Camp Gagnon - Did this Film Open an Occult Curse?

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Today on Camp, we are diving deep into one of the most chilling, controversial, and allegedly cursed horror films of all time: Rosemary’s Baby. From the eerie real-world locations like the "Coven Hotel" to the dark, off-screen tragedies that followed the cast and crew, we look at whether this cinematic masterpiece accidentally opened a portal to a real-life occult curse. Pack your bags, lock your doors, and welcome back to Camp! 🏕️ Download Cash App Today: https://click.cash.app/ui6m/io6bi7nv #CashAppPod. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card.  Savings provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon 👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com 🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com timestamps: 0:00 Welcome to Camp 1:30 Camp Bulletin + Christos YAPPIN 2:40 Rosemary’s Baby Plot 15:27 Tannis Root 18:43 The Coven Hotel 21:31 Satanic Anagram 26:15 Selling Your Soul to The Devil 28:15 Incubus Ritual 34:00 Anton Lavey’s Connection 37:05 Mia Farrow & Frank Sinatra Divorce 39:12 Curse of The Film 41:23 William Castle 43:03 Sharon Tate Murder 46:19 Roman Polanski's Arrest 52:13 Drop Your Thoughts! 54:40 Year One of Satanic Age #CampGagnon #RosemarysBaby #OccultHistory #HorrorMovies #HollywoodCurses #RomanPolanski #MiaFarrow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A fictional story about the occult, a coven, and an innocent woman who birthed the Antichrist might not be completely fictional. You see, Rosemary's Baby was released in 1968, and within months, the composer who scored it was in a coma. The director's pregnant wife was murdered in her home by a satanic cult, and the director himself, the man behind the camera, the man who shaped every frame of this story, turned out to be the villain that nobody saw coming. And buried inside the novel was a secret number.

And some say that it was never meant to be found and wasn't even intended by the author. Well, today we're breaking it all down. The real occult practices, the coven rituals rooted in ancient witchcraft, and the horrors of the movie that somehow bled into the real lives of the actors and the creators. Did Ira Levin write a horror story,

or did he somehow document something that he wasn't supposed to know? Is it possible that they disturbed something dark, something that crept off the page and into their actual lives? Did they open a portal into a darker realm? Exactly in the way that it crept into Rosemary's life in the movie. Well, today, we're going to find that out. So, sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, people, and welcome back to camp.

My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from all time forever. That is what I do here is I try to deep dive into the strangest mysteries, the occult conspiracies, and all the things that I find interesting in my free time, and I share them with you. And oh boy, today we have a fascinating one. This is a movie that my mom has been telling me about since I was like 12 years old.

She was like, when you're older, they're going to watch this. And it's going to explain the entire world. And I was like, Mom, you're crazy. And let me tell you, after seeing the movie, it's wild. So, before we jump into it, I want to say a few things. One, I want to say thanks to you. Yeah, dude, or girl, whoever you are. I want to say thanks for watching this show.

Every time you click on an episode or comment or like or anything like that, you help keep the lights on at the tent. You help keep the fire burning here at the campsite. I also want to give a big shout to my pal, Christos Papadaparos. Christos, how are you? He can't speak today. He's a little bit sick and under the weather, so I've kept him in a quarantine inside of a glass case of emotion.

Now, before we jump into all the crazy stuff with Rosemary's Baby, let's just give some background, okay? Because if you saw our episode that we did on Eyes Wide Shut about Stanley Kubrick and we went through all of the weird occult stuff in that movie, Rosemary's Baby is maybe more occult. There's all sorts of weird stuff. And as we both know, Hollywood is weird. What happens in Hollywood specifically back in the day,

like in the 60s in Hollywood, it was strange. And Rosemary's Baby is like all of that put into one story. Not only what happens in the movie, but everything that happens off screen is just weird. And there's a cult imagery and all sorts of weird stuff. But before we do that, let's just go through the movie. If you haven't seen it, this is basically what happens. If you have seen it, this would be a good refresher.

So here's the way the movie goes. In the year, 1965, there's a young married couple, Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse. They move into this beautiful. Gothic revival apartment in Manhattan. The place is called the Bramford. Now, their close friend Hutch tries to stop them from signing the lease because Hutch knows the Bramford's history.

And it's not a good history. It has a history of witchcraft and murder and cannibalism. There was a pair of sisters rumored to have cooked and eaten children in the basement of the building. There was a coven of witches that operated out of one of the upper apartments. There was multiple self-dilitions. I can't even, it's annoying we can't even say that word without YouTube monitoring us, but you know what I'm saying. And the previous tenant of the specific apartment that they're moving into, an elderly woman who, shortly before they arrived, had fallen into a sudden, inexplicable coma had passed away.

And so when she died, there was a vacancy open, and they took the place. Now, Hutch lays all this out, but the woodhouses, they don't care. They sign the lease and they move in. That is just classic New York City apartment hunting when you find a place that's open in the right neighborhood. It doesn't matter how many cannibals or witches live there. You got to just take it. And if anyone lives in New York, you know that you probably live with some witches.

Probably some demons. Who knows? Now, in the movie, again, shortly after moving in, Rosemary is in the basement of the building doing laundry and she meets a young woman named Terry. Terry's bright, she's nice, and turns out she lives with the elderly couple in the building, the cast of vets, who had taken her off the street and essentially saved her from a life of an addiction and homelessness,

and she spoke very highly of them and told Rosemary what great and generous people they were. And around Terry's neck is a small silver locket that was given to her by Minnie Castavet. Now, Rosemary notices it, and she notices that it smells really bad, and Terry tells her that it's filled with something called Tannis root, which, according to Minnie, is a good luck charm. Now, a few nights later, Rosemary and Guy find Terry dead on the sidewalk below the Castavet's window. And apparently, according to the story, she jumped. And the castavets, Roman and Minnie, the kind elderly neighbors, appear at the scene after it happens, meeting Rosemary and Guy for the very first time. Minnie seems pretty shocked and pretty sad, as she should, but Roman seems like unsurprised.

