Poltergeist Curse: Paranormal Activity, a Plane Crash, and Murder

a story where two more actors died unexpectedly. It's a story about a horrible plane crash, a story about the poltergeist curse, a movie that scared the hell out of moviegoers, and a movie with an iconic theme. Great music, unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron called c Static MK two. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Ebony and Ivory by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder.

And why would I play you that specific slice of black and white cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on June fourth, nineteen eighty two, and that was the day of the film franchise Poultergeist launched into theaters, scaring the hell out of teenagers and little kids like me at the time, and starting rumors of a cursed film franchise that would claim the lives of many. On this episode strangulation, exorcism, murder, death,

and destruction in the Poultergeist Curse. I'm Jake Brennan, and this this disgraceland Richard laws And thought it was his lucky day. First, he had been able to beat the incoming snowstorm by switching his flight from Monday to Sunday, which meant that he'd be able to escape New York and make it to Cleveland, where he could honor his

commitment to the Cleveland Cavaliers. As a drug counselor for the NBA, Richard often extolled the virtues of simply showing up and if he needed a little luck so that he could show up well, he'd gladly take it and

then and more luck. The ticket agent at LaGuardia recognized him not from his work with the NBA, which, despite being real honest work, was actually his side hustle, because Richard Lawson's day job was as an actor with appearances and recurring roles on everything from Remington Steel to Dynasty, and most recently, as a regular cast member on the

daytime soap All My Children. The ticket agent noticed that Richard was sitting in coach seat six A, and as a diehard All My Children devotee, quickly upgraded the actor to seat one F in first class. But now from the leathery comfort of his spacious first class seat, Richard had a sudden, inexplicable feeling that his luck was about to change. The snow was already coming down. Flights had been delayed all day long as Creuz worked to thaw

out the side of the plane. Richard thought he could actually feel the warm chemical blast of de icing fluid. And then he felt something else, a chill. His stomach went upside down. The plane wasn't even moving, but something was off. Something was wrong. Richard felt it deep in his gut. He had to get off the plane. Now, hold up. He took a deep breath, calm down. The basketball team was waiting in Cleveland. He had to show up. He needed to chill the fuck out. Everything was going

to be fine. Richard convinced himself that there was nothing to worry about. The plane took its place behind several others on the runway. Minutes passed, ten minutes, twenty minutes, the snow began to come down harder. Thirty minutes the plane slowly ambled down the tarmac and the wind blew, stinging wet against the cabin windows. As the plane was cleared for ta off, Richards started to worry again. All that de icing had happened thirty minutes ago. What if

the plane was covered in ice again. Richard's anxiety began to increase in direct proportion to the plane's increase in speed as it taxied down the runway, and then they were airborne. The plane was barely fifty feet in the air when it began to roll to the right. It rolled some more hard, and then the nose pointed down like it was a magnet being pulled down to a steel turmac. Passengers screened and the plane was nearly sideways when it hit the ground, and the crunch was deafening.

They caught air again briefly, and then once more came down hard, and the nauseating screech of metal on asphalt rang out. Flames licked the windows from outside. It was impossible for anyone to tell where the plane was at or what direction it was headed in. It was rolling over on itself, tumbling towards oblivion, literally splitting apart at

the seams, and suddenly everything went black. The noises stopped, and the passagers could barely see a thing, but they knew they were upside down, held in place only by their safety belts, and the sound of bubbles began to percolate from all sides. Goddamn thing was underwater. The plane had landed in Flushing Bay and it was slowly sinking to the bottom. But Richard Lawson knew he was going to die. He was trapped, His body was pinned between two unseen objects. He began to panic for real, and

this was luck, all right, bad luck. Maybe he shouldn't have taken that upgrade to first class, Maybe he shouldn't have switched flights. Maybe one of his minor decisions that day had jinxed it. And maybe his bad luck was

bigger than his choices that day. As the plane cabin began to fill with ice cold salt water, Richard's mind flashed back to that one movie he had made ten years earlier, in nineteen eighty two, The legacy of Poltergeist and its Seagulls was infamous, four actors dead in their wake. Some said the productions were ill fated and that the actors were the ones paying the ultimate price. One by one. Richard Lawson struggled to free himself from the overturned airplane

