Haunted Natalie Wood Artifacts Resurface on Drowning Anniversary: ‘Public Still Unaware’

The soul of Hollywood starlet Natalie Wood is yet to find peace, museum staff and friends of the late actress have warned after a series of hair-raising incidents. 

Zak Bagans, the host of HBO’s Ghost Adventures, claims paranormal events involving artifacts connected to Wood’s death have been taking place at his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas.

Wood famously drowned off the California coast on the night of November 29, 1981, after falling from her husband Robert Wagner’s yacht while celebrating Thanksgiving weekend. She was 43.

The actress had been drinking aboard the Splendour that evening with Wagner, fellow actor Christopher Walken and the vessel’s captain, David Davern. 

Wagner later confessed he and Walken argued fiercely about Wood’s career before the drowning. 

The Oscar-nominated actress made her name as Maria in 1961’s West Side Story, and drowned during a production break from her would-be comeback film Brainstorm, starring alongside Walken.

The investigation into her death was reopened in 2011. Wagner was named a person of interest in 2018 after it was revealed there were discrepancies in his version of events and Wood’s autopsy discovered bruises on her arms and upper body.

Although the case was declared cold in 2022, meaning Wagner was officially cleared, conspiracy theories have continued to examine him to this day.

Now Bagans has reported feeling Wood’s lingering presence in his museum, and has exclusively shared photos and footage with the Daily Mail purportedly showing the occurrence of unexplained phenomena.

The creepy occurrences are said to include a shadow on the wall, a page of a book flipping without being touched and a glass exhibit case falling apart.

‘Her spirit is not at rest,’ Bagans told the Daily Mail on the 44th anniversary of her death.

‘We don’t know everything, there’s something that isn’t out in the public – so her spirit is not at rest.’

The Daily Mail has contacted Wagner and Walken’s representatives for comment, but has not heard back. 

Bagans’s museum contains a collection of goosebump-inducing relics from the Splendour, which he obtained after meeting with Davern and Wood’s sister Lana nearly a decade ago.

One of them is a table on which Wagner slammed a wine bottle during an argument the night of Wood’s drowning.

Davern told Bagans the force of the bottle upended two candles that are also on display in the museum.

In February 2017 shortly after Bagans procured the memorabilia, photographer Tom Knapp, who has been on Ghost Adventures, was alone in the museum when he claimed to have caught sight of a person’s shadow.

Knapp was able to snap a picture of the shadow, which fell near a porthole-style window, in the room with the Wood artifacts. 

‘There is poltergeist activity in that room,’ said Bagans. ‘A sealed case, a commercially graded case with heavy duty sealant, filled with items from the exhibition, fell apart. It broke like something was inside it trying to get out.’ 

Bagans has provided footage of another incident to the Daily Mail, showing a pane of glass as it detached from the table’s display case tumbling to the floor.

In another bizarre video, museum visitors are seen milling around when a page of a book – untouched, sitting in a sealed display case – turns apparently by itself.

During the early days of the Covid pandemic, Bagans and his crew were at the museum preparing for their miniseries, Ghost Adventures: Lockdown, when he claimed Wood’s ghost appeared.

‘I will never forget, we were moving a mannequin figure into the Natalie Wood exhibit,’ Bagans said. ‘I was setting it down, I heard something, I felt something.’

He said he sensed Wood’s presence around him, a heavy lingering feeling in the air – and just then, he got an email from Davern.

Writing from his home in the Philippines, a distraught Davern claimed items had started randomly flying out of his wardrobe.

In another chilling moment, a clock gifted to Davern by Wood which had not worked in years started to chime while he and a friend were discussing the late actress.

‘Dennis Davern messaged me saying the spirit of Natalie was in his living room, he was sobbing,’ Bagans told the Daily Mail, adding he, too, felt like ‘I was about to cry.’

Davern worked for Wagner for a year after the drowning, but has since claimed he believes Wagner was the one who pushed Wood from the yacht. Wagner did not respond publicly to Davern’s accusations, and the Daily Mail did not receive a response when a representative was contacted for comment. 

Now 95, Wagner wrote in his memoirs that the theories circulating about why Wood fell off the Splendour were nothing but ‘conjecture.’

‘Nobody knows,’ he maintained. ‘There are only two possibilities: Either she was trying to get away from the argument, or she was trying to tie the dinghy. But the bottom line is that nobody knows exactly what happened.’