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July 9, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
56:00
Edition 468 - David Oman
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is still the unexplained.
Well, here we are, well and truly in the middle of July 2020.
And what have we done this year?
It's almost like singing So This Is Christmas and What Have We Done, but So This Is Summer.
And what have we been able to do this year?
As most of us remain in a total or semi-state of lockdown.
Thank you so much for all the emails that you've sent me that have kept me going through this period.
One of these days, we're going to talk about lockdown.
There I am using the L word again as if it was an historical era.
You know, we'll say, oh yes, lockdown.
Do you remember that?
But right now, a lot of us are still stuck in it, and I'm very grateful for your support.
If you want to email me, please go to the website theunexplained.tv and follow the link and send me an email from there.
Tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show when you get in touch.
And if you'd like to connect with my Facebook page, which is TheUnexplained with Howard Used, the official page, then please do that.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster.
Thank you to Haley for booking the guests.
The suggestion for the guest on this show, though, came from you.
David Omen is the man we're going to be speaking with, who decided to build a house very close to the site of one of the most heinous crimes in all of history.
I'm talking about the Manson murders and the death, among others, of Sharon Tate.
A case, of course, that rocked not only the United States, but shook the world and still traumatizes when you read the details of it, some of which we will go into on this show.
So if you are easily stomach-turned and upset by details of murders, essentially, I mean, I will try and, you know, I won't give you the intense and extreme detail of it, but there are some things here which are just not pleasant to hear, but they happened and they have to be part of the story.
But if you're concerned about those things, then please maybe skip this podcast and come back to us on another one.
But I think you will be fascinated and chilled by this story from David Oman, who built a house very close to the house on Ceelo Drive in Beverly Hills where those events happened.
I think, although maybe this is too heavy and big a statement for somebody like me to make, I think those crimes were the point at which the flowery dreamings of the flower power and psychedelia era came to an abrupt and bloody end.
People woke up from it all.
But if we are to believe what David is about to tell us, those crimes and the things that happened then left with them a legacy, a legacy that is very real and very tangible in paranormal activity.
David Oman, thank you very much for listening to all of that.
Please pick me up or correct me on anything I got wrong there.
No, as a matter of fact, Howard, first, thank you for having me on your show today and or this evening.
And again, everything you got was absolutely, positively on the mark.
My house actually sits about 100 yards or 100 meters from where the Sharon Taton murders took place 51 years ago and five weeks from tonight, as a matter of fact.
And my house is crazy, has crazy activity.
And I mean, I've had things happen that most people, as I've told them, would basically run out of the house and never return because of the amount of incidents that have taken place here that I've witnessed and others have witnessed.
And it is, as you said, a tragedy.
It's one of the most horrific tragedies of the 20th century on a small scale.
When you talk about one person leading a small group of people to do such violent, vicious crimes and murders, it's kind of, as I like to say, it stained the history as we know it all over the world.
Because when those crimes took place and Sharon Tate was killed some 51 years ago, it wasn't isolated to just the U.S. that knew about it.
It was a worldwide phenomenon.
And why I say that is because in the time of doing research about the house and the area, I found newspaper articles back from 51 years ago in South America, South Africa, in Australia, in the UK, across the European continent, even I would have to say probably in Russia.
They might have even heard about her then, because just the notoriousness and the way that the crime was committed with such brutality in such a heinous manner that people were like saying, but she was eight and a half months pregnant.
And they stabbed her 16 times.
I mean, now, obviously, fast forward to the present day, I don't want to say it's common, but it's less less scary.
It's less traumatizing.
But in 1969, in that era, set up against the backdrop of the flower power movement and the peace, love, and war movement, etc., it's just, it ran diametrically opposed to that era.
Well, it did.
And as I said, David, you know, it was the thing, I think, that made people wake up.
You know, it was like they'd been having a real nice dream.
Maybe they'd been to a party or had a nice night out.
And this is like the most abrupt wake-up call that the world could have had.
And I think the reason, and we will talk about, because we have to refresh people's memories here, we will talk about the details of those crimes just to, you know, not in great deep detail, but just enough to be able to explain to people and also to a younger generation.
It's not just to people who are in the United Kingdom listening to this.
It's going to be to a younger generation who may have the foggiest idea, but only a foggy idea of what this is.
So we need to be doing that.
But like I said, this crime was something that shocked people to the core.
And there is this, as you said, international interest, certainly here in the United Kingdom, right across Europe and in all kinds of places, because I think at some kind of deep level, people are horrified, horrified and fascinated.
And often those things can go together.
They're horrified and fascinated by the depths to which certain human souls can sink.
You know, obviously they're not capable of people reading about these crimes.
They're not capable of them themselves.
But they are fascinated and scared, as I would be scared reading these details and was, that such things can happen in this world that we thought was nice.
I think that's what it is.
But you tell me.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
I think that at the time it was so out of the blue and so completely unexpected.
And because Sharon had been to Europe and was in the UK filming a movie called 13 earlier, and I think David Niven was in it, and there were a couple of other famous English actresses, actors that were in the movie, that she was a,
I don't want to say a worldwide phenomenon, but the murders struck a chord worldwide because people were familiar with her story and her love affair with Roman Polanski, and because she was in Europe, as I just said, I just remembered she worked on the movie The Fearless Vampire Slayers with Roman Polanski, and I think they shot that in Poland.
So again, the fact that she transcended a large swath of this planet when she was alive, that the fact that when she was killed, it was just horrendous.
People, as you said, they were fascinated and still are fascinated by the tragedy that took place.
Because after the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood came out last year, where I lived, literally down the driveway from her house has been swamped and swarmed with tourists and looky-loos to the point where for the first three months of the movie, we were getting about 200, I'd say about 100 cars a day driving up here.
And I mean, day, day and night, middle of the night, middle of the day, there would be throngs of cars driving up here to see where it took place.
And that's a fascinating thing that I've reflected on before in broadcasts that I've done, not always on this show, but on other broadcasts that I've made, that sometimes people want to go to see the location where a bad thing happened to almost to they feel easier to know that this is not a fantasy and it also reassures them in their own safety.
In other words, there's a little, and maybe this is going too deep into the psyche and the psychology of it, but there's a bit of a feeling of, well, you know, that's interesting and isn't that terrible.
And thank God that wasn't me.
I think you're exactly right.
But the thing about this, what took place, the tragedy that befell them down the driveway here is the fact that you come up here and the people look around and say, oh my God, this is craziness.
Because now, 50 years later, there's one, two, three, four houses that are now up here.
And when I meet people that drive up here and I say, well, you have to remember, at the time of the murders, it was pretty isolated.
There was the house at the end of this drive, which is where Sharon resided.
There was a house outside of her property, maybe about 50 feet from her, from the gate that was there.
and then another 50 feet down from that was another house.
And then it was empty.
Right.
To the very, very, very bottom of the driveway.
And we have to give people a sound picture of this place.
It's Cielo Drive, isn't it?
That's, that's, I think that's how you pronounce that.
Yes, Cielo.
And it became internationally famous, actually infamous for the events there.
And as you say, it was a part of Los Angeles that was quite select and quite not exactly isolated because nobody, nowhere there is really, but, you know, away from the rest of it.
And I always had this view whenever I watched old newsreels of this location, and you are living along that drive, and that's why we're talking now.
I always had this view that they were the kind of houses that you would probably see Henry Fonder and his family in some, you know, he had a TV series where he played a cop in the 70s.
And he was a good, clean cop with a great big smile and, you know, his badge on display in his jacket and his family all around him.
I kept expecting to see Henry Fonda bound out of one of those houses.
They were, they are, the all-American home.
Yeah, well, as a matter of fact, the irony that you mentioned Henry Fonda is the fact that he actually was one of the residents at that house in the 50s, I do believe.
God, do you know something?
I didn't.
I had no idea of that.
You know, that is, isn't that weird synchronicity?
All right.
So that's the location.
Yes.
Give me the details then, just a thumbnail sketch of the crimes that will be central to that which we are about to discuss, if you see what I'm saying.
Sure.
Well, on August 8th, 1969, Sharon Tate and her ex-fiancé, JC, bringing hairstylist to the stars.
And we have to say, Sharon Tate, just for those young people, those who may have forgotten, Sharon Tate, up and coming movie star.
Right.
Up and coming film star.
She had done a few motion pictures.
She was famous for doing a film called Valley of the Dolls, which was her dramatic film that she had done, that was her outbreak film.
She had done some other roles with her husband, Roman Blansky, one of them called The Fearless Vampire Slayers.
Let's see.
She'd done a movie with Tony Curtis.
It was a film that was a beach film, so it wasn't high in content, but a lot of visual and a lot of B and B. Boobs and bums.
I think we can relate to that in the United Kingdom.
Those words are quintessentially British, but better than the alternative.
Okay, David.
So she was in a variety of films, and obviously you have to do certain films to establish your career.
If you have to do a jolly beach movie to get to where you want to be, then you do it.
Exactly.
And so she had done that.
And she was coming up into her own as a very, very qualified actress from her serious dramatic role in, again, Valley of the Dolls.
Well, on the 8th of August, the evening of, she and her friend, Jay Siebring, her ex-fiancé, who lived up the street, and her dear, I guess her best friend, Abigail Folger of the Folgers Coffee Empire, and her boyfriend, Wojciech Vrykowski, were at the home at 10,051 Cielo Drive, which is at the end of the driveway from where I am talking to you right now at.
And Charles Manson had basically, who was a drifter and now a guru to a group of people that lived in the San Fernando Valley, they were called the family.
Him and his cohorts basically went upon the murder spree that started on the 8th into the 9th of August, 1969, and basically laid waste to Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant,
her ex-fiancé Jay Sebring, their friends Abigail Folger and Wojciech Frykowski, and of course the odd person that was not part of their group who was visiting the caretaker, William Garritson, were all horrendously slaughtered at the house down the street from my place right now.
Sharon was stabbed some 16 times.
She had multiple additional lacerations and defensive wounds to her forearms.
Jay Sebring was shot five times, was shot multiple times and stabbed to death.
Stephen Parent was shot five times, point-blank range in the entrance of the driveway as he was trying to leave.
