Ep. 9 - Los Feliz, a Rich Place to Die

Los Feliz is a hybrid of nature and urban sprawl with a long history of Native American habitation, ranching, high-end living, curses, suicide, murder and hauntings. The enclave really has it all with Los Feliz Village offering boutiques and fine dining, Griffith Park featuring great hikes and views and the neighborhood hosting homes with architectural distinction, including the Sowden House, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr. Los Feliz is a charming neighborhood, but it is also a rich place to die!

For thousands of years, the Chumash and Tongva Native American tribes lived in the area that would eventually become Rancho Los Feliz. The Santa Monica Mountains parallel the Pacific Ocean along the coast of southern California. The mountain range stretches from Point Mugu in Ventura County to the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles. Spanish settlers arrived later and set themselves up near the banks of the Los Angeles River. One of the first land grants in California went to Corporal José Vicente Feliz in 1795 for his service in the Spanish military. The plot measured 6,647-acres. The property stayed in the hands of the family for who it was named for nearly 80 years. 

Domingo Feliz was part-owner of the Rancho and he was married to Maria del Rosario Villa. Maria began a torrid affair with a vaquero who was a criminal named Gervacio Alispaz. She eventually left the Rancho with Alispaz. Some time later, Domingo ran into his estranged wife and her lover at the Mission San Gabriel. Domingo had Maria arrested for infidelity and brought her back to Rancho Los Feliz. Maria ran away a short time later and pleaded with the mayor of Los Angeles to let her leave her husband. The mayor told her to go back home and be a good wife and she seemed to agree to do that, but she actually had a plan. Domingo came to get her and the two of them were riding home on his horse when Gervacio jumped out from a hiding place and attacked Domingo. Maria told her lover to stab her husband and he did it, then the two of them pushed Domingo's body into a ravine and covered him with leaves. Domingo’s body was found two days later, and Maria and Gervacio were arrested. The murder caused an uproar in the small pueblo of Los Angeles. A Junta Defensora was called and they petitioned city officials writing, "We demand of you that you execute or deliver to us for immediate execution the assassin Gervacio Alispaz, and the unfaithful Maria del Rosario Villa, his accomplice … nature trembles at the sight of these venomous reptiles and the soil turns barren in its refusal to support their detestable existence. Let the infernal pair perish! It is the will of the people. We will not lay down our arms until our petition is granted and the murderers are executed." The Junta Defensora took matters into their hands and killed the lovers by firing squad.

Don Antonio Feliz would be the final Feliz to own the property. He had inherited the property from his mother Maria Verdugo de Feliz. He shared the ranch with his sister Soledad and his niece Dona Petronilla (don-ya pe-tro-ni-ya) who was blind according to some accounts. Petronilla had been orphaned by Feliz's brother, so Feliz raised her as his own. In 1863, small pox swept through and Don Antonio Feliz came down with the dreaded disease. Petronilla was sent to the pueblo to prevent her from becoming sick. While on his deathbed, Feliz was visited by a friend named Don Antonio Coronel. This so called friend coveted the ranch and he coerced Feliz into signing a will that left his extensive land holdings to Coronel and a few modest jewelry pieces to his sister Soledad. Feliz died and his niece returned to find Coronel in charge of the property. She had been left nothing. 

There are legends that surround what happened next. History reveals that Petronilla eventually married and had a son and died peacefully at the ripe old age of 92. But a story claims that Senorita Petronilla was enraged and she cursed the land so that great misfortune would befall anyone who owned the land of Rancho Los Feliz, specifically Don Antonio Coronel. She said, "Your falsity shall be your ruin! The substance of the Feliz family shall be your curse! The lawyer that assisted you in your infamy, and the judge, shall fall beneath the same curse! The one shall die an untimely death, the other in blood and violence! You, senor, shall know misery in your age and although you die rich, your substance shall go to vile persons! A blight shall fall upon the face of this terrestial paradise, the cattle shall no longer fatten but sicken on its pastures, the fields shall not longer respond to the toil of the tiller, the grand oaks shall wither and die! The wrath of heaven and the vengence of hell shall fall upon this place." Then the story claims she dropped dead. Obviously, that part isn't true, but how about that curse? Was it just a bunch of baloney?

