Life After Paranormals: Season 3, Episode 7

When David Oman built a house near the site of the infamous Manson murders, he was soon visited by unwelcoming neighborhood spirits in "The Manson Curse."

David recounts when he first bought the property.
When we first came up here and bought the lot, I remember vividly looking down the street at where the gate was, and I just felt this tremendous sense of sadness. The initial thought was just a recollection of, "Oh my God, that's the place where the Sharon Tate murders took place all those years ago." And I had to stop and just like, take a moment, and look down at the ground and just say, "I'm honoring the memory of what took place here, and I just want you to know with all due respect, I am here," in the present sense of the word being here. And just saying, "You know, I just want to pay homage to you all that passed away there," and honor them, because it felt uncomfortable just to be here and hang out here.

Did you ever have any odd experiences while building your house, or did the experiences start once the house was built?
During construction, when we were building, after we had the framework up, I remember walking on one of the lower floors and having the sense of somebody being there. I remember turning around and saying, "Oh! Is there--?" and I'd look and there's no one there. But I got the sense that I wasn't alone on any of the floors in the house during the construction.

We had four laborers from South America working on the house. These guys were from the ages of about 16-23 years old, and they didn't know anything about the history to the Sharon Tate murders because I didn't want to freak them out. But, during the construction the guys would come up to me and say, "You know, one of the tools – one of the saws that was down on the third level – wasn't there. Did you come by after the construction was done that day and take the saw and bring it upstairs and put it in the closet in one of the rooms where it was hidden?" Apparently tools were literally going from one place where they had been left and the following day they were in a different location, according to my laborers.

At the end of the construction of the house, I assembled all of my laborers – the four of them here… in the dining room area.   We were sitting there talking and I said, "Guys, it's been two years you've been working on this construction. Have you guys had any experiences that were a little bit more out of the ordinary? You know, a little bit crazy, that you couldn't explain." The oldest laborer we had who was from El Salvador, he was twenty-two years old said, "Yeah. I had this experience when I'm on the third level six months ago, and it's about six o'clock, and I'm just wrapping up. Everybody else has left for the day, and I hear voices and footsteps coming from the top floor."

He says he comes upstairs and he looks, and there's no one on the top floor. So he says, "I go back downstairs. I start working. And within five minutes I hear again the voices and footsteps coming from the top floor." So, he came up the spiral staircase; goes and looks around the entire top floor; goes back on the street and looks and there's nothing there. He says, "That's it. I'm leaving."

He goes back down to the bottom floor and starts packing his stuff up, and all of a sudden he says he hears footsteps coming down the spiral staircase.  So he says he hears these footsteps getting louder and louder. Louder and louder until they got to the very bottom of the staircase to the landing right next to the door that he was, you know, in the room of. And he says, all of a sudden he pops out to see who's there, and he's looking around to the left, right, and there's no one there at the landing of the staircase. And he says all of a sudden, this ice cold breeze isolated against the nape of his neck, he said, and he said the hairs on his neck stood straight up. He got terrified. He ran up the stairs and took off and didn't come back for six weeks.

David recounts incidents where a wine glass was moved by a paranormal entity.
The wine glass was at the dining room table. There were six of us. Myself, this woman, her husband, her daughter, and her daughter's two friends. The morning of the dinner party, her [the woman's] aunt said, "Dear, don't you know that when you were a little girl, your family lived in Texas in the early sixties, and your mom and Sharon Tate's mom were very, very, very, very good friends."

So, they came for dinner, and at the dining room table at the middle of dinner, we all had glasses of wine in front of us, a glass of wine between her daughter and one of her daughter's friends flies across the table. And not at a high rate of speed, but at a pretty decent clip. The red wine was cascading from one edge of the lip[of the glass] to the other edge of the lip but didn't go over the lip of the glass. And I sat there and I leaned back in my chair and I said, "Okay, now I've seen everything."

On one occasion, we had a party several years ago where a glass of wine and a plastic cup went whizzing across the room into the stairwell and hit the wall and basically splattered on the wall. We had like seventy-five people here at the party, upstairs and the downstairs, and the people that were at the bar were sitting there talking, and it was like it took everybody by complete surprise.

How did you feel when Jeff played you the recording he made that captured a voice saying "Jeffrey don't shoot me"?
I was blown away. Again, I was just intrigued. I'm fascinated. I don't care that they're dead. I have respect for them, and I expect them to have respect for me.

