Amityville and beyond
Something clearly happened at the house in Amityville, New York, but did they occur as author Jay Anson described in his best-selling book? In fact, what happened at the house was so distorted by Anson's book that it was ultimately dismissed as a hoax by skeptics and some paranormal researchers.But paranormal phenomena did take place in that tragic Amityville house, and who better to ask about what really happened than the man who lived it, George Lutz. Jeff Belanger does just that in his new book, Our Haunted Lives, getting the real story from Lutz in one of his last interviews. (Lutz died in May 2006.) And the real story is just as eerie and fascinating as the Anson book or the two movies based on it. More so, perhaps, because it's real.
Belanger's book covers much more than the Amityville story, however.
First-hand accounts
Our Haunted Lives focuses on more than 30 true-life encounters with ghosts and haunting phenomena, and each are approached in the same way that the Lutz case is: through direct interviews with the eyewitnesses.This approach benefits the book in two ways: it eliminates the possibility that the author is going to embellish on the story for dramatic purposes; and it gives the reader the feeling of sitting down and conversing with the witnesses in a personal way. They tell their stories in a simple, straightforward manner, which lends them a higher degree of believability.
Belanger gathered the stories from all over the U.S., and a few from abroad. (A few of the cases came from our own "Your True Tales" section.) There are encounters with deceased relatives, sinister cloaked figures, and ghostly meetings "on the job." Belanger also takes us to several haunted hotels and inns, then interviews people who have had remarkable near-death experiences and strange sleep-related phenomena that go beyond bad dreams.
Ghost hunters
There are people who are encountered by ghosts and there are those who seek them out. To round out his book, Belanger interviews several ghost hunters, including Travis Hayes, John Zaffis and Bill Jimenez, who provide their own experiences as well as their insight into the nature of ghosts.Is it just another book of true ghost stories? Well, yes, but I don't think we can have too many of them. The ghost phenomenon is so fleeting that perhaps the best evidence we have is the sheer number of eyewitness accounts, and those stories need to be told and documented. In the long run, they are going to help us understand what's going on.
They are reminders that there is more to our existence than the physical world, and that we do indeed lead haunted lives.