Abigail Folger was stabbed, I forgot how many times, but a number of times, so much so that her white nightgown was stained completely red from the blood.
I mean, look, this is, and we have to once again say to our listeners here, it is after midnight, so I hope you listen to what I said at the beginning of this, that if you find such details difficult, then tune out right now and come back later.
But, you know, this was, we have to tell you this because this was an horrendous crime.
It not only shocked America, news got out really quickly, it absolutely shocked the world.
But the thing about this, David, is, and I'm sorry just to jump in here for that reason and for this reason, Manson himself, and this was a fact that I'd forgotten until I did an interview with an author last year who'd written a book about the 50th anniversary of this crime.
Manson himself was not actually part of that rampage.
Right.
He sent them on their, he gave them their marching orders to commit the crimes.
And a lot of people said he's a psychopath.
And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no.
The difference between a psychopath and a sociopath is that the psychopath enjoys and revels in the opportunity to get his fingers literally drenched with blood.
The sociopath, on the other hand, derives a certain thrill of the ability to make other people do the deed.
And in so doing, he has no physical blood upon his hands, even though he has instructed these people to commit the heinous crime.
Charles Manson was a sociopath.
Deeply.
Deeply disturbing.
Sorry, you were saying.
Oh, he was he, again, was able to make others, in a sense, they thought it was people nowadays say it was because of drugs, and he hypnotized them.
No, it was none of the above.
He basically had fresh, moldable clay in these kids because of the circumstances into which they were coming from and the reasons why they became into his fold was because of the fact they were all escaping their parents and the generation gap that the parents that they were living with and they were coming from had basically instilled upon them.
And the rivalries of, you know, what is acceptable, what isn't acceptable was rife in those days.
So these kids were looking for a way out to find some kind of a dynamic in an environment where they were loved and rewarded with affection and appreciation, which they weren't getting from their parents.
So Manson did what he was able to do, not because of the facilitation of drugs, because as I understand it, there is no drug that you can give to somebody to make them into an autonoton to do your bidding.
That's just not how drugs work.
You can't brainwash somebody.
These people wanted and willingly were brought in gradually into his collective.
Well, it was effectively what we would call today a cult, and we've seen examples of that at Waco and Jim Jones and other cases through history, haven't we?
Exactly.
Yes, and that's what it was.
They admitted it's like people say, well, they spent 50 years in jail.
Nobody looks backwards to the time when these people were in jail and incarcerated originally and what their statements were to the press and media.
They openly expoused his desires, and his desires were to basically remove these people from the planet.
And I don't believe that Helcha Skelter was necessarily the only motivation to Charles Manson.
It was a sense of revenge and resentment and hatred of those that had succeeded in their lives.
Just explain the reference to Helter Skelter.
We know that was a Beatles record that was around at the time.
Right.
At the time, the Beatles record Helcher Skelter and the song was based upon, as you know, the roller coaster ride in Liverpool, if I'm not mistaken, that you guys, that was once there.
Well, I'm from Liverpool.
I remember it, yeah.
Right.
So the idea was that Manson supposedly used the song Helcheskelter as the marching orders directed to him from the Beatles to create a race riot, a worldwide race riot, and specifically in the United States to have the blacks overthrow the white establishment.
And that then the blacks would look for someone to be the leader and would look at Charles Manson.
And again, I don't understand this, but of all the millions of people on the planet in this country, again, that Charles Manson would ascend the throne to be the leader of the Black Panther movement, which I didn't understand.
And I still don't.
That's why a lot of my personal perception is that from what I've read and gathered is that Manson had tremendous resentment towards the people in the music industry and the entertainment industry who had succeeded in their chosen careers where he felt that he was gypped.
And what I'm meaning is that Charles Manson became friends with Dennis and Brian Wilson.
And the Beach Boys, right?
And he had made cross paths with them years before the murders take place in 67 and 68.
And he became friends with Brian Wilson and hung out with him.
And Brian used to take Charles to all these Hollywood parties, including a famous one that is shown in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which is where he's at Mama Cass's party at her house.
And he has a big argument with Mama Cass, and she throws him out of the party.
Okay, David, we're going to have to pick this up in just a second because I've got commercials breathing down my neck.
David Oman were talking about the terrible events in Ciela Drive, Los Angeles, a long time ago that left a deep scar and impact on the world and changed many, many lives.
And the name Charles Manson, of course, written into infamy.
But this all has a ramification today because David lives at an address on that drive that is deeply, he says, deeply haunted and almost possessed by those events there.
And you were saying that Manson, the word I'm getting in my head is wannabe.
He wants to be famous.
He was able, because this is Los Angeles, it was the 60s, he was able to associate with people who were famous.
But it must have rankled with him massively that he didn't get to where they got and he didn't have what they had.
Yeah, well, what happened was, is he was, I hate to say he was misled or he was led to believe that he was on the path, which was because when he met Brian Wilson, he had shown him some of his lyrics and Brian had said or expressed his interest in saying, you know something?
These lyrics, these actually might be lyrics to a song we can actually, you know.
So he was given, I hate to say he was afforded the opportunity that he would be believing that Brian Wilson was going to develop this, his music, his lyrics and some of his writings.
And that's when he started to believe seriously that he had chops and the chomps to do this.
