PASSING THROUGH - AFTER HOURS - Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016)

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016)

II

AFTER HOURS

CHAPTER EIGHT

PASSING THROUGH

Los Angeles, CA

Why does Elizabeth Short—the Black Dahlia—haunt the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles? True, it was the last place she was seen alive, but why doesn’t she haunt the sad stretch of sidewalk in South Los Angeles where her body was found? Why doesn’t she haunt wherever she was actually murdered?

The Biltmore is old Hollywood, classic Hollywood. Opened in 1923, at the time the largest hotel west of Chicago, it displaced the nearby, equally opulent Alexandria as the epicenter of LA glamour. It was here, in the grand Crystal Ballroom, that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded, in 1927, and where eight early Academy Awards ceremonies were held, in the hotel’s underground banquet room, the Biltmore Bowl.

I understand why people feel the Biltmore is haunted. I’ve stayed there, heard the heating pipes creak and tick in unpleasant, unfamiliar ways, as though the whole building were alive, breathing. I’ve stared down the desolate hallways, half assuming that some vague butchery was taking place behind one of those doors, something to be hushed up and forgotten, something whose trace would come to inhabit the walls like a stain—even as its grand ballrooms still speak to the glory and allure of Hollywood. In October of 2010 a woman named Laura Finley fell six flights down the stairwell to her death; a few hours after her half-naked body was found, her husband auditioned in the lobby in front of Piers Morgan, Sharon Osbourne, and Howie Mandel for the next season of America’s Got Talent.

As though these things happen all the time. One former employee later claimed, “There are many stories about ghostly presence on the 10th and 11th floor. I know when I used to work there lots of employees, even security, didn’t like working the graveyard shift there due to a lot of ghostly presence. My sister used to work the 10th floor VIP lounge … , and there have been ghosts touching and moving stuff around there. People might say ghosts don’t exist. Try staying there. I know—I have experienced it myself.”

Los Angeles has its haunted houses, its haunted bars and haunted restaurants, but its best-known ghost stories involve hotels. Not just the Biltmore: nearby, the Alexandria Hotel, now apartments, supposedly hosts Rudolph Valentino, still dancing under its oval skylight. Valentino also haunts the retirement home that was once the Hotel Knickerbocker, along with the ghosts of Elvis Presley (haunting the perennially cold Room 1016) and William Frawley (who played Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy and dropped dead in the Knickerbocker’s foyer). Frances Farmer was dragged from the Knickerbocker to be institutionalized against her will, and the Hollywood costume designer Irene Lentz jumped from its roof in 1962, distraught over the death of Gary Cooper. Marilyn Monroe, too, haunts the Knickerbocker, but she also haunts cabana room 246 of the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, where she shares duties with the malicious spirit of Montgomery Clift, who plays his trombone all hours of the night. Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, and Harry Lee all have been seen at the Roosevelt. The Culver Hotel hosts the ghostly traces of the dwarf actors who played the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, filmed across the street at Sony Studios; none of them died here, but it’s their voices you hear conspiratorially whisper as you move through its halls. And finally there’s the Hollywood Tower, a hotel so famous for its ghosts that Disney built a ride (the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror) based on its haunting.

But, then, all hotels are haunted. You’re kidding yourself if you don’t see this, if you don’t recognize that you sleep with ghosts. Every hotel staff has its stories; any cleaning person or bellhop knows the score. In Wilkie Collins’s 1878 gothic novel The Haunted Hotel, an Italian villa is converted to a hotel shortly after hosting an unexplained, horrific tragedy. On opening night a guest (“not a superstitious man”) takes Suite 14 and leaves hurriedly the following morning. The next night a couple takes the suite; throughout the night the woman has horrifying dreams; awake, “afraid to trust herself again in bed,” she, too, makes excuses and leaves.

Assume, then, that every nightmare you’ve ever had in a hotel was a cry for help, some violence from the past reaching out to you.

You can go searching for Marilyn and Valentino, but, truth be told, these are among the least interesting ghost stories that Hollywood has to offer. The postmortem celebrity sightings have their tragic elements, to be sure, but after a while they feel banal. You can’t hope to understand Hollywood, its glory and debauchery, if all you care about is the marquee names. You have to seek out the forgotten stories.

