David Oman believes in ghosts. More specifically, he believes the victims of the Manson family are haunting his home.
Almost twenty years ago, the Los Angeles private investigator bought a vacant lot in Benedict Canyon, California, just 45 metres from 10050 Cielo Drive.
Cielo Drive is where on August 9, 1969, actress Sharon Tate and four others, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring and Steven Parent, lost their lives at the hands of a deranged cult led by Charles Manson. And Oman was moving in next door.
Oman hoped to build his dream home on the land, and felt he had gotten a bargain when he was only charged $40,000 USD ($53,000 AUD) for what appeared to be an idyllic plot in a prime location not far from ritzy Beverly Hills.
He may have got a bargain but he also got more than he bargained for.
The “haunting” at Oman’s property began immediately during construction, he says, with workers claiming they’d heard voices when no one was there. Cold air would dance upon the back of their necks on warm days. Heavy footsteps thudded across the floor boards in empty rooms. The building site just had a bad vibe.
No doubt the fact that it was in spitting distance from the site of one of the most notorious and brutal mass murders in America’s history didn’t help. But the house at 10050 Cielo Drive, where the Manson Family murders were committed, had been torn down long before Oman moved next door.
The original property, rented by director Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon in the year prior to her death, was demolished in 1994 and a new home built in it’s place. Even the street address was changed from 10050 to 10066 Cielo Drive in the hope of erasing the lot’s brutal history. Oman moved into his nearby property eight years after that demolition, in 2002.