In October 2024, some internet users got in the Halloween spirit by making posts on X ( archived ), Facebook ( archived ), and other social media sites claiming that the skeletons featured in a notoriously spooky scene from the 1982 film "Poltergeist" were genuine human skeletons, not replicas.
(Facebook)
The claim was far from new. In fact, Snopes first investigated it in 2017.
As we found back then, multiple statements from two different people who worked on the scene offer convincing evidence that the film's art department did indeed use real human skeletons for a scene, embedded below, in which the character Diane Freeling falls into an unfinished swimming pool and finds herself surrounded by decaying skeletons. As a result, we've rated the claim true.
JoBeth Williams , the actor who played Diane Freeling, has stated on multiple separate occasions that the skeletons were real. In a 2008 interview for the TV Land show "TV Land: Myths & Legends," for instance, she said:
You have to understand that this sequence took probably four or five days to shoot. So I was in mud and goop all day every day for like four or five days with skeletons all around me [as I was] screaming. In my innocence and naiveté, I assumed that these were not real skeletons. I assumed that they were prop skeletons made out of plastic or rubber. I found out — as did the whole crew — that they were using real skeletons, because it's far too expensive to make fake skeletons out of rubber. And I think everybody got real creeped out by the idea of that.
I thought the skeletons were props. I thought they were made by the prop department, but I found out some years later that they were actually real skeletons, and I thought, if I had known that, I don't know if I could have gotten into that mess.
Craig Reardon , a special-effects makeup artist who worked on "Poltergeist," has likewise said on multiple occasions that the skeletons were real, while also offering some additional details about why the art department chose to use real skeletons from a biological supply company rather than replica ones.
I'm going to describe very simply what the "real skeletons" were all about. The skeletons I ordered in 1981 were featured in the catalog of a company that provides biological supplies. They came wired together for display in classrooms and included a metal stand and a vinyl cover. I ordered about 12 or 13 of them. Please try to contain your horror at the number 13! Alternatively, the company also offered plastic skeletons for the same purpose: classroom study. The drawback was that the plastic skeletons were really all replicas of one original sculpture or mold, whereas, the real skeletons were all different. This was pointed out in the catalog. Also, the plastic skeletons were actually more expensive, presumably because of the materials and labor required to produce one of them. For these reasons, purchasing the real skeletons was a no-brainer, and so I did.
A little later in the interview, Reardon described how he and his colleagues turned the "very clean classroom skeletons" they received into "semi-realistic" decaying corpses using "melodramatic sculpture and exaggerated textures and colors."
Reardon again cited cost as the reason for the decision when he appeared in a 2020 episode of "Cursed Films," a series produced by the horror-focused streaming service Shudder. In that episode, he said:
No low-budget B film is going to pay anybody to sculpt a human skeleton, when all you had to do was go to a biological supply house and get a human skeleton. You know, wake up and smell the budget.
In the same segment, Reardon also expressed frustration with the persistence of online allegations that the use of real skeletons on the "Poltergeist" set somehow caused a series of incidents that subsequently befell the film's cast.
Those incidents included the sudden deaths of two young actors, Dominique Dunne , who played Dana Freeling in the first "Poltergeist" movie, and Heather O'Rourke , who played Carol Anne Freeling in all three films of the original trilogy. In 1999, Snopes investigated — and rated false — the rumor that these deaths resulted from a curse on the film's cast and crew.
Regarding that rumor, Reardon said in 2020:
The subject of the skeletons that were used in Poltergeist, to my utter amazement, has created sort of an online mythology, and not a pretty one. Apparently, there's a contingent of people out there who believe that the fact that real human skeletons were used [was] some kind of pretext to "explain" — air quotes — why two actresses that worked on the film subsequently died, which is not only just conceptually ridiculous, but is personally offensive to me. Here's something I guess they don't know, and that's the fact that human skeletons have been used in movies for years and years.
According to Reardon, other famous films that used real human skeletons as props included 1931's " Frankenstein " and 1959's " House on Haunted Hill ."
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