How many times do you need to hear what’s-his-name playing the trombone in the Roosevelt Hotel?” Lisa Strouss asked me. It was August 2012, and we were sitting at an outdoor café in the Hollywood Hills, talking about ghosts. “Why are ghosts only famous people? It’s so stupid.”

Strouss is a co-founder of the Ghost Hunters of Urban Los Angeles (GHOULA for short), which she and Richard Carradine started in the summer of 2008. She has believed in the paranormal in one form or another since she was a teenager. Carradine, on the other hand, is a skeptic, though by his own account he’s had multiple experiences with full manifestations (when a ghost appears not just as an orb or a voice but as a visible, full-bodied translucent specter)—the gold standard of paranormal sightings. For several years GHOULA has been holding monthly meet-ups, called “Spirits with Spirits,” each at a different haunted location in Southern California, always on the thirteenth of the month.

“There are people who came to GHOULA in the early days,” Strouss told me, “who I had known for years, never heard a peep from them about ghost stories, and then they come to a meeting and just barf up this story. It’s always preempted by ‘I totally don’t believe in ghosts, I’m totally logical, I’m a scientist, whatever … but there was this one time.’ That’s always the kicker.” From there, a story spills forth, one that’s been bottled up for who knows how long. “They almost get weepy,” Strouss said, and then as soon as it’s over, they go back to their shell of logic. “But they feel relieved to get it out there. It gives them reassurance somehow, hope,” she added, looking away. “It’s a comfort to hear this story, even if it scares you.”

It was at a GHOULA meeting in 2009, at the Eden Bar and Grill in Pasadena (a building that had formerly operated as a morgue), that Craig Owens met Bobby Garcia. Owens was working as a still photographer in the film industry when he started carrying around ghost-hunting equipment. He’d been spooked once while working at the Warner Bros. lot, and what started out as a side hobby has gradually taken up more and more of his life. Garcia had been seriously exploring the paranormal for about five years; he’d started out on Yahoo! chat groups, trying to find people in the San Gabriel Valley who might be interested in going on investigations with him. The two hit it off, making for an almost perfectly paired odd couple. Garcia is a large guy, soft-spoken, a stark contrast to Owens’s wiry frame and loquaciousness. “We’re two different people,” Garcia told me, “but our fascination with history and LA history is what we talk about a lot… . My connection with Owens is that we both love the history of LA and read into it.”

Unlike Owens, Garcia sees the paranormal in terms of science. “It has a lot to do with physics,” he explained, “and natural phenomena—as natural as lightning. They have guys that feel that it could be a wormhole, and you have an opening, and it just shuts, and during that moment you have voices or something coming through. And the wormholes open and close all during the day, like right now, they could be doing it right now. It could be something related to the geomagnetic magnetism coming out of our earth or something, I don’t know. But it seems like it’s more of a science thing than an actual religious or an actual mystical thing.”

After that first GHOULA meeting, the two decided to team up, seeking out places in Los Angeles where they could hunt for ghosts. Among the places Garcia suggested as possible venues was the Aztec Hotel.

Far from downtown Los Angeles, in the tiny hamlet of Monrovia, stands the Aztec Hotel. A Mayan revival designed in the 1920s by Frank Lloyd Wright’s contemporary Robert Stacy-Judd, the hotel was one of the many roadside attractions that made Route 66 famous. But with the rise of the interstate freeway system, Route 66 became a footnote to history, along with the Aztec. Forgotten in suburban Monrovia, the hotel struggled financially for much of its history, going through a succession of owners.

Owens earned the trust and friendship of the then owner, Kathie Reece McNeil, who allowed him and Garcia to hunt for ghosts in the hotel after hours. “Craig was the one who pretty much set up everything,” Garcia recalled. “He talked to the lady and he was able to get it, which a lot of people couldn’t, so I give him credit for that… . The management didn’t seem too friendly with people walking around there, and when you’re asking questions, they didn’t seem too forthcoming.” (Said Owens: “She took a shine to me.”)

