Hello! I’ve been traveling a lot and am in the process of getting some videos ready to share with you. First though, I need your help. I’m calling on you, ghost story fans to help me find the perfect location to do an extensive investigation on with a small group of people. Some of them are people you’ve seen in my videos before, some are brand new additions.
We’ll be filming in the Los Angeles area, but if LA and Hollywood are one thing, they are crowded! If they’re something else, they’re loud! So, I’m looking to find a location outside of the heart of LA. A place we could get permission to have the run of the place. It would be a single night overnight investigation. I’m looking for a place that is actively and heavily haunted. It doesn’t have to be a place where people see full apparitions or a place where people get physically confronted, though those would be okay for me too…. Sorry team, but just a place where the activity seems to be interesting and ongoing. If you have a personal experience there, we might be able to get you even more involved with the project, if you’d like.
Here’s a rough map showing where I’m looking. The red locations are potentially good target areas where the blue area is likely locations I’d avoid. So, I’m looking at a pretty big area. From Hidden Hills to Rancho Cucamonga, from the massive Angeles National Forest to further south than this map shows, really.
It can be a private residence, a public place or a company. We just need permission to conduct this one-night investigation. We’re not trying to do anything sneaky here.
If you know of a place within a more populated (blue) area, but you think the building is quiet and isolated enough that we could do an investigation without sound contamination, I’d be all for it. I even have a wish list for places In these areas:
The Hollymont house just north of Hollywood Blvd
Themla Todd’s Café and the house she died in, Castillo del Mar
The Warner Pacific Theatre, one of my favorite buildings in LA, one I’ve never set foot in because it’s been restricted since the earthquake in ’89. I’d love to get in there and try to make contact with one of the original Warner Brothers.
So, if you have leads on any interesting haunted location in any of the cities listed, please drop me a line with any info you may have, the history, alleged hauntings, if you know who I should contact and, maybe most importantly – if YOU have a personal experience there!
A photo posted by Los Angeles Hauntings (@lahauntings) on Aug 8, 2013 at 11:11am PDT
Did you know we’re on Instagram? If you haven’t been following us, here’s a small sample of some of the fun you’ve been missing. It’s not too late to find us – we are simply LAHauntings over at Instagram! To the left, Scott Markus and Connor Bright take a moment to rest at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
The perk of working in the film industry is access to places that are off limits. For a few days, I got to work on the haunted backlot of Culver Studios, even working on the soundstage where “Wizard of Oz” was filmed.
A photo posted by Los Angeles Hauntings (@lahauntings) on Aug 8, 2013 at 2:32pm PDT
Visiting the historic neighborhood of Hollywoodland – the reason the Hollywood sign was constructed in the first place (which also originally read “Hollywoodland”). Above you can see the original stone walls that once held a gate, keeping Hollywoodland exclusive.
A photo posted by Los Angeles Hauntings (@lahauntings) on Sep 9, 2013 at 5:10pm PDT
Of course, we had to find some horror movie filming locations too! On this day, we found where one of the most memorable scenes from one of the classic horror films of all time was shot. Malibou Lake, deep in the Santa Monica Mountain range played host to 1931’s “Frankenstein,” and much later hosted “The Ring” and “Twin Peaks.” In all, over 100 productions were filmed at Malibou Lake, including “Gone with the Wind,” “The Great Dictator” and “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.”
Another film shoot has brought me to an amazing location that might eventually be covered in my next book. This time it was a week long shoot in Altedena (near Pasadena), CA called Mountain View Mausoleum. Unlike another recent film shoot that landed me in the famously haunted Linda Vista Hospital in East LA, there are no known reports of hauntings at this location. I must also say, that in my four days at this location, I didn’t feel anything other than excitement for the location, which is not the case when it came to Linda Vista.
The initial excitement certainly came from the overall beauty of the site. It was absolutely epic in scale. The the building seems large from the outside, but feels even larger within. When you think you’ve seen the entire place, you find another corridor that leads you to another chain of hallways.
I snapped the top picture on my first day and immediately Dan Melone chimmed in from Chicago on it, comparing it to one of Chicago’s Freemason resting places, Acacia Park Cemetery. So, with partner in crime Kyle Jolly, we scoured the place, finding all sorts of symbols. Kyle had a surprising amount of knowledge and I’m entirely new to the Masonic conspiracy theories. I haven’t even seen or read “Di Vinci Code.”
The entire place was covered with symbols, from some familiar, though still interesting like the one on the left, to the more elusive carvings over the front door (are those chickens in the above picture?).
I hadn’t seen so much stained glass in a mausoleum (or anywhere for that matter) since Chicago’s famed Rosehill Cemetery, which has the largest collection of real Tiffany glass in the world, but, even Rosehill doesn’t have entire, long, hallways of stained glass ceilings.
Beauty and majesty aside for a moment, one chilling moment (though not at all paranormal) happened when we were filming in one room that was referred to in the script as the “storage room.” Turned out it was the room where the cremations happened. Being a production that had rented out the entire place, we had full access to both the viewing room and the “business end.” Again, a chilling place to be standing, but nothing paranormal (pictures of both are posted below).
There are apparently 120,000 interments in the mausoleum and surrounding cemetery, so I wouldn’t at all be surprised if there were some ghost stories associated with the place. If you have any stories of your own or even just any additional interesting facts about this location OR if you want to start a discussion about the Freemasons, conspiracies, etc, just leave it in the comments below! I did return to this location a week later with friend Max Timm. He has similar interests in the unknown, the paranormal and conspiracy theories, so I knew he would appreciate this place. In addition, I brought along an EMF detector. This was far from a formal investigation, but I was curious if I would get any strange readings. Mountain View Mausoleum did not disappoint. I had one of my most direct responses ever after requesting, “If anyone is here with us, can you please come up and touch the device in my hand.” The needle started jumping around almost instantly.
Max wasn’t present by that point. He had been overcome, feeling sick to his stomach. His only concern was leaving the building immediately. Sitting outside of the mausoleum was the only remedy that made him feel any better. Was there something from the other side that was effecting Max? We don’t know for sure, but his feelings would not be considered uncommon at a strongly haunted location.
Video from our trip, including the incident with the EMF detector, can be found here (skip ahead to the 6 minute mark to see the Mountain View footage:
