City of Ghosts

Real, first-person tales of the ghoulish and ghastly from L.A.’s most supernatural spaces.

Sometimes it’s just an odd chill to the air, or a flash of shadow in the corner of an eye. Other times it’s a light, a footstep, a slammed door, or an unexplained gust. Many times, it’s just a…feeling. Suddenly, breathing turns shallow, pupils dilate, and pores weep cold sweat, all while the mind tries to rationalize it away. Too many times, it can’t.

Everyone has experienced the uneasy sensation of otherworldliness, especially in a city with a history as rich in violent scandal and notorious death as this one. The spirits that haunt Los Angeles haven’t changed much in their transition from life to death: they came to this town to be seen, and they won’t rest in the corners of the afterlife for long. Because of that they find us, harass us, touch us, watch us, breathe on us, sleep with us, all in an effort to be noticed, or out of furious anger that we never did.

To appease these ambitious Angeleno ghouls, we’re giving them the 15 minutes they sought and still actively, chillingly seek. We asked some Los Angeles residents to share with us their encounters with the supernatural, down to the most chilling detail. And while not all the incidents took place in L.A., those spirits have been brought here in the sleepless nights and nervous, over-the-shoulder glances of their victims.

And now, they’re about to haunt your dark hallways as well.

Sleep tight, Los Angeles. And happy Halloween.

Phoenix Rising
by Shana Ting Lipton, writer

It was late October. I was living in a large old house near Beachwood Canyon. The two-story mansion was in and of itself ghostly, very “Sunset Boulevard”- falling apart but filled with architectural peeks at its former glory. When I moved in and appropriated a wing on the second floor, one of my roommates gave me some background on the place. Its living room had been the location of the party scene in the ’90s movie Swingers. And more specifically, my bedroom once belonged to actress Samantha Mathis. She often shared these quarters with her then-boyfriend actor River Phoenix, just prior to his overdose. In fact, the memorial for his friends had been held in the back yard, which my living room balcony overlooked. Unlike me, my roommate did not grow up in the hills of Los Angeles with the Night Stalker and the Manson murders in his psyche. So he often, much to my chagrin, casually left all the doors in the house open. The amber lights downstairs were also on at all times. When he wasn’t around, his dog would lie on the couch in the sunroom, generally quiet.

One night, he and my other roommate were out. I was finishing up writing an article on the computer when I heard the dog barking just outside the door to my wing. Normally when he barked it was downstairs, and due to someone driving by slowly or stopping their car in front of the house. When I opened the door I saw that he was facing towards me really agitated. I got a chill and then actually felt a cold gust of wind brush past my right side. I tried to calm the dog down but now he was just growling so I sent him away and shut the door because he was freaking me out. The hallway, which I stood in, did not have a light switch so I went to get a flashlight, thinking that maybe a mouse or a raccoon had somehow gotten in the house. As I walked slowly down the hallway between my living room and my bedroom, I realized that I was shaking. I pointed the flashlight on the walls and the bottom of the closet door but saw nothing. Just as I was approaching my bedroom door, my living room door forcefully slammed shut. I screamed and ran out of my quarters and down the stairs to get the dog.

When I had caught my breath I analyzed the situation and was even more troubled. There were no windows open in my living room or bedroom and the door to the rest of the house was locked shut. A breeze coming from the outside was impossible. After washing down some Tylenol P.M. with red wine, I managed to get to sleep that night. In fact, I had almost forgotten about that night until a few days later. My friend came over to pick me up and go to a Halloween party. I had never told her that I was living in the former Mathis/Phoenix dwelling. Half-rushed as she scurried us out the door she asked me rhetorically, “Did you know that River Phoenix died on Halloween?”

A Mid-Summer Night In East L.A.
By Ricardo Cuevas

It was 1989. The night seemed still and peaceful, engulfed by a mixture of darkness and the pale dim light - like that moonlight shade of ocean blue that creeps in after the witching hour. I lay in my bed awake and restless, staring into the night, when a sudden, overwhelming feeling of a presence came over me like a cold draft in the middle of winter. Lying there, I scanned the room, making phantoms out of shadows and monsters out furniture. Fear does some funny things to the imagination, but as I further examined the room, I noticed a shadowy figure directly in front of my window. I remember thinking to myself that I don’t have any furniture shaped that way.

My shallow breath was the only sound in the room; my heart felt like it was going to shoot out of my chest and through ceiling. Fixated on this figure, I could not decipher what was casting it. Then it moved. Paralyzed with fear, my arms felt as though they weighed a ton. I couldn’t lift my head and my body lay there motionless as if being held by some invisible force. I did not take my eyes off this thing for one second. Then it moved toward me, seemingly growing larger as it moved closer. I could see now that it had a human-like appearance. For a second I thought “Home invasion!” Then, as it approached the foot of my bed, growing taller by the step, I knew this was something else completely.

The dark figure was now standing menacingly at the foot of my bed, standing so tall it had to crouch and bend its back so that it wouldn’t hit the ceiling. Standing over me, the figure had to be at least 9 feet tall. I was petrified and when I tried to scream in horror, only my breath was expelled without a sound. The figure moved around my bed and walked closer to me as it approached the head of my bed. Then something even more strange occurred, the figure grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared somewhere behind my bed. That was the last I saw of the dark figure. Needless to say I did not sleep that night.