Don Coronel didn't actually coerce the property away from Don Feliz. He paid $1 an acre. But what lends credence to there being a curse is that Coronel's family members started dropped like flies in violent ways. Coronel became a believer and he sold the land before he himself was caught up in any more misfortune. The next owner had cattle and a dairy farm. The cattle sickened and the property flooded and the owner was heavily in debt. Fire swept through the timberline as well. This owner decided to sell what did seem to be cursed property. The property was then purchased by Colonel Griffith J. Griffith in 1882. The Colonel made his money in coal mining and started an ostrich ranch on the property.  Though ostrich feathers were popular in fashions at the time, Griffith's primary interest in the farm was to draw people to his nearby property holdings. He was a notorious land baron and hoped to lay out the land in suburban tracts. Then in a sudden turn of events, Griffith donated the land to create a park named for himself in 1896. People wondered what would make a man poised to make a lot of money in development to all of a sudden donate the land. Rumors of the curse really fired up at this time and a party celebrating the transfer of the land would lead to claims of more than just a curse. This place appeared to be haunted.

Major Horace Bell was a frontier writer and newspaperman who was known for embellishment. He founded "The Porcupine" in Los Angeles, which was a paper dedicated to social commentary. He popularized the story about the Feliz Curse and he related that Griffith seemed to be tormented by visits from the spirit of Don Antonio Feliz and demons. He wrote that at the party where the city's influential people had gathered in Griffith Park to celebrate the transfer of the land from Griffith to the city, the ghost of Feliz took a seat usually reserved for Griffith and proclaimed, “I come to invite you to dine with me in hell. In your great honor I have brought an escort of sub-demons.” The lights went out and a cacophony of gongs and cymbals filled the room. All of the guests fled before the demons would have arrived.

The curse did seem to attach to more than just the land in the case of the Colonel though. It was either that or the alcohol. In 1903, he had accused his wife of conspiring with the Pope to poison him, so he shot her. He didn't kill her, but he did blind her in one eye and disfigured her face. He was sentenced to two years in San Quentin for the attack. Despite his grand donation of the Griffith Park land, when he was released from jail, he was damaged goods and rejected by society. He died in 1919 from liver disease and only a handful of people attended his funeral.

Griffith Park is today the largest municipal park with urban wilderness area in the United States and it stretches over 4,200 acres. Adults and children come to the park for camping, biking, horseback riding, interaction with animals and the chance to climb aboard a steam train. The adventurous types can hike along the mountain and get a closer look at the iconic “Hollywood” sign and scientific minds can visit the Griffith Observatory and take in the Los Angeles skyline. The park has been in the hands of the government since the time of the Colonel, but it seems to be sharing control with supernatural forces as well. There is no shortage of haunting experiences and other high strangeness in this park. Despite the fact that Petronilla died in her son's home decades after she supposedly cursed the land, there are claims that her apparition is active. The spirit is described as a young woman in a white dress, sometimes riding a white horse. At midnight, she is reportedly often seen in an adobe house, watching from the adobe’s windows on dark and rainy nights. Her uncle Don Feliz's ghost is reportedly still seen wandering his former ranchland on horseback. The ghost of Griffith J. Griffith has often been spotted, also on horseback, checking on the upkeep of the land.

Actress Peg Entwistle is a tragic figure. She was born Millicent Lilian Entwistle on July 1, 1908 in Port Talbot, Wales. Loss came early for her when her mother died when she was a child. She and her father moved to New York after that and her father remarried. Then her father was killed when he was run over by a car on Park Avenue. Her younger brothers went to live with an uncle, but Peg decided she wanted to be an actress and she stayed in New York. She made her stage debut with the Boston repertory company at 17 and then she moved onto working on Broadway with the prestigious Theater Guild productions. She was unhappily married to a man that was a dead beat dad to a child from a previous marriage and they ended up divorcing when she found out. Stage work started to dry up, so she decided to head to Hollywood. She was signed by RKO, but she went absolutely nowhere and depression set in.