But from that moment on, they will not leave the woodhouses alone. Within days, many starts showing up at their door unannounced, bringing food, coming to Chad, making tea. Roman keeps Guy up talking late into the night, and they basically become the stereotypical annoying New York City neighbors. And weirdly enough, Guy becomes pretty close with the cast of vets, which Rosemary doesn't really understand. She's like, why are you friends with these super annoying neighbors? Like, these people suck. Then, shortly after that starts happening, Rosemary starts hearing strange things around the thin walls, muffled voices and what sounds like chanting coming from the cast of vets apartment but every time she mentions it guy just says ah

it's nothing you're just you're it's a new place just go to sleep it's fine and then guy gets some exciting news you see guy is an actor and he just landed the lead role in a broadway play he wasn't initially cast but the actor who beat him out suddenly and inexplicably went blind pretty crazy luck right so far the woodhouses seem like they're doing great they moved into this new place guy all of a sudden gets cast in this amazing production and everything's going awesome. And then, a few days later, he comes home and suddenly declares to Rosemary out of nowhere that he wants to have a baby. He's even already checked the calendar and he knows, for whatever reason, exactly when she'll be ovulating. Something is already being orchestrated behind the scenes. Rosemary just doesn't know it yet. Now, on the night guy has

decided that they'll try to conceive. He calls it baby night. The two are having dinner in their home when Minnie shows up at their door with dessert. Two chocolate mooses. Rosemary takes a bite of hers notices that it tastes kind of weird. And she tells Guy she doesn't want to eat it. But he snaps at her saying that she's being rude and to keep eating. She secretly scrapes most of it off into a napkin, but she'd had enough. And what happens next is one of the most disturbing sequences in modern horror. Rosemary passes out, and she has what she thinks is a dream. She's on a yacht. Then she's somewhere else.

Then she's laying naked on a bed surrounded by the cast of vets in a group of elderly people she'd never met. All of them also naked, chanting in a language that she's never heard and doesn't understand.

And then something is on top of her. Something that is not human. Something with rough, clawed hands and like yellow reptilian eyes. And in the middle of it, Rosemary realizes what's happening. And she screams the line that has haunted audiences

ever since. She says, this is no dream. This is really happening. Now, she wakes up the next morning in her bed. Everything seems normal. But she's covered in like these long, painful scratches. And guy is in bed next to her. He smiles and tells her that even though she'd fallen asleep last night, he hadn't wanted to miss baby night. So yeah, I mean, pretty disturbing regardless. And we'll talk more about that later. Now, a few weeks after that, Rosemary is pregnant. Now, This is the point where the film stops feeling like a regular horror movie and starts becoming something that feels more real and grounded and because of that, way more haunting.

Rosemary's health throughout her pregnancy has taken a serious decline. She loses a ton of weight in her first trimester. Her skin turns like gray, dark circles are under her eyes. She's in this constant agonizing pain. And she starts craving raw meat. There's a moment where she finds herself standing over the kitchen sink biting into this raw chicken liver and blood is running down her chin before she even realizes what she's doing.

The cast of vets insist that Rosemary abandoned her own doctor and switched to a man named Dr. Saperstein, a high society obstetrician and a personal friend of theirs. Now, Saperstein immediately tells her not to read any pregnancy books, not to talk to any other pregnant women, not to worry or dwell on the pain, and he prescribes her a daily herbal drink. prepared by mini, hand-delivered, every morning to help build up her strength, which is pretty

weird. Like, your neighbors are like, hey, go see our personal friend. And then the personal friend is like, hey, here's a concoction you have to drink every morning prepared by your neighbor that referred you to me. The whole thing is strange. And meanwhile, Rosemary's condition continues to get worse. And every time she raises a concern, Guy tells her, hey, babe, don't worry about it. This is normal. Saberstein, the doctor tells her that it's normal. Minnie says, hey, I've been there. This is totally normal. Now, the only person who notices something is seriously wrong and affirms Rosemary that she's not crazy is her old friend Hutch, the same Hutch who warned her not to move into that building. So Hutch starts doing some digging

into Rosemary's symptoms. He also researches the Bramford's history and looks into everything that they're doing to Rosemary, the tannis root, the weird like potion she's drinking, even the cast of vets. He calls Rosemary up to set a meeting because he thinks that he found something really important, but he never makes it. The night before the meeting, Hutch falls into this sudden mysterious coma, and he stays there for months, and then eventually he dies. Now, remember that. Keep that pin, because now there's two characters in the film that have gone into a mysterious

coma, and then they died, the previous tenant, and now Hutch. But before he goes, he briefly regains consciousness and sends Rosemary a single cryptic message. The name is an anagram. Rosemary takes the witchcraft book that Hutch left to her, and she reads it and comes across a name, Stephen Marcato. He was the stun of Adrian Marcado, a notorious Satanist who apparently once lived in the Bramford and was beaten nearly to death by a mob in the lobby. Rosemary sits in her kitchen table with a set of scrabble tiles, the letters that spell Stephen Marcado, the same letters that rearrange they spell Roman castavet. And then everything becomes clear to Rosemary. Her neighbor is the son of one of the most

infamous Satanus of the 20th century. The entire building is a coven filled with witches and Satanus, and her husband is the newest member, and that she has been poisoned, and that the baby growing inside of her is not entirely hers. Now, at this point, Rosemary tries to run. She heads to Dr. Saperstein's office to demand a referral to a real actual hospital, until in the waiting room, the receptionist casually mentions the smell of Tannis root. Sabresstein is wearing the same kind of necklace that Terry was. It turns out he's also in the coven.

