Ghost stories of a sun-splashed city
Have you ever seen (smelt, felt or heard) a ghost in the greater L.A. area, or do you know someone who has? This is the thread for local ghost stories, first person or once removed.
Here's mine. In late 2001, right after 9/11, I rented the old vaudeville house The Palace Theatre on Broadway for a two-night music festival, Scramarama. It was a celebration of the first ten years of my zine Scram, a journal of unpopular culture, and featured favorite artists from past issues, among them heavy-funny singer-songwriter Brute Force, Radio Birdman guitarist Deniz Tek, neo-garage legends The Cynics, brainiac pop master Scott Miller (of Game Theory/Loud Family fame), and the first shows in decades from the wonderful Nikki Corvette and Sean Bonniwell's Music Machine. Plus the Loons, Red Planet, Harvey Sid Fisher, Bangers & Mash, & MC Mike Lucas of the Phantom Surfers. It was completely amazing, and I wish everyone reading this could have been there.
I knew the theatre was said to be a psychic hotspot, and had been told about a recent neo-Vaudeville show where spectral rotten eggs pelted the performers, supposed to be a review from long-dead stagehands. If the building had ghosts, they were suitably sassy and theatrical.
I'm fairly sure that in all the work of planning this big show, with performers coming from as far as NYC, that I didn't bother to brief the artists on the rumors of hauntings. And yet before the weekend was done, both Deniz Tek and Brute Force would report first-hand experiences with unknown forces.
Brute thought his experience was normal--he asked me about the little boy who'd been down by the men's room late in the evening. At first I thought he'd seen one of my young siblings who was at the show, but later realized they weren't there the night he was talking about, and that no other child could have been present. This area that projects under the Broadway sidewalk felt particularly creepy, always cold and echoey, with a flat, dead light on red walls.
Deniz, who when not playing rock and roll is a trauma surgeon, and is not given to flights of fancy, later reported that he'd had his beneath-stage nap interrupted the rattling of paint cans in a nearby room, and when he went to close the sliding door between rooms, the paint cans erupted into an angry frenzy. Then they stopped, but his rest was then disturbed by the sound of a spectral fountain: the unmistakable arc and sputter of someone taking a leak. No one was anywhere near him at the time, he decided it could be ghosts, and went to sleep.
Both Brute and Deniz played wonderful Scramarama sets, and I'd like to think the spirits enjoyed them as much as the living fans did.
I would have been happy to have seen or heard something paranormal at the Palace, where I spent a lot of time pre- and post-Scramarama as part of a group of preservationists seeking to make use of this special place in that pre-gentrified downtown. But aside from a shadowy, cat-like thing that I may or may not have seen crouching on the dressing room stairs stage right one evening, the Palace has thusfar kept its secrets from me.
There was a period of about a year, when I worked at a restaurant. I used to eat my lunch with two women who worked doing some sort of accounting related stuff. I didnt care for their company but it would have been impolite to sit alone when I was always invited to eat with them. Soon after I started work, one of the women, Laura, began recounting to us odd things about the house she had just recently moved into.
Laura was in her late thirties or early forties. She was married and had a four year old daughter. From the first day of sleeping in the house, the daughter, who had her own room, kept telling her mother about The Indian. She said The Indian kept coming to play with her, and to show her things. Laura was puzzled and asked her daughter how she knew her new friend was an Indian. The daughter said it was because he had paint all over his face.
Laura and her husband had made friends with a homeless man the previous year. When they ran into him around town they would invite him for dinner and to spend the night at their house. This day, Laura saw the man while coming out of the market and offered to take him home with her, to the new house, and he could sleep over. He agreed. They had dinner and Laura made a bed for him on their couch. The following morning when the family awoke, the man was nowhere to be found. No note, no nothing. This was highly unlike him and it unnerved Laura and her husband greatly. A month or so went by. They spoke of wine and shoes and tv sitcoms and I ate my lunch and smiled and nodded in the appropriate places.