On September 18th in 1932, Peg had been drinking and she was in the grip of depression. She told her uncle who she was living with at the time that she was going to walk up to a drugstore to meet friends, but instead she crawled her way up to the "Hollywoodland" sign. She took off her coat and folded it neatly placing it on the ground along with her purse. She climbed the ladder up to the top of the letter H and jumped to her death. She was 24 years old. People staring at the sign after dark have reported seeing a young woman jumping from the letter H and that they hear her scream on the way down, vanishing before hitting the ground. Other sightings include those of a woman matching her description and period clothes wandering the parks trails, as well as walking up the path between the sign and her former residence. The smell of gardenia, her perfume scent of choice, has been reported to linger near where her apparition is seen.

On  Halloween night in 1976, 22-year-old musician Rand Garrett and aspiring actress Nancy Jeanson, 20, were having sex on a picnic bench near Mt. Hollywood Drive when they were crushed by a falling tree. The lovers had been childhood sweethearts and their distraught families spread their ashes around the picnic table. A group of workers that were hired to clear the tree fell sick or were injured before they could finish the job, including a supervisor who was found dead of an apparent heart attack at the scene. His chainsaw was bent and his hair had turned white. Sightings of a ghostly couple in the area persist and people familiar with the tale make pilgrimages to the site in the hopes of witnessing paranormal activity. The picnic table and tree still reside in the same spot. The LA Times reported the following:

"'People thought I was damn crazy,' says retired city tree trimmer Morris Carl when he tried to explain what happened to him a few days after authorization had been given to clear the fallen tree and he was tapped for the duty. 'I drove up there with a job to do and I aimed to do it. What I didn't figure on was getting scared out of my wits!' Carl is quick to add that up to that day he never gave much thought to whether ghosts were real. 'But from that point on I certainly don't give any thought that they aren't,' he says. According to the incident report he filed with his supervisor later that evening, Carl arrived at the site at 11:40 a.m. on November 7. He was to be joined by two other Bureau of Street Services Tree Division workers with a large truck and loader to remove the material later in the afternoon but until then he was charged with sawing up the branches and trunk of the large sycamore tree into more manageable pieces. Only a few minutes into it he wrote that was overcome with a strange sensation. 'In my statement I said that I felt funny. What happened was I'd sawed off the crown of the tree when from out of nowhere I got hit with these real strong chills so hard it was as if I was coming down with the fastest flu ever. I tried to shake it off and get back to work, but each time I'd fire up the saw and get near the tree I'd get real cold and hear this weird moaning and crying. So I'd stop the saw and listen and it would go away. But then I'd start her up again and it would come back. Finally I was freezing so bad I had to go to the truck and get my coat.'

That's when Carl wrote that the fallen tree started shaking violently. 'I set down the saw on the picnic table and headed over to the truck, and that's when I heard it start shaking from behind me. The tree just went crazy! Not just lightly shaking, but bouncing up and down as if someone was picking it up and dropping it.' It landed repeatedly on the table with such force as to knock the heavy powersaw off the table to the ground. As soon as that happened,' he wote in the report, 'the tree stopped moving.' But then the moaning started up again, accompanied by a warning from an ominous voice that Carl says sounded as if someone was sitting right there in the cab with him and whispering into his ear. 'It told me 'leave us alone' very insistently,' Carl says. 'So I tried, but the engine wouldn't turn over. Next thing is this rubbing sound along the windshield and letters are being written across the fogged up glass. First there's an 'n' and an 'e' and the first word is 'next.' Then there's a 't' and an 'i' and then that ends up being 'time.' Then a 'y' and an 'o' and a 'u.' The last word was 'die.' 'Man, but did the truck engine finally fire up right then and I burned rubber,' Carl says. 'Left the saw right there on the ground in broad daylight and just got the hell out. I still get chills, and no there never was a next time. I never went back.'

One of the stranger stories to come out of Griffith Park is a story about some kind of creature that is described to be similar to a werewolf. Some claim it is one of those demons promised by Don Feliz. The story has been around for decades. In October of 2005, three men allegedly retreated from a late night excursion into the park after an encounter with a beast that had green skin and red hair. The men visited a friend immediately after their experience and to prove they weren't making the story up, she had each of them draw the creature separately. With minor variations,  the men’s sketches all matched. The monster's legs were very long as were its feet and they claimed it was taking huge strides as it made its way down the street. Its back was bent backwards and its neck was very long and bent forward in a way that no human could be bent. More recently, an 11 year old boy named Jack said that on a 2009 visit, he was chased by an unusually large coyote. Reaching the top of a hill, he saw another kid around his age, and warned him about the coyote. “I’m quite glad you warned me,” the kid told Jack, then handed him an old firecracker. “Here, take this. Its good luck.” The kid then ran through some bushes and onto a small path. Fearing the coyote, Jack tried to follow him, but never caught up, and never saw the kid, or the coyote, again.