as it was swallowed by flushing bay. He knew it was futile. His fate was clear. He was about to become the latest tragedy in the Poltergeist Curse. The skeletons weren't supposed to be real, or that's what actress Joebeth Williams assumed. Real skeletons would be too creepy, too gross, But fake skeletons cost too much and took too much

time to manufacture. Real skeletons were cheap and easy to come by, so it was real skeletons that bobbed up in the muddy water and brushed elbows with joe Beth Williams in the iconic pool scene from the original Poltergeist, Toby Hooper's nineteen eighty two horror classic. Joe Beth's authentic reaction to her close encounter with actual human bones helped make Poltergeist not only the highest grossing horror movie of nineteen eighty two, but the eighth highest grossing movie of

the entire year. And it wasn't the only authentic reaction in the movie. Eleven year old Oliver Robbins, who played Joebeth's son, was reportedly nearly choked to death by his character's toy clown as the possessed toy wrapped a long arm around his neck and tried to strangle him. According to Oliver, while they were shooting the scene, the animatronic

clown malfunctioned and the arm actually constricted his airway. He struggled, his eyes bumped out, he gasped for air, and the crew of adults thought that Oliver was simply delivering a knockdown, drag out performance, and it wasn't until his face began to turn blue that they realized something was terribly wrong.

None of these terrifying onset mishaps faced child actress Heather O'Rourke, who was all of five years old when she was first cast as Carol Anne, the youngest member of the Freeling family and the character who makes contact with and later is abducted by the malevolent spirits haunting her family's house. Heather was told there was nothing to fear. In fact, she had been taught how to pretend she was afraid. She hadn't acted before, but she knew the business of

making movies, the make believe business. Her older sister made movies. In fact, Heather was lunching in the MGM commissary with her mother one day, waiting for her sister to wrap a scene, when Stephen Spielberg spotted her. Spielberg was Poltergeist writer and producer, and Heather fit his vision for Carol

Anne Freeling to a tea. Spielberg was in the middle of making his latest masterpiece, E T the Extraterrestrial, and was therefore contractually prohibited from directing another movie at the same time, which is why MGM hired Toby Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre Fame to direct Spielberg's Poultergeist script. But Spielberg couldn't divorce himself from the production. He was on set just as much as Hooper, and according to which cast or crew members you ask, he was the one

who was actually really calling the shots. What Spielberg and Hooper did and didn't do where one of them ended and the other began. Well, that was just a little bit of Hollywood magic. It was all part of the larger sleight of hand. As Heather O'Rourke would learn, it was how movies got made. It was all make believe, just like the scary bits were make believe. But that wasn't entirely true. That was just something that adults said

to make children less frightened. The truth was, there were things there, unexplainable things, things that made the hair stand up on the back of your neck and the skin on your arms tinkle. Who were what those things were? It was sometimes impossible to know, but one thing was for sure. There he and they had always been here. James Hermann stood in the doorway to the bathroom, speaking

to his son, who was brushing his teeth. It was a perfectly normal moment, downright prosaic, actually, one that happened nearly every day. But it was about to be disrupted by a very abnormal occurrence, the kind that was beginning to happen with alarming frequency at the family's three bedroom, single story house. It was around eleven in the morning Sunday, February ninth, nineteen fifty eight. Strange things have been happening in the Hermann's home at sixteen forty eight Redwood Path

in Seaford, Long Island for nearly a week. Bottles all throughout the house were popping open on their own and falling to the floor. Shampoo, medicine, liquid starch in the kitchen, bleach in the basement, a bottle of holy water in the mast at bedroom, and none of the bottles were sealed with corks or pop tops. They all had screw caps,

which required several rotations to remove. James and Lucille, along with their children, twelve year old James Junior and a thirteen year old daughter, also named Lucille, listened in varying degrees of confusion and fear as the bottles popped and fell from nearby rooms all week long, but they hadn't

witnessed it firsthand until now. As James Junior worked the toothbrush back and forth on his molars, James Senior stood in the doorway of the bathroom and watched in horror as a glass medicine bottle moved shakily across the top of the sink eighteen inches give her take entirely on its own, and then it crashed and shattered into the sink basin. James Junior jumped, his toothbrush hit the floor, and James Herman couldn't explain it. The sink top was level.