And so when Brian brought him around all these parties, you got to remember that the people that were named on the Charles Manson hit list were people that Charles Manson had met and had spoken to.
And most of those people he had come across because of the parties that he went to with Brian Wilson.
So that what I kind of gathered when I was reading Helter Skelter as, you know, later on, you know, past couple of years, I started realizing, wait a second, you have the dynamic setup for Charles Manson to believe that he's going up to his path to ascend the mountain to get his piece of, you know, of success.
And what happened was it's a twist of fate, Brian Wilson had released, or the Beach Boys had released the album Pet Sounds, which as I use the analogy of Phil Specter in the early 60s created the wall of sound.
When Phil Specter's music hit the airwaves, every group, music group, ran to Phil Spector to produce his albums.
I mean, of course, musically, the Pet Sounds album was the Beach Boys version of Sergeant Pepper.
It was a defining, of that era, it was the defining album.
Exactly.
And that's exactly what it was.
It was something so intrinsically brand new that brought everybody's attention to Brian Wilson, just like what John Lennon and Paul McCartney had done with Sgt. Peppers brought them all that attention and everybody wanted them to produce albums.
Same with Brian.
So Brian now was inundated with requests to produce other people's albums.
And Manson started getting, as I would say, impatient.
And he couldn't stand still in the fact that Brian's busy.
I have to wait for Brian to get unbusy to then get to working on my projects.
But in the meantime, it sounds to me like Brian was just...
And, you know, Brian sounds like he was just being as many people in the entertainment industry that I've known through my life.
You know, just being nice by saying, you know, we will look at some of your songs here.
It's not saying we're going to make you a platinum album.
It's just saying, well, you know, if we get some time, we'll look at your songs.
Sounds to me.
It was, but it was even further than that because in fact, Brian did include one of Manson's songs on the album, one of the albums of the Beach Boys, apparently, and didn't give Manson credit for it, I don't believe.
I think that was the story.
But the bottom line is, is that, no, there was a tremendous interest and curiosity from Brian Wilson.
It was a two-way street in the beginning.
Okay, all right.
So here we have somebody then who has issues.
Yes.
And they're very serious issues.
And those issues are principally the ones that you would see and experience issues of resentment.
I can't, you know, in a city where people are famous, in the place where entertainment is king, I can't really be that.
And I don't see why this is not fair.
So you've got all of that seething resentment, which I guess percolates through to this man's followers because he's clearly charismatic in an evil kind of way.
And then those events transpire.
Who was brought to justice for this?
Because Manson didn't go to the electric chair for this.
He wasn't executed, was he?
No, well, they were all committed to the death penalty.
They all received the death penalty in 1970 after the trial was commissioned.
But what happened was, is that Manson and the others were basically had their sentences commuted to life in prison, but with the possibility of parole because the California legislature in 1971 or 72 basically dismissed the death penalty.
So the death penalty was out of time, was abolished.
Abolished, right?
So what was it then?
For Manson, life in prison.
Life in prison, but they kept on coming up for parole.
And a small tidbit of information that nobody seems to know, or few people know, is that after the murders were committed and they started about midnight, the 8th into the 9th of August, Friday night into Saturday morning, and they were finished, the murders were completed by about 12.20, 12.30.
Manson came back to the crime scene at about 2 in the morning with an accomplice to see the disposition of the crime scene.
And there's some corroborating facts to this that people can figure and find out when you read the book Helter Skelter.
Manson said to the family the following night saying, I want you to commit, to be more witchy.
And he was referring to the way the disposition of the crime scene was the night before.
You remember, nobody had cameras that were taking photographs on their cell phones of the crime scene.
So Manson had no idea of what the disposition of the crime scene was had he not been there.
And he basically said to them, I want it to be done this way with more this and more that.
So he gave them specific instructions based upon what he had seen the night before.
That's the one point of reference.
The second was that the police know for a fact that somebody came back to the site between 1.30 and 2.30 in the morning because the neighbors or the, I guess there were witnesses from around the area that heard two men arguing late in the evening.
And it was coming up from the Tate House at a bound between 1.30 and 2 in the morning.
Secondly, Susan Atkins, the reason why the murders were so slow in being, as we say, in the process of being uncovered, was because when Susan Atkins had described the crime scene to her cellmate, Ronnie Howard, she did not mention a word about the rope that was drift over the, was draped over the rafters and the beams in the house that connected Sharon Tate's body to Jay Sebring's body.
And that's because they didn't do that.
That was done after the murders were committed.
Hold on, then, so did, are we saying that people admitted to something who hadn't done it?
No, no, no, no.
They admitted to what they admitted, but the disposition of the crime scene as she related it to her cellmate, Ronnie Howard, did not match the crime scene that was left after when it was discovered by the police.
As you say, somebody else had been in there and had adulterated the crime scene.
Yes.
And Vincent Bugliosi, who a friend of mine who was a producer made a movie with, asked Vincent, and Vincent said, oh, I know somebody came back to the crime scene after the murders were committed.
But Vincent, to his dying day, didn't believe that Manson was the one, was one of the people that returned to the crime scene.
And I said, because he thought that he would expose himself to being potentially caught.
