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

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Four different actors from the 1980s horror franchise Poltergeist died within a 6-year span. Dominique Dunne was murdered. Julian Beck succumbed to stomach cancer. Will Sampson suffered from a degenerative disease. And Heather O’Rourke’s death at the age of 12, was deemed “distinctly unusual.” Was it an eerie coincidence...or something more sinister?This episode contains themes that may be disturbing to some listeners, including descriptions of domestic violence and graphic descriptions of violence.To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at www.disgracelandpod.com.Poltergeist scared the hell out of Jake when he was a kid. What movies scared you in your childhood? Let Jake know at 617-906-6638, [e-mail], or on socials @disgracelandpod.Visit www.disgracelandpod.com/merch to see the latest Disgraceland merch and check out the new limited edition Halloween merchandise!To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership.Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTERFollow Jake and DISGRACELAND:InstagramYouTubeX (formerly Twitter) Facebook Fan GroupTikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed, I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Monjou, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court. On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history,

including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis.

This is a story about a horror movie franchise, but it's also a story about a a curse. And freakish events that haunted the sets of three horror films. I'm talking about strangulation. I'm talking about an exorcism. I'm talking about a story where one actress from the film franchise was brutally murdered and 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 that scared that 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 CA Static MK2. 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 4th, 1982. And that was the day 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, Exercising. murder, death and destruction, and the poltergeist curse.

I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land. Richard Lawson thought it was his lucky day. First, he'd 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 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 6A, and as a diehard All My Children

devotee, quickly upgraded the actor to seat 1F 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 crews worked to thaw at 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 hard. 30 minutes. The plane slowly ambled down the tarmac. The wind blew stinging wet against the cabin windows. As the plane was cleared for takeoff, Richard started to worry again. All that de-icing had happened 30 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 50 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 tarmac. Passengers screamed, and the plane was nearly sideways when it hit the ground. 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 passengers 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. sides. God damn 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. 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. 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 10 years earlier in 1982. The legacy of Poultergeist and its sequels was infamous. Four actors dead in their wake. Some said the productions were elvaded 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 Jobeth Williams assumed. Real skeletons would be too creepy, too gross. But fake skeletons cost too much and took too much. 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 Poultergeist. Toby Hooper's 1982 horror classic. Joe Beth's authentic reaction to her close encounter with actual human bones helped make Poultergeist not only the highest grossing horror movie of 1982, but the eighth highest-highest. gursing movie of the entire year, and it wasn't the only authentic reaction in the movie. 11-year-old Oliver Robbins, who played Joe Beth'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

bugged out. He gasped for air, and the crew of adults thought that Oliver was simply delivering a knock-down drag-out performance. 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 Ann. The youngest member of the Freeling family and the character who makes contact with and later is a little bit of the last. 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 Steven Spielberg spotted her. Spielberg was poltergeist writer and producer and Heather fit his vision for Carol Anne Freeling to a T. 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

poltergeist 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 out there, unexplainable things, things that made the hair stand up on the back of your neck and the

skin on your arms tingle. Who or what those things were, it was sometimes impossible to know. But one thing was for sure. It had always been here. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends...

Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed.

I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark.

When, like, young people come off, to me and they want to be an act or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? You'd rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance.

Like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises. And his entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going. And the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and scrape. I immediately know that I've been at sleepwalk. David O'Yellow. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham.

So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Moderato from Stranger Things. Tena Monsu. Camilla Marone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened.

Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. James Herman 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 11 in the morning, Sunday, February 9, 1958.

Strange things have been happening in the Herman's home at 1648 Redwood Path and 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 master 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, 12-year-old James Jr., and a 13-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 Jr. worked the toothbrush back and forth on his molars, James Sr. stood in the doorway of the bathroom and watched in horror as a glass medicine bottle moved shakily across the top of the sink, 18 inches, give or take entirely on its own, and then it crashed and shattered into the sink basin. James Jr. jumped, his toothbrush hit the floor. 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. Ghosts, spirit specters, all horseshit. Surely there was a reasonable logical explanation for what was going on. perhaps a high-frequency radio transmission, a downdraft in the Holmes 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. Later that same day, James Jr. 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 Tozzi himself bore witness to some truly weird shit. It challenged his logical just-the-facts 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 21st, a little over two weeks since they had begun to experience the inexplicable, they packed their bags and went to stay with the relative. And they were gone for two days. No supernatural activity was detected at their home while they were away. And neither did anything out of the ordinary happen at the relative's house where they were staying. When they returned a 1648 redwood path on the evening of February 23rd,

they were greeted by a flying sugar bowl. An 18-inch statue of the Virgin Mary rose from a bureau and soared 12 feet through the air. A large bureau tipped over in James Jr.'s room. A record player weighing 10 pounds rose from a table and traveled 15 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 at 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 March 1958 profile of the Hermanns in Life magazine raised another possible suspect, James Jr.

The article reported that, 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 Jr. was often nearby when bottles popped and porcelain figures hovered mid-air. Dr. 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 Jr.'s mind was indeed influencing matter. Like Detective Tozzy, Dr. 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, Dr. Pratt once said, that if 8 million New Yorkers at one time concentrated on moving the Empire State Building, it might move a bit. Dr. 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 Herman's 1958 haunting.

And that true story was used nearly 25 years later as the basis for the poltergeist screenplay written by Stephen Spielberg, Michael Greas, and Mark Victor. In the movie, Carol Ann Freeling, played by five-year-old newcomer Heather O'Rourke,

the one Spielberg met in the MGM commissary, is the manifestation of Life magazine's psychokinetic child. She doesn't move it. 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 1982. It also scared up

some serious box office box. Throughout the summer of 82 and well-end, the fall for 24 weeks, Poultergeist ranked in more than 75 million in domestic gross. That said, the number was peanuts compared to the money that the other out of this world Stephen Spielberg blockbuster made when E.T. was released the very next week. One cast member in particular was never able to see Poultergeist reach its full box office potential. When she was cast as the eldest Freelink sibling, Dominique Dunn was a 22-year-old 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 Poultergeist 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 Sweeney a letter, but never sent it. We are not compatible, it read. When we are good, we are great. But when we are bad, we are horrendous. The bad outweighs the good.

