“LOS ANGELES: A CITY OF HAUNTINGS” (PLUS BLOOPERS!) #WeirdDarkness

Listen to ““LOS ANGELES: A CITY OF HAUNTINGS” (PLUS BLOOPERS!) #WeirdDarkness” on Spreaker.

IN THIS EPISODE: Los Angeles is one of the world’s most famous cities. It’s known for being the home of the rich and famous, the film and music industries, theme parks, beautiful warm weather, gorgeous beaches, and an active nightlife… but it’s also known for smog, skid row, and bad traffic. But one thing most people don’t immediately think of is the almost overwhelming number of ghosts and the city’s history of the occult. In this episode we’re going to look at L.A.’s haunted locations and famous ghosts, as well as look at how prevalent the occult was and possibly still is in the City of Angels.
SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM THE EPISODE…
“Hollywood’s Haunted Magic Castle” by Christina Sanza for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/nhdf2f29
“Los Angeles’ Haunted Hotels” by Andy Miller from Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mvbdcwac
“L.A. Ghosts” by Jen Lennon for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/39xypc6c
“Los Angeles: City Of The Occult” by Christine Aprile for Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4y9rj77r
Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music Library.
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“I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.” — John 12:46
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Originally aired: April, 2021

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT:

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SHOW OPEN=====
Welcome, Weirdos – I’m Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you’ll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained.
If you’re new here, welcome to the show! While you’re listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, to connect with me on social media, and more!
Coming up in this episode… Los Angeles is one of the world’s most famous cities. It’s known for being the home of the rich and famous, the film and music industries, theme parks, beautiful warm weather, gorgeous beaches, and an active nightlife… but it’s also known for smog, skid row, and bad traffic. But one thing most people don’t immediately think of is the almost overwhelming number of ghosts and the city’s history of the occult. In this episode we’re going to look at L.A.’s haunted locations and famous ghosts, as well as look at how prevalent the occult was and possibly still is in the City of Angeles.
Now.. bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness!

STORY: HOLLYWOOD’S HAUNTED MAGIC CASTLE=====

The Magic Castle is the clubhouse for the Academy of Magical Arts. Located in Hollywood at 7001 Franklin Avenue, the castle is private; only members and their guests are allowed inside, though it’s rumored that you can get in if you spend the night at the Magic Castle Hotel.

The castle is filled with magical memorabilia and is reportedly haunted. There’s the Houdini Séance Room, where guests are able to make contact with the spirit world. In the Haunted Cellar, the ghost of a young girl has been seen wandering the halls. Several people have died there, including a beloved magician who died by suicide just before he was supposed to go on stage.

Is everything inside the castle just a magic trick, or do ghosts really haunt the historic building? Guests are not allowed to take photos or video while inside, so the evidence of any ghostly interactions are scarce. But even though the Magic Castle tries to keep its secrets close, rumors still fly, and this list contains just some of the spooky stories that have made it outside of the Castle walls.

William Larsen, Sr., the father of Magic Castle founders Milt and William Larsen, was an attorney and a magician. He worked for Harry Houdini’s wife, Bess, and the Houdini Séance Room is now filled with Houdini memorabilia that the Larsen family collected over the years.

Houdini did not believe in séances or mediums and he tried to debunk spiritualism throughout his career. He and his wife came up with a code phrase for him to say if he ever made contact from the afterlife: “Rosabelle, believe.” After her husband died in an accident on Halloween, Bess held a séance every year for 10 years, but was never able to make contact with her late husband.

Today, the séances continue at the Magic Castle. A medium connects groups of 10 – 12 guests to the ghostly occupants that haunt the castle, and more than a few spooky encounters have been reported. It’s rumored that the original resident medium, E. Raymond Carlyle, made contact with his recently deceased daughter during one séance.

One of the current mediums, Misty Lee, said she once saw a dark figure standing behind one of the guests. She thought it was a staff member trying to scare someone, but when she mentioned it afterwards, the guest said the mysterious dark figure had been following him for his entire life.

Dai Vernon was a magician-in-residence at the Magic Castle. He watched shows from the front row of the Palace of Prestidigitation, one of the performance venues inside the Castle, every night until his death in 1992. His ashes now sit on a shelf outside the theater.

A team of paranormal investigators explored the castle and set up a camera directly in front of Vernon’s favorite seat in the theater. While the camera was rolling, they investigated the room next door and asked the spirits to perform a magic trick for them. A ghostly voice responded from the empty Palace of Prestidigitation, right where Vernon used to sit.

The music room at the Magic Castle is occupied by a piano-playing ghost named Irma. Guests can request any song that comes to mind and Irma will play it.

Only the Castle staff members know what kind of magic trick lies behind Irma’s piano playing, but according to Castle legend, Irma was a frequent guest at the mansion in the early 1900s. She loved playing the piano, but the homeowner, Rollin B. Lane, was not a fan of music. He moved the piano up to the third floor so he wouldn’t be bothered by it anymore, and Irma took this as a great personal insult. She died in 1932 and vowed to return and haunt the mansion. When the Magic Castle opened in 1963, the piano was moved back downstairs and Irma has been entertaining the guests nightly ever since.

Her story may just be some fun fiction created by the Magic Castle, but the owner swears that one night during a power outage, the piano was playing all on its own.

On Halloween in 2011, a roofer’s blowtorch fell over and started a fire at the Magic Castle. There was extensive damage to the attic, third floor, and the Dante Room, named for Dante the Magician.

The owner of the castle, Milt Larsen, noticed a strange coincidence. Harry Houdini had died on Halloween in 1926, and it turned out that the fire had started at the exact time of his death. Houdini hated Dante, and now the Dante Room was totaled while the Houdini Room suffered no damage.

Some people believe it was Houdini’s ghost finally making contact from the afterlife.

The Hat & Hare Pub inside the Magic Castle is only open on Friday and Saturday nights, but many guests have reported seeing a male bartenderserving drinks there during the week.

His description matches Loren Tate, a bartender who used to work at the Hat & Hare. He died many years ago, but it seems he wants to keep working even in the afterlife.

The basement area of the Magic Castle is known as the “Haunted Cellar.” It’s been remodeled over the years to make room for performance spaces, but at some point, the ghost of an unidentified girl was spotted running up and down the hallway.