And I said, however, Vincent, the crime scene is two-tenths of a mile up a private driveway off the main street.
The cops would have barricaded the bottom of the driveway and allowed traffic to continue up and down Cielo Drive proper because there were too many houses that had nothing to do with the crime scene since it was on an isolated private drive off the main street.
Secondly, we know that the police reports show that there was bloodstain evidence that's in the backyard that only matches Sharon and Jay's blood type, but there's no bodies.
And at the front door, there's a pool of blood that is a mixture of both Sharon Tate's blood and Jay Sebring's blood.
So what happened was that Nansen and his accomplice dragged Sharon Tate's body from the living room with also with Jay Sebring's body.
They stopped at the front door, at the porch, at the front, right at the entryway.
Blood pulled up as it was coming off of their bodies.
They took them into the backyard.
My theory is they tried to put them into a pseudosexual position, and they couldn't because the bodies were basically had rigomortis set in.
Okay, I think that really, that illustrates what we're talking about here, the depths of depravity and evil that we're seeing.
I don't think we have to go into any more detail than that.
No, that's fine.
Partly because it's absolutely horrible.
And, you know, my listener can read about that if they want to, but I'm going to spare other listeners further details unless we really need to go into this more, then we can.
So we understand that this is the most heinous of crimes.
There are very few crimes in history that are as bad, as incomprehensible as this one.
And a bunch of people ended up in jail.
Manson himself in the land of the death penalty did not experience the death penalty.
So what happened to him?
Just remind us of how he ultimately expired, because people are going to want to remember that.
I think it's three years ago now he died of old age.
Susan Atkins died of a inoperable brain tumor a few years earlier.
And the rest, Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houghton, are still very much in jail.
Right.
Okay, now, there is a connection, a big one, and a chilling one between you and all of this, which is why we've told this story.
Yes.
Because here's a guy, David Oman, who is interested in paranormality, but actually acquires a house very close to the crime scene.
Talk to me about that.
Talk to me about you and talk to me about that process.
Well, I've always been fascinated by the paranormal since I was a child and had my first, I guess you'd say, experience with a spirit.
I was five years old.
I ran into my parents' bed in the middle of the night because I was scared of something.
I remember falling asleep and then a few hours later waking up in the middle of the night and sitting up in the bed in between my mother and my father.
And looking to my right at about four and a half, five feet off the ground, I saw an object that just manifested out of the door.
And it was a ball of red, green, and blue light, and it was not blinking, but it was illuminated, and it was floating.
And it went around the perimeter of semicircle around the front of the bed in front of me, all the way around to the other door, and then disappeared.
Ever since then, I've been fascinated by the paranormal.
Um, and to make to correct you on something, my I actually didn't buy a house.
I bought a lot 21 years ago in 1999 with my father, who found it on a Sunday morning in the classified section as a piece of real estate that was a lot, vacant lot for sale on a foreclosure for $40,000.
Wow.
Okay.
Well, in that area, real estate for $40,000 is cheap by anybody's standards.
However, didn't you look at the address?
Yeah, well, it was down the street.
He calls me up at 8 in the morning on a Sunday morning, says, get up.
I found a lot.
It's like, dad, it's 8 in the morning.
It's $40,000.
It's in Beverly.
I said, Beverly Hills, $40,000.
I said, Dad, is it, say, 40K for 40?
He goes, yes.
I said, it's a misprint.
It's missing a zero.
They misprinted it.
He goes, no, I don't think so.
Get up and meet me.
I said, all right, fine.
So I got up.
I drove up to this location.
And I remember hearing the name Cielo Trim saying, why does that sound so familiar?
And yes, I had read Helter Skelton, had been up here when I was a kid in high school to see where the infamous Manson murders had taken place because we had all read Helter Skelton.
It was in the neighborhood, so to speak.
So didn't you, you know, as any of us might have said, didn't you say, now I understand why this is $40,000 and not $100,000 or more?
Well, the reason why I said to him on the phone, I said, it must be a vertical slope.
I said, there's no such thing as a piece of empty real estate in Beverly Hills.
That's $40,000.
And how close to the events?
How close to the location of the events is this piece of real estate?
It's about 150 feet down from where the house, where the property began and stood.
Gee, I thought you were going to say a quarter of a mile.
It's 150 feet away.
Oh, yeah.
And the thing is, is that in 1994, they tore the house down, the Tate property, and bulldozed from one end of the property, and I think it's two acres flat at the end of the street, to the other end of the property and bulldozed and flipped the earth three feet.
But they left two bearing walls and the floor from the original kitchen to get away with the remodel so they wouldn't have to spend as much money on providing with the new permits and for new construction permits.
So I had seen that in the house that was there, the new house was under construction during the period that we were building our house.
Hold on.
So you're saying that because of a technicality of law to do with building there, part of that original terrible house was used to build what is there now.
Yes.
God.
Exactly.
Wow.
Okay.
And then you decide, I'm really interested in a piece of real estate where I can maybe build my dream home 150 feet away.
Yeah, it wasn't.
And by all means, I am not a death hag and a big fan of Sharon Tayton.
I wasn't then.
I certainly, I wouldn't say I am now.
