*** led to the The Amityville Horror book in 1977***
That hoax sure took in a lot of people who believed it. It was in so many of the tabloid magazines back then. (STAR, National Enquirer and many others.)
It made those charlatans Ed and Lorraine Warren famous.
And IIRC Hollywood didn’t exactly go out of its way to make people understand that the story the movie was based on was fiction either.