In 1986, a magician named Chris Michaels passed away while waiting to go on stage. When a staff member went backstage to let him know the show was about to start, his body was discovered sitting in a chair. Today, any mishaps that happen backstage are blamed on Michaels’s mischievous ghost.

The entrance to the Magic Castle may just be a good magic trick, but it sets the stage for a very creepy evening. To enter the depths of the Castle, guests first gather in the library. A small statue of an owl stands guard on a bookshelf and only opens the secret doorway if you give him the magic password: “open sesame.”

This is the only room in the Castle where guests are allowed to take photos, so whatever happens beyond the secret doorway remains (mostly) a mystery.

Inside there are more elements of spooky stage craft, including a telephone booth where a skeleton appears to startle unsuspecting visitors.

Originally known as the Holly Chateau, the Magic Castle was built in 1909 by real estate investor Rollin B. Lane. He and his wife Katherine moved to Los Angeles from Wisconsin in 1902 and later began work on the mansion at 7001 Franklin Avenue.

Lane suffered a stroke at home and died there in 1940, in what is now the Houdini Séance Room. Katherine died in 1945, and after that the mansion became a multi-family home, then a home for the elderly, and finally a collection of small apartments. The Lane family sold the home in 1955 and it was eventually purchased by the brothers Milt and William Larsen, who transformed it into the Magic Castle.

BREAK=====

Looking for a scary vacation spot? Look no other than the hotels of Los Angeles where even if you are booking the room for just one, you’re never really alone! That’s up next on Weird Darkness!

STORY: LOS ANGELES’ HAUNTED HOTELS=====

Los Angeles is a tourist town; people flock from across the globe to visit Hollywood and the beaches, the theme parks and studios. As a result, the hotels of Los Angeles are some of the most interesting places to stay in the world. From the Chateau Marmont’s history to the Skid Row speakeasies, the hotels in Los Angeles offer something for everyone. The coolest hotels in Los Angeles all have rich histories. Some, like the Knickerbocker Hotel, have creepy pasts, and others, like the Georgian, were the home to lots of criminal activity. Below are the strange histories of Los Angeles’s most infamous hotels.

So, where do you want to stay in the City of Angels?

The Knickerbocker Hotel opened in Hollywood in July of 1929. Famed architect EM Frasier designed the hotel in the Spanish Colonial Style, and it immediately attracted the film industry’s elite. It was perhaps best known for two things – its world class bar, the Lido Room, which hosted live Tango music, and the lobby’s chandelier. The light fixture cost a reported $120,000 in 1925.

The Knickerbocker had a lot of ups and downs. It began as one of the hippest hotels in town and hosted celebrities Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe on their honeymoon. However, there are reports of Monroe’s ghost haunting the lobby. Elvis stayed at the Knickerbocker while filming his first movie, Love Me Tender. In some of the more “down” moments for the hotel, director DW Griffith had a stroke in his room at the hotel and died shortly thereafter, and Frances Farmer was dragged kicking and screaming while in a manic stupor from the hotel, institutionalized the next day. Irene Lentz, a costume designer who was deeply bereaved by the death of Gary Cooper, committed suicide by jumping from the building. In the 1960s, the neighborhood began to decline, and the hotel was converted to a Senior Living home.

Today, it is best remembered for its association with Harry Houdini. When Houdini died in 1926, he promised his wife Bess that he would visit her from beyond if it were possible. Bess held a séance on Halloween for 10 consecutive years. The tenth and final year was a media sensation – even the Los Angeles Times covered it. The seance was on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel. That night, Houdini failed to reach out to the gathered. As the séance disbanded and the guests began to mingle, the sky opened up and thunder and lightning rained down. They all rushed inside for cover. The next day, they discovered that it did not rain anywhere else in Los Angeles.

The Ambassador opened on Wilshire Boulevard on New Years Day, 1921. At the time, Wilshire Boulevard was a dirt road surrounded by dairy farms. The arrival of the 500-room hotel brought quick and decisive changes. During its hey-day, the hotel and its world class night club, the Cocoanut Grove, set the trends for all of Los Angeles and the film industry. The Ambassador hosted six Academy Awards. Every president from Hoover to Nixon stayed at the hotel. Hollywood’s elite packed the Cocoanut Grove night after night – Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, and Jimmy Stewart were all regulars. It’s even been rumored that Rudolph Valentino supplied the hotel’s paper mache palm trees from the set of his film The Sheik.

As the 1960s progressed and cities were falling into disrepair from the rise of the suburbs, the fate of the Ambassador was forever changed. Robert F. Kennedy won the presidential primary for California on June 4, 1968. He addressed his supporters from the Ambassador’s Embassy Room ballroom. Moments later, he was gunned down and killed in the kitchen by Sirhan Sirhan. It was a morbid and monumental sign of the changing times. The Ambassador struggled along until the mid-1980s and finally checked out its last guest in 1989. It was demolished to make way for a new school in 2006.

The Rosslyn Hotel Annex in downtown Los Angeles opened in 1923 on the corner of 5th and Main. It was designed by the Parkinson and Parkinson Firm in the Beaux Arts style and still stands today, although it has been re-purposed as low income housing. In 2010, the building was bought by the SRO Housing Corporation, and they discovered a long-forgotten speakeasy, the Prohibition haunt for those looking for a good time when drinks were hard to come by. Down in the basement, they found a barbershop and bathrooms directly across from a speakeasy named the Monterey Room. There was also a marble-lined tunnel that led up to 5th Street and a secret passage that led to the original Hotel Rosslyn across the street.

The Hotel Alexandria is located in downtown Los Angeles. It opened in February 1906 and was the nicest hotel in Los Angeles before the Biltmore was built. The Alexandria was so popular that a second building was built, and then a neighboring wing was added. The added wing was on the adjacent property and owned by William Chick. He built the building to connect to the Alexandria – the hallways from the original building were extended onto his new addition, and the add-on rooms were handled just like the rest; the guests checked in at the front desk as usual, etc.

In 1938, ownership changed hands, and the hotel became the property of Phil Goldstone . At the time, the add-on wing was owned by William Chick’s daughter. They argued over finances, and Goldstone eventually sent in bricklayers to seal off the original hotel from the Chicks’ building. William Chick never planned on running his rooms separately from the main hotel, so there was no lobby or check-in for the wing. To make matters worse, there weren’t even stairs connecting the sealed-off floors to each other, and there was no retail space on the ground floor. The phantom wing was completely cut off from the outside world and lay undisturbed until 2012, when it was finally bought and converted to condos.

