The 9th film from Quentin Tarantino takes place in 1969 Los Angeles, blending real history with fiction, real characters (Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate) with fictional ones (played by mega stars Leonardo DiCaprio & Brad Pitt).
My series “A Ghost Hunter Watches” usually looks at fact versus fiction. While we will do the same a little bit in this episode, we will instead focus on what haunted locations where featured at in the film. Yup, in addition to having a Charles Manson storyline, QT filmed at some iconic locations that were even part of my LA Hauntings tour (one is even featured right here on the movie poster)!
Keep up to date on future live streams on my YouTube page here. Enjoy the look back at “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”:
Check out this great behind the scenes video taken by spectators on Hollywood Blvd showing the immense detail the films art department partook. And this is just for things seen in the background…. beyond just signs, full store fronts and sometimes even interiors were built and dressed just to have Leo & Brad drive past them.
Every location mentioned on this list is a place I’ve visited for the very first time in 2018. Commemorating the 10th anniversary of the release of “Voices from the Chicago Grave,” I’ve made it a point to revisit every location covered in the book. This is an ongoing process, but it was great to see places like the 
I should give an odd shout out to the Museum of the Weird in Austin, TX, which houses tons of fascinating exhibits and, in fact, is so weird that Johnny Depp lived next door at one point. The main highlight is the “Minnesota Ice Man,” an alleged Bigfoot corpse kept preserved on ice since the late ‘60s.
One of my favorite investigations of the year took place at the Southern Illinois Cemetery of Elmwood, where a legend surrounds a beautiful monument to H. Annie Marshall, better known as “Violin Annie.” The legends around Violin Annie are more plentiful than the facts. The basics are that this gravesite belongs to a girl who died tragically young. In life, quite clearly, she played the violin. Speaking on the legends, there are countless tales of hearing violin music waft through this cemetery at all hours. The uniqueness of this monument, plus its easy access (near the front of the cemetery, just two dozen feet from the access road), makes it an easy candidate for urban legends. Does that mean the area isn’t haunted? Of course not. The restless adventures of “Violin Annie” may very well be legit. It’s also possible that thousands of people over the years, visiting this site, hoping to hear violin music, have impacted the area, imbuing it with a psychic residue from the living. If Annie’s consciousness is here, we brought a trigger item in the form of violinist Wendy Lynn Staats to play songs and simple scales to see if we could coax a musical call and response. With several cameras rolling and even more microphones scattered around the area, it will take some time to dig though all the recordings, but our fingers are crossed!
Dipping as far as we could possibly dip into the Florida Keys, we found ourselves at the home of Ernest Hemingway’s six-toed cats and a doll that can move on its own. “Robert the Doll” has been a story so sensational, it’s no surprise that people assume the movie “Child’s Play” was based on this legend. In 1904 a young Eugene Otto was given a doll in a navy uniform. It did not take long before this doll began terrorizing the family, especially little Eugene. Massacring his other toys, and flipping his furniture over, the parents were understandably suspicious, however even they heard voices and laughing coming from Eugene’s room that were not his own. Eventually the doll was banished to the attic, where it remained peacefully for decades. Currently the doll itself is on display at Fort East Martello Museum where it apparently does not like being on display. If you are bold enough to take a picture of Robert without first asking his permission, legend has it that you will be besieged by extreme misfortune. There is a nearby wall of the museum covered with letters addressed to the doll from people desperately asking Robert’s forgiveness.
I was in Key West with family. My parents have both been exceptionally supportive of my unorthodox line of work. They’ve attended paranormal conferences to watch me speak and my mom even joined for an exploration of Bachelor’s Grove and was pinched by an unseen hand in the process. They were all for visiting the museum until we took a ghost tour that lead us past the home where the events took place. Upon hearing the full story, I was no longer asked, “Hey, do you wanna check out that museum today?” I had previously been vague, offering only that there was a “famous, haunted doll on display.” Not wanting to push them or, honestly, expose myself to something truly negative (just in case), we never visited Robert. However, by total luck and coincidence, we did take a walk through the Key West 
Cemetery and, coincidentally (again), I stumbled across the grave of Eugene Otto! I was able to conduct an EVP session at his grave site. While nothing came of it, I do always urge investors to try poking around at all locations associated with the tale you’re investigating, not just the main target. Travel Tip: you can now rent out the room where Robert was banished for decades as the Otto house is now a B&B.