They’d spend all night in the basement and unoccupied rooms, sometimes three or four nights a week, sometimes with others, sometimes not. Garcia and Owens found the most psychic activity in the basement. Garcia repeatedly heard the same woman’s voice, barely a whisper, and later was able to hear it more audibly on his recorder. Another time, just as he was packing up to go, without any recorder, he heard her say his name, loudly, as if to say, “Where are you going?” “I think she became familiar with me,” he said. Owens heard a voice on one of his EVP recordings stating, “My name’s Quiggle”—a reference to James Quiggle, Monrovia’s chief constable, who used to participate in the raids on the basement when it was a speakeasy. “My guess,” Owens told me, “is that some really bad, dark stuff happened in that hotel and he’s somehow associated with that… . I think he’s a corrupt cop.” Eventually Quiggle was replaced by a guy named Frank Scott, and one night Owens got the other investigators he was with to ask for Scott—only he screwed up the name and told them to ask for “Frank Little” instead. “When I listened to the audio,” he told me, “I get this weird voice going, ‘Frank Scott’ … so it’s like we were corrected. The mistake actually makes the evidence more compelling.”

But it’s not the basement that the Aztec is most known for; it’s Room 120—haunted, most agree, by a ghost named Razzle Dazzle, a name divined by psychics who’ve visited the room over the years. According to one version of her story, Razzle Dazzle was a prostitute murdered in Room 120 by her john. Another version casts her as an aspiring actress, newly married, who fell on her wedding night, hit her head on the heater, and died instantly.

Her story, told and retold in so many conflicting versions, is never about celebrity; it’s about a no one, such a nobody that no one even knows her actual name. Herein lies the darker side to classic Hollywood: its promise lured so many starlets and other hopefuls to LA throughout the past century, but some instead found fame only in death. Virginia Rappe, dead in 1921 from a ruptured bladder after a wild party involving Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, or perhaps dead from a violent rape, or perhaps from complications of a botched abortion. Peg Entwhistle, a failed star whose 1932 leap from the “H” of the HOLLYWOODLAND (later, HOLLYWOOD) sign began a vogue of thematic suicides. Lou Tellegen, stabbing himself repeatedly in the chest with sewing scissors, his former glory as a matinee idol long faded. One could spend all day listing these tragedies, as Kenneth Anger did with savage detachment in Hollywood Babylon, pillorying those who wagered and lost as so much used-up trash.

Strouss spoke of Los Angeles’s turbulence, its reputation as “a violent, exploitive place… . LA is really effed up, so we technically should have more ghosts.” The world Hollywood manufactures is uncanny; it’s a world of strange similarities, repeated without end. Freud describes one aspect of the uncanny as involving unusual repetition, or “involuntary repetition”; a random number may not be particularly striking or noteworthy on its own, but if you see it over and over again in a single day, “or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number—addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains—invariably has the same one,” then it does start to feel uncanny. Add to this aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, brutally dismembered and left as a grotesque calling card, famous now not because of what she accomplished in life but because of the barbarity of her unsolved murder. The haunted hotel manages to record both sides of the great narrative of classic Hollywood, its light side and its dark, kept close within tattered walls in buildings that seem to live on beyond death.

Stare down a long hotel corridor and you’ll feel something like this: there’s something uncanny about the very nature of a hotel, its endless, involuntary repetition of home-seeming spaces, rooms that could almost be home but are always somehow slightly off. Cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum writes, “The uncanny is home defamiliarized—its rule book torn at the seam. The hotel mutates the unhomelike into industry and canned hospitality.” And behind each one of those uncanny doors, perhaps, another uncanny aspiring star, each like the next and yet somehow slightly different.

A short walk from the Biltmore is the Cecil Hotel. Built in 1924 and originally advertised for traveling businessmen, the Cecil fell on hard times immediately. Already by 1935 Raymond Chandler could refer to it as “an old hotel that had once been exclusive and was now steering a shaky course between a receivership and a bad name at Headquarters. It had too much oily dark wood paneling, too many chipped gilt mirrors. Too much smoke hung below its low beamed lobby ceiling and too many grifters bummed around in its worn leather rockers.” It’s been recently refurbished and renamed Stay on Main, as though a name change might help it escape its past, though its original name is still painted in stories-high letters on the building’s side.