At one time owned by Sandy Koufax, the Tropicana Motel did not have much going for it esthetically, but it made up for it with amazing clientele. Located in West Hollywood on the corner of Santa Monica and West Knoll, it was just a hop, skip, and jump down the road from the Troubadour. As a result, just about every rock band from the ’60s through the late ’70s set up camp at the famed budget motel. Jim Morrison was often there. Led Zeppelin and the Mamas and the Papas were frequent guests.Tom Waits was a long-term resident. He even broke off a section of the kitchen counter so he could move a piano into the kitchen. The Clash and Blondie had memorable visits. The motel’s restaurant, Duke’s, was a late-night hangout for the after hours crowd. Unfortunately, the location was too good, and it all came to an end in 1987 when the wrecking ball cleared the way for a new and bigger Ramada.

The Pico House is the last hotel from the original downtown of Los Angeles. It sits just North of the 101 Freeway, near Chinatown, on the Old Plaza. Built in 1870, the Pico House belongs in a Western film. Ezra Keysor, the architect, designed it in the Italianate Style. The hotel’s namesake, Don Pio Pico, was the last Mexican governor of California before it became a part of the United States. Pico threw lavish parties in the hotel square and entertained the masses.

Upon its completion, the Pico House was considered the greatest hotel south of San Francisco. However, Los Angeles was a lawless city during the 1870s, and lynch mobs ruled the streets. The Chinese Massacre of 1871 occurred right outside the Pico House as belligerent mobs hung, beat, and burned the Chinese population that was helping with the railroad. Upon the completion of the railroads, the downtown and financial districts outgrew the Old Plaza and moved south to what are now Broadway and Main Streets.

The Georgian opened in 1933 at the end of Route 66 in Santa Monica. Rosamond Borde, the proprietress, envisioned her posh hotel as a getaway for the Hollywood elite. After all, Santa Monica was a sleepy beach town back then, and the Georgian offered a number of services. It had a barbershop and playground; it hosted galas in its lobbies. These amenities were all well and good, but what ultimately drew the Hollywood elite was the alcohol. During Prohibition, the Georgian had a top notch bar that hosted stars like Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, as well as mobsters like Bugsy Seigel and his crew. Being an old hotel, there are also whispers about a ghost in the kitchen. Santa Monica may no longer be a sleepy beach hamlet, but the Georgian is still taking guests and serving drinks.

The Biltmore is perhaps Los Angeles’ most elegant hotel. It certainly was upon its opening in 1923. Designed by architectural firm Schultze and Weaver, the building is a synthesis of Italian and Greek Renaissance, with touches of Moorish flavor. It is all designed to pay homage to California’s Castillian heritage. It is a striking building with countless ballrooms and extravagant lobbies. In the Biltmore, the beauty is in the details – gold, vaulted ceilings, frescoes, an ocean-liner-inspired pool and spa.

Many of Los Angeles’ great historic hotels went into decline during Prohibition and the Depression. The Biltmore, however, continued on its merry way thanks to its infamous “speakeasy,” the Gold Room. It’s hard to consider it an actual speakeasy when there were double-sided mirrors for the paparazzi. The Gold Room is perhaps the most well-documented speakeasy of its time. The Biltmore’s rich history includes high times like hosting the Academy Awards throughout the ’30s and ’40s, feeding the crew of Graf Zeppelin on its journey around the world, and hosting the 1960 Democratic National Convention when John F. Kennedy won the primary. In less sunny remembrances, it was also the last place that Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia, was seen before her murder in 1947. Troops stayed on the second floor before departing to the Pacific in WWII. Needless to say, many consider the hotel to be extremely haunted.

The Hotel Figueroa has one of the richest histories of Los Angeles’ many hotels. In fact, Hotel Figueroa was revolutionary. It was the first hotel catering exclusively to women. The YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) purchased land on the corner of 10th and Figueroa in 1925. Unlike the YMCA, which concerned itself with community, the YWCA was focused on social issues. At the time, women were beginning to assume more prominent roles in society, especially in business. The YWCA grew concerned as women began to live more independent lives and travel on their own, believing they needed a safe place that catered to their own needs. Thus was born the Hotel Figueroa.

The Hotel Figueroa opened its doors in 1926. The top floors were reserved exclusively for women. Men and their families were permitted on the bottom two levels. There was a hair salon and pool and even a phone bank for important calls. Live music was hosted once a week, as well as dry dances. Unfortunately, rising debt forced the hotel to change its format. In 1928, the top floors were no longer reserved exclusively for women, but the YWCA still owned and operated the hotel. Then, the stock market crashed, and they were forced to sell it. The Hotel Figueroa’s feminist history was slowly forgotten as the area declined. Interest in the hotel and its rich past was only re-ignited upon the revival of the surrounding area in the early 2000s with the building of LA Live.

The Sportsmen’s Lodge has a long and storied past. Located in Studio City, it is just three miles from Universal Studios and Hollywood. It has had various names and passed through countless owners. In the 1920s, it was still primarily known as Hollywood Trout Farm, although it offered hotel accommodations, as well. Republic Pictures was located nearby, and its Western film stars often stopped off at the Trout Ranch for a bit of fishing and a drink on the way home to their little ranches in the San Fernando Valley. At this point, Roy Rogers and Rex Allen, John Wayne and Gene Autry were all regulars.

In 1945, the name was officially changed to Sportsmen’s Lodge. Hollywood A-listers often caught fish off the storied docks, and the kitchen would then cook up the catch. Clark Gable, Katherine Hepburn, and Humphrey Bogart were regulars at this point. The Lodge made adjustments as the San Fernando Valley grew and developed into a sprawling suburbia. A ballroom was added – it was the only large room for rent in the region, and it could hold 500 guests. Many San Fernando residents were married at the hotel, had bar mitzvahs, and hosted family celebrations in the ballroom throughout the ’50s and ’60s – becoming a beloved institution in the process. The Sportsmen’s Lodge is still open for business, but major overhauls have made it virtually unrecognizable.

