The Most Haunted Places Near Los Angeles

Are you looking fro spooky places in L.A.? Keep reading for a list of the most authentic haunted places in Los Angeles. No manufactured haunted houses here; this list is the real deal of L.A.’s most haunted spots. From strange noises to ghost sightings, check out the spookiest places in Los Angeles if you’re looking for a real scare.

Griffith Park

In the late 1800s, wealthy Los Angeles landowner Don Antonio Feliz died from smallpox and left behind his massive estate to his sister Soledad and his blind 17-year-old niece Doña Petranilla. Soledad and Doña lived with him on his land, Rancho Los Feliz (present-day Griffith Park). Soledad and Doña were the rightful owners of the estate, but were cheated out of Feliz’s will soon after he died. Feliz’s will, signed on his death bed, left all his property to Don Antonio Coronel, a former Los Angeles Mayor, and the future California state treasurer. The story says that Coronel and his lawyer illegally obtained Feliz’s signature on the will. It is said that Doña put a curse on the land and all its sequential owners.

Since then, disaster and deaths have followed all the owners who have taken over the property of Rancho Los Feliz. The last owner Griffith J. Griffith suffered terrible losses on his ostrich farm and donated all 3,012 acres left of Rancho Los Feliz to the city of Los Angeles to serve as a public park. Seven years later, he was convicted of an attempt to murder his wife at a Santa Monica hotel. Mrs. Griffith testified that although Griffith said he never touched alcohol, he was a secret drunk subject to paranoid delusions. Griffith served two years in prison, and due to his loss of reputation, Mount Griffith was renamed Mount Hollywood. Griffiths’ offer to give $100,000 to build an astronomical observatory was rejected until he died.

Believers of the curse say they have seen teenage Doña in a white dress on horseback roaming the trails. Several park rangers say they have seen her ghost in the park.

4730 Crystal Springs Dr.
Los Angeles

Pasadena’s “Suicide Bridge”

Pasadena is a pleasant little city in Los Angeles full of charming turn-of-the-century craftsman homes littered with lovely parks, restaurants, and shops. Pasadena is in the San Fernando Valley and hosts the famous Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl. Its founders in the late 1800s wanted to create a community for people who valued honesty, innovation, and sobriety. Even today, Pasadena hasn’t changed much in its moral and conservative reputation, but one hiccup threatens Pasadena’s mirage of purity: Pasadena has a suicide bridge.

Colorado Street Bridge

The beautiful Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena is a historic work of art. But, unfortunately, it is also a place of death. This bridge has lured 150 dejected people off its ledges in their most desperate final moments. The Colorado Street Bridge was completed in 1913, and just a few short years later, it claimed its first suicide in 1919. On November 16, 1919, 70-year-old Smith Osgood traveled to the bridge with the intent to end his life. As he walked to the bridge, he gave someone passing by a note and told him not to read it and give it straight to the police. The note said: “Please telephone at once GG Wheat, undertaker, Huntington Park, to send for my body and prepare for its cremation. I am about to make the leap from your beautiful Colorado Street bridge. Farewell, beautiful Pasadena! I loved you so well!”

Paranormal Activity

This suicide started a sad string of untimely deaths ever since. During The Great Depression, Colorado Street Bridge was home to over 40 suicides of men and women jumping to death. These deaths follow plenty of ghost stories and tales of paranormal activity. For example, people have claimed to have seen an apparition of a woman in a white gossamer gown leaping from the bridge. There have also been reports of people hearing a baby’s cry and a gruff voice under the bridge screaming, “It’s her fault!” Among the most famous of these tales is the story of Myrtle Ward.

On May 1, 1937, Myrtle walked to the bridge with her three-year-old daughter. When they reached the nook of the highest point, Myrtle made a point to make eye contact with numerous people walking by before she flung her daughter off the bridge. The pedestrians watched in horror as her three-year-old daughter was thrown over the bridge, with Myrtle jumping along after her. By the grace of angles, the pepper trees below broke the baby’s fall, and today she credits her survival to angelic intervention. Unfortunately, Myrtle faced a not-so-fortunate fate dying a painful death in a hospital nearby.

504 W Colorado Blvd
Pasadena
91105

Hollywood Roosevelt

Today, the Hollywood Roosevelt is a luxury, reimagined Hollywood hotel with vintage 1960s-style rooms and a glamorous, historic pool. Its style is an ode to the hotel’s golden years when some of the most famous actors of the 1960s lived there, but is the hotel just a place for relaxation, or is it a place of death? Hotel guests and employees claim they have seen ghosts belonging to Hollywood celebrities in its halls. For example, the legend says that Marilyn Monroe still haunts her old suite in room 1200. The most notable apparition is in her old mirror that once hung in Monroe’s room. The mirror is now famously hanging in the hotel lobby. Guests have said they have witnessed Marilyn’s reflection above them as they stare into the mirror. Her ghost has also been seen dancing in the hotel’s famous ballroom, which hosted the first-ever Academy awards.

Another actor who lived at the hotel was Montgomery Clift. He famously stayed at the hotel in suite 928 for three months, practicing his trumpet while filming From Here to Eternity. Guests staying at the hotel claim they have felt him brushing up against him in the hall or practicing his trumpet. Other people have seen Hughes’s ghost roaming the hotel halls or feel a man brush up against them.