So she runs to her original doctor, the kind, normal one, and tells him everything about the witches and the poisoning and the conspiracy, and he listens and he's nodding and he's writing everything down, and he tells her to lie down and rest. And then thinking, you know, Rosemary's like genuinely unwell. He picks up the phone to call the other doctor Saperstein.

And within minutes, Guy and Saperstein arrived to collect her. She's brought home, sedated, and then forced into labor. When she wakes up, she's told that the baby was stillborn, that she hallucinated everything, and that she needs to rest, that the trauma that she's undergone has made her go crazy, and she almost believes it. But she can then hear a baby crying through the thin, walls of her apartment. Rosemary escapes her room and sneaks into the Castavet's apartment,

and she finds the entire coven gathered there, drinks in hand around a black bassinet draped in taffeta. This, you know, it has an inverted crucifix hanging above it, and she pulls back the curtain and sees her child for the first time. And she yells, what have you done to its eyes? Roman Castavet looks at her and explains he has his father's eyes. And then he tells her the entire truth. She tells her that Satan is the father. The child has been chosen to, quote, overthrow the mighty and lay waste their temples. He says God is dead, that Satan lives and that the year is one, the first year of a new age. Rosemary is distraught, and then Robin makes the final move. He tells her that nobody is asking her to join them. They're just asking her to be the mother to the child. Suddenly,

the baby cries. Slowly, Rosemary walks back over to the bassinet and rocks the cradle and the film ends. Crazy movie. No? I mean, it's like an insane movie, but this is just the beginning of the insanity. The reality is, even though that's where the film ends, that's just the beginning of the horrific impact Rosemary's baby has beyond the screen. Because Ira Levin, the author of the original book, Rosemary's Baby, didn't just write a scary novel. He embedded it with real occult symbolism so specific and so accurate that scholars, modern day occult researchers, and even witches have been unpacking it ever since. And to this day, practicing occultists call it the most accurate portrayal of a coven ritual ever to be portrayed in Hollywood ever. But even more than what's actually in the story, there are eerie and inexplicable things

that started to happen all around the people who were involved in the film. Things that range from just, you know, eerie similarities to horrific, violent, and tragic acts. There's a reason we're covering it today. We're not just talking about a movie. We're talking about, I mean, we're kind of talking about a curse. Okay, so let's go back through all the real occult and witchcraft lore hiding inside the story that you might miss if you're just watching it for the first time. Because honestly, the truth here is more disturbing than just what the movie shows. So we're going to start by looking at this ingredient, this thing.

that showed at the very beginning on Terry's necklace, this Tanis Root. Now, if you try to find Tanis Root in a real grimor or an actual, like, witches' book, there wouldn't really be anything. Because Tanis Root doesn't actually exist. Ira Levin made it up. He needed something that felt occult and mysterious

to help, you know, make readers feel uneasy without ever having to explain it. But the name is actually significant. Tanis is almost a perfect anagram of Satan. If you read it as satin, and you say it out loud, you can obviously hear the connection. Some have also tied it to what they call Taneth, which is the name of the Phoenician goddess of fertility and of the moon.

Her name also comes through in Greek as Tanis, which is, I mean, basically spot on. Levin never confirmed exactly where the name came from, and I guess that's part of the point. The word is meant to feel ancient and real without, actually belonging to anything. But even though the Tannis root itself is fictional, the purpose that it serves in the occult is not.

When Rosemary first meets Terry, the young woman that the castavets had taken in, Terry is wearing a silver ball on a chain, packed with Tannis root, and she's been told it's good luck. And after Terry dies, the same charm is passed to Rosemary from the castavets as a gift.

So what does it do? Functionally, Tannis root is a mind-controlled. drug, the thing that lets the Coven steer Rosemary through nine months without her ever breaking free. Again, it's a ball on a chain. And the charm itself is the key detail, because that part isn't invented at all. Wearing a substance on your body to influence your fate is one of the oldest practices in folk magic ever. The idea is that it's a spell and a bag, a charged object that keeps working its intention around the clock as long as it stays close to you, like a talisman or like an omen. And it could be for protection or for luck or for love or sometimes to

influence somebody else. Well, that's exactly what the Castavet's silver locket is. The necklace keeps the tanness root close to her body at all times, which is essential for the effect that it's supposed to have. Levin took a real recognizable practice and simply swapped in a root that he made up. And he was sharper than he gets credit for because the fake root sits right next to the real one. In the film, the fictional occult book, All of Them Witches, shows an illustration that's supposed to be Tanisroot. But that illustration is actually Mandrake, Mandragora, one of the most witchcraft-associated plants in all of European folklore. And if you've ever heard of Mandrake, yes, it's also in Harry Potter. So Tannis root looks occult, it smells occult, it's worn like a real occult charm, and behaves like a real sedative-slash-mind-control drug, and is illustrated with a real magical plant in the film.