The Hotel Normandie is best remembered for its association with the novel Under The Volcano. Malcolm Lowry wrote much of his masterpiece during his stay. As Los Angeles continued expanding west, the Normandie fell on hard times. It was remodeled countless times, usually for the worse, and it passed from owner to owner, eventually becoming a long-term single unit residency. Then, in 2010, it was reopened as the country’s first cannabis-friendly hotel. It was sold again and remodeled back to its former glory in 2012 and is once again a regular hotel.

The Chateau Marmont opened in February of 1929, but it was originally an exclusive apartment building. However, the high rent kept occupancy down during the Depression, and it was sold and converted to a hotel. The fortress-like appearance, large suites, and thick walls made the Chateau Marmont ideal for Hollywood stars of the 1930s to misbehave in during the Motion Picture Code days. The Chateau values its guests’ privacy, and employees are sworn to secrecy, but there are thousands of rumors swirling around. It’s been said that Howard Hughes peeped on beach bunnies from his room. Jim Morrison once jumped off the roof – so high at the time that he walked away just fine. John Belushi overdosed and died in his suite. More recently, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears have called the place home during their darker days.

The Cecil Hotel is so terrifying that an entire season of American Horror Story was based around its lore. Two serial killers (Richard Ramirez, a.k.a. the Nightstalker, and Jack Unterweger, an Austrian serial killer who murdered women in multiple countries) spent time at the Cecil Hotel. In fact, Unterweger killed three people while he was staying there.

But that’s not even close to the whole story of why the Cecil is so creepy. In 2013, a guest of the hotel named Elisa Lam went missing. More than fifteen days later, patrons of the hotel began complaining that the water coming from the taps and showers was discolored and tasted funny. A maintenance worker went to check the hotel’s rooftop water tank, and guess what he found inside of it? The body of Elisa Lam, which had been in there for, you guessed it, more than fifteen days. There’s even creepy security camera footage from the night she disappeared, showing what appears to be her talking to someone who the camera can’t see—or isn’t there at all. The police ruled her death an accidental drowning, but many people believe she was murdered.

The Cecil moved most of the guests staying there at the time to a different hotel, but 11 people chose to stay. They had to sign a waiver acknowledging the health risks of using the contaminated water, which begs the question, if water contaminated by a decomposing dead body couldn’t get these people to move to a new hotel—free of charge, I might add—then what would?

The hotel has recently rebranded itself as The Stay on Main to try and shake its creepy image, but it’s probably a safe bet that there’s more than one ghost still haunting its halls.

Marilyn Monroe allegedly haunts The Roosevelt Hotel (although her ghost is also seen elsewhere in Los Angeles as we will see a bit later). Monroe lived at the Roosevelt before she married Joe DiMaggio, and guests have reported seeing her in a mirror in the hotel’s lobby. Guests have also spotted Montgomery Clift, star of Judgment at Nuremberg, in room 928, where he resided while filming a movie.

BREAK=====

Los Angeles’ long history of the occult is up next on Weird Darkness.

STORY: LOS ANGELES – CITY OF THE OCCULT=====

Southern California is as far as you can get in the contiguous United States from the puritanical roots, restrictive social norms, and old money of cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Los Angeles is nearly 2,700 miles from Washington DC, and the watchful eyes of the federal government. California is the westernmost destination of the American frontier, a land rich in natural resources like oil. A place you go to reinvent yourself. An area with a long, sometimes sordid history of new religions, experimental spirituality, far-out cults, and psychedelic occult activity.

From the financial and cultural behemoth of Scientology to the psychotic folkies of the Mason gang and the sex-crazed, psychedelic vegetarians of the Source Family and their messianic leader Father Yod, the occult in Los Angeles wears a number of guises. Yet each of these groups, and the history, mythology, and dogma associated therewith, was born of countercultural tendencies. L. Ron Hubbard didn’t want to pay taxes. Edith Maida Lessing, who founded the Mount Helios cult compound in Glassell Park, “declared free love would replace marriage, believed in communal ownership of property, and boasted that she had control over more than 1,000 men”. Carlos Castaneda, an anthropologist at UCLA, claims to have met an indigenous Mexican shaman at a bus stop in the southwest who had the ability to manipulate time and space, and taught him, among other things, kung fu and how to take peyote.

Scientology has attracted so many members it’s frequently described as a legitimate religion, not a cult. According to CNN, there are at least hundreds of thousands of practitioners. The Church of Scientology claims that number is in the millions, with 167 missions and more than 10,000 churches spread across the globe. However, many believe these stats to be vastly inflated. Whether any religion qualifies as an occult organization is a debate for another day. Merriam-Webster defines occult as “matters regarded as involving the action or influence of supernatural or supernormal powers or some secret knowledge of them”, a definition that could very easily apply to any and all religious beliefs. So, potato potahto.

A native of Nebraska who also spent time in Montana as a child, Hubbard moved to California after service in World War Two. Scientology’s beliefs are perhaps most succinctly described by a South Park episode in which the whole system of apes with alien souls and ancient volcanoes is explained . Hubbard, a science fiction writer, has a background rooted in California occult circles. Before his rise to power, Hubbard lived for a time with Jack Parsons in Pasadena. The pair took part in the “Babalon Working” ritual in the hopes of bringing forth a goddess through a creative combination of chanting, parchment paper, and semen. Their relationship imploded when Hubbard stole Parsons’s mistress, his boat, and $20,000 of his savings.

Hubbard’s son accused his father of fraud, drug use, black magic, and Satanism, and talked of how the organization is a business that used religion as a way to evade taxes. According to Hubbard’s wife, he once said: “The only way to make any real money was to have religion. That’s essentially what he was trying to do with ‘Dianetics.’ Get a religion where he could have an income and the government wouldn’t take it away from him in the form of taxes.” In 1993, the Church of Scientology won a decades-long battle with the IRS to be fully tax exempt, and the case was extremely bizarre. For instance:

“Scientology’s lawyers hired private investigators to dig into the private lives of I.R.S. officials and to conduct surveillance operations to uncover potential vulnerabilities, according to interviews and documents. One investigator said he had interviewed tenants in buildings owned by three I.R.S. officials, looking for housing code violations. He also said he had taken documents from an I.R.S. conference and sent them to church officials and created a phony news bureau in Washington to gather information on church critics. The church also financed an organization of I.R.S. whistle-blowers that attacked the agency publicly.”

