Character Inspirations

Janet’s grandparents are based on my great-grandparents, John and Bessie Callahan (Bessie is pictured here with my grandfather and his brother), originally from Minnesota. In the early 1920s, John—along with Bessie and their three children—traveled around Southeast Asia on behalf of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. John succumbed to heart failure in 1923 at the age of 40, and was interred in Bidadari Cemetery in Singapore. 

My great-grandmother then made the arduous journey back to the United States with her three small children, whom she ultimately raised in California. In the early 2000s, the Singapore government dumped the contents of all the non-Muslim graves at Bidadari Cemetery, including my great grandfather’s, into the South China Sea. 

My late mother, Pam Callahan—like Janet Brown—was an only child, raised by a transient and eccentric woman named Leola who sometimes placed uninterrupted male companionship above motherhood. 

Pam reported two key experiences from her life that informed my story. In 1966, Pam attended a party at a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, where she wandered alone into a private wing. On a large, high wall was a curtain that her curiosity drove her to open, revealing a massive photo-realistic portrait of Satan. Was this merely avant-garde art? Perhaps. But young Pam was overcome with dread, convinced she was in the sacred space of a satanic cult, and fled the party. Decades later, she could describe the scene with a compelling blend of detail and sincerity.

Pam’s second experience was a period of months in 1976 living with my father, brother and me in what Pam described as nothing less than a haunted house. While I have no memory of the events that may (or may not) have transpired in that Bay Area home, Pam swore until she died that they were true. She recounted objects repeatedly moved or hidden, items flying out of kitchen cabinets, unexplained loud noises and variations in temperature, and a toy chest lid that slammed inexplicably on my young brother’s fingers. Pam also claimed that my brother and I inquired about a dark-haired lady in white who had visited our room. 

But the best story from Pam was the basis for Janet’s infamous video. Pam believed, unwaveringly, that she saw my three-year-old brother pushed violently backwards in the yard by an invisible force. After my father reacted with repeated disbelief to all my mother’s tales of poltergeist hijinks, she removed my brother and me from the house, and we drove to her aunt’s home near Los Angeles. Pam, age 28, told my father, age 33, he was welcome to rejoin us once he sold the house. And so he did.