The medicine bottle shattered with such force that it must have been shoved, but by whom or what. When Nassau County Detective Joseph Tauzy arrived at the Herman's house to investigate, he made it clear that he didn't believe in the supernatural ghost spirit specters all horseshit. Surely there was a reasonable logical explanation for what was going on, perhaps a high frequency radio transmission, a down draft in the home's chimney,

but unexplainable things continued to happen. The bottle of holy water once again fell from the master bedroom bureau. When James ran to retrieve it seconds after hearing it fall, he found it hot to the touch. And later that same day, James Junior and Lucille were watching TV when a porcelain figure rose from a table, moved three feet through the air, and fell to the floor. Detective Tozy himself bore witness to some truly weird shit. It challenged

his logical just the fact's mind. He went home each night and thought about all the ways he could try to explain what he had seen. And the Hermans, on the other hand, had seen too much, and they were freaked the fuck out, so they got the fuck out. On February twenty first, a little over two weeks since they had begun to experience the inexplicable, they packed their bags and went to stay with a relative, and they

were gone for two days. No supernatural activity was detected at their home while they were away, and now did anything out of the ordinary happen at the relatives' house where they were staying. When they returned to sixteen forty eight Redwood Path on the evening of February twenty third, they were greeted by a flying sugar bowl. An eighteen inch statue of the Virgin Mary rose from a bureau

and sword twelve feet through the air. A large bureau tipped over in James Junior's room, a record player weighing ten pounds rose from a table and traveled fifteen feet across the room. The Herman's predicament became a local, even national sensation. People all over the country wrote letters, made phone calls, even showed up the Herman's home to play armchair ghostbuster. A priest performed a blessing. Another so called holy man conducted a ritual to cleanse the house. Some

people blamed aliens, others said it was communists. A marche F fifty eight profile of the Hermans in Life magazine raised another possible suspect, James Junior. The article reported the quote in the Annals of Poltergeist, it has been consistently noted that the mysterious motion of objects has taken place in households containing adolescent children. It further reported that James Junior was often nearby when bottles popped in porcelain figures

hovered midair. Doctor J. Pratt, a psychologist from Duke University's Parapsychology Laboratory, made the trip to New York from North Carolina, to investigate whether or not James Junior's mind was indeed influencing matter. Like detective Tozy, Doctor Pratt didn't believe in ghosts, but he did believe that some people were able to let's say, animate otherwise inanimate objects with their own minds without even knowing it. It is within the realm of possibility.

Doctor Pratt once said that if eight million New Yorkers at one time concentrated on moving the Empire Higher State Building, it might move a bit. Doctor Pratt was in Seaford for three days, and nothing moved on its own, not the Empire State Building, not even a decorative porcelain figurine. But as soon as he left to return to North Carolina, it all started up again. Unlike the movies, there was no tidy ending to explain the paranormal activity occurring in

the Herman's Long Island home. There was no discovery of an ancient burial ground beneath the house's foundation, no four foot three spiritual medium named Tangina who was able to detect an unsettling dark presence called the Beast, no portal to another sphere of consciousness that douses those who pass

through it with a sloppy layer of ectoplasm. Those, of course, were Hollywood embellishments to the true story of the hermans nineteen fifty eight haunting, and that true story was used nearly twenty five years later, as that's the basis for the Poltergeist screenplay written by Steven Spielberg. Michael Grayis and Mark Victor in the movie Carol Anne Freeling played by five year old newcomer Heather O'Rourke, the one Spielberg met in the MGM Commissary is the manifestation of Life magazine

psychokinetic child. She doesn't move objects with her mind, but she is clairvoyant and communicates with ghosts directly through the family's TV set. Heather talked to the TV set the way she talked to her stuffed animals and dolls. It was make believe. She knew not to be scared for real. Her performance, however, in the movie as a whole, scared the pants off audiences in the summer of nineteen eighty two.