Jack Parsons was a rocket scientist whose pioneering work and role in the formation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were instrumental in the space race. Throughout the ’30s and ’40s, Parsons was also a devotee of the occult, performing sex magick rituals in his attempts to summon deities. When L. Ron Hubbard was living with Parsons before the founding of Scientology, Parsons had Hubbard sleep with his wife as part of one such ritual.

Parsons was taken with the occult as a young man, after witnessing a Gnosis Mass performed by Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), an occult society co-founded by an Austrian esotericist and a German tantric occultist. The ritual, described: “On a black and white stage stood an altar embossed with hieroglyphic patterns, a host of candles and an upright coffin covered with a gauze curtain out of which the group’s caped leader would appear. Poetry was read, swords were drawn, breasts kissed, and lances stroked. It was a highly charged sexual atmosphere. Wine was drunk and cakes made out of menstrual blood were consumed.”

Not long thereafter, Parsons became an adherent of Thelema, a religion created by English occultist Aleister Crowley (and which was practiced as scripture by the members of Ordo Templi Orientis). He bought a mansion in Pasadena and used it as a new hub or OTO operations in Los Angeles. Witches and fellow scientists moved in with him. He was known to answer the door with a snake wrapped around his shoulder, and brought secretaries from the laboratory back to his place for drug-fueled ritualistic debauchery. Eventually Hubbard moved in, and the pair tried summoning a goddess. As author George Pendle writes: “For weeks the two of them engaged in ritual chanting, drawing occult symbols in the air with swords, dripping animal blood on runes, and masturbating in order to ‘impregnate’ magical tablets.”

Parsons died at 37, ripped apart by an explosion in his home laboratory.

Charles Manson’s troubled childhood is well-documented. In broad strokes: he never knew his father, his mother was 16 when he was born and landed herself in jail not long thereafter, he lived with an aunt and uncle for a few years before spending most of his adolescence and young adulthood in reform centers and jails for a slew of minor crimes. In 1967, at age 33, Manson was released from prison and moved to San Francisco, where he anointed himself a messianic figure and began his occult preachings, which foretold of a race war that would destroy America and leave Manson and his devotees, whom he referred to as the Family, in an advantageous position to rise ot power. The counterculture explosion that took place in the summer of ’67 created just the right environment for Manson’s message, and he attracted a following.

Around this time, Manson, who was also an aspiring musician, met Denis Wilson of the Beach Boys. He then relocated his Family to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County, setting the scene for the Manson Family Murders. Between August 8 and 10, 1969, Manson’s followers murdered seven people at his behest, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate, wife to filmmaker Roman Polanski. One of Manson’s followers even tried to assassinate Gerald Ford, then President of the United States.

Los Angeles’s reputation for new age religions and seeking truth and divinity through the use of psychedelic drugs can be more or less totally attributed to Carlos Castaneda. Castaneda was born in Peru, though he told people he was from Brazil. He arrived in Los Angeles in the early ’50s to study anthropology at UCLA. He spent the 17 years living in obscurity. At some point during this time, according to Castaneda’s account, while at a bus stop in the southwest, he met Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui (indigenous Mexican) mystic who claimed, among other things, the ability to manipulate time and space. Castaneda became a pupil of Don Juan, and in 1967 submitted a manuscript entitled The Teachings of Don Juan to the University of California Press in Los Angeles. The book was published in 1968, and became a bestseller around the world. Castaneda wrote a total of 10 books, which are attributed with starting the New Age movement and invigorating interest in using drugs like peyote to achieve religious experiences.

The Castaneda’s obituary in the New York Times states:

“Mr. Castaneda spun extraordinarily rich, hallucinogenic evocations of ancient paths to knowledge based on what he described as an extended apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian shaman named Don Juan Matus. His 10 books, etched in layer upon layer of psychological nuance and intrigue, became international best sellers translated into 17 languages and were credited with helping to usher in the New Age sensibility and reviving interest in Indian and Southwestern cultures.”

A typical passage from Castaneda’s writing, quoted from Don Juan: “We men and all other luminous beings on earth are perceivers. That is our bubble, the bubble of perception. Our mistake is to believe that the only perception worthy of acknowledgment is what goes through our reason. Sorcerers believe that reason is only one center and that it shouldn’t take so much for granted.”

Castaneda was frequently accused of inventing Don Juan Matus, or at least of making up the shaman’s teachings. Rather than defend himself or provide evidence, Castaneda lived in Los Angeles in total anonymity, refusing to be photographed and never making public appearances. By the end of his life, he was such a recluse his death wasn’t public knowledge until two months after it happened.

Jim Baker was a retired marine and Hollywood stuntman who rechristened himself Father Yod, took 14 wives, fronted a fully improvised psychedelic band, and used a cocktail of occult philosophy to lead his disciples in the Source Family. The Family was entirely sustained by a health food restaurant on Sunset Boulevard also called The Source (which appears in Annie Hall), and from which Father Yod recruited for his family, in part using his music (his group was the restaurant’s house band). The Source was frequented by everyone from dirty hippies and drugged out wayward youth to Andy Warhol and John Lennon (no word on whether Father Yod’s music influenced Lennon).

The Source Family flourished from 1972 until 1977, and moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco and Hawaii. In Los Angeles, the Family lived in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, where they donned flowing robes, partook in sex magick, and lived by ancient mystic traditions. Members of the Family shared everything, and each was allowed to participate in Father Yod’s band. They didn’t drink, and referred to marijuana as “the sacred herb”. A typical day-in-the-life of a Source Family member, according to Isis Aquarian, one of Father Yod’s wives, went something like this:

“We would get up, and do some yoga stretches and some breathing. We usually had a pool wherever we would live, so we would just kind of dip into the cold water, which was very refreshing, and get dressed, have a cup of coffee and wait for morning meditation, which was our morning class. We always greeted the sun wherever we were. We would go outside and watch the sunrise and then we would start our day. People would either go and work at the Source or we would do our duties around the house, or whatever business energies were happening. The band would go into the band room and try different things—you know, make a few more albums. We had artists. We all were a thread that made up that tapestry, and everybody had their part that they did.”

