Laura Wright 
Hollyweird
In 1982, audiences watched a suburban family discover that their beautiful new home had been constructed over a cemetery.
At first, the spirits seemed almost playful.
Objects moved.
Chairs rearranged themselves.
A little girl sat before a television and announced:
“They’re here.”
Then the haunting changed.
The spirits became dangerous.
And the Freeling family discovered the terrible secret beneath their home.
The developers had moved the headstones.
They had left the bodies.
It made for one of the most memorable horror films of the 1980s.
But there was something audiences didn’t know.
When human skeletons began rising from the muddy swimming pool during the film’s climax, some of those skeletons weren’t Hollywood props.
They were real human remains.
Within months of the movie’s release, one young cast member would be murdered.
Within six years, another would die at only twelve years old.
Two actors from the sequel would also die.
And gradually, Hollywood acquired another legend.
The Poltergeist Curse.
The House at Cuesta Verde
The original Poltergeist follows Steve and Diane Freeling and their three children, Dana, Robbie and Carol Anne, who live in the seemingly idyllic planned community of Cuesta Verde.
Something begins communicating with young Carol Anne through the television.
Soon the house itself seems alive.
The tree outside Robbie’s window attacks him.
A clown doll disappears.
Objects move on their own.
And Carol Anne vanishes into another realm.
The film was directed by Tobe Hooper from a story by Steven Spielberg, who co-wrote and produced it.
It became a major success.
But almost immediately after its release, fiction and reality began overlapping in uncomfortable ways.
Dominique Dunne
The first tragedy was also one of the worst.
Dominique Dunne played Dana Freeling, the family’s oldest daughter.
She was only 22.
On October 30, 1982, just months after Poltergeist reached theaters, Dunne was attacked by her former boyfriend, John Thomas Sweeney, outside her home.
He strangled her.
Dunne fell into a coma and never regained consciousness.
She died on November 4, 1982.
Her death had nothing obvious to do with Poltergeist.
It was a real act of domestic violence committed against a young woman whose career was just beginning.
But for people looking backward at the supposed curse, Dominique Dunne became its first victim.
And she wouldn’t be the last.
Poltergeist II
The sequel, Poltergeist II: The Other Side, arrived in 1986.
The surviving Freeling family returned.
So did the supernatural forces pursuing Carol Anne.
This time, the evil was given a face.
Reverend Henry Kane.
Thin, pale and dressed in black, Kane became one of the most disturbing horror villains of the decade.
The actor playing him didn’t require elaborate special effects to appear frightening.
Julian Beck was already dying.
Julian Beck
Beck had been diagnosed with stomach cancer before completing his work on Poltergeist II.
His gaunt appearance was partially the result of his illness.
He died on September 14, 1985, months before the sequel reached theaters.
He was sixty.
There is little mysterious about the medical cause of his death.
Beck knew he was ill.
The people making the movie knew he was ill.
Cancer killed him.
But imagine watching Poltergeist II without knowing that.
Kane appears almost skeletal.
He walks toward the Freeling house singing softly.
Then he smiles.
The performance feels like death approaching the front door.
And in a very real sense, the actor portraying him was approaching his own.
Will Sampson
The second film also introduced Taylor, a Native American medicine man played by Will Sampson.
Sampson is usually included among the four deaths associated with the curse.
He died in 1987, following serious health problems and complications surrounding a heart-lung transplant.
Again, there was an understandable medical explanation.
But Sampson adds another peculiar chapter to the legend.
Because according to stories from the production, he believed something was wrong on the set.
The Exorcism
Craig T. Nelson reportedly found the atmosphere surrounding part of the Poltergeist II production disturbing.
Sampson, who had traditional spiritual knowledge in addition to being an actor, examined the situation and reportedly performed a ceremony or exorcism of the set after filming one night. Accounts say he believed the human remains being used in the production were associated with the troubling atmosphere.
According to later recollections, the problems diminished afterward.
One can interpret that however one chooses.
Perhaps the ceremony reassured a nervous cast and crew.
Perhaps coincidence did the rest.
Or perhaps Will Sampson believed there are certain things one shouldn’t disturb merely because they make effective movie props.
A year after Poltergeist II was released, Sampson was dead.
Heather O’Rourke
Then came the death that cemented the legend.
Heather O’Rourke had been the face of Poltergeist since she was six years old.
She was Carol Anne.
She sat before the television.
She delivered the line everyone remembered.
And unlike Dominique Dunne, Julian Beck and Will Sampson, Heather appeared in all three films.
During the production period surrounding Poltergeist III, Heather became ill.
She had previously been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, but the diagnosis was wrong.
On February 1, 1988, Heather became gravely ill. Doctors discovered an acute intestinal obstruction related to a congenital condition.
Despite emergency treatment, she died.
She was twelve years old.
Carol Anne Was Gone
Heather’s death shocked the people who knew her.
It also transformed the Poltergeist curse from an obscure piece of movie-set folklore into something considerably more disturbing.
Dominique Dunne had died at 22.
Heather O’Rourke had died at 12.
Two actresses who played sisters in the original film were dead within six years of its release.
Julian Beck was dead.
Will Sampson was dead.
And Heather’s final movie hadn’t even reached theaters.
Poltergeist III was released approximately four months after her death.
The movie became a strange memorial to its young star.
Now the stories about the curse had something they hadn’t possessed before.
A pattern.
Or at least something that looked like one.
The Skeletons in the Swimming Pool
Then people began looking backward at the first film.
And they remembered the swimming pool.
During the climax, Diane Freeling falls into a muddy excavation while a violent storm rages around the house.
Skeletons begin erupting from the ground.
They float beside her.
They surface from the mud.
Diane screams and struggles to escape.