After World War II the core of Los Angeles emptied out as people fled to the suburbs that sprawled endlessly in every direction, leaving downtown an increasingly empty space. Smaller hotels were torn down, but the larger hulks, too big to be torn down but not too big to fail, were left behind. The Cecil, with its seven hundred rooms, became a transient hotel, edged against Skid Row. Its reputation took a further nosedive as a result of two particularly notorious guests. Richard Ramirez, a serial killer known as the Night Stalker, lived at the Cecil, as did Jack Unterweger, an Austrian serial killer. Unterweger had been convicted of murdering a prostitute in 1974 and served fifteen years in prison, during which time he established himself as a successful writer. Upon his release in 1990, he came to Los Angeles on a writing assignment, stayed at the Cecil, and killed at least three more prostitutes. While neither man, so far as has been established, committed any murders within the walls of the Cecil, Ramirez and Unterweger nonetheless remain inextricably linked to the hotel as its most famous residents.

Until, that is, the strange death of Elisa Lam captivated the Internet in 2013. A Canadian student vacationing in Los Angeles, Lam had been staying in the Cecil when she disappeared. Her body was found almost three weeks later in the hotel’s rooftop water tank, after residents complained about the smell and color of the water coming out of the tap. An elevator security video showed her shortly before her death. She enters the elevator and presses a button, but nothing happens; after a few seconds she goes back into the hall and appears to be engaged in a heated conversation with someone who can’t be seen. She returns to the elevator, pressing her body against the wall as if hiding from someone. Even though nothing is obstructing the door, and Lam herself is not pressing any button that could be holding the elevator, the doors never close, not during the entire three-minute video, until the moment she leaves the elevator.

Amateur sleuths became obsessed with the video and Lam’s story, convinced that the unknown figure she was talking to was her murderer or that the elevator’s odd malfunction was evidence of a malevolent spirit in the hotel. Police later determined that Lam had most likely been experiencing a psychotic episode and at some point had climbed onto the roof and either deliberately or accidentally ended up in the water tank, where she drowned.

What should have been a private tragedy for a family who’d lost their daughter became a circus: an Internet spook story, an urban legend, and the inspiration for the fifth season of the TV series American Horror Story. Elisa Lam’s story proved irresistible in the modern age: the surveillance video, the inexplicable malfunction of the elevator, her bizarre actions, the hotel’s history—it was all too much. This is how ghost stories are born, after all: not from a complete story so much as from bits and pieces that don’t quite add up, a kaleidoscope of menace and unease that coalesce in unpredictable ways. And what better breeding ground for such stories than a place like the Cecil?

The Cecil Hotel (or, if you must, Stay on Main) leaves one feeling trapped between spaces, neither here nor there. For years it has operated as an uneasy mix of a residence hotel and a backpacker hostel, and despite being a permanent fixture downtown, it seemed perpetually out of time and out of place.

Almost three years after Lam’s death, I spent two nights at the Cecil. Its lobby has rentable computer terminals and pumps techno music at all hours, and every morning the staff rolls out one of the dreariest complimentary hotel breakfasts I’ve ever had. The furnishings in the room are IKEA pieces installed on top of a hotel over ninety years old. There’s been no visible attempt to scour the rooms of the decades of slow accumulation of grime—though, in full disclosure, it was by no means the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed at.

But this is what it feels like being in a hotel: attuned to a past that you can’t understand and yet can’t ignore. Hollywood doesn’t do messy, it doesn’t do unresolved, and it doesn’t do ambiguous. Ghost stories are unresolved, ambiguous. There’s a vision, a noise, maybe a voice that speaks a name, offering the tiniest bit of a story. Usually not much else. You have to go digging through the archives; unearth a story of a long-forgotten murder, a jilted lover whose name has been lost to history, local lore that no one bothers with anymore. Even then it’s hardly a guarantee you’ll be able to put the pieces together.