I have deep respect for all of the people that were killed there, but it's not like I'm a fanatic and, oh, Sharon, I've got pictures and posters.
No, I have respect for the individuals.
I am not over-fantasized about or fantasy, you know, fan base.
Understood.
So did you think, well, it's a notorious location, but this is a great deal and I need somewhere to live.
Well, yeah, and it had always been my dream to build a house with my father because my father was a builder, architect, designer.
And I said, after he built my sister's house, or my sister commissioned him to build her house 30 years earlier, I said, oh, I was on the construction site then.
It's like, I want to do this with my house too.
I want to be able to.
And it was fortuitous because the lot was, it's a small little lot and it's on a very, very steep incline.
But as my father said, I like to build houses on slopes because if they're more difficult, it gives me a more of a creative space to work with.
And I was like, God bless you, Dad.
That's what you wanted to hear.
Okay.
So with the help of your dad, you build a house there.
Yes, yes, we did.
And the thing is, is that when I first bought the lot, I had this weird feeling inside my head of like, you know, I feel like it's almost, I hate to say this, it's fate that brought me here.
And when I was walking around, it's like, well, you know, I said, I love it up here.
It's the same feeling of where I grew up in the hills above Westwood Village.
And to me, I love the fact that there were animals, there was wildlife.
We have deer, coyote, bobcats, mountain lions and such.
And I thought to myself, this is, it feels like home.
I just had that sense of this is right.
And during the construction, it was stranger because I'd be working on one of the floors and the house is a three-story downslope, meaning the top floor is at street level and you go down to your second lower level and then to your third lower level.
And when we were doing the construction, it was like I'd be walking around and I'd have this weird sensation that there'd be sometimes somebody walking up upon me from behind me.
And I'd turn around and say, all right, what's and there'd be no one there.
Wow.
I asked my contract laborers, I said, look, you guys have been here now for three years.
Has any of you guys had any weird experiences during construction?
And one guy goes, yeah.
I said, I was on the third level six months ago in summer, and I heard voices and footsteps coming from the top floor at 6 p.m. when I was finishing up.
So I come running upstairs to see you and your father, because your father was the head contractor, and I don't find anyone there.
So I go out onto the driveway.
I look up and down the driveway and it's completely empty.
And I said, well, yeah, I said, I come up here at like 6.30 during the weekdays in the summer and it's empty because it's light and it's hot and no one's here.
He goes, yeah.
I said, what do you mean?
He goes, that's what I felt.
No one was here.
So he goes back downstairs and he starts working.
And five minutes later, he's voices and footsteps again coming from the top floor.
So he runs upstairs and he's looking around.
He says there's no one there.
He looks around the entire floor, goes back downstairs and he starts packing his bags.
Within about a few minutes, he hears the footsteps coming down the staircase, louder and louder as they're coming down the 30-foot spiral staircase.
He says they got so loud.
They got to the landing.
He runs out of the room adjacent to the landing and looks.
He says, there's no one there.
But he says, then it happens.
I said, what happens?
He goes, this ice-cold breeze, if you could call it that.
And he goes, it really wasn't a breeze, though.
It was like a two-inch wide band of ice comes whizzing across the back of his neck, below his hairline and above his shoulder blades.
And he says the hairs on his body stood straight up and he screamed, ados mios, ados mios, yame boy, yame boy, which means, translated from Spanish, means, oh my God, oh my God, I'm leaving, I'm leaving.
He didn't come back for some six weeks.
I'm surprised he came back at all.
Well, and I said to him, I said, you can't, he goes, yeah, he goes, I had to get paid for the prior three weeks.
I didn't get paid for it.
It's like, he says, but from that point on, I was always the first one to leave the job site every single day that I was there from that point on.
And I said, wait a second, that's when you were going to put in the tiles for the master bathroom and you didn't get around to it.
So after the third week that you weren't here, I got so frustrated, I took it upon myself to put the tiles in the master bathroom.
And let me tell you, as easy as these guys make it look to put in tile into a bathroom, I got news for you.
It is the most difficult accomplishment to do if you've never done it before.
And let me tell you, it is not as easy as they make it look because to them, it's secondhand.
They know how to do what they've been doing a million times, slapping those tiles in.
Well, if they're available, they want to travel the Atlantic.
I live in an apartment that is desperate for total renovation.
And if they're as good as that, then I think I need them here.
Okay, so when this place is being built, people are having experiences.
What were you thinking and feeling then?
Well, I was thinking like, all right, I know there's some points in the house that have always given me a little bit of the willies in a sense.
And there's certain parts of the house that we would go into that you literally step onto the floor, including my laundry room.
You step one foot up to the step that's part of the egress, the walkway going outside to the outside of the house or to the water heater.
And when you hit that landing, you all of a sudden feel like you're walking back and forth on a boat, like your equilibrium is being messed with.
And I mean, I've used to feel it all the time, but it would come and go in certain parts of the house and it would dissipate to the point where it's, no, it's not there.
Nope, it's now.
Oh, yeah, here it is.
It's again.
And other people would walk around the house and saying, you know, saying, I feel like this heaviness and a pressure on my chest or I can't, I'm finding it difficult to breathe.
I'm like having shortness of breath.