The sun finally rose and I had never been so happy to see the early morning light. I shot out of bed and into the living room, reached for the remote and turned on my Saturday morning cartoons. My mother was already in the kitchen making breakfast and my dad was in the dining room reading the paper and drinking coffee. A pretty normal scene in my household, except for one thing - it was 7:15 on a Saturday morning and I was always the first one up on Saturdays. My parents always slept in. As I sat there in front of the television, I listened in on the conversation my parents were having. My mother accused my father of keeping her up with his constant tossing and turning, and he accused her of the same. She said she was restless due to a nightmare she had had. She went on to describe this nightmare to my father. A sudden chill ran up my spine when I heard my mother describe the same figure that had been the object my fears only hours ago. My father responded, “That’s funny, I had the same dream.”

Mysterious Bedfellows
By Anthony Ausgang

One evening I spent the night with my girlfriend who rented a very old house in Silver Lake. I awoke during the night and was startled to see a white woman with black hair cut in a pageboy style sitting on the end of the bed. I woke my girlfriend to show her but when we looked back at the foot of the bed, the woman was gone.

Sometime later I was at a party and got in a conversation about Silver Lake with a complete stranger. It turned out that he had spent many nights in the same house that my girlfriend was renting. He asked me if I had seen the ghost so I told him that I had; I then asked him to describe her. He told me that he had seen a white woman with a black hair in the bedroom.

A little research revealed that a white woman who wore her hair short had indeed lived in the house in the 1920s and had worked in Hollywood as a makeup artist.

Photographic Evidence
By Ricardo Cuevas

The above photograph was taken on September 15, 2006 in Whitby Abbey, England.
While on a walking tour, I noticed a dark causeway and it gave me such an eerie feeling that I couldn’t resist snapping a photo into the darkness. In a town as notoriously haunted as Whitby (it’s the city where Dracula was invented), this can be anything. You decide. Keep in mind, this was a pitch-black hallway.

Phantom of the Theater
By Kitty Diggins, Dandy Club founder

I have always been a bit sensitive to the Spirits. My experiences date back from childhood, but I have had many as an adult. I have worked in theaters in varying capacities my whole life, and for whatever reason, these venues always seem to be wrought with ghostly types. Most of my encounters relate to locations in Portland Oregon where I spent most of my life. This is an account of the Paris Theater located in Downtown Portland.

This was a theater that dates back to the Vaudevillian Days, but has been through many changes over the years. The Paris Theater is built on top of the Shanghai Tunnels which run through all of which is known as “Old Town.” Many businesses in this local are notoriously haunted.

I began work at a new incarnation of the Paris in about 1995. I lived at the theater for a brief time and met several times with the ghosts residing there. My first encounter took place the first night I slept there. Of course I had my apprehensions about sleeping in an old theater all alone, and my mind raced, but I tried to tell myself I shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

When getting ready for bed, I had my hair up in several bobby pins and took them out and laid them on a table. When awoke in the morning, I went to the table where I had been sitting the previous night, only to find that the bobby pins I had taken from my hair were in fact gone. No one else had been in the place since then. I tried to not freak out about it, but of course I was spooked.

The following night, I decided to go to another bar for a nightcap. This was in February and it was bitter cold. I returned to the Paris at around 2:30 a.m. I unlocked and locked the padlock of the first gate and then the chain that went around the main entrance’s double doors.

I locked everything, put my keys in the pocket of my coat, went up to my room and got in bed with my coat over me for extra warmth. About 15 minutes later, I was aroused by the very distinct sound of someone unlocking the front door and walking in. I could hear the footsteps on the carpet, and my first thought was that it’s just one of my cohorts bringing a date in for a nightcap.

Then, I heard nothing. No laughter, no voices. Nothing. I began to get very uneasy and waited , hoping I would hear footsteps on the carpet.

I became really freaked out and got my knife out of my stocking. I got up and slowly crept out of the room. There were small windows in the projection room from which you could see into various parts of the theater.

I held my breathe for nearly 20 minutes, waiting. Nothing happened, but my heart was ready to jump out of my chest! Finally, I crept back to my bed and got in, knife in hand, for the rest of the night.

I awoke in the morning thanking my lucky stars that nothing had happened to me. All of the sudden, something made a clinking sound from the small table at the foot of the bed. I sat up. There wasn’t anything on that table, but on the floor lay a small key. I tried to think nothing of it, and got up and went about my business.

At around 2 p.m. the phone rang. It was an out of town band that wanted to load in early. I told them I would open the double doors so they could come in. To my alarm, the key to the padlock on the main door was not on my key ring. A picture of the little key on the floor by the bedside table appeared in my mind’s eye. I went upstairs, picked the key up off the floor and went back downstairs and unlocked the door with it. Every hair on my body crawled in every direction, and I told them to load in and I would be back. How did the key get off the ring and why did it make a distinct clinking sound on the floor by the bed?

These were some of the minor incidents that continued to happen as time went on. Many other people reported seeing a green outline of a person near the concession stand in front of the basement door. Maybe this explains why I always got a terrible feeling when coming in late at night after a gig elsewhere, sometimes so severe that, even though I barely had any money, I would call a cab to just come and get me out of there.

After I quit the theater, other people came and took over for a while, but the stories of ghostly encounters were overwhelming. Who were these spirits that stuck around and what were they trying to convey to the new comers?