Everything around, you know, the fictionalized version is cushioned with actual occult truth, which brings us to the next mystery, which is also something of a facade, but is also rooted in something much bigger. And that is the apartment building, the Bramford. In the movie, the building they used to film, the exterior is a building called the Dakota, an iconic Gothic apartment building in Manhattan's Upper West Side. You have a picture of it on the screen here that you can see. It was built between 1880 and 1884, and the director, Roman Polanski, chose it specifically. He didn't just want a creepy-looking building. He wanted that building. And here's why. The Dakota was, at the time it was built, considered so remote from the city center that people joked that it might as well have been out in you know decoded territory hence the name if you don't know uh the upper west side is pretty far away

from like downtown manhattan uh even today you know if someone's on the upper west side it takes a minute to get up there so by the time polansky was filming there in late 1967 it had developed a reputation people say that it has strange energy and tons of ghost stories and multiple reported deaths over the decades and one persistent local legend that wouldn't go away, a figure, occasionally seen in the basement described by witnesses as a small adult body with the face of a child. That building was already haunted. And then it housed another murder. So get this, on December 8th, 1980, 12 years after they filmed Rosemary's baby, the movie had already come out, people had already seen it. John Lennon was shot four times in the back as he walked into the archway of the Dakota with his wife.

John Lennon died at the hospital that night when he was just 40 years old. Now, he had nothing to do with Rosemary's baby. He didn't act in it. He didn't know Polanski. He just happened to live with his wife and his five-year-old son in the same building, 12 years earlier, that was the location of this fictional satanic coven. So, was it the building? Was it a curse? Is it just a weird twist of tragic serendipity?

I mean, who knows, right? Like, you can argue about curses and haunted houses all the time. It's just a little weird that the film that depicts this, you know, famous guy and his wife and the birth of their child is also the same exact building that John Lennon, perhaps the most influential and, I mean, maybe the most renowned musician of his day, perhaps of the entire century is shot, assassinated, right in the archway while he's living there. I mean, it's just weird. Hey, guys, I just want to take a break really quick to tell you about Cash App. I love Cash App. I use it all the time. If you know anything about me, I try to make my life less chaotic

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Banking services provided by Cash Apps Bank partners, prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, visit cash.app slash legal slash podcast for full disclosures. Thank you so much for Cash App, for supporting the show. Now, let's get back to it. Now, you can't prove that it was a curse, but there are some things that you can kind of prove. And this is something that's actually in the words of the page that Ira Levin wrote in to the original book. And this one is kind of hiding in plain sight. It's the anagram.

So Roman Castavet turned out to be Stephen Marcado. Now, one thing that we've got to be clear about, Adrian Stephen Marcato aren't real historical figures. Levin invented them for the book, along with the whole backstory of the Bramford. So this isn't a case of like a real 20th century Satanist that's put into the plot. It's Levin building this fictional occult dynasty. But the technique he hands the villain is drawn from something very real. Because the encoding and disguising of true names is actually one of the oldest threads in all of Western magic.

You can see it across a ton of different traditions. So in Jewish mysticism, like the Kabbalah, the name of God is treated as objects of immense power, and they're hidden and guarded and never spoken casually. And then, of course, which is an occult. will take that tradition out of Jewish mysticism, and they apply it to their own traditions. And then in the Salamic Grimois tradition, texts like the Lesser Key of Solomon, magic operates on the premise that a spirit can be summoned and commanded if you possess

its true name and seal. And we have actually done an entire episode on the seal of Solomon and the lesser key, and you can check that out to get actually a bigger idea of how magic works. But the principle works both ways. It's the reason that that's the reason that's the reason that spirits could be conjured by using their names, and the reason a practitioner would want to keep their own name concealed, like Roman would want to keep his name concealed. A hidden name is a protected one. You can't conjure a entity or a spirit according to occult tradition without knowing the name. So Rosemary, with her Scrabble tiles, is doing exactly what Inquisitors and exorcists believe they were doing for centuries, trying to crack a concealed name to expose what

what's behind it. Now, there's a tempting second layer here that I want to flag and then set aside because it doesn't really hold up. You'll sometimes hear that Roman Castavet is a wink at the director Roman Polansky. You know, his first name is in the villain's name. It's a fun idea, but the timeline is kind of tricky. So the book was published in 1967 before Polanski was ever attached to direct it. And any line drawn between Roman the villain and Roman Polansky, the director, is, seems like just a genuine coincidence, not a buried signal. Or maybe it's some type of evidence of some type of bigger occult plot. But as far as evidence goes, there's nothing to suggest that. The book has Roman's name in there, and then, coincidentally, the director is

also named Roman. But since our whole subject here is the difference between real hidden meaning and the meaning that we kind of project onto stuff, I think it's worth bringing up. And it kind of plays into the theory that maybe something beyond Levin, beyond Polanski, was working on this all along behind the scene, some type of force, some type of energy that pushed this into being. But more on that later, because the anagram isn't even the most unsettling thing embedded into the story. It's not a name at all or a root or a building. It's a number. And I think you can already guess which number. In the novel, Rosemary's Baby is born on June, 1966, the sixth month of the year 66. And of course, that makes 666.