It also scared up some serious box office box throughout the summer of eighty two, and well it's the fall. For twenty four weeks, Poltergeist raked in more than seventy five million in domestic gross. That said, the number was peanuts compared to the money that the other Out of This World Steven Spielberg blockbuster made when e T was

released the very next week. One cast member in particular, was never able to see Poltergeist reach its full box office potential when she was cast as he yelled this freeling sibling. Dominique Dunn was a twenty two year old actress with a handful of TV roles under her belt. Poltergeist was Dominique's first movie role, in her big Hollywood break. Her potential as one of the decades defining scream queens was palpable. Audiences loved her. One person in particular professed

to love her more than anyone else. But Dominique knew that John Thomas Sweeney was confusing love with obsession, which was why she broke the relationship off. Sweeney was more than just jealous and possessive. He was volatile, unhinged. Even in August, when Poltergeist was putting fear in the hearts of moviegoers, Dominique was busy dealing with the horror film that was her life. During an argument, Sweeney grabbed Dominique by the hair and pulled so hard that he ripped

out a chunk by the roots. Dominique wrote Sweeny a letter, but never sent it. We are not compatible. It red. When we are good, we are great, But when we are bad we are horrendous. The bad outwetes the good, the whole thing is made me realize how scared I am of you. A month later, against their better judgment, Dominique was living with Sweeney again. Around three am one night, they fought again. Sweeney wrapped his hands around Dominique's neck and the two fell to the floor. He was on

top of her. He squeezed tight and Dominique struggled. She managed to escape. She scrambled out of the house of the bathroom window. Sweeney heard her car start up and ran outside. Suddenly he was in front of the car, but Dominique smashed her foot into the gas pedal. Sweeney jumped out of the way to avoid getting hit, and the car sped off into the La darkness. Dominique Dunn escaped for their life at least that time, but there was no escaping the fear she lived with constantly. She

hit out at her friend's house. She only showed her face in town when she was one hundred percent sure that Sweeney was at work. It wasn't ghosts or an unsettled dark presence that would come for Dominique Dunn, but it was a beast, and not a make believe beast either. We'll be right back after this.

Dominique cared about her own safety. She cared about the fact that, when she filmed the cameo was a victim of abuse on the gritty TV cop drama Hill Street Blues. She didn't need any makeup to look battered. The black and blue bruises on her neck that she wore to set were real. Every time she looked in the mirror, it was a reminder of that cycle of violence that

she continued to fall into, and she wanted out. October thirtieth, nineteen eighty two, eight thirty pm, Poltergeist was still showing well at movie theaters across the country, even if it had slipped from the upper echelonne of the box office. While movies like First Blood and An Officer and a Gentleman Dominated, not to mention Spielberg's et, which was well on its way to becoming the year's runaway smash, didn't matter much to Dominique Donne. She was already moving on,

prepping for the next thing, the next big success. Dominique was at her one bedroom home on Rangeley Avenue in West Hollywood, the same one she had once shared with John Thomas Sweeney. She was running lines with fellow actor David Packer for the pilot of a new TV mini series called V. Dominique and David paused when they heard a car pull up outside the house. A car door opened and slammed shut. A voice, A knock. Fuck. She knew it was Sweeney again, always fucking Sweeney. Dominique opened

the front door, but left the door chain attached. She looked through the two inch gap and saw Sweeney staring back at her. He said he wanted to talk. He was worked up, out of breath. She wasn't about to let him inside, but she knew she had to get rid of him. She hoped she could reason with him. She told David to wait inside. She undid the door Jean walked out onto the porch and closed the door behind her, looked over the script in his hands and began to run lines on his own. He could hear