Many times a ghost story is simply an attempt to account for some scattered tidbits, some disconnected facts, that don’t add up. We tell spooky tales and scary stories because the alternative—the open-ended chaos of the unknown—is even more terrifying. That’s why ghosts cling to Hollywood, why they whisper underfoot.

It’s not the mansion of Norma Desmond from Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard that best exemplifies old Hollywood’s history. It’s the Hotel Earle from Joel and Ethan Coen’s Barton Fink, a building that the directors described as a “ghost ship floating adrift, where you notice signs of the presence of other passengers, without ever laying eyes on any.”

One of the strange beauties of Barton Fink is how the film eschews standard cinematic practice and avoids establishing shots: we’re brought immediately into interior scenes without a sense of what the buildings look like. And so we see the Hotel Earle’s lobby, its elevator, its corridors, and its rooms, but never its exterior. We have no sense of its size, its layout, how it appears to the unsuspecting passing by. It could go on forever. If not for the diffused light coming through the windows, the hotel could be miles underground.

When Barton Fink checks in at the Earle, the desk clerk asks him, “Are you a trans or a res?” meaning transient or resident. Fink doesn’t get it, he’s confused, as though he’s not yet ready to commit to the implications of the question. He stammers out a vague response: “I, uh, I don’t know. I mean, I’ll be here indefinitely.” The clerk finally answers for him.

By the time I started attending GHOULA meetings, they had already exhausted the usual suspects: the Biltmore, the Roosevelt, the Culver, and, of course, the Aztec. Because they try not to repeat a location, after the first few years the meeting spots became more and more unexpected, including Burbank’s Pickwick Bowl, the haunted bowling alley, and the haunted Queen Mary in Long Beach. Which is how I ended up at a seemingly unlikely candidate for a haunted hotel: the top-floor revolving restaurant at the futuristic Westin Bonaventure in downtown LA.

Designed by architect John Portman in 1976, and still standing as the largest hotel in the city, the Bonaventure’s easily recognizable shape of five clustered glass cylinders has made it a landmark of Los Angeles. Inside, a massive atrium dominated by a central concrete pillar is populated with floating plazas, rings, and balconies. A lobby bar circles the central pillar, which in turn is bordered by a gentle moat and escalators and circular staircases lead off in all directions. It has no exterior windows, so you can quickly lose track of what time of day it is. Iconic enough that it’s been featured in dozens of films and is visible from two major freeways, it stands out easily against the tepid skyscrapers surrounding it, even those that tower over it.

By the time the Bonaventure was built, much of downtown was a dead zone. Unlike many downtowns, Los Angeles’s has had, for much of its history, a curious excess of space. Boosters who tried to sell the city as a tourist destination in the 1920s and ’30s built up a massive downtown filled with monstrous hotels like the Biltmore and the Cecil, and much of that real estate was gradually vacated after the war. Unlike in San Francisco or Manhattan, here few geographical barriers stood in the way of suburban sprawl. Many of the old buildings were too big to demolish, so for decades they stood emptied out in an emptied-out city. With little commercial interest to dictate how one experienced the city, downtown Los Angeles became, in its own way, a dream space—free to be colonized by alcoholics and junkies, of course, but also by artists and writers who found cheap living space and no one looking over their shoulders.

The Bonaventure, whose street-level façade is grim and bunkerlike, seemed to want to insulate itself from the dream world around it. Despite (or perhaps because of) its status, the hotel has over the years become almost universally reviled. It was most famously excoriated by literary theorist Frederic Jameson in 1991: “It does not wish to be a part of the city,” he wrote, “but rather its equivalent and replacement or substitute.” Jameson singled out not just the façade but also the glass cylinders, which achieve “a peculiar and placeless dissociation of the Bonaventure from its neighborhood: it is not even an exterior, inasmuch as when you seek to look at the hotel’s outer walls you cannot see the hotel itself but only the distorted images of everything that surrounds it.”

