Land Spirits: Native and Immigrant, (Amytyville), part 2

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-> AMITYVILLE
In 1644, relations between the English and the Dutch on what is now Long Island, New York, were touchy, and one of the problems was that the two parties couldn't agree on how to treat the local Massapequa Indians, whose chief Tackapausha claimed that he had sold the Dutch only the use of the land their settlements occupied-not the land itself. After going back and forth about the problem, the Dutch decided to take matters into their own hands, hiring a certain Captain John Underhill, a feared Indian fighter who during the Pequot War a few years before had become known for the Mystic massacre, in which four hundred Pequots were burned alive or slaughtered as they fled a village near the Mystic River. With this atrocity on his resume, and having recently moved to the island of Manhattan (his plot of land is now the site of Trinity Church), he was the perfect person for the Dutch to hire to remove their Massapequa problem. This he did, first presiding over the torture and killing of seven Massapequa accused of stealing pigs, and then ambushing and slaughtering approximately 120 Massapequa and burying them in a mass grave at a site known as Fort Neck. For this, and another massacre conducted a few months later in what is now Westchester County, he earned a fee of twenty-five thousand Dutch guilders.
When a road was built on the Fort Neck site, years later, the soil was said to be redder than anywhere else in the area. An archeological dig on the presumed site, near the time of the road construction, uncovered the bones of twenty-four people, presumably some of Underhill's Massapequa victims. The rest have never been found.
What's interesting about this is that the Fort Neck site is about a mile from 112 Ocean Avenue, the address of probably the most famous haunting in American history. After Butch DeFeo killed his parents and four siblings in the house, he claimed to have been possessed by the spirits of an Indian chief while committing the murders. The Lutzes, the next family that lived there, fled after less than a month, driven away by an avalanche of paranormal activity. You've seen the movie: sulfurous smells coming from the "red room" in the basement, temperature fluctuations, a crucifix turing upside down, ectoplasmic oozings from the walls-classic poltergeist. Wouldn't surprise us a bit if Tackapausha or one of the other Massapequa who died at Fort Neck was just angry enough, and died just violently enough, to coalesce into that kind of angry spirit.
Some of the Lutzes' story has been questioned, but we know it's not unusual for people who have experienced the supernatural to have unclear or fragmentary recollections of it. People also make stuff up. But hey, if you ask us, a local history of massacred Indians and mass graves is more than enough to spur a haunting. Could be the Lutzes got off easy.

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