Griffith Park is far from being the only weird, haunted and cursed place in Los Feliz. The infamous murders of successful grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary took place in this neighborhood. Their home was located at 3301 Waverly Drive and it was a gorgeous property. This covered three-fourths of an acre on a hillside lot, giving it a beautiful mountain view. A long, gated driveway wound past a spacious yard with a fountain in front. The house was 1,655 square feet with a two bedrooms and two bathrooms. This was a peaceful place until the evening of August 10, 1969. Charles Manson and members of his family would come calling. Manson was trying to start a race war and this would be his big finale. He took Steve Grogan, Leslie Van Houten, Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Tex Watson on another mission with murder on his mind. The group drove around for several hours before stopping at the LaBianca home. Manson joined the group in slaughtering the LaBiancas.

Tex and Manson tied up the couple with lampcords and put pillowcases over their heads. Manson lied to them and said that this was only a robbery. Manson left and Van Houten and Krenwinkel went into the house and joined Tex in murdering the couple. Leno was taken to another room and Tex stabbed him repeatedly as Leno screamed for Tex to stop. Rosemary panicked upon hearing the shouts and tried to free herself from the lampcord. She fought hard and the girls had trouble controlling her, so they asked Tex for help. Tex ran to their aid and stabbed Rosemary multiple times. He then handed Van Houten the knife and she continued to stab Rosemary. When they were done, Rosemary had been stabbed 41 times. Leno was still alive in the living room and Tex returned to finish him off. When he was done, Krenwinkel carved the word “WAR” into Leno’s stomach and stabbed him a few more times for good measure. She jammed a carving fork into his stomach and left it there. She also left the knife in Leno’s throat. He had been stabbed a total of 26 times.

The group decided to decorate the walls and they used Leno’s blood to write “Death to pigs” and “Rise” on the walls. The word “Healter Skelter” was written on the refrigerator door, It was misspelled. The term is what Manson used to describe the approaching race war. Rosemary’s son from a previous marriage and his sister’s boyfriend found the couple dead. Members of the Manson family and Manson were arrested and tried. Kasabian testified against the rest of the group in exchange for immunity. The trials became a circus full of Manson’s crazed outbursts and the women chanting in Latin. All were found guilty and sentenced to death. Those sentences were later commuted to life sentences. Atkins died in prison in 2009. The LaBianca home has been renovated since the murders and new carpet installed. But the blood still stains the floorboards beneath the carpet.

In 2019, the address of the home had changed and Zak Bagans, host of “Ghost Adventures,” had bought it for over a million dollars. He planned to make a documentary about the house, but outcry from the public made him change his mind out of respect for the LaBianca family. He sold the house in 2021 for $2 million to someone who wants to update the house. Despite the history, there have been no reported hauntings at the house. Perhaps that is why Zak decided the documentary wasn't a good idea?

The John Sowden House is located at 5121 Franklin Avenue in the Los Feliz neighborhood. Many people refer to it as the Jaws House because of its unique design. From the front, it looks like the open mouth of a shark. Other people refer to this house as the Black Dahlia Murder House because one of the owners had been George Hodel and some people believe that he might have killed Elizabeth Short and commited that crime in this house. This is one of the homes designed by the son of legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Lloyd Wright Jr. He also was known for his unorthodox and controversial designs. This particular house was built in 1926 in the Mayan Revival architectural style. The Los Feliz of the 1920s was an enclave for silent movie stars and people on the upper end of the financial spectrum. It was here that retired artist John Sowden moved with his wife Ruth and they commissioned Lloyd to design this home.