Coming straight off the bucket list is a MUCH fabled tale of “America’s most well-documented haunting,” as it’s always called. The story of the Bell Witch is too vast and spectacular to fully cover in a blurb, but I will tease that it involves a curse, mythical creature, disembodied voices, an intensely violent invisible entity, a homicide blamed on a ghost and some of the paranormal activity was even witnessed by a man who would become president. You’d think this would be so rich a story that it would make for a great movie. Well, they tried. Wendy and I visited the location, then watched the movie before then shooting a new episode of “A Ghost Hunter Watches.” Check that out below:
Most of the time I find an incredible location with a colorful story… the type of place where I’m dying to find some paranormal evidence, that’s exactly where I’ll find nothing at all. This was not the case at the darkly impacted Shoal Creek in Austin, Texas. A Native American massacre of a settler family in 1839 could be enough to generate some paranormal activity, but this area was also the site of skirmishes and battles through the years and countless unmarked burials. When the banks of the creek flood, taking with it lose dirt, it is not uncommon for more and more human remains to be unearthed. A recent flood unearthed the remains of a solider who served with General Custer. There are also multiple tales of gold being hidden in this area by criminals who were apprehended before being able to reclaim their hidden loot. Might their spirits be the ones still occupying the area, keeping their gold hidden? Shadow figures are seen in the area and disembodied voices are heard. Visiting the site in the middle of the afternoon with 
Another location, rife with urban legend-y glory that really deserves to be somewhere on this list is the 
Are you ever caught in the difficult situation, trying to decide, “Do I want to look for a ghost, a UFO or a crypid today? Maybe I wanna look into a place that has ties to the ultra creepy phenomena of Black-eyed children. Well, you’re in luck! This is the one-stop shop! Down in very rural and very remote southern Illinois, at the end of a dead end gravel road on the top of a wooded hill is Shelby County’s pioneer cemetery. When it comes to cryptids, the threat of coming across a werewolf-like creature (better known as an up-right canine in cryptid circles) would be enough, but there is also a winged dragon-like creature seen flying over the area. As long as you’re looking to the skies for dragons, you might as well keep an eye open for UFOs as well while as lights have been spotted in the skies and cows have been mutilated here. Indeed, the unnerving black-eyed children have been spotted here and occasionally appear after the fact on video recordings. That said, the ghostly encounters here probably get the adrenaline pumping the most: An elderly man charges out from the woods, seemingly ready to attack you, but he vanishes moments before striking! Wendy and I spent a couple of hours here, but had no experiences ourselves. This is a place I definitely want to visit again and spend a lot more time on site. Unlike many outdoor locations, this cemetery is so remote there is no fear of audio interference from a neighboring house or school, nor is there a blanket of traffic noise interfering with EVP recording.
You’ve gotta love a mountain hike that leads to a mostly hidden cemetery! Glendale, CA’s “first family,” the Brands, started a pet cemetery that they themselves began laying themselves to rest in. The nearby family home, library and this cemetery all claim some level of paranormal activity. There are reports of occult activity at the cemetery, though that’s always a red flag for urban legends to me.
Parking in one of the main parking lots, walking up the paved Brand Park Drive, keeping Miradero on your right, gaining altitude as you reach the Verdugo Mountain range, you’ll eventually reach a T intersection. In front of you, you’ll find decaying stars to nowhere (pictured left). It’s eerily similar to the present date site of Altadena’s Cobb Estate.
Below is another stairway to nowhere, deeper within the mountains. While there seems to be a large amount of infrastructure, including old, decaying roads, power line supports and building foundations, researching historical topographical maps to not show any buildings whatsoever. Perhaps these buildings were not built with any official permitting as Brand kept these grounds private, even hidden from civic meddling, as he was a powerful force in Glendale. Unfortunately, this makes dating and identifying buildings in this area quite difficult. Event the cemetery, which has to have started in the early 1920s or earlier doesn’t appear on these maps until 1967.
Glendora’s Bennett House, built in 1905, was purchased by the Daughters of the American Revolution and they found out quickly (during their very first monthly tea party meeting) that they weren’t alone in the home. The visage of a phantom man crashed the party before vanishing. Occupants also talked about hearing sounds of objects moving, but not seeing anything out of the ordinary happening; this seems to be a common residual-type haunting.
It’s unclear if much activity has taken place in the house since that first encounter with the vanishing man in 1982. It’s not uncommon for paranormal activity to spike when a building undergoes a change (renovations, new inhabitants, etc.). Maybe once the new owners settled in, the spirits settled back down as well.