Essay: How The Movie ‘Poltergeist’ Influenced ‘Lake Dungeoneva’
By Theron Moore
I previously mentioned that the movies Late Night with the Devil and Poltergeist were highly influential in the writing of Lake Dungeoneva. Absolutely true. In fact, found footage gem Area 51 and The Fourth Kind factored in heavily as well.
The TV show ‘LOST’ is another deep-dive obsession of mine but that show influenced parts of the precursor to Lake Dungeoneva – Roswell: Book Of The Dead and I will have an essay written on that subject soon. You can find that on the Facebook page for Roswell Book Of The Dead.
Let’s dive into Poltergeist.
I saw the original film during its early eighties theatrical run—a Friday night outing with my parents when I was fifteen. It hooked me from the beginning and shocked me until the very end. Though I knew what to expect going in, I underestimated its impact. The film rattled me in ways I hadn’t anticipated. It scared the hell out of me.
Let me dig a little deeper into my past to explain why this movie affected me the way it did. I grew up with paranormal experiences to the point where many of them became second nature to me as they occurred and unfolded around me.
The House On High Street
I was born in Freeport, Illinois, in 1967. My parents lived in a nondescript home on High Street. According to what I’ve been told, the house had zero paranormal activity until I was born and brought home from the hospital.
Prior to that, the only odd experiences my parents had were moving into the place and being greeted by a black cat already living there, and the matter of the basement, which had a dirt floor and, in my mom’s own words, “really, really creeped me out. I didn’t like being in the basement at all.”
When I was brought home from the hospital, that’s when the “experiences” began happening to all of us. My father told me stories of furniture in the living room moving around him and watching stove knobs (and subsequently flames) turn on and off by themselves.
The most famous story my parents would later tell me involved the crucifix above my bed being found turned upside down the next morning, and the picture of Christ hung on a nail in our hallway, which on more than one occasion was found propped up on the floor, leaning against the wall. In fact, my father told me he actually witnessed the painting lift off the nail and slide down to the floor.
The UFO Encounter of 1966 (?)
The kicker is that a year or so before I was born, my parents had an actual close encounter with a UFO outside of Freeport while driving back from a rain-filled date night. They were somewhere near the vicinity of Pecatonica, Illinois, when they saw a bright object in the night sky.
The closer they got to it, the more they noticed it was hovering over power lines—and that’s when their car stopped, the radio and lights turned off, and they were sitting on the side of the road in complete silence.
My mom remembers feeling like she was asleep but wasn’t. She looked over at my dad, who was in the same semi-paralyzed state. She recalls hearing footsteps—multiple footsteps—moving around the car, touching it as if curious about what it was. Whoever or whatever it or they were remained quiet; no one spoke. When it was over, the object flew up and disappeared, the car started up on its own, and my parents were “awake” and conscious again.
I asked her what their reaction was when they “woke up,” but she couldn’t remember. Did they talk about the incident on the way home? Again, she couldn’t recall. In the years to come, they’d talk about it with me extensively but rarely would they discuss it with other family members or friends. It’s also worth mentioning that this UFO sighting appeared in a local Rockford, IL newspaper the next day, presumably Sunday. It was seen by a lot of people.
I bring this up because I believe in these three points. First, I think that because I was the firstborn, the experience and everything connected to it imprinted on me in some way, shape, or form. Second, it was a shared experience between my parents, and because I believe I was imprinted with it, it became a shared experience between the three of us. Third, taking all of this into account, I believe it was my presence at the house that triggered this activity. I don’t believe this activity was necessarily paranormal as much as I believe it was connected to whatever that object was that my parents came into contact with.
Poltergeist
From that point on, I felt surrounded by paranormal activity—not constantly, but in bouts or intense cycles, including to the present day. I’ll go into more detail about these experiences later, but I want to return to Poltergeist, which I began discussing at the start of this essay.
