Life & Wisdom Quote by William Peter Blatty

A throwaway detail, delivered like small talk, that quietly drags a whole mythology behind it. When William Peter Blatty says he lived in Georgetown in the late ’70s “about four houses down from the steps,” he’s not offering a quaint real-estate anecdote. He’s planting a flag in the physical world that his work famously corrupted, and he’s doing it with the casual certainty of someone who knows exactly what that location means to an audience.

“The steps” is the tell. In Georgetown, it’s not just any staircase; it’s the Exorcist steps, the site that became a pop-culture pilgrimage and a shorthand for a certain kind of American dread: respectable neighborhoods, nice facades, and the suggestion that evil can be local, specific, walkable. Blatty’s intent is credibility-by-proximity, but also authorship-by-territory. He’s reminding you that the story’s terror wasn’t born in a generic haunted house; it was embedded in a real cityscape with a ZIP code and a slope.

The late ’70s context matters, too. The Exorcist (novel 1971, film 1973) had already detonated. Returning to Georgetown after that moment reads like living inside your own afterimage: fans, rumors, and the uncanny experience of watching a neighborhood become a set. The subtext is lightly proprietary, almost amused: I wasn’t just inspired by a place; I inhabited the landmark you can’t stop associating with me. That offhand “four houses down” is a ruler measurement of legacy.