And other people were feeling the experience of being cold spots that were literally moving cold spots.
And we're talking no air conditioning, no heating, no windows open, just moving cold spots in the house where you can put your hand through a space in the air and say, oh, it's chilly there.
And then you pull it out and it's like, nope, it's not chilly on the other side though.
And then you put it back in.
It's like, nope, now it's moving to the left.
And just strange, strange types of experiences that you'd say, that's not normal.
And why did you make, since the Manson crimes did not happen on that site, why did you eventually make that connection?
Well, what happened was, is after two years of living here, I started to feel, you know, I've had enough experiences here with my own personal thing, with my dog.
I had a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Sebastian.
A little background, Ridgebacks don't bark unless there's a threat to their territory.
And that's the reason why I bought my Rhodesian Ridgeback.
He used to bellow at the front door as if someone was about to knock the front door.
We'd open the front door up.
There'd be no one there.
We would have knocks at the front door and open the door and there would be no one there.
And it wasn't like the neighbors' kids were doing ding-dong ditch.
It was literally that kind of stuff.
Faucets were turning on by themselves in front of guests in the bathroom.
My friend ran out saying, I just went to the, I tried to go to the bathroom and as I'm taking a leak in the toilet, the faucets turns on right behind me.
And I turn around to look to see the faucets are on full bore and I just freaked out and ran out of there.
I'm sure our British listeners know, but I'm sorry for being mister explained them, but we call them taps here.
The taps, right.
And it's amazing because I had never seen that.
And I was upset saying, all right, spirits, you did that for them.
When are you going to do it for me?
I want to be privy to this.
I deserve to have the experience, not my guests.
This is unfair.
And people go, you're serious.
And it's like, yes, I am darn serious.
I want to experience a paranormal activity in my own home and not let it be known and let it be known that I'm curious.
I'm not afraid.
Let's see it.
Let's have the action be brought upon us.
So I brought in a paranormal research group in 2004.
I think it was on the 9th of August.
And they had never been here to the house.
There was no history.
I had not been on any television shows.
I said, I want to do a paranormal investigation on the anniversary of the murders.
Can you guys come over?
So Rob Rodowski and Alma Carey, their psychic, and Rob's wife came over to the house with another two people.
And the six of us were, I guess, early in the evening, about five o'clock, me, Rob, Alma Carey, and Rob's wife were in the house.
Rob, myself, and his wife went outside to talk about something.
And Alma Carey, the psychic, who was here for the very first time, was sitting in the dining room.
I come back in the house five minutes later.
And mind you, we're the only people in the house, period.
There's no one else there.
And Alma says to me, oh, I just saw your girlfriend.
And my jaw got a little slacked down.
I said, huh, what?
And she goes, oh, I just saw her.
And she just walked downstairs.
And I said, and of course, knowing what I know, that's not the case, so I said, I acted dumb, and I said, Oh, can you describe my, can you describe her for me?
Instead of me telling her what I was about to say, which was, my girlfriend's not here, what are you talking about?
And all that stuff to set her off, I thought, no, ask her the simple questions.
What did she see?
Don't make her feel uncomfortable.
Don't make her feel like something out of the ordinary took place.
Just go along with it.
So I said, so what did she look like?
And she says, well, she's about five foot five, five foot six.
She had long blonde hair.
It was pulled back behind in her back.
It was pulled in like a knot at the base that then flew, you know, was going down, flowing down.
I said, uh-huh.
She goes, she was wearing a white sundress.
She had naked legs, meaning she didn't have stockings.
She had very shapely legs.
She turned as she was walking from the den past the bar counter.
She turned and she looked and she smiled at me and acknowledged me and continued to walk towards the staircase and made her way down the stairs.
And I looked at her and I said, really?
I said, you positive about this?
She goes, as positive as you can be.
Why?
I said, well, because my girlfriend doesn't believe in the paranormal.
Therefore, she's not here.
And secondly, and more importantly, she is about six feet tall.
She has long chestnut, straight chestnut brown hair, and she's model-esque, but she is certainly not blonde.
She is not five foot six.
She is not.
And she goes, well, I know what I saw.
And it's like, I said, I brought a picture that I had of Sharon Tate, a candid shot of hers.
It wasn't a publicity shot.
And I said, I said, could this be who you saw?
And she goes, that's who I saw.
That's her.
And my jaw dropped.
And I said, I put my hand in my face.
I said, that's Sharon Tate.
She died some 40, some 35 years ago tonight at the end of the street.
And she goes, well, that's who I saw.
And I was like, okay, that's it.
And you're sure that these things did not happen just because you're living in a famous location, that drive, and it was an anniversary and you're all conditioned to it.
Well, the thing is, is that she, I told Rob, I told Rob the story.
I said, Rob, I don't want anyone, not even your wife, knowing much about this.
But of course, Rob told his wife because his wife wanted to know.
But I said, I said, that's fine.
He says, did you tell Alma?
And I think he goes, no.
He says, we brought her up here and that was it.
She came with us and we didn't mention anything about it.
And she wasn't, you know, paying attention to where we were going and looking at the street signs and stuff.
So she didn't know any of this.
