“America is not a young land,” William S. Burroughs writes in Naked Lunch; “it is old and dirty and evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians... the evil was there... waiting.” It’s this same belief in an old, dirty evil that drives so many of our modern ghost stories. There are haunted bridges and haunted alleyways, haunted parks and haunted parking lots. But in the United States, the most common—the most primal—haunted place is a house. Home ownership has always been intertwined with the American dream; we have magnified this simple property decision in part because it represents safety and security. The haunted house is a violation of this comfort, the American dream gone horribly wrong. And in the last few decades, the most common cause for a house’s haunting—a problem cited so frequently it’s almost become a cliché—is the Indian burial ground.

The Anglo fascination with Indian burial lands stretches back at least to the eighteenth century. The Revolutionary poet Philip Freneau was one of the earliest to approach these sacred lands with a mix of exoticism and foreboding. In his 1787 poem “The Indian Burying Ground,” he saw the spirits of vanquished Indians still hunting, feasting, and playing:

Thou, stranger, that shalt come this way,

No fraud upon the dead commit—

Observe the swelling turf, and say

They do not lie, but here they sit.

Be wary of the Native burial ground, Freneau warns us, for life still moves there.

If for Freneau these lands were mystical and sacred, in the 1970s this idea turned malevolent, becoming the foundation for a series of horror movies and stories of haunted houses. Its popularity stems almost entirely from Jay Anson’s 1977 massive bestseller, The Amityville Horror, and the genre-defining horror film based on it. Anson’s book, advertised as a true story, was based on testimony from George and Kathleen Lutz, who claimed to have undergone a harrowing experience in the Long Island, New York, hamlet of Amityville. When the Lutzes bought their dream home, they knew it had been the site of six murders: In October of 1974, twenty-three-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr., shot his father, mother, two sisters, and two brothers in the house. Deciding not to let this factor influence their decision, the Lutzes bought the house just over a year later. But a host of unexplained occurrences took place as soon as they moved in: George began waking up every morning at 3:15 a.m., the time that the DeFeo murders had happened, and the Lutz children began sleeping on their stomachs, the same pose in which the DeFeo victims had been found dead. The children began acting strangely and claimed to see a pair of red eyes hovering outside their bedroom. In less than a month, the Lutzes abandoned the Amityville home, leaving their possessions behind.