The Poltergeist series has long been rumored to be cursed, reportedly due to the fact that real human skeletons were used in a scene from the original film. Since then, five actors who were involved with the franchise have died, some under circumstances that sound straight out of a horror movie. Take Dominique Dunne, who played Dana Freeling in the first entry, for example. Five months after Poltergeist premiered in 1982, Dunne was strangled by her ex-boyfriend, John Thomas Sweeney, outside of her West Hollywood home; she never regained consciousness. 

Then there’s Julian Beck, best known to Poltergeist II fans for portraying Reverend Henry Kane. Beck died from cancer eight months before the 1986 sequel hit theaters. His co-star, Will Sampson—a real-life shaman hired to play one in the movie—followed suit in 1987, a result of post-operative kidney failure (he’d just undergone a heart and lung transplant). Sampson also apparently felt the need to perform an exorcism on the set of the film at one point.

Why People Believe the ‘Poltergeist’ Movies Are Cursed

Heather O’Rourke (Carol Anne in the original trilogy), like Beck, didn’t live to see the release of her final entry in the series: 1988’s Poltergeist III. O’Rourke began exhibiting flu-like symptoms in January of that year and went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital. She later died from septic shock caused by congenital stenosis of the lower intestine, which doctors at the time called “distinctly unusual” because she lacked prior symptoms. O’Rourke was only 12 years old.

Lastly, we have Lou Perryman, a character actor who had a small role as Pugsley the construction worker in Poltergeist. On April 1, 2009, Perryman was murdered in his home by a man he’d met a little while earlier. Seth Christopher Tatum, who’d recently stopped taking his prescribed medication, had attacked his mother’s ex-boyfriend and fled to Perryman’s neighborhood. Shortly after striking up a conversation with Perryman, Tatum entered Perryman’s house and repeatedly struck him with an axe.

However, one person who isn’t buying the whole curse angle is Robbie Freeling himself, Oliver Robins. In 2022, Robins told Yahoo Entertainment, “I do believe in the paranormal to some degree, but I don’t think there’s a curse because those deaths can be explained.” He went on to say, “You had these tragedies happen, but they were going to happen whether [the actors] were in the movie or not. Like with Heather, she had a medical condition for which she wasn’t treated. So I don’t think they are interconnected.”

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2005’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose was inspired by the story of Anneliese Michel, a young German girl who was believed to have been possessed by demons. As a teenager in the late 1960s, Michel started having convulsive seizures and was diagnosed with epilepsy. Before long, she was suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts. Eventually, Michel began experiencing hallucinations and hearing voices that would tell her she was damned.

In the midst of her alleged possession, Michel would display bizarre behavior, such as ripping off her clothes, barking like a dog, eating spiders, biting the head off of a dead bird, and licking her own urine from the floor. After turning to the Catholic Church, fathers Arnold Renz and Ernst Alt performed 67 rites of exorcism on Michel over the course of about 10 months, with some lasting as long as four hours. More than 40 audio recordings were made during that time, in which Michel could be heard growling in the voices of Satan, Judas, Cain, Nero, Adolf Hitler, and a priest named Valentin Fleischmann:

The Bizarre True Story Behind ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’

By the spring of 1976, Michel was refusing to eat and subsequently dropped down to just 68 pounds. However, at her own request, doctors were never consulted, and she continued to slowly deteriorate. Michel died on July 1 from what her autopsy deemed “malnutrition and dehydration.” She was 23 years old.

Michel’s parents, Anna and Josef, were put on trial for murder alongside the two priests. They were all found guilty of negligent homicide for letting her starve herself and were each sentenced to six months in jail. Following the release of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Michel’s mother told The Daily Telegraph that she didn’t regret her actions. “Anneliese was a kind, loving, sweet and obedient girl. But when she was possessed, it was something unnatural, something that you can’t explain,” she insisted.

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In July 1974, while Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was still being filmed in Martha’s Vineyard, the decaying remains of a young woman were discovered in the nearby Race Point Dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts. The mystery victim was almost decapitated and both of her hands had been removed—presumably to prevent anyone from identifying her. Tucked beneath her head were a blue bandana and a pair of Wrangler jeans. For close to 50 years, the girl was known only as the “Lady of the Dunes.”

Despite having been exhumed several times between 1980 and 2013, police were unable to determine who they’d found that day in Provincetown. This led to numerous theories regarding the woman’s killer, with some even suggesting that mobster “Whitey” Bulger was responsible. The decades-old cold case ended up back in the news around 2018, when an earlier blog post from Stephen King’s son, fellow author Joe Hill, resurfaced. In it, Hill pointed out that a female extra in Jaws was wearing the same outfit found underneath the Lady of the Dunes.

Did Steven Spielberg Accidentally Film a Murder Victim in ‘Jaws’? The Mystery Explained.

At about 54 minutes and 2 seconds into the film, the woman in question briefly pops up during a crowd sequence sporting a blue bandana and jeans. This young lady, according to Hill, bears a “striking resemblance” to a composite sketch of the unidentified murder victim. Though Hill acknowledged that there were several problems with his theory, like the fact that the woman in the scene doesn’t appear to be wearing Wrangler jeans, he still ran the observation past an FBI friend of his. “Odder ideas have cracked colder cases,” he was told.

We may never know for sure if the Lady of the Dunes was in Jaws, but in 2022, the FBI finally identified her as Ruth Marie Terry of Tennessee (born September 8, 1936). The following year, the case was officially closed and Terry’s husband, Guy Muldavin, who died in 2002, was named as her killer. “I’m sort of fascinated by the idea that, for decades afterwards, every time Jaws came on TV, he saw his dead wife turning her head to stare out of the screen at him,” said Hill while speaking with Inside Edition, “There’s something sort of chilling in that notion.”

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