The Sowdens had requested that the house have a stage for them to host avant-garde performances. Also included were secret rooms and a central courtyard filled with plants, a pool and fountain, which were later removed. The entire structure is built from steel and the concrete blocks used in construction were ornamental. The carved stones are so unique and really make this house. The designs are on the outside and inside and are so hard to describe, but are beautiful. The floors are wood and the windows are uniquely shaped and designed. The style of the house has been referred to as "brooding" and "cultic." A 1938 article in the Los Angeles Times wrote of the house, "It's the sculptural style of architecture,” explains Mr. [Lloyd] Wright. Sculptural architecture, it seems, fits the building right into the landscape. One of the striking features of the Franklin Avenue structure is the mass of stone and cement which project out from the roof line." One of the most impressive features of the house are the huge sculpted copper gates at its front. The interior is described as labyrinth-like and has seven bedrooms, four bathrooms and covers 5600 square feet. This house would be considered the pinnacle of Lloyd Wright's career.

The house was sold in 1930 to Ruth Rand Barnett who kept it for six years and sold it in 1936. I'm not sure who that owner was, but they sold it in 1944 to someone who didn't keep it long. George Hodel bought the property in 1945 and moved into it with his ex-wife Dorothy. Steve Hodel described the house as, "Once through the gate, you turned immediately to your right and continued up a dark passageway, then made another right turn to the front door. It was like entering a cave with secret stone tunnels, within which only the initiated could feel comfortable. All others proceeded with great caution, not knowing which way to turn. Growing up in that house, my brothers and I saw it as a place of magic that we were convinced could easily have greeted the uninvited with pits of fire, poison darts, deadly snakes, or even a giant sword-bearing turbaned bodyguard at the door. Right out of Arabian nights."
   
After George Hodel was accused and aquitted of raping his daughter Tamar, he sold the Sowden House and left the country. The house changed hands throughout the years, but has been fairly recently renovated. Whether Hodel murdered Elizabeth Short and committed the crime at this house is a matter of conjecture. The Black Dahlia was killed during the time that Hodel lived in this house. She went missing on January 9th and her body was discovered on January 15th in an empty lot near 39th Street and Norton Avenue in Los Angeles. The body had been surgically bisected. Short had been posed with her torso lying on the back and the arms raised over the shoulders. The lower half of her body featured her legs spread in a vulgar way. The body had been mutilated and the coroner's report would reveal some twisted stuff. The mouth resembled the Joker's smile having been sliced from corners of the mouth to the ears. This type of mutilation is called a Glasgow Smile. The reason is because the practice originated in Glasgow. It became very popular with English street gangs. And we would have an answer as to where Betty had been for six days as rope marks on her wrist, ankles and neck indicated that she had been tied up and tortured for days. Her intestines were tucked underneath her buttocks. 

The most peculiar thing was that the body had been drained of blood and washed. This was confirmed by Detective Lieutenant Jesse Haskins who described the scene as “the body was lying with the head towards the north, the feet towards the south, the left leg was five inches west of the sidewalk… The body was lying face up and the severed part was jogged over about ten inches, the upper half of the body from the lower half… there was a tire track right up against the curbing and there was what appeared to be a possible bloody heel mark in this tire mark; and on the curbing which is very low there was one spot of blood; and there was an empty paper cement sack lying in the driveway and it also had a spot of blood on it… It had been brought there from some other location… The body was clean and appeared to have been washed.”

Former LAPD detective Steve Hodel interviewed many times. He has written several books including "Black Dahlia Avenger" that detail what he believes were the crimes of his father. Steve put forward that he thinks his father killed at least nine women and that three of them came to their end in the Sowden House, including Elizabeth Short. There is evidence to back up the claim that this is true and one of those things is that a cadaver dog named Buster was brought to the house in 2013 and he marked several places in the basement as having the scent of death. Soil samples that were collected revealed the presence of human decomposition.

And Steve found that he wasn't far off when LA Times reporter Steve Lopez went through police transcripts and found that George Hodel had been a suspect. The police had also bugged the Sowden House during the incest trial and in those tapes it is believed that there are the sounds of a woman being assaulted and then there are sounds of a shovel moving dirt. George later called a friend and said, "Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn't prove it now. They can't talk to my secretary because she's dead." We don't know what his secretary, Ruth Spaulding, knew, but Steve believes his father killed her. She apparently died of an overdose.