Fans have long noticed the shorthand, the six month, the year 66, and the three sixes of Revelation, basically right there. Obviously, the mark of the beast, the number of the beast. And the birth is telling you quietly that the baby's father is Satan and ultimately what the baby is is, without anyone really having to say it out loud. And Levin tucks in an even creepier signal into the timeline. The story spans 1965 into 1966, and at the Coven's New Year's Eve party, Roman Castavet raises a toast and says,

Happy 1966, the year is one. That line means more than you think. You see, later in April of 1966, Anton LeVay founded the Church of Satan. and declared it year one of the satanic age. Ano satanus. Levin, writing the novel in that exact window, dropped a real-world piece of contemporary Satanism

into that part of the story. Now, every layer that we're kind of pulling back here, there's another one underneath. But this one goes deeper than all of them. They call it the oldest deal in the book. This is the devil's pact. And it's the arrangement that Guy makes with the cast of it. Guy trades his wife's body, her autonomy, her womb, perhaps the most sacred element of a woman

in exchange for a successful acting career. And it's one of the oldest tricks in occultist and satanic tradition. Guy is, in essence, Faust. Now, in the Faustian sort of legendary tale, Faust makes a deal with the devil, a pact that he can never undo. But the Faust legend itself is a derivative of a much older, much more famous retelling of a story that goes all the way back to the 6th century. The first recorded account that we have of a man selling his soul to the devil comes from a Christian cleric named Theophilus of Adana, who died around 538 AD. Now, according to the legend, Theophilus was offered a position as bishop and turned it down out of humility and was then deprived of his existing post as an archdeacon by the man who took the job instead. And of course, Theophilus was furious and humiliated. He sought out a necromancer who put him in contact with Satan.

They made a deal that was signed in blood on parchment. Theophilus renounced Christ and the Virgin Mary, and in exchange for his soul, he was elevated back to power. Now, that story established the template for every soul-selling devil-packed narrative that followed. A man trades something that the devil wants in exchange for worldly success, and someone eventually has to pay the price. Guy thinks that he made a deal. What he actually did was step into a 1,500-year-old story that ends the same way the devil always wins when you make a pact with him, which actually and crudely brings me to the next

layer of the story that we have to cover, and that's the ritual itself. The ritual where Rosemary is drugged, restrained, and handed over, just like Theophilus's soul to the devil himself. This scene sits at the center of Rosemary's baby. Rosemary, half conscious in this dreamlike haze, a chanting circle of naked elderly people, and this demonic figure with reptilian eyes climbing on top of her. It's extremely disturbing, to say the least. And unlike the Tanis root, It's not a fictional invention. It's a near-perfect dramatization of something called the Witch's Sabbath, the imagined gathering at the dark heart of European demonology,

where witches were said to meet to renew their loyalty to Satan. In the demonic literature, the Sabbath had a recurring set of elements. It always had group nudity, chanting, and the presence of a high-ranking demon, sometimes Satan himself. Sexual congress between humans and humans, demons, and in many accounts, the ritual would use infants. People often credit the Malius Milafacarum, the notorious witch-hunter's manual published in 1487, as the source of the full Sabbath. But the Malius doesn't even use the word Sabbath. The fully assembled image of the ritual was

actually built up across several different texts, beginning with earlier works like Johannes Niders formicarious in the 1430s, and elaborated on by later demonologists. So the Sabbath, as we see it, was a composite, assembled over decades of different texts. Now, within the film, the fictional book, All of Them, which is the one that Hutch actually leaves for Rosemary to help her crack this whole case, echoes this material directly. So Levin and Polansky reconstructed all this with unsettling accuracy. They matched almost element-for-element what European demonologists spent decades or even centuries describing. And once you see that, the demon at the center of it stops looking like a generic movie monster,

and it's touching on something deeper and ancient and connected to spiritual tradition, and it even has a bit of a paper trail. The entity with the rough-scaled hands and the claws and the yellow reptilian eyes, the one that climbs onto Rosemary while the Coven Chants, it has a name, and a resume thousands of years long. He is an incubus. The word comes from the Latin word incubare to lie upon. In Western demonology, the incubus is a male demon that assaults women in their sleep,

pins them in a kind of paralysis and crucially impregnates them. The term itself is medieval, servicing around the 13th century, but the idea of the creature is far older than that. The earliest version of the idea reaches back nearly 4,000 years all the way to Mesopotamia, where a being called Lelu was said to visit women, as they slept. Remarkably, even the father of Gilgamesh in the famous epic, the hero of one of the oldest stories we have, is named as Lelu. And this motif recurs across cultures with eerie consistency. So Mesopotamia has Lelu and Lelitu, Jewish tradition has Lilith, medieval Europe folded the incubus

directly into Christian demonology, and the described pattern doesn't change really at all. The demon comes at night, the victim can't move, her health decline, she loses weight, her color kind of fades from her skin, her vitality goes away, and in some accounts, she even dies. Now, remember what Rosemary endured in the film. It's almost beat for beat the same medieval description of a woman in prolonged contact with an incubus. And the child of such a union has its own name, too. The offspring of a demon and a human, according to demonology literature, is called a Cambion. The likeliest root is the Latin Cambiare to exchange. In the 1200s, the theologian William of Overn wrote of Cambions, these sort of children of demons and humans,

the sons of these incubus demons who wailed endlessly from milk and could never be satisfied. So, are there other Cambions on record? In legend and in literature, yes. But for the purpose of the episode, we're just going to stick with Rosemary's Baby, aka Rosemary's Cambon.

Which brings us back to that bassinet. In the film's final scene, Roman Castavet stands over the crib and says, Satan is the father, and his name is Adrian. He shall overthrow. the mighty and lay waste their temples. He shall redeem the despised and wreak vengeance in the name of the burned and the tortured.

