I must relay my personal story of rubbing elbows with the weird, the wicked, and maybe even the dead.
One night, I woke up to voices.
Film friends had baited me with a production manager role if I would help set up their facility to produce an independent motion picture. There were whispers about the place; strange sounds and sights. Had I been a believer, such talk would have elicited a straight-up, “Nope.” I suggested they relocate if the happenings disturbed them, but with their moviemaking underway and so much to do, the team feared the disruption would blow their schedule.
The drive from Silicon Valley to Beverly Hills had been tedious and exhausting; a rare, drenching rain tormenting Interstate 5. To my surprise, the “facility” was neither sound stage nor executive office, but a sprawling private home tucked into a canyon above Sunset Boulevard. Its four acres were once part of an impressive estate built by 1920s Los Angeles banking luminary, Benjamin R. Meyer, whose personal architect also designed Greystone, that infamous mansion once owned by Ned Doheny, Jr., scion of the wealthiest family in Los Angeles; the place he perished under strange circumstances.
The owner had parceled out the property into several separate dwellings. Our mini-manse, the former race horse stables, had been refashioned into a palatial, albeit eccentric, geometry of disparate parts and levels with an open air atrium in its center, a pool and pool house nearby. In its heyday, this home had appeared in architectural digests along with the renowned Hollywood diva from whom my friends were now leasing. She had moved out of state to a farm more aligned with her nature, away from the insanities of the city.
The idea, as my compeers explained, was to convert the entire residence to a working film studio, then move to other living quarters. And upon success of the silver-screen venture, I was to fly out to meet the diva and negotiate the production company’s purchase of the estate. Thus began my personal tale of rubbing elbows with the weird, the wicked, and maybe even the dead.
But that first night I needed sleep. After a few introductions and a quick tour, my hosts offered a comfortable couch in the Blue Room, a private office suite.
A bit after midnight, I roused to the thrum of voices. They seemed to come through the mirrored wall between my accommodations and a large bedroom already converted into workspace. The discussion continued, growing louder and sometimes heated. When it ebbed to a murmur, I finally drifted off.
I rose refreshed. Then I noticed a drain about the size of my palm in the center of the tiled floor, quite out of place with the fine furnishings. I made a mental note to ask its purpose.
The crew greeted me with breakfast and small talk, and then a curious inquisition about the quality of my sleep. Not wanting to complain, I assured the others that the accommodations were agreeable, and that I was able to get some rest once their raucous late-night meeting ended. With that, spoons of granola hovered mid-air and the clatter of coffee cups came to an abrupt halt. The silence was profound. Nervous laughter circled the table.
I apologized. I hadn’t meant to offend; after all, working into the wee hours is common to the filmmaking craft. Then I speculated on pipes and ducts sandwiched within the wall, their vibrations mimicking the rise and fall of impassioned debate.
My hosts assured me it could not be. The mirrored wall was not a wall at all — just an archway, sheet-rocked over to separate the spaces. And no meeting had taken place; all were in bed, resting for the morrow.
As for the peculiar drain, I was told the home had been converted from the horse stables of the main mansion. The iron grating at the room’s center, explained away as sanitary care of the erstwhile animal tenants.
Now I recalled the writer-director’s warning the house was haunted. He had relayed some odd occurrences: footsteps followed across the living room floor by several witnesses, including the cat; floating mists traveling through rooms and down a spiral stair; and furnishings moving on their own. The disturbances had already sent some packing. Ultimately, we ignored the psychic intrusions in favor of putting the film in the can. Yet, the oddities persisted.
Early one morning, stomping on the roof startled me awake. Slow. Heavy. Booming. Had the pool maintenance crew mistakenly climbed the retaining wall that led from the gardens to the main level? But what were they doing up there? I went outside to assess the damage that had surely been done to the delicate clay tiles, only to find, to my surprise, they were perfectly intact. No one around. Oddly, none of my housemates had heard the sinister sounds.
As I was starting my busy workday, I caught an associate’s reflection in a mirror approaching behind me. I called out a hello. No answer. I jogged a circuit through the adjoining rooms. No sight of him. And no one else was around. Later that day, I mentioned the incident to him. He’d been out all morning. In fact, he had stopped for a haircut at an exclusive salon; the customer in the next chair, the legendary David Bowie. Looking back, I realized the phantom I had pursued was a ringer for the homeowner’s former spouse, long dead.
The household was, in a word, unbalanced. A cloud of paranoia had befallen my host, who had taken to packing a sidearm. I was in the residence alone when I beheld a woman; her face pressing against the glass of the dining room slider. She demanded to get in to see the lady of the house, a friend from long ago. The enigmatic visitor in motley attire had the air of an old voodoo priestess. Despite being assured of the diva’s absence, she lingered. The colorful shamanista seemed familiar with the property and its appurtenances, and was eager to tell anyone who would listen that it was a place of evil. Speaking in soft riddles, she conveyed certain strange events. She intimated that the domain where I laid my head was witness to ritualistic sacrifices; whether man or beast, she would not say. The grounds, I realized, did offer a huge, ornate, wrought-iron aviary, vacant save for the souls of its feathered residents. That floor drain and the unexplained whispers in the wall now held new meaning for me. Unnerved, I bid her farewell, then barred the doors and windows, should she return while my attentions were elsewhere.
Beyond the depopulated coop, a cobwebbed cast iron door hunkered in the hillside, locked up tight. Was it a speakeasy tunnel for Prohibition-era escapades? Perhaps behind that rusted entrance lay a passage directed toward the Dohenys’ bloodstained Greystone Mansion, not far away. Black widows and recluse spiders be damned, we wanted to explore it, but the key was lost to time.
In the last days of my tenure at the estate, I discovered faded photographs of the building’s original equestrian incarnation. Out front was a hand-dug well, in a spot now concealed beneath the diva’s reimagined oasis. But why? And what secrets do its cold stone walls hold to this day?
Several dwellings comprised our enclave in that valley of shadows, which many privacy-craving celebrities have called home. Uphill from our abode resided a world-famous writer of TV murder mysteries, his own presence an enigma; his place among the living affirmed only by articles in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. To the south brooded the castle-like main house, dark and quiet. Only by happenstance did we glimpse its reclusive resident, a music producer of great note; those chance encounters, constrained to the zone between our properties reserved for refuse and recyclables. The man was silent and staring, perhaps confounded by, or disapproving of, the industries of his young neighbors; it was hard to know. Some said he slowly but surely went off his rocker.
Only later did I learn that the wild-eyed man in the stucco castle next door was music mogul Phil Spector, the gun-brandishing psychopath who would leave actress Lana Clarkson in a pool of blood.
You’ll find that true-crime tale of grisly murder and many more in my book, EVIL’s EDEN: Only Murders in Los Angeles.