Sex was sacred, and seen as the creative force of the universe. It was governed by strict rules, there were never orgies, and no one was ever expected to do something with which they were uncomfortable. As for Father Yod’s teachings, Isis Aquarian explains:

“We took from everything. We took from every religion. We took from past lives. We took from the mystery teachings. We took from the yogis. We took from the Buddha. We took from whatever made sense and worked to us and distilled it into our own uniqueness. There is one concept that I do want to tell you about because many people do say, Well, how did you see him as god? That’s very confusing to a lot of people, but to us it was not confusing because we saw each other as god. We saw the god and goddess in each of us at a time when that concept wasn’t really popular, or it was misunderstood. That’s how we saw Father, and that’s how he tried to get us to see each other, and that was our evolution from being just a human to a spiritual being.”

Filmmaker and publisher Jodi Wille explains the importance of the Source Family in the cultural fabric of Los Angeles during the psychedelic days of the early 1970s:

“[T]hey gave so much to the community of Los Angeles. In the early 1970s we had some of the greatest culture on the planet being produced here: films, music, art, and literature. And many of the people responsible for it hung out at the Source Family restaurant. Frank Zappa and all of those Laurel Canyon musicians who lived close by came into the restaurant all the time. To me, the Source Family represents a time in Los Angeles when the city was at its very coolest. Not since the 1910s and the 1920s had spiritualism and esotericism been so prevalent in this city.”

Avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger was born in Santa Monica in 1927, when there was basically no downtown Los Angeles skyline, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre had vacant lots on either side of it, Inglewood looked like a small town in the Midwest, and you could park your Model T on Santa Monica Pier. He in essence grew up with the city. Given the esoteric and occult nature of his films, it’s no surprise Anger was involved with some of LA’s most well-known eccentrics.

Anger directed a number of short films staring Marjorie Cameron, wife to occultist and rocket scientist Jack Parsons, who, along with Parsons, was involved with the The Gnostic Mass at the Church of Thelema, participated in sex magic rituals, and knew L. Ron Hubbard in the pre-Scientology days. Cameron was also a painter and, allegedly, a witch. An interview with Anger in the Guardian reads:

“‘She was extraordinary – a genuine witch,’ Anger says matter-of-factly. ‘She had powers. Unusual powers. Extra powers. She kind-of knew things before they happened. She loved a full moon.’ During their time living together, Anger was able to observe Cameron at work; she painted Anger as Saint Sebastian nailed to the ground with swords. ‘She considered them talismans. In her lifetime she never sold anything. She didn’t want to be a commercial artist. She had a couple of gallery shows but insisted they were not for sale.’ Mysteriously, Cameron destroyed much of her work. ‘If she destroyed some of them, it was for magical reasons that [she] consigned them to the flames. Of course, this sounds insane. If I’d been there I’d have tried to stop her. But it was her business she wanted to do that.'”

In the 1960s, Anger met fellow Aleister Crowley obsessive Jimmy Page, of Led Zeppelin, and asked him to contribute music for Anger’s Crowley-inspired cult classic Lucifer Rising. Page agreed but never finished the music, which led to Anger putting a curse on him. Anger also worked with Rosaleen Miriam Norton, known as the Witch of Kings Cross. His 1954 short film The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome starred, and was partially shot at the home, of part time actor and full time eccentric and self-described warlock Samson DeBrier, who hosted sensual salons at his Georgian house in Hollywood, where regular guests included Jack Nicholson, Stanley Kubrick, James Dean, Jane Fonda, and even Igor Stravinsky. Anger was also friends with a member of the Manson Family at the time of the murders.

On Saturday, January 3, 1920, the LAPD raided the Temple of the Sun, meeting place of what the Los Angeles Times described as the “the Mazdaznan cult of ‘sun worshipers'”. On January 7 of that year, the LA Times ran an article entitled “Child Witnesses Missing in Mazdaznan Cult Sex Case”, which reads in part: “The five children, against whom Hanish is said to have committed unprintable acts, were sought in vain Monday”. Hanish here refers to Otoman Zar-Adusht Hanish, founder of the neo-Zoroastrian cult Mazdaznan, which he ran from a house in Arlington Heights, in central Los Angeles, for about 20 years. Nothing is known for certain about Hanish before he began his religious movement in Chicago in 1900, before moving to Los Angeles in 1916, but it’s believed his real name was Otto Hanisch, and that he was born to a German mother and a Russian father in Terhan, Iran, in the mid-19th century.

Legal charges against Hanish were eventually dropped, and he lived the rest of his life in relative quiet, although acolytes, known as electors, helped spread his teachings to Europe, where they were accused of being racist and anti-Semitic (and also, ironically, banned in Nazi Germany). As for his occult teachings, Hanish claims to have become a member, while in Iran and/or Tibet (the history of Mazdaznan is a bit confusing), of a secret order that taught him the ancient secrets of a Ainyahita, a prophet whose teachings preceded Zoroaster (also known as Zarathustra) by 3000 years, dating her to about 3500 BCE. According to Hanish, these teachings formed the basis of all major monotheistic religions; he described them as “the eternal religion that stands behind all religions”. He spoke of making Earth a garden once more, in which man would coexist with God, and of the importance of breathing exercises. He was also a vegetarian, who “carefully taught the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of diet, menu-making, food preparation, food care, and all relating to the subject. Frequent simple ‘banquets’ were demonstrations to the students.” A deep dive into his beliefs reveals a strong sense of mysticism and esotericized folk beliefs.

Hanish’s followers make a number of claims about him, including that he was the first person in America to drive a car, and that Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were disciples of Mazdazan.

In 1975, David Bowie moved to Los Angeles and took up residence in the home of Deep Purple bassist Glenn Hughes. As it turns out, Hughes lived in the former home of Leno LaBianca, who, along with his wife Rosemary, was murdered by the Manson gang a few days after Sharon Tate and four others. While living with Hughes, Bowie intentionally kept himself in a permanent state of cocaine-induced psychosis. As Bowie biographer Marc Spitz writes:

“Hughes was, at the time, leading a somewhat debauched lifestyle but soon realized his new best friend was taking such decadence to extremes uncommon even for a rich rock ‘n’ roller. Unlike Hughes, Bowie was not ingesting blow for the fun of it. He remained awash in a state of neurosis and fears and obsessed with using occult black magic to attain success and protect himself from demonic forces. A self-induced cocaine psychosis was, addiction aside, maintained in part because it was a mental instability he could control, unlike the one he was convinced was still encoded in his DNA…”

Spitz goes on to reference members of Bowie’s family who suffered from mental health issues Bowie feared would also consume him. To protect himself against evil forces, Bowie drew pentagrams on surfaces throughout the house and collected books on witchcraft, white magic, and black magic. Hughes speaks of Bowie’s state of mind at the time: “He felt inclined to go on very bizarre tangents about Aleister Crowley or the Nazis or numerals a lot. It’d leave me scratching my head. He was completely wired. Manically wired. I could not keep up with him. He was on the edge all the time of paranoia, and also going about things I had no friggin’ idea of what he was talking about.”

