The real-life ghost story of The Exorcist’s Linda Blair
The Exorcist has gone down in movie folklore as one of the most cursed sets in the history of horror.
It’s not alone. Poltergeist is infamous for the tragedies that happened both on and off set, ditto The Omen. The Exorcist is among the most famous, though, and not only because the film itself is widely regarded as the single most frightening horror picture ever made.
This was a movie that survived a freak fire ripping through most of its set and props midway through production. Several cast members suffered freak accidents, causing injuries that plagued them for years afterwards. Where the producers found it necessary to have the set blessed by actual priests, in a case of life imitating art.
Considering this was the early 1970s, where Hollywood producers would only shell out for catering if a union rep threatened to take their kneecaps if they didn’t, the fact that they paid for the set to be blessed and purified says a (quite literal) hell of a lot. Something supernatural seemed to be haunting the set.
However, if you talk to Linda Blair, whose electrifying performance as Regan is still one of the best in the history of the genre, she’ll tell you that this is nothing new for her.
No, apparently, she was someone already well familiar with the world of the supernatural, as an interview she gave to the Fortean Times shows. She spoke candidly of her upbringing in Connecticut, and how a chance visit to a haunted house with her sister and a family friend showed her a side of the world that’s completely unexplainable.
One that could make for a damn fine horror film of its own.
Did Linda Blair have a supernatural encounter?
Blair begins by talking about how in the town of Westport, where she grew up, the further our from her suburban idyll you’d walk the more likely you were to come across abandoned houses, which got a reputation for being “haunted“. Almost certainly, most of these houses were simply falling into disrepair, but on one fateful day, when Blair was ten, they found one that seemed to have something beyond our understanding going on inside it.
She said, “We slowly went up the old staircase. The floors were so rotten there were holes in them. We were on the second floor and looking through things and just as we opened the bedroom door, we heard footsteps down below. They were absolutely footsteps, you just sort of knew that they probably weren’t made by a human.”
It gets worse. She continues, saying, “We ran down the stairs as fast as we could – only I was the smallest, so I was last. As we got to the big, heavy front door, my sister and her friend flew out and the door closed in front of me. Oh my God! That scared me! And then I turned around and I saw these figures – but then the door opened and I was gone!”
Honestly, how anyone could have an experience like that and still sign on to do a movie as scary as The Exorcist makes slightly more sense to me now. After all, very few things are going to scare you the way that did. Pazuzu and co got nothing on literal ghosts, even if they did seem to be ushering her out of their home in a polite but firm manner.