Sometime after that month passed into memory, Laura told us she had finally run into the homeless man. She inquired as to why he left that night and expressed their concern and alarm. The man told the following story:
He wasnt able to sleep well that night. It was an unfamiliar place and he kept having feelings of anxiety. He sat up on the couch, which was located just underneath a large picture window in the living room. The window had curtains on it, the kind that have the two panels that meet in the middle. They were a little small, and didnt actually meet in the middle though. He saw something move just between the space of the curtains, outside. He parted them a bit more, and looked out, seeing nothing. Just as he was backing away from looking, a face appeared in the window. He recoiled in horror upon seeing it and described it as having the sort of face paint on that a clown would have, however, the face was filthy and looked, literally, part rotted. The colors werent as bright or tangible looking as a normal, real person's would have been, he remarked. The man said the owner of the face seemed to look at him, no eyes were sharply visible, then it vanished. The main waited for morning to come, then hastily left the house. He told Laura he would never go near the house again.
Meanwhile, the daughter kept talking about The Indian.
One day, before dinner, Laura had been out in the garden, and came in through the sliding glass door that was the entry/exit into the garden from the living room. Her daughter was outside playing on a tire swing in the yard. She left the door open all the way, as she was going to be returning momentarily and wanted to be able to hear the daughter. When she returned to go through the door, perhaps two minutes later, not only had the glass door been shut completely, but it was locked and could only be done so from the interior of the house. She tried again and again to open it, to no avail. She left the door to find an object in the kitchen to try to pry the lock open with and, when she returned, the door was unlocked.
Almost one year later, from my first hearing of these accounts, which no one had really strung together as related, save for me which I kept to myself, Laura didnt come to work. At the end of the week I found out why. The family had been sleeping at night already for a few hours. Laura and her husband in their room and the daughter in hers. Laura awoke first, to the smell of smoke, her husband next. They both claimed something was forcibly holding them down, and neither of them could create any audible noise vocally. Firefighters finally axed down the door and pulled the family out. The fire started in the garage. The investigators never found a cause.
The house is located somewhere in Reseda.
Oh, I LOVE this topic Kim!! Yes, where I currently work is haunted. There is a lady ghost that plays havoc with what we call, the Situation Room. Lights go on and off at will and some of us have seen an apparition that looks like a woman flying above the room. It is crazy. If you go on the weekends when no one is there, you feel a bitter chill when you go into this room. There are several areas, especially the old jails that you see and hear some really crazy things. I have several friends who are psychics who want to do tours of some of the buildings. I think that it would be amazing! Let's do a haunted tour!!!
Boyle Heights Paranormal Project, by invitation of fellow Visionary Richard Carradine from GHOULA, recently conducted an investigation of the Stella Adler Theatre in Hollywood. Here is a little history of the location and some of the stories I was told.
This building has been home to a variety of businesses over the years. Before the Wax Museum moved in, the building was home to a luggage company, and the museum's current Operations Manager, was told that the luggage company might have been a front for organized crime. "And during the 1920s," he said, "the basement of the building was used as a speakeasy, so who's to say who might be buried beneath us that we're not aware of."
The Embassy Club was opened in February of 1930. A new, exclusive club where the celebrities would not be mobbed by unruly fans. The Embassy featured a rooftop promenade and a glass enclosed lounge with a sweeping view of the Hollywood Hills.
Membership was restricted to 300 of the proprieter’s closest friends including Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and Sid Grauman. As the years went on the Embassy was run by Bruce Cabot who brought in Delores Del Rio, David O Selznick and Mary Pickford who hosted all of the Motion Picture Relief Fund dinners here. Soon after, Embassy owner, Brandstatter, allowed the public entry ensuring it’s failure.
The Stella Adler Theatre moved into the location in 1993. Students, teachers, staff and guests have claimed to experience numerous, possibly paranormal phenomena.