Dominique and swing He talking outside. Their voices slowly began to escalate. Sweeney's voice erupted. It dominated the argument with aggressive force. David could no longer concentrate on memorizing lines. He couldn't make out what they were saying, but he knew it wasn't good. A loud, smacking sound made David jump and sent chills down his spine, and another one in the front of the house shook with each thud. David couldn't see what was happening, but he knew someone

or something was hitting the house. It was rattling the windows. Then a scream. Another scream, this one more blood curdling than the last. It horrified David. The screams were followed by more thuds. David panicked. He picked up the phone and called the police. Lapd responded and told him that Rangeley Avenue, West Hollywood, that was out of their jurisdiction. Nothing they could do out of their jurisdiction. David couldn't believe he didn't have the number for the Sheriff's department

off hand. Lapd wasn't in a call forwarding kind of mood, and David was terrified to open the front door. He decided to slip up the back door, and as he came up the side of the house and approached the driveway, he saw Sweeney trying to blend in with the bushes but failing, crouching hiding like the cowardly piece of shit animal that he was, and then David saw Dominique lying lifeless in the driveway. On November fourth, Dominique Dunn was taken off life support at Cedar Sinai. Her funeral was

two days later. Four to six minutes that's how long medical examiners estimated John Thomas Sweeney strangled Dominique Dunn outside her West Hollywood house four to six minutes. The prosecuting attorney opened Sweeney's murder trial by letting a stopwatch run for an agonizing four minutes to drive the point at home. But despite those chilling four minutes of silence, justice did

not prevail. First, the judge would not allow another of Sweeney's former living girlfriends to testify about the ten times he had beaten her during their relationship. About how Sweeney broke her nose, punctured ear drum, collapsed or lung. The judge said, quote the law says you judge a person for his acts and not for the kind of person he has been in the past. To make matters even worse, the judge then granted the defense's motion to reduce the

charge from first degree murder to manslaughter. In the defense's eyes, the killing was not premeditated. It was committed in the heat of passion. Despite their personal views on the matter, members of the jury had to deliver a verdict within the strict confines they were being presented. Sweeney was saved by the law. He got a max of six years, but wound up serving lightly less than three years eight months. To Dominique's family, it was a miscarriage of justice. The trial,

the sentence, the time, all of it. It defiled the memory of their daughter, The tragic loss of Dominique Dunn, and the travesty of justice would haunt them for the rest of their lives. When John Thomas Sweeney was released from his appallingly short prison stay in nineteen eighty six, coincidentally, perhaps it was around the same time that the sequel

to Poltergeist hit movie theaters. Steven Spielberg didn't return to co writer produce Poltergeist Too the other side, but the other original screenwriters did return, as did the majority of the original cast. Heather o'rouric, now ten years old, was back as Carol Anne. Since she was so young in her exposure to the media was kept to a bare minimum. There was very little documentation of how much Dominique Dunn's

death impacted Heather on or off the set. There's also a little documentation to back up the rumors about strange occurrences that once again were reported to have happened during the sequel's production, like the one that an actual exorcism was performed in order to cleanse the set of evil spirits. While Poltergeist Io retains a cult status among diehard movie fans, it certainly wasn't the same phenomenon the second time around.

It barely made half the amount of money as the first installment, but there was one eerie similarity between the

first and second Poltergeist. A few months before Poltergeist Too was released, Julian Beck, the veteran actor who co starred in the sequel as Reverend Harry Kane aka Evil Incarnate, succumbed to stomach cancer at the age of sixty and then in June nineteen eighty seven, a little over a year after the sequel came out, another of its co stars, Will Sampson, who played the Native American shaman protecting the family from Harry Kane's Our Normal Voodoo, died at fifty

three from post operative kidney failure. Like the unexplained activity that had taken place nearly thirty years earlier at the Herman family home in Long Island. The fact that three actors died shortly after making Poltergeist films began to make people wonder was it all just a coincidence, a random tragedy, or was there something more, something that couldn't be seen.

When principal photography wrapped up for Poltergeist three in the summer of nineteen eighty seven, Heather O'Rourke went home to Big Bear Lake in California. That winter, she turned twelve years old, she began to prepare for the press junkid that would precede the third movie's Hollywood premiere, But Heather O'Rourke never made it to the premiere. She never even

got a chance to see the finished movie. What happened next turned a series of strange coincidences into a widespread theory that the Holtergeist movie franchise, just like the Herman's Long Island Home, was cursed. March twenty second, nineteen ninety two, Richard Lawson was still upside down. The entire plane was still upside down. US Air Flight four H five was currently inverted in Flushing Bay. The runway lights of LaGuardia flashed in the rear distance, and the snow continued to