Without a doubt, it is a disorienting space. Though it seems symmetrical, not every elevator bank goes to the top floor, and not every stairwell in the atrium leads to every other floor. Though it’s wide and airy, sightlines are oddly obscured by the concrete pylons, so it’s difficult to see sometimes which stairway will take you to the floor you need to get to. Describing the central core as a “bagel,” architect-critic Charles Willard Moore commented, “You are likely to move around and around that bagel with increasing frenzy, since you can’t help feeling that you’re lost. The place is as frustrating as a Piranesi prison drawing.” As open as the atrium is, it feels perpetually claustrophobic.

The Bonaventure’s tendency to disorient its visitors, to confound space, and, yes, to turn the simple into the uncanny has no doubt helped attract its fair share of ghosts. There are those of Eli and Esther Ruven, murdered in the Bonaventure in 1979 during a drug deal gone south, their bodies dismembered and carried out in trash bags. In the basement lives another ghost, a young red-haired girl who wanders the tunnels beneath the hotel’s parking garage. Those tunnels were once part of LA’s original trolley line, the Red Car, already in disuse when they were caved in to form the foundation of the Bonaventure. Even as the hotel looks toward a Blade Runner-esque future, in the decades since it first opened, the space has become as haunted as every other hotel in Los Angeles.

Which is to say, even in a place as sprawling as Los Angeles, whose buildings aren’t nearly as old as New England’s, you can’t build anywhere without building on top of some other ruin, on top of some old ghosts. Hawthorne’s character Holgrave might be happier here than in Salem, since Southern California has less compunction about demolishing the old to make way for the new, but even here the ghosts remain. The problem with ghosts is that they can never figure out if they’re transients or residents—they don’t quite stick around, and yet they never really leave.

In Los Angeles, a city of endless dreams and endless dreamers, the old, glamorous buildings—historic yet faded, baroque yet underused—are vulnerable to a different kind of infestation: not ghosts but ghost hunters. At some point a shift happened in the paranormal community in which money and fame began to eclipse earnest, solitary searchers. Around the time GHOULA formed in 2008, more and more shows started appearing on basic cable, shows called My Ghost Story, Fear, Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters International, Ghost Hunters Academy, Most Haunted USA, A Haunting, Paranormal State, The Othersiders, Celebrity Paranormal Project, and on and on and on. Nearly all these shows follow a basic routine: a “crew,” usually in matching T-shirts and usually consisting of three or four guys and one woman, in a default pose of a tough, crossed-arms stance staring straight at the camera, investigating a reputedly haunted locale. They bring with them a variety of devices for locating ghosts: infrared cameras, audio recorders for EVP sessions, thermometers for locating “cold spots,” and the ever-popular KII meter, a handheld device for measuring electromagnetic fields of electrical devices.

Los Angeles’s status as the mecca of movies and television has guaranteed an explosion of near-identical outfits imitating the crews on TV: LA Ghost Patrol, LA Paranormal Association, Ghost Interactive Investigations, Paranormal EXP, Darklands Paranormal, California Society for Paranormal Research and Assistance, and so forth. These groups range from the serious to the absurd—at the more absurd end of the spectrum is perhaps the Paranormal Hot Squad, an all-female group of several models and exotic dancers whose motto is “We’ll scare you stiff.”

All these ghost-hunting groups sell T-shirts and other merchandise on their Web sites, and each of them, more or less explicitly, is gunning for its own show, trying to build up enough street cred and cult following for producers to notice them. People come to LA to get famous for all sorts of reasons; the ghost hunters are only the latest round of starlets who want to make their names in show business.

“I come from the old school,” Craig Owens clarified, “where you don’t try to capitalize on this… . That used to be completely unethical ten, fifteen years ago… . I associate hauntings with pain and suffering of somebody; why capitalize on that to make a buck? Something horrible might have happened.”

For GHOULA it was never about getting famous. “They want to capture the ghost,” Strouss told me. “We want to capture the ghost story.” And yet, she admits, GHOULA, with its clever acronym and its ability to bring together so many lone investigators, might have inadvertently birthed many of these groups. “We triggered that,” she said after a pause.