Now, this is the dialogue that Levin wrote. There's no real 1,300-year-old Cambon prophecy that he's quoting. But what Levin did do is build that speech out of the real raw material. The incubus, the Cambon, the demon-fathered child destined to overthrow and lay waste. And Adrian, the baby that Rosemary rocks at the end,

is the modern echo of that ancient idea. Keep in mind, too, that there is a whole other adjacent history of spiritual beings having relations with human women. So that's like the whole story of the book of the Watchers and the whole origin of the biblical figures, the Nephilim. But we're not going to get distracted on that side tangent, which is fascinating, but we've got to focus on Rosemary's Baby. We've talked a lot about the Nephilim on this channel,

and you can see episodes on them elsewhere. But for this, let's pull all this together. Between all these various symbols and rituals and practices and events really rooted in ancient occult tradition and ancient sort of witch lore, Levin and Polansky weren't just making a horror story. They were narrating a real-life encyclopedia of ancient and occult traditions woven so tightly into this domestic Manhattan story that millions of readers absorbed it without even realizing what they were. had just consumed. And then inexplicably, things started to happen. The people who made the film, the cast, the crew, people on set would, in the months and years that followed, begin suffering fates that map onto the stories that they just told with eerie parallels that I think are pretty difficult to ignore, which raises some questions that still have never been answered. Did Levin and

and Polansky unlock something that should have never been showed to the public? Did they open some type of portal with this book and with this film? Did they mess with something that should have just been left alone? And did they get cursed by the forces behind the story itself? Well, let's look at everything that happened. So we'll start with a rumor that won't die, that Anton LeVay, the founder of the Church of Satan, the most famous Satanist in America, secretly worked on the film. The story goes that he served as a technical advisor and personally played the devil in the conception scene climbing into the scaled costume himself. Now, that rumor is almost certainly false.

The actor in the demon suit was a stuntman named Clay Turner, on set photographs taken during the filming show Tanner in costume in the scene that LeVay supposedly performed. But here's the part that matters for us and for this story. LeVay didn't just fail to deny the rumor. It seems like he actually manufactured it. We did a whole episode on LeVay. if you want to understand who he was and kind of how he fits in with the Church of Satanism.

But the claim that he was flown to Hollywood and wore the devil costume appears stated as fact in his own authorized biography. There is no production record of this occurring and the producer himself has denied it. But exactly as we saw with the Tannis route, once enough people believe that it's a thing, the gap between what's real and what's rumored stops mattering.

Remember, LeVay founded the Church of Satan in 1966, on April 30th, the night that European folklore reserved for the witches gathering and proclaimed 1966 year one, the first year of the age of Satan. So just like Roman Castavet did in the story, Rosemary's Baby is set in the same stretch of time, 65 into 66. But the church came first in 1966, and then the novel arrived in 1967, and the film in 1968. So the movie didn't create the moment so much as it just took advantage of it. But that's atmosphere, the cultural sort of noise around the film. What comes next is more concrete. So the actress in the film that actually plays Rosemary,

a woman named Mia Farrow, while she was on set, the woman, you know, whose husband quietly trades away her well-being to serve his own ambition, a version of the same story was unfolding in her own life. At the time of filming, Faro was married to Frank Sinatra. She was 21 and he was 50, and he held a deeply traditional view of what a wife should be, once saying on the record that he was a good enough provider that he couldn't see why a woman would want to do anything else. So when they married in 1966, Mia Faro actually agreed to step back from acting. She spent months trailing Sinatra from film set to film set to concert to private show with nothing of her own to do. And eventually she grew restless enough that she signed on to do.

Rosemary's Baby. Then the shoot ran long. Sinatra had cast her in his own movie The Detective, and Rosemary's Baby, which she described as the film that she was in every shot of, wouldn't release her in time. He wanted her to walk off of Polansky's movie to do his, but she wouldn't do it. So in November of 1967, while she was still shooting, with roughly like a month of filming left, Sinatra's lawyer walked onto the set and handed her divorce papers. According to her account, it was the first that she had ever heard of a divorce at all. She had held herself together and signed everything on the spot without reading it, and then finished the movie.

I mean, think about that. On screen, she's playing a woman whose husband treats her autonomy as something to be managed and overridden, who sacrifices her for his own advancement. And offscreen, her marriage was ending for kind of the same reason, because she refused to be managed and chose herself and her autonomy over an ultimatum. Mia didn't give in. She chose the film and her own life

and her own desire over her husband's terms. Rosemary eventually learned to do the same. So that haunted hollowout quality in the second half of the movie, it's worth wondering how much of it was just acting.

But guys, we still have a long way to go. This is still only the prologue. The actual deaths haven't even started. Now, the first death in this entire saga that happens in real life is the composer. His name was Christoph Kometa. He was a celebrated jazz pianist and a composer and one of Roman Polansky's closest creative collaborators.

And then in December of 1968, just about six months after the release of the movie, Kameda was at a party in the Hollywood Hills. Late in the night, after heavy drinking, he and the writer Mara Klasko got into some horseplay near this kind of rocky encarpment thing, and Kometa thing. and Kameda went over the edge and struck his head.

Now, accounts differ exactly how or what happened, but the result is the same, a serious head injury that everyone at first seriously underestimated. Kameda seemed kind of shaken and had his bell rung, but he was okay. He even turned up at the Paramount days later with two black eyes and a lump on his forehead and just kind of brush it off as some drunken horseplay. But in the weeks that followed, he developed relentlessly. headaches. Doctors reportedly reassured him that nothing was wrong, that he would recover,

but it wasn't true. His brain was bleeding. His condition deteriorated and he was hospitalized, and he slipped into a coma from which he never recovered. He died on April 23rd, 1969, just four months after the fall. Now, in Rosemary's baby, the Coven gets rid of Hutch by striking him down with a sudden coma. And the woman that lived in the apartment before, the woodhouses moved in, also fell into a sudden coma and died. In the film, Hutch never truly wakes up. He services just once and then he's gone,

dead four months after he first collapsed. Now, on its own, it's a horrible accident, nothing more. You know, if you're drunk and playing around, things can happen. But go back to the story, and it starts to look really similar in a way that's just too weird to brush off. Now, the next person to feel the curse was the film's own producer, this guy, William Castle. So after the film came out, Castle started getting mail that he wasn't prepared for.

