But here’s the thing: the big reveal at the end of the book is demonstratively false. Pennsylvania was one of the first states in the union to abolish slavery. In 1780 – nine years before George Washington became the first American president – the government of Pennsylvania passed America’s first state abolition act. It didn’t immediately free all of the slaves in Pennsylvania, but it outlawed the enslavement of anyone born after the passage of the law. Look up “History of Slavery in Pennsylvania” on Wikipedia and you’ll find a chart showing that, by 1840, a full 24 years before the alleged murder of Miss Lisa, only 64 black people remained enslaved in Pennsylvania. By 1860, the figure is zero. Enoch’s story couldn’t possibly have been true. But this isn’t to say that either Enoch or Harold Cameron was lying. The story of how some lily-white young girl was brutally raped and murdered by a heinous black slave was probably a fairly commonplace one during the 19th century. Stories like that no doubt made white people feel better about keeping black people enslaved. Armed with this information, however, the reader can see Night Stalks the Mansion for what it really is: a story about an upper-class family who got spooked by a creepy old house they were renting and, eventually, found an explanation that exonerated them of the charge that they had been frightened by nothing. And who is the real bad guy of this story? Not just a black man, and not even just a poor black man, but a black man who can’t even be considered poor because, far from owning very little property, he himself is property. Psychologically, this is a very unsatisfactory resolution to the story. Especially nowadays, when we tend to think of ourselves as more enlightened than the people of earlier generations. But even in the 1970s, this resolution probably disappointed a lot of people. And that may be why, despite being more sincere and better-written than Amityville, Night Stalks the Mansion never gained anywhere near the kind of cultural traction that Anson’s book did. Amityville is a pack of lies. None of the supernatural events described in it ever happened. Plenty of evidence has been uncovered since the publication of Anson’s book to show that the Lutzes, originally in collaboration with a lawyer hired by Ronny DeFeo, fabricated their story in order to make a quick buck. And even many of the non-supernatural details in Anson’s book have been exposed as false. The bar he calls The Witches’ Brew never existed. On the night that he claims a pig left its hoof prints in the snow of the Lutzes’ backyard there was no snow on the ground anywhere in Long Island. Weirdly, though, The Amityville Horror still sort of feels true. And that’s not because Anson did a good job of describing the terrors that plagued the Lutzes. It’s because the subtext of The Amityville Horror, whether Anson was aware of it or not, is fear of financial ruin. Stephen King first identified this truth in his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre. He wrote: “The movie might as well have been subtitled The Horror of the Shrinking Bank Account…I found myself wondering not if the Lutz clan would get out alive but if they had adequate homeowner’s insurance. Here is a movie for every woman who ever wept over a plugged up toilet or spreading water stain on the ceiling from the upstairs shower; for every man who ever did a slow burn when the weight of the snow caused his gutters to give way; for every child who ever jammed his fingers and felt that the door or window that did the jamming was out to get him…’Think of the bills,’ a woman sitting behind me in the theater moaned at one point…but I suspect it was her own bills she was thinking about…[T]he main reason that people went to see it, I think, is that The Amityville Horror, beneath its ghost story exterior, is really a financial demolition derby. Think of the bills, indeed.”
In my Quillette piece, I had this to say about The Amityville Horror: “The book is a pedestrian piece of writing and the events it recounts are mostly ludicrous. But somehow The Amityville Horror managed to capture the mindset of financially strapped middle-American homeowners of the 1970s better than almost anything that has ever been written on the subject. You can pore through dozens of nonfiction works about the 1970s, and read every article published by the New York Times about middle-class America’s financial anxieties of the period, but I doubt you’ll find anything to bring it all so viscerally alive as Jay Anson’s silly book.”
That’s one of the charms of popular fiction. The commercial success of a book isn’t necessarily tied to its quality. Sometimes a dumb piece of fiction can tap into the American psyche in a way that a much more literary or scholarly piece of writing cannot. How many people are still reading fifty-year-old nonfiction books about the economic woes that faced middle-class Americans in the 1970s? Very few, I suspect. But The Amityville Horror remains in print and the film franchise has produced more than 45 titles. Meanwhile, Night Stalks the Mansion, a better book, has fallen into near complete obscurity. And deservedly so. A book that blames all of its horrors on an enslaved African-American and lets its gullible wealthy white people off scot-free should never strike any reader as psychologically satisfying. The Amityville Horror is garbage, but it’s psychologically satisfying garbage. And that’s why it seems as if it will never go away.