This may seem harmless, but the proliferation of guys in T-shirts and event planners hoping to make a buck off of LA’s haunted past has had unforeseen effects on the city’s fragile historical buildings, and it was the pursuit of the dual succubi, money and fame, that contributed to the downfall of the Aztec. “Some paranormal groups want to hijack a location,” Owens scoffed. “They want to be the house band, and charge money, and commercialize it.” The Queen Mary is one such location. The Aztec was another: groups began charging money for fans to essentially hang out in the bar, and without giving a cut to the hotel, they quickly alienated the owner, who turned to Craig Owens. “She just appointed me to weed through people to see who was legitimate and who was not,” he said, still sounding bitter about the whole affair. “Well, I wasn’t getting paid, I wasn’t earning a dime.” He all but gave up, as did the Aztec, which called off all investigations, and what meager income these groups were contributing to the failing hotel dried up.

As Garcia put it, you try to be respectful, do your research, but most of all you try to distinguish yourself from these types of people. “We were on the Queen Mary,” he recalled. “We were in one of the ballrooms, and it’s quiet, and then all of a sudden you see this group of people running through, and then you see security chasing them.” Wanting to be entertained is one thing; the larger problem is guilt by association. “It’s the people who’re wanting to be scared, waiting for Halloween to come—that’s the ones who’re kinda ruining it. They’re looked at as your peers, and when they’re there, they’re seen as the same as you.”

One of the last GHOULA meetings I attended was in the summer of 2012, in downtown Venice, at the Townhouse Bar, which has been around since 1915 and that operated a speakeasy in its basement during Prohibition. According to stories, the former owner still occupies his booth downstairs in the former speakeasy, a basement that currently features local bands on weekends. We were there on a weeknight, so the basement wasn’t open, but one of the bartenders told us she was going off shift soon and if we waited, she’d take us down there for a few minutes. So those of us assembled milled around, waiting for something to happen.

Overall, the evening was, as I had been prepped to expect, mostly devoid of the magic that Strouss and Owens described of the early days. Neither of them was at the Venice meet-up, and while Garcia showed up late, he didn’t say much. The paranormal groups, however, were there, and while they weren’t wearing T-shirts, for most of the night, people stayed in their little cliques without interacting. I spoke to one ghost-hunting crew, whose name I’ve forgotten now: it could have been the LA Paranormal Association or the LA Ghost Hunters, the Ghost Busters of LA—they become a bit interchangeable after a while. The leader could’ve been any generic guy just out of USC or UCLA: short but muscular, close-cropped hair, answering my questions in as few words as possible. The obligatory girl—his girlfriend, naturally—was the bubbly, outgoing member of the group; the third guy didn’t say anything at all.

It will be a shame if groups like this become the face of LA’s paranormal community. Asked during a local TV affiliate’s Halloween coverage one year why they do what they do, the lead investigator of the LA Ghost Patrol said, “We want proof. We want to be the team that proves that this stuff is real. We want to be the ones that capture it and prove to the world that this stuff does exist.” It’s the kind of fairly pat, unexamined answer that one finds again and again; it’s one of the many reasons why the whole enterprise threatens to teeter into nonsense. Contrast that with the work of someone like Craig Owens, obsessed as he is with the history of a place and how that history may imprint itself on one’s psyche. Not just the recorded history but also a forgotten history, and a history that will never, ever be known.

Take, for example, the mystery of Room 120 in the Aztec, the supposed home of Razzle Dazzle. Searching the Monrovia city archives, Owens found no mention of any prostitute or actress killed at the Aztec. “The room does appear to be haunted, but her name was never Razzle Dazzle, if in fact someone died there.”

He did find something else, though. When the hotel opened, the local Elks Lodge operated a monthly gambling and drinking night in the basement, something unsanctioned by the cops during Prohibition, except perhaps by the few, like James Quiggle and Frank Scott, who might have been bribed or might have taken a cut of the action. Owens believes that some dark aspects of Monrovia’s history might have surfaced in that basement, perhaps a murder or a violent incident during one of those parties that had to be hushed up.

Those monthly parties, Owens learned, had an informal name. They called them Razzle Dazzle Nights.

“No one would know that,” he told me, “unless they went through those darn Monrovia papers.”