The whole thing has made me realize how scared I am of you. A month later, against their better judgment, Dominique was living with Sweeney again. Around 3 a.m. 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 through 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 L.A. darkness. Dominique Dunn escaped with her life, at least that time. But there was no escaping the fear she lived with constantly. She hid out at a friend's house.

She only showed her face in town. when she was 100% 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 world, word, word. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl.

You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends. either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always,

can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head. with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance, like he's about to attack me, like,

making karate noises. And his entire, the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. And I immediately know that I've been a sleepwalk. David O'Yello. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction

or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Tena Monsu. Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast.

Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says she's gone.

She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the drug. journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened.

Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dominique Dunn decided that she had left John Thomas Sweeney for the last time. She didn't care that he was the right-hand man to famed chef Wolfgang Puck in the kitchen of the Shishi Maumaisant restaurant on Melrose Avenue, or that he continued to professes on dying love and remorse with a fistful of flowers.

In actuality, he did more evil with those fists than prepping food and carrying flowers. Dominique cared about her own safety. She cared about the fact that when she filmed a cameo as 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 30, 1982, 8.30 p.m. Poultergeist was still showing well at movies.

movie theaters across the country, even if it had slipped from the upper echelon 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 done. She was already moving on, prepping for the next thing, the next big success. Dominique was at her one bedroom home on Rangely 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 miniseries 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, saw Sweeney's 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 chain, walked out onto the porch,

and closed the door behind her. David looked over the script in his hands and began to run lines on his own. He could hear Dominique and Sweeney 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 Rangley Avenue, West Hollywood, that was out of their jurisdiction. Nothing they could do. Out of their jurisdiction?

David couldn't believe it. He didn't have the number for the sheriff's department offhand. LAPD wasn't in a call-forwarding kind of mood, and David was terrified to open the front door. He decided to slip out 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 4th, 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 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 her eardrum, collapsed her lung.

The judge said, quote, The law says you judge a person for his axe 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 slightly 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 1986, coincidentally perhaps it was around the same time that the sequel to Poltergeist hit movie theaters. Stephen Spielberg didn't return to co-writer produced Poultergeist Two the other side, but the other original screenwriters did return, as did the majority of the original cast. Heather O'Rourke, now 10 years old, was back as Carol Ann. Since she was so young and 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 2 retains occult 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 II 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 60. And then, in June 1987, a little over a year after the sequel came out, another of its co-star is Will Sampson, who played the Native American shaman protecting the family from Harry Kane's paranormal voodoo, died at 53 from post-operative kidney failure. Like the unexplained activity that had taken place nearly 30 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 3 in the summer of 1987, Heather O'Rourke went home to Big Bear Lake in California, That winter, she turned 12 years old. She began to prepare for the press junket 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 Poltergeist movie franchise, just like the Herman's Long Island home, was cursed. March 22nd, 192, Richard Lawson was still upside down. The entire plane was still upside down. U.S. Air Flight 405 was currently inverted in Flushing Bay. The runway lights of Liguardia flash in the runway. 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. Richard struggled to free himself, but he couldn't move. His head was stuck. What were these two objects pinning his body down?

Seats maybe? Other passengers? He was trapped. He was going to die. Up at the 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. Fuck 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 O'Rourke, well, that had come out of left field. Shocked everyone. They all thought she had a nasty case of the four. flu, her family, the doctors. But her heart stopped on the way to the hospital. They were able to revive her and life flighted her to the children's hospital in San Diego. She died on the operating table before the doctors could help. They didn't even know where to begin. No one knew that she had

been born with a birth 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 bloodstream. 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 problems seemed to have come from nowhere. Insights like those drove the curse conspiracy theorist 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 his 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 underwater, was about to finally let it all go. One giant exhale and done when something came over him.

He felt the 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 seatbelt 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 unmovable before. Now they easily moved to the side with the gentless of touches from his hands. He could hardly believe it. His body began to move. He didn't know if it was opered down.

He just wanted to find. an air pocket. When his head finally surfaced, the twisted wreckage below his feet, kicking and thrusting him toward salvation. He took a deep breath. He inhaled bay water and jet fuel and spat it back out. He looked up and an arm had 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 were so cold you knew you were alive. 27 people died in the

crash of U.S. Air Flight 405 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. Long Island back in 1958. 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. and this is disgrace land. All right, Poltergeist. Listen, I'm going to re-watch this now. I hope you guys are too. As I mentioned in the A-block, 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.

617-9066638, leave me a voicemail, send me a text, and let me know. We'll get into it in the after-party bonus episode. You can also reach me at Disgraceland. as well on Instagram, X, and Facebook. Leave a review for the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and win some free merch. All right, here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracellandpod.com.

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Visit disgracelampod.com slash membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at DisgracelandPod, and on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at Disgracelandpod. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed, I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this.

He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever,

and my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yello. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo for. Stranger Things. Tanya Monsu, Camilla Marone,

Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Movies can make you feel, make you dream. Sometimes they even make you appreciate architecture. Is there anybody who's been hotter in a doorway than Elizabeth Taylor?

That's the kind of analysis you'll find every week on Dear Movies I Love You, the new podcast from the Exactly Right Network. Every Tuesday, we break down the films we're crushing on, from blockbusters to deep cuts. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.