Dateline>City of Angels

One of L.A.’s favorite ghost stories is the Feliz Curse, a hex allegedly placed on Griffith Park by a young girl a century and a half ago. Each Halloween, the story inevitably pops up in some newspaper or blog.

I’ve written extensively on many aspects of the curse (for example, here and here), but a little-known chapter in the drama actually unfolded 117 years ago this week.

First, Some Background

For those who don’t know the legend as originally told by Horace Bell, the Reader’s Digest version goes like this…

Just before her death in 1861, Rancho Los Feliz owner Maria Verdugo divided her approximately 6,000-acre estate among several heirs, with the lion’s share of about 4,000 acres going to her son, Jose Antonio Feliz. A bachelor, Don Antonio remained on the family homestead with his sister Soledad and a young, beloved niece named Petranilla.

In 1863, Feliz contracted smallpox and Petranilla was sent away for safety. Meanwhile, family “friend” Antonio Coronel paid a visit to her dying uncle. An attorney, Coronel hastily drafted a will granting himself control of the ranch and coerced Feliz to sign it.

Upon Feliz’s death, Petranilla returned to find herself disinherited. Angered, she cast a vicious curse of ruin, misfortune and death on the land and all future owners. Then, for dramatic flair, she dropped dead.

A Legacy of Doom?

Of course, many historians scoff at the notion that subsequent owners were stalked either by Death or bad luck, but let’s examine the record…

• As executor, Coronel conveyed the ranch to C.V. Howard, a fellow attorney who promptly negotiated a lucrative sale of the land’s water rights. While celebrating his windfall at the town saloons, Howard got rowdy and was shot dead.

• Dairyman Leon Baldwin acquired the ranch next, but didn’t fare much better. He was murdered by banditos during a Mexican business trip.

• Next came Thomas Bell, a San Francisco financier. He held the tract briefly, then sold it to Col. Griffith J. Griffith. Bell lived to his 80s, but suffered a freak, deadly fall from his mansion’s banister. (Rumor had it his mistress gave him a push.)

And Griffith? Well, that brings us to today’s twisted tale…

When he purchased the nearly 4,000-acre heart of Rancho Los Feliz in 1882, Griffith at first planned on developing it into a suburb. As a marketing ploy, he allowed an ostrich farm to operate on the property to lure visitors from downtown L.A. When the attraction failed, he foreclosed on its owner, Frank Burkett, who swore to get even.

A 19th-Century Drive-By

Burkett’s opportunity came Oct. 28, 1891, when Griffith drove his wife Tina and her sister by carriage to Old Calvary Cemetery at what is now the site of Cathedral High School on North Broadway. While the women paid their respects to family, Griffith waited outside the graveyard walls.

Suddenly, Burkett pulled alongside in a wagon and leveled a double-barreled shotgun at Griffith’s head, letting loose the first barrel. Wounded, the colonel escaped a second volley by ducking into the cemetery.

Apparently thinking he’d bagged his quarry, Burkett then killed himself with a revolver shot to his own head.

But dumb luck had literally saved Griffith. When they investigated the incident, authorities found both buck and birdshot in Burkett’s wagon. The assailant had mistakenly loaded his shotgun with the non-lethal birdshot, which merely peppered Griffith’s face. The Colonel suffered no permanent damage, but the buckshot certainly would’ve killed him.

Oh, the Irony…

While Griffith may have survived his brush with the Grim Reaper, it appears Dona Petranilla got the last laugh. Like other owners before him, Griffith failed to maintain a profit from Rancho Los Feliz. Faced with mounting taxes, he donated the rancho to the city in 1896.

Then, in 1903, during a fit of “alcoholic insanity,” Griffith ironically shot his own wife in the face, maiming her for life. After serving two years in San Quentin for assault, he returned to L.A. a social pariah. Few mourned his passing from liver disease in 1916.

To be sure, several contemporaries of Griffith nabbed parcels of Rancho Feliz without misfortune. One example is James Lick, whose tract is now the east side of Hollywood. But Lick and his counterparts acquired the holdings of other Feliz heirs, so presumably Dona Petranilla’s malediction didn’t apply.

Oddly, with the exception of Antonio Coronel, you could argue that every owner of Jose Antonio Feliz’s tract was visited by some ill omen.

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They say you can’t take it with you.

Maybe not, but it sure can buy you one helluva sendoff.

Just ask Louise Maier, only daughter of the wealthy Joseph Maier, the Bavarian owner of L.A.’s Philadelphia Brewery in the late 1800s. When Lulu (as she was known about town) died in 1897 at the blossom age of 18, her final exit created quite a stir.

“For the first time at a funeral in this city, the corpse was not encased in a regular casket,” reported her March 28, 1897, Los Angeles Times obit. Rather, her funeral directors introduced a stylish catafalque “in the shape of a burial couch.”