This is perhaps as close to proof as one could possibly hope for: a random name that some psychic had pulled out of thin air during some séance turned out to have a very specific connection to the hotel’s history. Maybe this does tell us something about the Aztec, but what? It will never lead to a clear, complete narrative of events, as anyone who might have been able to tell us about what happened during those Razzle Dazzle nights is dead now.

Ghost stories like this will never have a perfect Hollywood resolution. Another LA ghost hunter, Michele Yu, once referred to this as “paranormal archaeology,” which is as good an analogy as any: you get fragments that suggest histories, that hint at a purpose, but have nothing definitive to offer, which ultimately stare dumbly back at you.

Unlike those in search of some holy grail of definitive, objective evidence of supernatural life, Lisa Strouss seems interested in the paranormal more as a means of self-reflection. Though an avid believer, she told me that she herself had never seen a ghost. “I would like to have my own ghost story,” she said, almost mournfully. “I really want to believe, but I keep discrediting my own stories. I’m my own worst skeptic.” Besides, as she’ll tell you, even if you have proof, what—really—does that get you? It’s not just a question of finding proof of the paranormal, because “even when you get the evidence,” she offered, “you’re still at the same place you were before the evidence. You can prove all you want. It’s like the god question: you come back to the same point.”

This existential problem of proof is the thing that all ghost hunters have to wrestle with, something each person seems to face in a different way. “Say we take [proof] to a scientific board,” Garcia surmised, “which is really what it’s going to come down to. They’re not going to say, ‘Yeah, that’s a voice from the dead.’” He’s given this enough thought to know it’ll never come down to a single sighting, a single EVP, a single video. “You gotta have so much, an overabundance of each event, and then you have a whole bunch of those events, and then you might have something.” He stops for a second, perhaps taking in the quixotic nature of the quest he’s set before himself, the enormity and the impossibility of a quest that’s taken up the last seven years of his life, most of it in solitary pursuit. “It’s going to take a lot more than what we’re doing now, and a collective thought of everyone on the same page … and that’s not going to happen.”

If there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, there are as many ways of looking at a ghost. For Bobby Garcia, it’s a means of understanding science. For people like Richard Carradine and Craig Owens, ghost hunting is a way of unearthing history, of figuring out the past. For Lisa Strouss, who’s left the LA ghost-hunting community, it’s a means of understanding something about herself. But none of these kinds of discussions took place the night of the GHOULA event in Venice, and I couldn’t help but feel that I was years late to a party long over—like showing up at Haight Ashbury after the ’60s or CBGB’s after the ’70s. There was a brief moment in time, it seems, when a remarkable—remarkably weird and remarkably thoughtful—collection of passionate oddballs came together and found one another. Almost as soon as it had begun, the scene was co-opted, standardized, and commodified, and the thoughtful ones all scattered to the winds.

I was about to leave the Townhouse when, as promised, the bartender got off shift and offered to take us downstairs to the former speakeasy. We all trudged down to the event space, which, unsurprisingly, looked like an LA venue on an off night: stage at one end, bar along one wall, a smattering of velvet curtains and leather booths—including the one supposedly still inhabited by the former owner. As I watched these milquetoast ghost hunters mill about the room, furtively taking EVP recordings on their phones, asking one another if they saw anything, felt anything, I could’ve been in any bar in Los Angeles—heck, it was any bar in Los Angeles.

And then an old man rose up out of the crowd—a guy in his eighties at least, shock of white hair, baggy in his skin, someone who wasn’t a ghost hunter but who’d heard about the GHOULA event, heard about Richard Carradine’s fascination with LA history, and had come out for a drink, some son of a former mayor or councilman from decades ago, from some other time. He stood on the lowest step of the basement stairs, floating just above the rest of us, and he started to speak about old Venice, about the trolley line that used to run from Venice to Santa Monica, about the time when Orson Welles filmed Touch of Evil across the street, strange memories and stories of local corruption and gossip. He didn’t really have any point, and he meandered, getting confused, trailing off, repeating himself, but none of this mattered. There—among the ghost hunters scurrying around, amid enthusiasm both naïve and cynical—there, for the briefest of moments, this ghost-made-flesh appeared above us, speaking of the forgotten and the fragmentary stories that make up a city, stories told barely above a whisper in basements such as this.