Lately Cinemax has been airing scary movies from the 80’s & 90’s. The ones I have been enjoying mostly are the films that make the Hellraiser series. I can’t stop watching the first two. Just this week, they began to play the Poltergeist movies.

As I was watching Poltergeist II this morning because I woke up at 4am for some reason to down a gallon of water I couldn’t help but wonder about the little weird looking girl from the movie that is now a recognizable face and name, Carol Ann.

Carol Ann was played by an actress named Heather O’Rourke who I got curious about. See, often times these 80’s kid stars never amount to much and we never see them after the performance that made them famous.

So in looking into the life of Heather O’Rourke I found a bit more than I was looking for. What I was expecting was a criminal record of meth usage or some failed album attempts. Not the case.

Apparently O’Rourke died when she was 12 years old shortly after filming Poltergeist III which she never got to see.  According an O’Rourke Fansite:

On the morning of Feb. 1st, 1988, while preparing for school that day, Heather’s mother noticed that she did not look well and became concerned that Heather had not yet recovered from the apparent flu that she had over the past weekend.  When Heather’s symptoms suddenly became worse and she collapsed, an ambulance was summoned.  On the way to a local hospital, Heather went into shock and lost consciousness, followed by cardiac arrest. 

O’Rourke was resuscitated and taken to the hospital where she later died that afternoon. I was unable to locate any official reason for the child star’s death but the main one is she suffered an “intestinal obstruction that had eventually caused part of her small intestine to burst.”

Now the crazy part of all this her death was blamed on a belief that O’Rourke, along with 4 other people involved in the making of the Poltergeist series, died due to The Poltergeist Curse. An urban legend that brought down despair to the people making the movies in an attempt to cease production.

According to backstage personnel at Paramount, the ghost of O’Rourke herself haunts Paramount Pictures’ stage #19, where she filmed the episodes of Happy Days she was in.

Creepy, huh?