It was hate mail, threats and letters from people that were outraged, the religious and the skeptical, and they were accusing him of unleashing evil on the world. And then he got sick. Castle was struck with excruciating kidney stones, this agonizing illness that was severe enough to put him through surgery and at times leave him delirious in pain. And in that delirium, in his own telling, the film bled into reality. While he was hallucinating from the pain, he started to hallucinate scenes from Rosemary's baby. The most famous report of this tells us about him crying out, to no one in particular, Rosemary, for God's sake, drop the knife. Another version was him begging to not be cut again by Rosemary's

knife when doctors scheduled another surgery. Now, after everything, Castle's survived. But the experience changed him. He withdrew. His career never recovered the momentum that he had from this massive hit movie, and for the rest of his life, he said, sincerely, and out loud, that he believed Rosemary's

baby was cursed. He basically wrote it in his autobiography. By the time the film was collecting Academy Award recognition, he didn't care because he was at home frightened of what he thought he may have brought into the world. He wrote, and I quote, the story of

Rosemary's baby was happening in real life. And later that August, the horror stopped being about a film at all when it reached Roman Polansky's wife, a young woman named Sharon Tate. Now, Sharon Tate was an actress, and she wanted the role of Rosemary badly. She wanted to star in the movie. Now, at the time, she was Roman Polansky's girlfriend, and they would marry in January of 1968. Now, Sharon Tate had recently filmed a movie called Eye of the Devil, playing a sinister young witch who performs ritual sacrifices. And according to a later account, Tate became fascinated by Wiccan ritual and took it up after filming. A friend later quoted her saying, quote, the devil is beautiful. Most people think he's ugly, but he's not. Now, obviously, she didn't get the role. But she lingered around

the set during production, and if you watch closely, she's actually in the film. In the early party scene when Rosemary is with her friends, Sharon Tate appears in the background as an uncredited extra, kind of just like a ghost in the film that she wanted to star in. Now, what follows here is a real crime and one of the most tragic and horrific crimes in all of Hollywood history, in which real people were killed and actual families are still dealing with it. But it deserves to be told plainly without any type of sensationalism, so that's, you know, how I'm going to try to do it. On the night of August 8th, going to August 9th, 1969, just over a year after Rosemary's baby was released. Sharon Tate was at home in Los Angeles. Her husband, Roman Polanski, was in Europe

working on another film. Three of her friends were with her that night. She was just 26 years old and about eight and a half months pregnant, only weeks away from her due date. After midnight, members of Charles Manson's cult, the Manson family came on to the property. This is when Tex Watson entered the house. He reportedly told the victims, I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the 's business. What followed became one of the most infamous crimes in American history ever. Tate, her unborn child, and everyone on the property were all murdered. Tate was stabbed 16 times. According to Susan Atkins, one of the killers that night, Tate spent her final moments pleading for the life of her unborn child. Before leaving, the killers used Tate's blood to write the word pig on the wall.

At the time, Sharon Tate was killed, Rosemary's baby, a film about a pregnant young woman tormented by a cult of devil worshippers, was still in theaters across the country. And the film's director had lost his pregnant wife, who had once hoped to play that very role to a real cult that framed its whole mission as the work of the devil. They didn't see themselves as murderers. They saw themselves as carrying out something much larger.

And that's the parallel that people found impossible to shake, When the news reached Polansky in London, he later wrote in his autobiography that weeks earlier, a grotesque thought had serviced in his mind that he couldn't explain or dismiss. The thought that came into his mind was, you will never see her again. He made nothing of it at the time. There was no reason to, but I guess it was true. In almost any other story, this is where it would end. I mean, how could it possibly get darker? Well, it does.

The shadow over the Polansky household wasn't finished. Roman Polansky became one of the most powerful filmmakers in Hollywood. Rosemary's baby had made him a star. Chinatown made him into a legend. He had survived the Holocaust as a child. He lost his pregnant wife to one of the most notorious murders of the 20th century. The world had largely decided that he was a tragic genius. And then on March 10, 1977, Roman Polansky was arrested at the

home of his friend, Jack Nicholson. Now, I don't know what YouTube's monetization will let us say here, so I could say sexual assault, but just let it be shown that the charge was the R word. Her name was Samantha Gaily, and Polansky had been photographing her, supposedly for a Vogue Paris spread. Now, over the course of two photo sessions at Nicholson's house, he gave her champagne. And then he gave her a Kualoot, basically a drug that is a sedative. And then he walked her to the jacuzzi, and then, according

to her grand jury testimony, which she never recanted, and which Polanski ultimately did not contest, he sexually assaulted her. Polanski was originally charged with six felonies. He pleaded guilty to one, unlawful sexual intercourse

with a minor, as a part of a plea argument. He served 42 days of a 90-day evaluation at Chino State Prison, and then when his lawyers tipped him off that the judge intended to throw out the plea deal and sentence him to 50 years in prison, Roman Polansky in 1978, boarded a plane to Europe and never came back. He's been a fugitive from U.S. Justice ever since. In the decades since his flight, at least five other women have publicly accused him of sexual assault, including in a civil case settled out of court in October of 2024, an alleged,