I remember my dad remarking to my mom on the way home from the movie that “it’s somewhat close to the truth, Spielberg kind of got it right,” or something to that effect, implying that the movie, albeit a Hollywood production, was fairly accurate regarding story and content. Poltergeist is a movie I’ve been obsessed with ever since. I probably watch it at least 5–10 times a year and deep-dive it every time—probably more than I, or anyone else for that matter, should.
There are things about this film that, in 1982, really no one in mainstream America should have known about, let alone Spielberg—unless he had friends in high places like Dr. J. Allen Hynek, for example, who could feed him inside information and perhaps guide him in the “right direction.”
The UCLA Paranormal Program & SRI, Circa 1970’s
Case in point: the scene where dad Steven Freeling seeks out and engages Dr. Lesh and her team at UCLA. This could just be one heck of a coincidence, but UCLA had a very famous yet “unofficial” paranormal program that came to fruition in the late ’60s and ran until around 1978 before it shut down operations.
The person in charge was Dr. Thelma Moss, possibly an inspiration for the character of Dr. Lesh. It was the team of Dr. Thelma Moss and researchers Barry Taff and KerryGaynor who investigated the “Doris Bither case” at her Culver City home in 1974, which became the inspiration and basis for the film The Entity.
And 375 miles away is the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), known for its own paranormal program regarding remote viewing research, famously funded by the CIA in the ’70s with notable involvement by Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ, Ingo Swann, Uri Geller, and others. Here’s another curious FYI: the first ARPANET message was constructed in 1969, connecting UCLA to SRI.
A lot of interesting coincidences, right?
Close Encounters of the Third Kind & Dr. J. Allen Hynek
Spielberg shot Close Encounters of the Third Kind with astronomer and astrophysicist J. Allen Hynek serving as technical adviser to the film. Hynek had previously served as lead investigator for the USAF “Project Blue Book” program dating all the way back to the 1950s.
Hynek reputedly had inside information about UFOs and the paranormal that was beyond anything any of us could imagine to be true. My bet is that Spielberg probably got Hynek to share a few tidbits of information with him—inside information that probably blew his mind.
If you go back to Close Encounters, there’s a lot about that movie that I’m convinced (without proof, though) came from Hynek and his experiences investigating this phenomenon, directly or indirectly. The sequence in the beginning where Dreyfuss encounters the UFOs was based on a real UFO incident in Ohio.
There’s much more to discuss regarding this movie, but I want to save that for a future essay and circle back to Poltergeist, which, believe it or not, was intended to be a sequel to Close Encounters. That fascinates me. That’s what leads me to believe that some of that movie may have been based on certain events Hynek may have told Spielberg about—not everything, mind you, as it is, after all, a Hollywood movie.
But in 1982, at age 15-ish, after having been surrounded by the paranormal all my life (on and off), that movie made sense to me and my parents. And in 2025, after having seen it probably hundreds of times and deep-dived it as thoroughly as I have, Poltergeist still impacts me to this day.
The Influence Of Poltergeist On Lake Dungeoneva
When I wrote Lake Dungeoneva, which wasn’t written in linear fashion by the way, Poltergeist played a major role with one character and an organization I created.
The “Drydek Institute of Meta Humanistic Studies” was inspired by both the UCLA paranormal program and SRI. I envisioned the character of “Dr. Sylvia Kelsey-Parker” to be the daughter of Dr. Lesh herself, obviously changing the name to avoid copyright infringement.
At one point, I considered writing a sequel of sorts to Poltergeist as a short story in Lake Dungeoneva, but I scrapped the idea because I wasn’t looking for legal hassles over copyrights and intellectual property.
The house on High Street, all of my paranormal experiences from childhood to the present day, the UFO encounter my parents had, my own UFO encounters over the years—it’s all documented, without any fictionalization, in Lake Dungeoneva, with the exception of the story titled “A Clowder of Cats.”
But long story short, that’s how the movie Poltergeist plays a role in Lake Dungeoneva.