And it wasn't, I said, I want to keep it under wraps so that she's in the dark, so that it's not overtly obvious that this is what she's creating in her mind's eye.
Right.
Okay, understood.
And by the, and one last thing, I had not been on any TV shows.
I hadn't done any radio programs.
This is the very, very, very genesis of this whole experience in the house.
So no one had, there's no history outside of, as you say, the history, excuse me, that took place down the street, but nothing related to the paranormal activity that is now known about the house and so forth.
So you'd have to say it was the dark ages for this place.
There was nothing known about it.
It was an unknown.
All right.
Got you.
As we say here.
We've got five minutes remaining, so we've got a lot of ground to cover here.
One of the things that has come out of paranormal and haunting stories that we've told here on this show many, many times is that they start in a fairly benign kind of way.
People see things, they hear the odd bump, maybe something gets moved, maybe the temperature goes down, and that's it.
Those occurrences at your place did not stop with those things.
Oh, no, no.
We've had things, like I mentioned earlier, the faucets have turned on.
I've had objects move a port, which means that they're there one minute, then they disappear, literally physically, disappear and reappear in some other part of the house.
I've had objects slide on their own, move on their own.
I had a glass of wine slide across the dining room table about eight inches, three quarters of the way filled with wine in front of five other people besides myself here for a dinner party.
The curious point of that story was, is the woman had a direct connection to Sharon Tate as a child.
And her family and Sharon Tate's family back in the day, we later on found out in Texas used to get together for picnics and parties and stuff.
And it was kind of one of those things you'd say, oh my God, how did you not know?
We didn't find this out until two days after their visit.
So there are things that have happened here.
And I like to say that benign, everything in the paranormal, people are going to hate me for this, but the fact is, is that it's about your perception to the incidents of the paranormal that create the or tint the perception of it being good or bad, meaning that spirits aren't rattling chains and trying to scare human beings that are still alive.
I do not ascribe to the Charles Dickens dramatical response.
So why do you think the spirits and Sharon Tate in particular are trying to reach out to you?
Well, Lisa Williams, the famous English psychic, was here, oh, 14 years ago after I was on Ghost Hunters.
And she saw the house and she said to me that she was communicating with Shon and Sharon had expressed to her that she likes this house, that she likes me, that she wanted her story told.
And so much so that about 15, well, God, 16 years ago in 2004, on one of my walks down the driveway, I said out loud, I said, I need a Break here.
I need to get some kind of direction in my life.
I'd like to find something that I can fall into that I really enjoy.
I've done so many different things.
And Sharon's spirit gave me this vignette of a guy, myself, driving up the driveway past the second house and seeing her apparition there.
And I wrote this down, this incident down, and it turned out to be the first of many experiences or visions that I had, courtesy of Sharon, to create the story, House at the End of the Drive, which is the movie that I produced and co-wrote about this man that buys a house on a private drive down the street from these terrible murders, but the spirits are trying to get closure and get something out of the new homeowner.
So effectively, that person is you.
And just quickly, because we're coming to the back end of this, there's never enough time to do these things.
What do you say to people who say that Sharon Tate died in the most horrendous circumstances?
And really, if you believe that she's around you in this place, you shouldn't really be...
I think that those people are turning a blind eye to the people that are out there that have created this cottage industry about demythologizing Manson's partaking in the murders and these people's culpabilities and looking for responsibility other than those that committed the murders.
In other words, you're saying that by revealing what you think is going on where you live and by doing the things you've done, you're keeping that story out there so people don't blur it.
Right.
I'm here basically in a sense, well, beyond the Sharon Tate victims that visits the house, the house is visited by thousands of other spirits as well, which we found out.
But for my part with Sharon, I'm here basically as a mouthpiece to venerate her memory and to remember their memory as people, not as victims, but as people that had lives ahead of them and that they should never be dismissed as such more than a footnote to history as they have been so far in the portrayals of them.
Okay, I hear what you say.
I totally understand what you're saying.
And you say other things happened there.
We've only got 60 seconds, but can you give me an example of something that my listener might find scary?
Yeah, well, I saw the apparition of Jay Sebring, one of the victims down the street 15 years ago, about seven months before my mother passed away of pancreatic cancer.
And his apparition did not look anything like the way he was dressed when he left this earth and when he died.
And also, he didn't look as terribly morbid and disgraced, I guess, disfigured as he was when he was killed.
So people should realize that spirits are coming back to visit you, to see how you're doing, to check up on you, to say hello, to be there for you, not to be scaring you.
I think a lot of people who live in houses that may have apparitions and stuff like that are going to be very pleased to hear you say that.
If people want to check you out online, you have a great website.
What is it?
That would be theomenhouse.com.
And they can go to, that's T-H-E-O-M-A-Nhouse.com and youtube.com forward slash DavidOmen.
And of course, my book, GhostsofCielodrive.com for the new book, Ghosts of Cielo Drive.
What a story.
And what a chilling account of things that are still going on.
Your thoughts on David Omen?
Please drop me an email through the website, theunexplained.tv.
What an amazing story, I think.
But you tell me what you think and what you made of this edition of The Unexplained.
We have more great guests in the pipeline here through the summer of 2020 as it is now.
Who knows what's going to happen next.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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