1973 assault on a different minor. The man who directed Rosemary's baby was a serial predator and on the run from his consequences. Now look at the story. A young woman is drugged against her will and is betrayed by people that she trusts and the person she trusted the most, her husband, she is then sexually assaulted while unconscious. After Rosemary wakes up with scratches on her body and fragmented memories of a disturbing nightmare, her husband dismisses her concerns by saying something along the lines of, I didn't want to miss my night. Referring to not wanting to miss the opportunity to conceive and explains that he had sex with her while she was unconscious, passing it off casually. The exact line that Guy says is, it was kind of fun in a necrophile sort of way. It's delivered with

this chilling, nonchalance, framing his assault on her as a judge. joke. And it's one of the most disturbing moments in the entire film, precisely because of how casually he says it, revealing his complete disregard for her. I mean, keep in mind, that's not even technically what happened. She was actually assaulted by Satan himself at her husband's behest to conceive the child of Satan. But then his cover for the story is basically admitting to his wife, oh yeah, I just did it myself. I mean, it's crazy and disturbing in the film. dynamic, a drugged victim, a betrayal of trust, an assault treated as nothing, is kind of in broad strokes, what Samantha Gailey described happened to her. It echoes what other woman have since

alleged about Polansky across the span of his career as well. Now, in the decades since, he has faced further accusations. Four women came forward between 2017 and 2019, alleging sexual abuse in the 1970s. Three of them saying that they were might. at the time, and a French photographer has alleged that he assaulted her to in 1975. In 2024, Polansky settled out of court a civil suit brought by a woman who alleged that he had assaulted her in 1973 when she was a minor. Now, we should say that he has denied these allegations. The one case he did not fight is the one that he pleaded guilty to. And that, possibly more than the deaths, maybe more than the murders, more than the cursed coincidences,

That might be the most disturbing fact in this entire story. That the man behind the camera telling the story of a woman whose nightmare no one believed was actually creating the nightmare that no one believed in real life. There's no curse in that, only a choice and the actual people that he harmed. So, I mean, what do we make of this? Ira Levin didn't invent the darkness in this story outright. I mean, he borrowed a lot of it from the charm. worn in a locket, to the drugged conception, to the Witch's Sabbath, the demonologist manuals, the anagram, the demon child.

He reached back into centuries of genuine occult tradition, pulled out the real pieces and assembled them into a story. And the story seemed to reach back. It reached out of the screen and into real life. From the tragicoma and the death of the composer to the hallucinations of the producer, the eerie haunting of the apartment building, the devastating murder of Sharon Tate and her unborn child, and the horrors of Polanski himself. I mean, where does it stop? Levin once said that while writing it, he began to feel that the book was in his words meant to be. But given all of what we've covered today, all of the things that happened outside of Levin's control, I think we need to ask ourselves who exactly was writing this story. And that's the story. And that's the thing.

ladies and gentlemen is a brief synopsis about the occult history of the film rosemary's baby i mean dude what a weird what a weird thing right like it's just like i mean the fact that john lennon's killed at the actual place that they filmed it that roman polanski's girlfriend and then wife that wanted to be Rosemary is then murdered while she's pregnant by a satanic cult led by Charles Manson. The guy that does it walks in and says, I'm the devil, I'm here to do the devil's business. The composer goes unconscious, goes into a coma, and dies just like two of the characters in the movie. I mean, dude, the whole thing is crazy. Now, we can take the skeptics approach here and be like, okay, on any number of movies, people are going to die. You give it enough time, a movie gets made,

and bad things happen to people. We only notice it with this one because the nature of the movie is so grim and so disturbing that it seems poignant when there's parallels, you know? If people died after they made Toy Story, I don't know if we would draw a connection. You know what I'm saying?

But with this one, it just... I don't know. There's something about it, even watching the film that just feels so unsettling. And then for all of this to happen outside of the film, it just makes you wonder, like, is it possible? Again, this is like on my religious kind of conspiracy

vibe, but it's like, is it possible that if God is real and if the devil is real, does the devil use people, perhaps even outside of their knowledge, to usher in stories into the world, to, I guess maybe show people the occult world and the occult tradition to maybe normalize occult and magical behavior? And there is a consequence for that. Is it possible that Roman Polanski made a deal and said, hey, I will make whatever movie you want if you make me a star, if you make me one of the biggest directors in Hollywood. And then he makes this movie,

he holds up his end of the bargain. And then, of course, just like we saw with Faust, the devil always comes out on top. Look, that's unprovable. That's crazy conspiracy land. Who knows? But if you ask my mom, that's probably what she would say. Now, if you were interested in all sorts of interesting religious topics,

Well, great news. We have Religion Camp where we deep dive on the lesser key of Solomon and all sorts of stuff like that. If you're interested in other, like, occult history, we've done a bunch of episodes on Ben Franklin's occult ties and all sorts of other stuff over at History Camp where we talk about everything that's ever happened. And if you like just deep diving on crazy mysteries and the most interesting stuff happening right now and around the world and you like interviews with other people way smarter than me, well, great news. You're in the right place at Camp Gagnon. We drop these episodes twice a week, every single week, one on history camp as well, and one, every one, every day. religion camp, so make sure you subscribe to all the channels. If there's anything I missed in the story or anything I overlooked or anything got wrong, please drop a comment. I would love to know, and I would love to know what your thoughts are. Do you think that this movie was actually cursed? Is it just serendipitous? Is there something weird here that maybe I'm missing or all of us are

missing? I would love to know your thoughts. Please drop a comment, YouTube or Spotify. I read all of them, and even if I don't get back to you, I'm sure someone will. Thank you all so much, and I'll see you next time. Peace. Hey guys, if you love conspiracies and hypothetical history, well, I want to invite you to check out Signal 33. This is a companion pod to our podcast here at Camp. It's made and edited by the same team that runs all of our shows, and I choose the topics every single week. So check it out, subscribe, and start the dialogue in the comment section.