Amityville visit

I love movies and whenever we travel we always try to find something interesting that has some form of connection to a movie, book or whatever. This way when you visit that area/place/location you can actually see something that you recognize or if you rewatch the movie you can say “We were there”…

 

Now some places you know are going to be a disappointment but you still want to visit them.
Amityville was one of those (so we thought).
Amityville was made “famous” when in 70’s someone shot his whole family and claimed that demonic voices made him do it, now that didn’t really put Amityville on the map but the family that moved into the house after that did… the family literally left the house screaming after only 28 days claiming the house was haunted, even a priest was involved.
After this event a book was released called “the Amityville horror” which also launched a movie and some sequels and even a remake. The house itself still stands, although they changed the look “slightly” from the original house.

Now in the movie the address the Ocean drive 421, in reality it’s actually 112, so we had some information and decided to go and visit the house this time for the simple reason we always postponed it because it would probably be a disappointment, but I kept the feeling I wanted to visit it and at one point you just have to do it.

 

It already started weird with our satnav “dumping” us in the middle of nowhere in an industrial area, was the house already having it’s influence????????? (que music), luckily we had Google maps to help us out and indeed we ended up in the right street… I expected the house to be hard to find but the opposite was true, the only problem was it was not 112 but they relabeled it 108 (so beware of this), now in all honesty the house actually stands out a lot, if I would be living there I would probably not want to house to draw any attention but this inhabitant thinks differently I guess, it’s one of the few houses with a fence, which actually is very low and totally open and it’s the only house with small red signs warning you to not trespass… now if I would be living there I would have probably posted a small sign claiming “No dummy this is not the Amityville house” but at least we now knew we had the right one.
Now one of the things you have to realize is that there are people living there, so don’t park your car in front and walk close to the house, respect their home and to be honest maybe it’s better to not come to close because it was FREEZING around the house, it was feeling like well below zero…… brrrrrr creepy (In all honestly it was frickingly cold everywhere but that doesn’t sound as scary right?)

I took some images from the house, just because I wanted to keep them for myself and show you guys of course, and we also drove to the other side of the canal and shot some from that area. Overall the house looks like a normal house now and lost it’s intriguing look we know from the movie (that house scared me to death when I was young, and still does).

Now was it a disappointment….?
No not all, the feeling of going on an adventure and looking for a house that was/is haunted and was the “star” in movies and books alone is already worth the time you spend on the road and looking for the location. Taking the pictures was just the icing on the cake. Sometimes the road travelled is a much bigger adventure than the destination…. now who said that again…. anyway we loved it, I hope you guys did too.
BTW during our trip to New York we filmed a lot of material including this trip, and they will appear on a new video Annewiek is creating called “Beyond snaps : New York” we hope to release this somewhere in the summer, it will include loads of cool locations, tips and techniques and is actually aimed at all photographers visiting that area and wanting to see locations that are not in the normal travel guides or for photographers that want to know more about street/travel photography.

 

And the color versions, looks slightly less scary right ? 😀