The Sowden House is said to be haunted. Steve Hodel claims that the house was abandoned in the 1960s and 1970s and his half-sister, Tamar, broke into the house, possibly seeking some kind of closure and when she was in there, she saw an apparition of a female. She wasn't sure if this was the Black Dahlia. Zak Bagans of Ghost Adventures interviewed members of the Hodel family and while he was talking to Tamar's daughter Fauna, they both felt a presence near them. Fauna claimed that she has felt ill many times in the home because of the negative energy. Psychic medium Patti Negri has felt that same negative energy in the house. She says that something pushed her up against the wall. Something she could not see. A friend of Hodel's named Edmund Teske said of his time at Sowden House, "It’s an evil place! Artists, philosophers, accountants and politicians we all played and paid there. Women were tortured for sport there. Murders happened there. It’s an EVIL place."

Another murder took place in Los Feliz on February 16, 1948. Gladys Kern was a real estate agent and she was showing a prospective buyer around a vacant house at 4217 Cromwell Avenue that day. She was found dead in the house, having been stabbed in the back with a hunting knife. That knife had been cleaned and was still at the scene. Kern's bag and purse were left open by her body, a watch was stolen and her appointment was missing, so robbery is thought to be part of the motive. Kern was seen with a tall and stocky man before she was murdered.

Probably the most mysterious house in the neighborhood is the one nicknamed the Los Feliz Murder House. This is located at 2475 Glendower Place and is a Spanish Colonial Revival mansion of 5050 square feet with five bedrooms and four bathrooms. The original house was built for $20,000 by Harry E. Weiner for Harry F. Schumacher in 1925. The Schumacher's didn't get to enjoy the house for long. Harry's wife Florence died of heart disease on July 1, 1928, and he followed less than a month later, dying of pneumonia. The house was rented to several tenants after that with one of those tenants dying in the house from infection. So three people have died in the house by the time Dr. Harold Perelson moved in with his family.

Dr. Perelson was a cardiologist and not someone people would believe was a murderer, but something snapped in this man. On the night of December 6, 1959, Dr. Perelson used a hammer to kill his sleeping wife. She ended up drowning in her own blood. He then tried to kill his 18-year-old-daughter Judye with a hammer as well. Judye woke up after the first strike hit her head and she began screaming, “Don’t kill me!” Her 11-year-old sister, Debbie, heard the screams and jumped out of bed and ran to Judye's room. Before she got there, she was met by her father her told her to go back to bed and that she was only dreaming. While this exchange took place, Judye got out of the house and ran to a neighbor's house to get help. This neighbor was Marshall Ross and he ran to the house and found an agitated Dr. Perelson. He told the doctor to lay down and he called the police. When the police arrived, they found Dr. Perelson dead from an overdose and Debbie and a brother named Joel still alive in the house.

What happened at the house in the years that followed is a matter of legend. For years, young people challenged each other to go up to the house and even enter it, which some did. They would report back a scene as though the house had been left in a frozen state of time. A Christmas tree still stood in the house with presents underneath it just as the Perelsons had left it. Those claims seem bizarre considering that the estate was bought by Emily and Julian Enriquez in 1960 and that they supposedly lived in the house for 30 years according to their son Rudy. Neighbors claimed no one was living in the house. Rudy inherited the house in 1994 and used it for storage. He claimed that any Christmas tree or presents were his and that they were just there to be stored. Rudy died in 2015 and the house was sold to attorney Lisa Bloom and her husband in 2016. They gutted the house and began an extensive restoration until the city informed them that the house would need to be brought up to current regulations and in order to do that, the house needed to be razed and the hill upon which it sat needed to be flattened. Needless to say, they sold the property in 2020 to an LLC represented by Luxmanor Custom Home Builders CEO Ephi Zlotnitsky. Their plans for the house are unknown.

So the truth about the house isn't as mysterious as the legends claim, although it is weird to have a mansion in a family for all those years and use it mainly just for storage and to house a couple of cats. But is it haunted? The crime that happened here was heinous. Five people died in the house, one by murder and one by suicide. That leaves some spiritual residue. Urban explorers who had broken into the house claimed to hear disembodied blood-curdling screams.  

The neighborhood of Los Feliz is a high-end enclave, but that doesn't protect it from violent death and curses. The spiritual residue seems to be high and there are many unexplained experiences. Whether there are hauntings we can't be sure, but what we can know for sure is that Los Feliz, indeed, is a rich place to die.