JoBeth Williams, who played Diane, later said she learned that the skeletons used in the sequence were actual human skeletons. At the time, real anatomical skeletons could apparently be obtained more cheaply than convincing artificial versions.
That fact became the centerpiece of the curse.
Real Human Remains
There is an uncomfortable irony here that almost seems too perfectly constructed.
Poltergeist is a movie about a housing development built over a cemetery.
The developers remove the headstones.
But they disrespect the dead by leaving their bodies underground.
The disturbed dead retaliate.
And to create the movie…
the filmmakers used actual dead people.
Not actors dressed as corpses.
Not plastic Halloween decorations.
Human remains.
Of course, anatomical skeletons were used in movies before Poltergeist. There is no evidence that bringing human bones onto a film set automatically produces supernatural consequences.
But if someone were deliberately trying to invent an origin story for a movie curse, it would be difficult to devise anything better.
The movie says:
Don’t disrespect the dead.
Then the production uses the dead as props.
Afterward, people begin dying.
Coincidence is the sensible explanation.
It is also an exceptionally eerie one.
JoBeth Williams and the Moving Pictures
Death wasn’t the only strange occurrence associated with the production.
JoBeth Williams, who played Diane Freeling, later described something peculiar happening while she was making the movie.
According to the story preserved in the original article, Williams would return home after filming and discover that pictures hanging on her walls were crooked or had apparently changed position.
She would straighten them.
Later, they would be disturbed again.
There are countless ordinary explanations for something like that.
Vibration.
Loose hooks.
Movement in the building.
Someone else entering the room.
Memory.
But when you’re spending your days making a movie about invisible forces moving household objects, repeatedly returning home to find objects moved takes on a somewhat different character.
Especially after what happened later.
Was Everyone in Poltergeist Killed?
No.
One of the most exaggerated versions of the curse claims that everyone appearing in the original movie died.
That simply isn’t true.
Most of the cast survived the trilogy and continued with their lives and careers.
The famous curse centers primarily upon four deaths:
Dominique Dunne.
Julian Beck.
Will Sampson.
Heather O’Rourke.
And even among those four, two were suffering from serious medical problems unrelated to the movies.
The legend becomes much less spectacular when phrased carefully.
But it doesn’t disappear completely.
Because Dominique and Heather remain difficult to brush aside emotionally.
Not because their deaths were medically or criminally inexplicable.
They weren’t.
But because they were so extraordinarily young.
A Curse Made Afterward?
This is the problem with almost every cinematic curse.
A movie employs hundreds of people.
Actors age.
People become ill.
Accidents happen.
Relationships become violent.
Eventually, people die.
Once someone declares a production cursed, every later tragedy can be added to the evidence.
Good things don’t count.
Ordinary lives don’t count.
The survivors don’t count.
Only misfortune does.
Given enough time, practically any movie can be made to look cursed.
That is the rational explanation.
And it is a good one.
But Poltergeist has always resisted being quite that tidy.
The Story and the Reality
Perhaps it is because the coincidences align so perfectly with the movie itself.
A film about disturbing human graves uses genuine human remains.
A film about spirits moving objects is followed by an actress reporting objects inexplicably moving in her own home.
An actor playing a spiritual healer reportedly performs a cleansing ceremony on the sequel’s set.
He later dies.
The terrifying preacher in that same movie is portrayed by a man who is himself dying.
Two actresses playing sisters die astonishingly young.
None of those facts establishes a supernatural connection.
But place them beside one another and the result begins to resemble the structure of a ghost story.
That may be all the Poltergeist curse ever was.
A story assembled from tragedy.
But stories have a peculiar way of acquiring lives of their own.
Did the Skeletons Cause the Poltergeist Curse?
There is no way to demonstrate such a thing.
Even the concept of a supernatural curse can’t be meaningfully tested against the events.
If the deaths hadn’t occurred, nobody would remember the skeletons as anything more than macabre movie trivia.
Because the deaths did occur, the bones became an explanation.
Perhaps unfairly.
The people whose remains were used in the movie had lives of their own.
Names.
Families.
Histories.
We simply don’t know them.
By the time they appeared in Poltergeist, they had become anonymous anatomical specimens.
Then Hollywood placed them in muddy water and filmed an actress screaming among them.
Maybe nothing followed those bones onto the set.
There is certainly no evidence that anything did.
But throughout human history, cultures separated by enormous distances have shared one remarkably persistent idea:
Treat the dead with respect.
Perhaps that belief exists merely because human beings need rituals surrounding death.
Or perhaps generations before us understood something we have become too comfortable dismissing.
The Poltergeist Curse
Four deaths do not prove that the Poltergeist trilogy was cursed.
Dominique Dunne was murdered.
Julian Beck had cancer.
Will Sampson suffered grave medical problems.
Heather O’Rourke died because of an undiagnosed congenital intestinal condition.
Each tragedy has an explanation.
Nothing requires a curse.
And yet the legend survives.
Perhaps because explaining each event separately doesn’t entirely erase the unsettling picture they form together.
The original film ends with the Freeling family fleeing Cuesta Verde.
Their house has vanished.
Their belongings are gone.
They reach a motel and finally prepare to sleep somewhere far away from the spirits that tormented them.
Then Steve Freeling does one last thing.
He pushes the television out of the room.
The family has learned its lesson.
Some doors are better left closed.
Some things are better left undisturbed.
And perhaps some remains are better left with the dead.
Was Poltergeist cursed?
There is no evidence that it was.
But somewhere between the real skeletons, the young lives cut short, the strange stories from the sets and a medicine man reportedly cleansing a place where something felt wrong, the trilogy acquired a shadow that has remained attached to it for more than forty years.
Maybe that shadow is nothing more than coincidence.
Maybe.
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