Paul Bern and Jean Harlow.

Paul Bern’s death was curious enough. Less than two months after marrying blonde bombshell Jean Harlow in 1932, he was found dead of a headshot wound in what determined, albeit controversially, to be a suicide. Days later, a woman named Dorothy Millette jumped to her death from a steamer ship on the Sacramento River – it would soon be determined Bern had been married to her for nearly 20 years, for much of which she was committed in an east coast sanatorium.

Roughly 36 years later, actress Sharon Tate was looking for a place to stay, and asked then boyfriend Jay Sebring could stay at his place. The home, at 9860 Easton Drive in Benedict Canyon, was where Bern had shot himself, which Sebring was well known to have purchased in large part due to its grim history. It’s likely the story Bern’s suicide had been a topic of conversation between the pair.

According to journalist Dick Kleiner, in an interview with him Tate recalled a vision she had on a night when Sebring was out of town. She was already creeped out by every little sound in the house, when, as she was getting ready to sleep, a “creepy little man” appeared in her bedroom that she recognized as Paul Bern. She pulled on a bathrobe and ran out the room. She ran down the stairwell, and at the bottom, saw a blonde woman tied to a banister. Her throat was slit, and there was blood everywhere.

Tate passed this off as a bad nightmare, unable to ascribe it to anything else.

Three years later and a mile and half later, Tate was found slaughtered with four others at 10050 Cielo Drive, victims of the Manson Family.