David recounts an experience where the spirits did not respect him or his home.
I got an electric bill once that was three times the normal electric bill. I'm no multi-millionaire, and I very much don't like to spend money on electricity. When I got my bill, I said "Oh my God! Seven hundred and fifty dollars?!" I said, "I can't and I won't deal with this! I'm not going to be bled dry financially because a bunch of spirits think it's funny to sock it to me in the pocket book."

I added two and two together and said, "You know something? These spirits are basically taking energy from the wall and playing games with me and doing things that are causing the electric bill to spike."

So I said, "If you want to manifest, you can manifest… if you guys want to manifest, you have to manifest as you were at the prime of your lives…" and I said, "As far as the electric is concerned, you can not and will not do that anymore." I said, "I can't afford it… you'll force me out of this house, and if I go, I'm going to make sure that you guys… are gonna get it worse than I do."

How did you meet Alma Carey, the psychic? Was there anything specific that drew you to choosing her to help you?
Nine years ago, on August 8th, last minute I reached out to a ghost investigator named Rob Wlordarski. I contacted him literally the day before and said, "Look, I'd like to have a paranormal investigation done on the anniversary of the murders. Could you bring your team and a couple of psychics and sensitives with you?"

Rob brought Alma Carey that night. She seemed very pleasant and nice. I'd say about a half an hour after she entered the house, I started noticing a change in her personality, her demeanor, and her just mannerisms – all became a little bit peculiar. And when I say peculiar, I mean agitated and kind of gruff and kind of like irritable and irascible. Twenty minutes earlier/half and hour earlier when I had met her in front of the house, she was as polite and as nice and as friendly as can be.

And then she started complaining of pains. And then, as the night got on, it got worse. She came to the conclusion that: "Oh my God. I'm taking in too much of these people's – of this collective energy. The pain of the people's murders."

She did a cleansing of herself, and that was it. It was all cleaned out.

What were you expecting going into the séance?
My expectations were just – is there any way to reach out and communicate with them? At the time I was thinking, "Look, I would much rather be a person of honor and respect to them and see if there's any way, shape, or form that I can help them move on into the light." Far be it for me to be a person who would want to keep somebody here for my benefit. It's like no – if they have a place to go and there's a destination for them to be at, I would rather be the person who shows them the way to their end destination.

How did the séance end?
During the séance, as I recall, we had three candles in the middle of the table, right in front of Alma, and the first thing Alma said is that if you're here, can you give us a sign? And she says, "Look, we have three candles on the table, it should be very simple to be able to manipulate one of the candles. I remember vividly that Alma started saying this, and within about a minute, the candle in the middle – the flame starts rising tall. And then all of a sudden the flame in the middle candle to slowly, slowly, slowly died down, until it extinguished on its own, and the other two candles on opposite sides of the middle candle weren't doing anything.

The other thing that happened that really was the mind blower... We're all sitting there at the table and we're all holding hands, and I'll never forget – there's a fragrance that comes. An aroma. It didn't take the whole entire room. Like, is there somebody at a perfume counter that sprayed perfume on the nape of their wrist and put it right under your nose and said, "What do you think of this fragrance?"

And I think, does anybody else smell that? I'm looking around the table and then the girl... that was sitting like four people over at the opposite side of the table to the left, she goes, "Oh my God!" She goes, "I smell it right under my nose, too!" Now when she's saying it, I don't smell it anymore. It's gone. Then to my right, four people over on the exact opposite end of the table, somebody says, "Oh my God! I smell it now too!" And it's literally going from one individual to another individual to another individual in no pattern whatsoever.

What regular measures do you take to deal with the paranormal activity?
I take a healthy, strong attitude of curiosity. As far as I'm concerned, I've seen so many things before my very eyes and heard things on my own ears and experienced so many things here – it's a question not of "How do you prepare yourself?" or "What do you think is going to happen?" It's just like the unknown. You never know what's going to happen.

Once you go to a place of fear, you've lost all ability to deal with the situation rationally. And as we all know, when you go to a place of fear and you act irrational, it allows a certain amount of craziness to unfold that you don't have any control over.

If you start in a place of fear, then it's a matter of walking on eggshells every second of the day, and that's not a healthy way to live life.

I just say, "Okay, cool. I live with them. That's fine. No big deal." I've accepted it. I deal with it. There's a certain amount of respect. There's a certain amount of mutuality where they understand I'm here and I understand they're here, and since neither one of us can do anything to affect the other, we just get along. We just let things happen.