Elaborate new death rituals were all the rage in Victorian Los Angeles, and Lulu’s didn’t disappoint. The Times went on to note that, after lying in state in her posh apartment “clad in a rich robe instead of the conventional shroud,” the “dead maiden” was conveyed to the cemetery “calmly sleeping” upon her comfy pink sofa, accompanied by a huge cortege of 120 carriages.

Upon reaching this family mausoleum at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery, “a funeral chant was sung, a cover was placed over the couch and it was placed in the bier and conveyed to the grave.”

Tempting as it was to peer into the tomb the day I snapped this photo, I have to admit I was too afraid to look.

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Hollywood is known for countless oddball pairings: Laurel and Hardy. Spanky and Alfalfa. Sonny and Cher.

But in my mind one of the oddest has to be Rudy Valentino and DeLongpre Park. There is no historical connection between the two. Yet here in the pocket park commemorating the famous floral artist Paul DeLongpre, you’ll find not one but two statues of the silent screen icon who died 82 years ago today.

Stranger still, the fleshly rendition of Valentino at the center of the park was originally sculpted by Roger Noble Burnham for a planned tomb for the actor. When that tomb failed to materialize, the memorial was instead placed here on Valentino’s birthday in 1930 — against protests of residents who found it a bizarre addition to a park honoring DeLongpre. (A second bust, below, was added in 1979.)

Ghost of the Town…

Not surprisingly, over the years there have been persistent rumors of paranormal activity around the graven monument, along with several mysterious incidents of vandalism. In fact, Valentino, who is buried in a borrowed crypt at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, remains one of the Southland’s most ubiquitous ghosts. Ever restless, his spirit has allegedly been sighted hundreds of times at numerous “lifetime haunts,” including:

• His former Falcon Lair mansion in Beverly Hills.
• Downtown L.A.’s Alexandria Hotel.
• Hollywood’s Musso and Frank Grill.
• The Paramount Studios wardrobe department.
• An apartment court at Hollywood’s Valentino Place.
• Mission San Fernando, where he once shot a film.
• An Oxnard beach house and an inn at Santa Maria.
• Riding an Arabian horse in Glendora and driving a roadster through Hollywood’s Whitley Heights.
• And of course, hanging about his final Hollywood Forever resting place.

As if that’s not enough, the spirit of Valentino’s faithful dog Kabar is also said to invisibly nip and lick at visitors to his L.A. pet cemetery grave.

As usual, many of these hauntings are highly suspect. For instance, historical research shows that, local legends notwithstanding, the actor had no actual link to Valentino Place.

Neither did the Latin Lover ever work on the present-day Paramount lot. He made his films at the Lasky Studios near Sunset and Vine before they relocated and became Paramount in 1926.

Still, even in death, Rudy continues to bask in the immortal limelight. To learn more about his career, legacy and supposed afterlife exploits, visit the following links/entries:

• Wikipedia on Rudolph Valentino
  
• Rudy’s IMBD Filmography
• You Tube Tributes and Film Footage
• Troy Taylor’s Haunted Hollywood

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You’d think Sasquatch investigator Tom Biscardi would’ve seen this one coming. Certainly the warning signs were all there.

First, the two men who claimed to have discovered the over-seven-foot carcass in northern Georgia this past July couldn’t stick to a coherent story as to how they bagged it in the wilds, dragged it out, and iced it down in an undisclosed freezer somewhere.

Next there was Jerry Parrino, owner of a large Halloween store in Port Washington, NY, who warned that the beast in the photos closely resembled a costume his company sells (pictured left).

Finally there was that matter of the “finders fee” (rumored to be in the neighborhood of $50,000), which the pair negotiated for turning their frozen friend over for examination.

But noooo… Biscardi went ahead, paid the gents, and scheduled a Palo Alto press conference last week to announce to the world that the creature’s unveiling was imminent.

Of course, with the money in their hot little hands, the guys who “found” the corpse beat tracks faster than the elusive beast ever could, leaving behind a slowly thawing hoax that left Biscardi and an associate good and frosted.

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Believe it or not, right now, the “hottest” spot in Southern California is someplace outside Fillmore in Ventura County, but unless you’re a thermogeologist, it’s probably no place you’d want to visit.

Experts are reportedly still baffled over the “thermal anomaly” that caused ground temperatures on a small patch of terrain to soar to more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit, sparking a three-acre brush fire. Even now, several weeks after the incident, temperatures remain high enough to melt the rubber off the sneakers of anyone who tries to get too close.

Whatever the cause, it seems we can rule out space aliens, the CIA, Bigfoot, global warming and all the other usual suspects behind weird natural phenomena. The leading theory is that some type of hydrocarbon caught fire deep below the surface and is seeping up through fissures in the earth.

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