In the heady jazz days of 1921, Glassell Park was a sparsely populated hinterland northeast of downtown Los Angeles. In that year, a woman named Edith Maida Lessing was arrested. According to a contemporary newspaper account, she was charged with “criminal syndicalism” on account of being the “so-called ‘high priestess’ of an alleged love-cult said to have flourished at her ‘Mount Helios’ colony in Glassell Park.” Los Angeles Magazine describes Mount Helios as a “ramshackle compound of tents and shacks” and attests “Lessing declared free love would replace marriage, believed in communal ownership of property, and boasted that she had control over more than 1,000 men. She was imprisoned in 1922 for sending obscene material through the mail”.

The devil’s gate is a feature of the Devil’s Gate Dam in Pasadena, erected to control the flood waters of the San Gabriel mountains. Behind the gate is a concrete tunnel covered in graffiti that is either a portal to hell or “a concrete dead end“, depending on your beliefs. The idea that area is cursed goes back to the indigenous Tongva people, who allegedly saw the face of the devil in the surrounding rock formation stayed away from it (why indigenous people were seeing the face of the Christian devil remains unexplained). In more recent lore, Aleister Crowley supposedly recognized the occult power of the location and, according to some, say the activities of Parsons and L Ron Hubbard opened a hell portal in the area (why Crowley would say this when he believed Hubbard was a fraud remains unexpelained). Jack Parsons was attracted to the place, using conduct early liquid-fuel motor tests on Halloween of 1936 (and not to partake in any of his occult rituals). At least four children went missing in the area in the 1950s. In the 21st century, most visitors to the Devil’s Gate are those with an interest in the occult or paranormal.

The curse of Griffith Park began long before the land was gifted to the city of Los Angeles. In the mid 1800s, the area was a ranch belonging to Don Antonio Feliz, a bachelor who lived on the land with his niece, Petronilla. As Feliz lay dying of small pox, local politician Antonio Coronel, along with his lawyer, convinced the wealthy man to agree to the terms of a new will that saw all his land left to Coronel. According to legend, a stick was affixed to Feliz’s head and moved back and forth to force him to nod in agreement to the will. In response, Petronilla cursed the land, saying “The substance of the Feliz family shall be your curse! The wrath of heaven and the vengeance of hell shall fall upon this place.”

According to a history of Griffith Park published in the Washington Post:

“Coronel swiftly ceded the property to his lawyer, who was shot and killed while celebrating the sale of the land’s water rights. The next owner attempted to turn the ranch into a dairy business, but the cattle sickened and died, and grasshoppers and fires demolished the crops. During the tenure of its last owner, Griffith J. Griffith, a lightning storm brought down huge stands of trees and sent a wall of water cascading through the canyons, ruining much of the ranch. According to the book Victorian Los Angeles, ranch hands claimed they saw Feliz’s ghost riding the waves down a hillside, cheering his successor’s demise. Afterward, Griffith would only visit the property during the day, and in 1896 — apparently having decided that the land was more trouble than it was worth — he donated it to Los Angeles as a Christmas present.”

In 1933, 29 people died in a wildfire in the park. In 1976, a couple was crushed to death by a tree while boning on a picnic table. In 2012, hikers found a severed head in a plastic bag.

BREAK=====

We’ll meet a few famous spooks and specters who have made Los Angeles their immortal home when Weird Darkness returns!

STORY: L.A. GHOSTS=====

It shouldn’t come as much of surprise that Los Angeles, with its glitzy, sordid past, has seen some sh*t. And that can cause some unruly spirits. There are many LA ghost stories, from celebrities haunting their former residences to parks plagued with the ghosts of dead lovers. Let’s just say that restless souls love this place.

This list includes stories of famous LA hauntings, some of them spawned by infamous crimes. Hollywood has been kind to a few, but many others aren’t so lucky. The pursuit of fame can take a serious toll. For all the people who have succeeded in Hollywood, there are thousands more who haven’t. The real tales behind these Los Angeles ghost stories run the gamut from desperation to success, just like the city itself.

Over 100 people have jumped to their deaths from Pasadena’s Colorado Street bridge. The bridge, which was built in 1912, is known as “the suicide bridge.” Several ghosts now haunt it. Supposedly, you can see a woman in a white flowing robe jump to her death. Homeless people who live under the bridge have heard someone—or something—whispering “your fault.” And then there’s Myrtle Ward, a woman who committed suicide and attempted to kill her three-year-old daughter. Ward threw her daughter off the bridge and then jumped. She died, but her daughter’s fall was broken by thick trees, and she survived. Some people claim they have seen her walking the bridge, looking for the daughter she was never reunited with in the afterlife.

There were several facilities that made up the Rancho Los Amigos hospital, though only the main hospital is still operational. But the grounds used to hold a dairy farm and a mental institution as well, which have since been abandoned. And oh boy, is the abandoned mental hospital scary. In 2006, some Marines who were using the empty building for practice drills found body parts, including legs, feet, and pieces of brains in a freezer in the morgue. Who knows how long those had been down there? And who knows how haunted that terrifying place must be?

There are so many terrifying things about Griffith Park. There’s the abandoned zoo. Supposedly, there’s the ghost of Peg Entwistle, who jumped to her death from the Hollywood sign in 1932. But the creepiest thing in Griffith Park is a picnic table. It’s known as picnic table number 29, and in 1976, a 22-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman were crushed to death on top of it when a tree fell on them while they were having sex. Numerous park maintenance workers have reported strange occurrences near the table, and attempts to remove the tree have been sabotaged. It still lays on top of the picnic table to this day.

