The Horror and the Clash

by editor Michele Catalano

“You go first.” “No way. You go first.” “You’re both wimps. I’ll go first.”

With that, Jack scaled the makeshift fence that had been erected in front of the house. He fell onto the front lawn. We hesitated for about thirty seconds, waiting for something bad to happen. When nothing appeared out of the shadows to attack Jack, we joined him in the yard.

I stared at the house. 112 Ocean Avenue. A shiver went through my body. The kind of shiver that makes you think there’s someone standing behind you, maybe reaching out a cold hand, ready to grab your neck. I pulled a beer out of the brown bag I was carrying and took a few swigs to settle my nerves.

This was in 1979, soon after a movie had been made about this house. The murders that happened there were old news; five years had passed and the bloody family siege was all but forgotten in the wake of the tales of hauntings, glowing-eyed pigs, and demonic possessions. The new owners of 112 Ocean Avenue had come and gone, leaving behind a legacy that was far more disturbing to some than the tragic life of the DeFeos before them.

We were teenagers with nothing better to do, I suppose. So we sat on the dock in the back of the Amityville Horror house, along with many other bored suburban teenagers, drinking, telling scary stories and waiting. Just…waiting for something to happen.

Someone had a portable cassette player (of course they did, it was the late ‘70s after all), and they were entertaining us with a mixtape, made for the occasion, with songs from various musical acts from that time. Ramones and Joe Jackson are the ones I remember. There was a party atmosphere, and I felt kind of creepy about that. People were dancing on the dock to “Blitzkrieg Bop,” and I had the brief thought that we would deserve it if anything scary and occult like were to happen to us.

Everyone was anxious for signs of the afterlife—maybe the moans of the dead coming from inside the house or a floating pig appearing at the window. If the house was a freak show in itself, the kids roaming around outside it were just another ring in the circus. Drunk, loud, and curious. Not a great combo. 

At some point everyone decided they were going to break into the house and hold a seance. Totally not my scene. Aside from the drinking and weed, I was a very by-the-books kid. I tried to put on the air of a rebel, a punk rock teen, but inside I was afraid of breaking rules. I also thought it was gross to go into the house, like it was an affront to the people who died in there. Why would I want to go to the scene of a heinous crime? I didn’t believe in ghosts. I didn’t believe in demons. Why was I even there? Because it was a rite of passage for bored Long Island kids.

I decided to wait on the dock while the others went in for the seance. They left me with the beer and the tape deck, and that was all I needed to have a good time by myself. I rifled through the kid’s cassettes and was pleasantly surprised to find my current favorite record, the Clash’s debut. I put it in, pressed play, and sat crossed-legged on the dock, cigarettes and beers on hand. Let them go play, I thought. I have everything I need. 

I sat facing the house, with my back toward the canal. I didn’t want to think about what went on inside there, so I pressed play on the cassette and let the sounds of the Clash wash over me. I didn’t play it too loud; the neighbors probably called the cops every night on teenage revelers. I also didn’t want to hear the peals of laughter coming from the house. 

I held the cassette player up to my ear and softly sang along to “Janie Jones” and “Remote Control” while I waited for everyone inside to finish making long distance calls to the ghosts of this house. It occurred to me then that I was making a conscious decision to have this Clash album always connected to the Amityville Horror house. Whenever I listened to these songs in the future, I would think about sitting on that dock, listening to shrieks and shouts emanating from a house where an entire family was murdered. 

I thought about the real horror that had happened beyond those sinister-looking windows. A young man possessed by his own personal demons slaughtered his entire family right inside that home. That’s what frightened me. Not some imaginary spirits. Not some made-up monsters. Real monsters lurked out in the world. That was enough to be afraid of. But that didn’t stop my spine from tingling or my hair standing on end anytime I heard a scream. I was scared. I was afraid of the neighbors getting mad. I was afraid of the cops showing up. And, yeah, I was a little afraid that I was wrong and my friends were right and the ghost of DeFeo was going to come after me. 

The Clash had already become a comfort album for me; here, on this night, I turned to it to save me from myself. I was feeling paranoid and anxious and more than a little frightened, and letting “White Riot” or “Police and Thieves” wash over me was helping. Joe Strummer to the rescue. 

It’s not the first time the Clash and this album soothed me, but this time the familiarity of the songs acted like a protective blanket. I thought about being home. I pressed the cassette player against my right ear and put a hand over my left ear. The sounds filled my head and protected me against all my negative feelings. For a minute, I was transported to my bedroom, where I was lying on my bed with my headphones on, listening to “I’m So Bored With the USA,” far away from this hellscape I was in. Thanks, beer and weed. 

A little over one pass through the cassette late, the kids started streaming out of the house. I didn’t ask how they got in. I didn’t ask what happened inside. I didn’t want to know. A few of them laughed at me, and, being a teenage girl, I took it very personally. The older kids, including the one whose cassette player I had been using, started making fun of me in spectacular fashion. My friends backed me up, and a brawl almost started. There were staredowns. Insults were thrown. And there I was, hurriedly packing up our belongings so we could leave.

We made it to the car without fists being thrown. But my friends were scared as hell. The older kids were bigger than us and outnumbered us, and I was scared that they had some kind of weapon on them. I thought it was going to be like our own little horror movie, in which Jack’s temperamental Duster wouldn’t start. But the car roared to life on the first try, and Jack made the K-turn on Ocean Avenue. We sped toward Sunrise Highway and home. 

The older kids in their Chevelle followed behind us. For a moment I thought they were following and we were going to have a scene. But they turned off on another road and, when they did, I, without saying a word, ejected Jack’s Doors tape from the car’s cassette player and inserted The Clash. “White Riot” came to life, and Jack asked where it came from. I told him that nobody calls me a pussy without paying for it in some way. Payment came in the form of a Clash cassette. I thought that was fair enough. Maybe I wasn’t the do-gooder I thought I was after all.

I left the tape in Jack’s car, a token of another of our adventures. When I got to my bedroom, I lit a joint and put on my Clash record. And I had some deep thoughts about the Amityville Horror house.

Some guy killed his whole family inside that home. What came after that—the new owners, some ridiculous ghost stories, a book, and a couple of movies—didn’t matter to me. Ghosts and goblins don’t scare me much. People who slaughter their family members do. Seeing all these kids running around the property like it was their own haunted playground, I couldn’t help thinking that most of them had no idea what happened before the Amityville house became the horror house. Maybe they wouldn’t be so quick to dump out warm beer on the lawn or kick in a window if they knew. Kids died there. Not fake kids on some movie screen. Real kids.

But bored, drunk teenagers mostly preferred to believe the gruesome tale of oozing toilets and slimed walls because it gave them something to do. I think about it now—spending nights hanging out in the vacant backyard of a fake haunted house—and I almost laugh at myself, until I remember all the other stupid things we did in the name of suburban excitement.

As predicted, I ended up associating that night with The Clash. Every time I put on that record, I immediately think of 112 Ocean Avenue and the events of that August evening. I’m okay that one of my all-time favorite albums reminds me of the crazy shit I did in my youth. 

Michele Catalano is the owner of I Have That on Vinyl. You can find her on bluesky.