![]() The year before her death she'd been diagnosed as having Crohn's Disease, a lifelong inflammatory small bowel disease which often first manifests in children and young adults.) Of course such an unexpected death would fuel rumors, especially when considered in conjunction with Dominique Dunne's murder only six years earlier. (That she looked healthy did not necessarily mean that she was. It's hard enough to accept that a child can die of an illness, let alone a healthy-looking youngster no one knew anything was wrong with. The circumstances surrounding her passing rendered her death even more of a shock than it otherwise would have been, as she went overnight from a little girl who had the flu to a dead little girl who expired during a desperate operation to save her life. The toxins rampaging through her system proved too much, however, and she died on the operating table. Her heart was successfully restarted and she was flown by helicopter to the much-larger Children's Hospital, where she underwent an operation to remove the obstruction. What had been thought to be a bout of ordinary flu launched her into cardiac arrest during the drive to the local hospital as bacterial toxins set loose by a bowel obstruction made their way into her bloodstream. Heather O'Rourke, the child actress who played Carol Anne Freeling throughout the Poltergeist series (starting when she was six years old), unexpectedly passed away at the age of 12 when she died of septic shock on 1 February 1988 at the Children's Hospital in San Diego. ![]() His short sentence and early release remain subjects of controversy. Sweeney was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, sentenced in November 1983, and released in 1986 after serving only 3 years, 8 months of a 6½ year sentence. The conversation did not go as he'd hoped, and the encounter ended with him strangling her for what was later determined to be 4 to 6 minutes, then leaving her for dead in her driveway. Weeks earlier, Dunne had ended her abusive live-in relationship with Los Angeles chef John Sweeney, but on the night of 30 October 1982, he dropped by their former shared residence to plead with her to take him back. It's the combination of the two unexpected deaths that lies at the heart of every rumor about a Poltergeist curse.ĭominique Dunne, the 22-year-old actress who portrayed big sister Dana Freeling in the first Poltergeist film (released in June 1982), died on 4 November 1982 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, four days after her boyfriend choked her into a coma from which she never awoke. Though two of the deaths were foreseeable (expected, even), two others were not. Though coincidence is a much more likely explanation than a curse, there have been four deaths among the cast of this set of films: Dominique Dunne (Dana Freeling), Heather O'Rourke (Carol Ann Freeling), Will Sampson (Taylor, a good spirit), and Julian Beck (Kane, an evil spirit). ![]() Each recounts an episode in the lives of the Freelings, a fictitious family who have the bad luck to take up residence in homes inhabited by spirits intent upon kidnapping their children or sending their kids to live in similar places. Poltergeist (1982), Poltergeist II (1986), and Poltergeist III (1988). Three horror films based on this form of lore comprise the Poltergeist trilogy: It is hypothesized poltergeists are drawn to homes in which there are prepubescent children, especially girls. This occurrence has given rise to the rumor the productions were in some way "cursed" due to the nature of the films themselves, as if the evil spirits conjured in the make-believe world of the cinema have since reached out into the real world to claim what they might see as their rightful victims.Ī poltergeist in folklore is a noisy and destructive (but usually mischievous, not malicious) ghost held to be responsible for unexplained noises and movement of objects within a home. ![]() What is seen as an unusually large number of deaths have occurred among the former cast of the Poltergeist trilogy.
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