Legend has it that Bela Lugosi hijacked his own funeral procession to take one last drive past his favorite cigar shop. The actor, who was known for playing Dracula (and buried in one of the character’s costumes), used to drive down Hollywood Boulevard every day to pick up cigars. And that’s exactly where the hearse carrying his coffin went when the driver lost control of the vehicle and it began moving seemingly on its own. The driver regained control of the car shortly after they had cruised past the shop.

The Queen Mary is haunted by so many people. Like, literally. So many. There are ghosts of dead sailors in the engine room. Ghosts of dead children in the swimming pool. A ghost of a dude in a 1930s-style suit in one of the first-class staterooms. A ghost of a lady dressed in a white gown dancing by herself in the Queen’s Salon. The former luxury cruise ship is now docked permanently in Long Beach and is used as a floating hotel. After it was a cruise ship, and before it was a hotel, the ship was used as a troopship in World War II, ferrying soldiers across the Atlantic Ocean. With so many passengers aboard the ship over the years, it’s no surprise that it’s super haunted.

In 1928, Edward Greystone, Sr. built Greystone Mansion as a gift for his son, Ned. Four months after he and his family moved in, Ned was shot to death in one the manor’s guest bedrooms. His assistant, Hugh Plunkett, was also found dead of a gunshot wound, but the mystery of what happened to the two of them has never been solved.

Many people believe Plunkett murdered Ned and then killed himself because Plunkett was being set up as the fall guy in a nefarious business deal Ned had carried out with his father. Still others believe that Plunkett and Ned were secretly lovers and Ned’s wife, Lucy, killed them both when she found them in bed together. When police came to investigate the crime, they found the bodies had been moved, and the stories from Ned’s family seemed rehearsed. It was suspicious, but the case was quickly closed.

People have seen the ghost of a man on the front stairway and the ghost of a woman who smells like lilac perfume around the house. Is this Ned and Lucy haunting the grounds? No one can say for certain, but it remains one of Hollywood’s most infamous crimes.

You probably know Elizabeth Short by another name: the Black Dahlia. Her ghost purportedly haunts the Millenium Biltmore Hotel, the last place she was seen alive before she was murdered. Guests have seen a black, ladylike figure floating down the 10th- and 11th-floor hallways.

In 1959, George Reeves, best known for playing Superman on The Adventures of Superman, was found dead in his home. He had been shot in the head; the police ruled it a suicide, but friends of the actor believe he was murdered. Since then, tenants in his former house have reported that he haunts the bedroom. Several times, the room has been found a mess—pillows and sheets tossed around, furniture knocked over—right after the occupants had cleaned it. One couple even claimed that Reeves’ ghost appeared to them in the living room, dressed in his Superman costume.

When your hotel has inspired a theme park ride called the Tower of Terror, it’s a pretty good bet that it’s majorly haunted. The Hollywood Tower was once a luxurious apartment building that catered to the wealthy. It’s still an apartment, just less luxurious than it once was. But residents have reported many ghost sightings. Tenant April Brooks told The Hollywood Reporter, “There are many spirits here. A lot of people report the ghost of a man standing on the seventh floor, in ’30s period clothing, staring at the Hollywood Hills. Then he disappears.”

If you’re anything like me, the word “sanitarium” calls to mind images of dirty, crumbling institutions where the mentally ill were locked up and given dubious treatments. Which is why the history of Rockhaven Sanitarium is such a surprise.

In 1923, a nurse named Agnes Richards opened Rockhaven as a women’s mental health facility. She worked on building up her patients’ self-esteem and treated them with respect and dignity, something she felt was lacking at other hospitals that treated women for mental illness. Marilyn Monroe’s mother, Gladys Baker Eley, was a patient there, along with Billie Burke, who played Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, and many other famous women.

Rockhaven is no longer open, and its former buildings are abandoned. Preservationists have reported that many of the former residents’ belongings are still in there. They have experienced odd happenings in the buildings, like intense feelings of anger, and sensed otherworldly presences in some of the rooms.

The Silent Movie Theater, now known as the Cinefamily, is allegedly haunted by two ghosts: John Hampton and Larry Austin. Hampton was the original owner of the theater. He and his wife, Dorothy, opened the cinema in 1942. He died in the late ‘80s. The theater had ceased operations in 1980. Larry Austin bought the place in the early ‘90s and reopened it in 1992. Patrons reported seeing Hampton’s ghost around the building.

In 1997, Austin was killed by a man named Christian Rodriguez, who had been hired by the theater’s projectionist, James Van Sickle, to carry out the hit. Rodriguez shot Austin in the lobby while customers were watching a movie. Unsurprisingly, some say that Austin now haunts the building alongside Hampton.

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater. As soon as you read the words “marionette theater,” a bell should have gone off in your head and you should’ve thought, “Yep, that place is definitely haunted.” I shouldn’t even have to tell you that it’s located under a bridge in a less-than-populated area near downtown L.A. You should be thinking, “Of course it is.”

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater is the oldest continuously-running puppet theater in the United States. Bob Baker himself opened the theater in 1962 and operated it until his death in 2014. And who is that haunts this weird building under a bridge that was once home to more than 3,000 marionettes? Oh, you guessed it, Bob Baker himself. And a few other dead puppeteers. You ever play that game where you try to make someone cringe using as few words as possible? Pretty sure you could win with “dead puppeteer.” Actually, you could probably win with just “puppeteer.” Anyway, the ghosts of Bob and his old friends like to just hang around the building, because why let death keep you from doing what you love?

SHOW CLOSE=====

Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do! And please leave a rating and review of the show in the podcast app you listen from – doing so helps the show to get noticed! You can also email me anytime with your questions or comments through the website at WeirdDarkness.com. That’s also where you can find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks, shop the Weird Darkness store, sign up for the newsletter to win monthly prizes, find my other podcast “Church of the Undead”, and more.
All stories in this episode of Weird Darkness are purported to be true (unless stated otherwise) and were adapted from articles on Ranker.com’s “Graveyard Shift” and “Weird History”. You can find source links in the show notes.
WeirdDarkness™ – is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. Copyright, Weird Darkness.
Now that we’re coming out of the dark, I’ll leave you with a little light… “Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes.” — Luke 12:23
And a final thought… “If you don’t love yourself you’ll never feel like anyone else does either.” – Bridgett Devoue
I’m Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.