fall sideways. Inside the plane, it was all blackness. The water was on its way in, the oxygen was on its way out. It was all happening way too fast. Richards struggled to free himself, but he couldn't move. His head was stuck. What were these two objects pinning his body down? See to maybe other passengers. He was trapped. He was going to die. Up until this moment, he had thought it was all bullshit, All that stuff about the so called Poltergeist curse, the one that had claimed

four actors from the three films. Fucked that curses were make believe those tragedies were real. Dominie Dunn died at the hands of a violent abuser. Julian Sands had cancer. Will Samson suffered complications from surgery. Heather, a uroric well that had come out of left field, shocked everyone. They all thought she had a nasty case of the flu. Her family, the doctors, but her heart stopped on the

way to the hospital. They were able to revive her, and life lighted her to the Children's Hospital in San Diego. She died on the operating table before the doctors could help, and they didn't even know where to begin. No one knew that she had been born with the burn defect that made a section of her intestine abnormally narrow. She didn't have the flu. She suffered a bowel obstruction that sent bacterial toxins into her blood stream. She died from

a shock caused by infection of her blood. The doctor said that Heather's death was very unusual because she never exhibited symptoms that anything was amiss at any point in her life. The problem seemed to have come from nowhere. Insights like those drove the curse conspiracy theorists wild, but Richard Lawson put little credence into any conspiracy theory, especially

one that connected all of these tragedies until now. Because even though his role as a parapsychologist in the first Poltergeist movie was a small role, Richard had nonetheless acted in a Poltergeist movie, and like four other actors before him, he now found himself staring down an unexpected death. This was his fate. He knew it now. He had been foolish to doubt it in the past. He accepted what was about to happen. He ceased to struggle. He wanted

to die with the spirit of peace. He wanted the people who loved him on the other side of the wreckage to know that he was okay, that he hadn't died afraid. He continued to hold his breath under water and was about to finally let it all go, one giant exhale and done, when something came over him. He felt a sensation take over his body. It was warm, friendly,

the opposite of fear. The sensation enveloped his entire body, from the top of his head to the bottom of his toes, and he heard a voice say, get out of here. Take your seatbelt off and get out of here. Richard put his hands on his belt buckle and released it. He felt the seat belt release from around his waist. Get out of here, now, Richard. He put his hands on the things that had trapped him in place for minutes,

things that had been on moor before. Now they easily moved the side with the gentlest of touches from his hands. He could hardly believe it. His body began to move. He didn't know if it was up or down. He just wanted to find an air pocket. When his head finally surfaced, the twisted wreckage below his feet kicking and thrusting him towards salvation. He took a deep breath. He inhaled bay water and jet fuel and spat it back out. He looked up in an arm and reached down through

a hole in the side of the plane. He couldn't see who it was attached to, if it was a man or a woman, a first responder or another passenger. He just saw the arm, and the hand at the end of that arm was reaching out just for him. Let me help you, a voice said, and with that Richard was hoisted from a watery grave to a place where the snow and wind where so cold, you knew you were alive. Twenty seven people died in the crash

US Air flight four or five that day. Richard Lawson later learned that at least one of those deaths had been a passenger sitting in row six, back in coach where he was originally assigned. If that wasn't a sign, he didn't know what was. His life hadn't been taken by some evil spirit. It had been saved by a benevolent force, something unexplainable, the kind of thing that made the hair stand up on the back of your neck and the skin on your arms tingle. Who or what

that thing was it was impossible to know. But curses, Nah, curses aren't real. Just ask the Herman family in Long Island back in nineteen fifty eight. They eventually moved out of their supposedly haunted house and never experienced another paranormal event. Again, evil spirits didn't follow them. Maybe it was just some unknown natural phenomenon, or maybe someone playing some sort of sick joke on them, which would of course be a disgrace.

I'm Jake Brennan. This this disgraceland. All right, Poulter, Guys, listen, I'm going to rewatch this now. I hope you guys are too. As I mentioned in the a Bloc, this movie, the original one anyways, scared the hell out of me as a kid. So this week's question of the week is which movie do you remember scaring the hell out of you as a child and why? I want to know?

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