The Hollywood Sign

The Hollywood sign is one of the city’s most iconic symbols, but who knew it could also be haunted? The world-famous landmark in Los Angeles represents the glitz and glamour of movie magic in old Hollywood — unfortunately, the beacon aided in broadway actress Peg Entwistle’s death. Peg had a troubled life. Raised by her actor father, the actress lost both her mother and stepmother early in her life and had a following of bad breakups and heartache. Entwistle shared the stage with the famous Humphrey Bogart, but she was forever cast in minor roles, never getting to play a main character. Peg thought she got her big break when she was cast in Thirteen Women, but she was cut entirely from the film. In the movie, she played a lesbian, which was controversial at the time. So the film chose a more conservative approach and cut Peg’s character.

Peg thought this movie would be her big break, leading to bigger and better things. Finally, the actress couldn’t take it anymore; climbing the 45-foot letter H of the Hollywood sign, Peg jumped to her death. Her true intentions for jumping will never be known, but Peg was said to be drunk that night. Combine that with her apparent depression, and it caused her to take her own life. A female hiker found her the next day with a suicide note that read: “I am afraid I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this long ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. P.E.” Visitors say they can smell a faint smell of Entwistle’s famous gardenia perfume near the Hollywood sign; some have even said they have seen her.

Mt Lee Dr.
Los Angeles

The Comedy Store

The Comedy Store is a famous stand-up comedy club on Sunset Boulevard but it has a grim history. Before it was a Comedy Store and the Sunset Strip comedy club, it was Ciro’s restaurant, one of Hollywood’s hippest clubs in the 40s and 50s. Back then, Los Angeles was run by gangsters, and it wasn’t unusual to see gunfights frequenting the streets. The owners of Ciro’s had affiliations with the mafia, and the building still has peepholes in the walls where the mobsters could see who was coming in and out of the club. Mobster Mickey, “The King of the Sunset Strip,” used Ciro’s restaurant as the base of all his mob operations. In the basement of the restaurant is where the gangsters would take care of problem people. There, they tortured and killed anyone threatening the mafia’s secrecy.

Today in the comedy club, there is still a hole that a gun can fit through where the gangsters used to shoot people going down the stairs. Even after the restaurant changed from a gang-related hub to an innocent comedy store, its dark history followed. One former employee of the comedy store jumped to his death from a nearby building and landed right in front of the comedy store. The club wouldn’t let him perform, which led to his untimely death. Because of the dark past, employees at the comedy store have heard voices and cries coming from the basement. The Comedy Store now embraces its ghost stories and has ghost tours of the haunted basement.

8433 Sunset Blvd
West Hollywood
90069

Pantages Theatre

The Hollywood Pantages Theatre is undoubtedly one of the world’s most famous and extravagant theatres. In its heyday during Hollywood’s golden age, it was the most popular venue for plays and movie premieres. The theatre still stands as an Art deco masterpiece located in the heart of Hollywood, but some of the most famous stars seem not to have left after they died. Theatre employees and guests have reported seeing apparitions of favorite stars and those who controlled them.

Businessman Howard Hughes bought the theatre in 1949 and renamed it, RKO Pantages, for his film company RKO Pictures. The RKO Pantages Theatre hosted the annual Academy awards from 1950-1959. Hughes was obsessed with the theatre and had his office connected to one of the theater balconies where he would think at night. Other people have seen Hughes’s ghost in the theatre. People have claimed that they saw a man stepping off the balcony, walking along the scaffolding, and standing over a worker to inspect his work.

6233 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles

The Del Monte Speakeasy

The Del Monte Speakeasy has been a hidden hideout since 1915. Townhouse restaurant in Venice was an authentic speakeasy during the prohibition era. During Prohibition, the top was an unassuming grocery store, while underground tunnels funneled booze from the Abbot Kinney Pier. As a result, the Speakeasy, originally called Menotti’s Buffet, was extremely hard to get into. First, you had to know that the Speakeasy even existed in the basement of a Venice, California, grocery store. Second, you had to see the bartender. The final step to the Speakeasy was to go through a trapdoor into a tiny two-person rope-operated dumbwaiter. Now those underground tunnels are utility corridors for the bar.

Frank Bennet was a former proprietor who owned the secret bar from 1972 until his passing in 2003. Allegedly, the owner still haunts his favorite corner booth across the bar. Being one of the oldest bars in Los Angeles, it has a very young ghost. People have seen Bennet still watching over his famous watering hole.

52 Winward Avenue
Los Angeles
90291

Queen Mary

The Queen Mary ship started as a luxury liner in 1937, hosting famous names like Bob Hope and Winston Churchill. It took off on its first maiden voyage from Southhampton, England, but when WWII began, it was drafted into governmental service as a ferry ship. It aided the war effort in carrying thousands of troops into battle areas of the ocean. As a result, the fancy boat was stripped of all her luxury decor, repainted camo gray, and renamed the “Grey Ghost.” After helping her majesty in the war, the Queen Mary was sold as a tour operator and now lives in Long Beach, California, where she has been floating since 1967.

According to Peter James, a well-known ghost hunter and psychic, numerous areas of the ship, including engine room 13 and the second-class pool deck, are haunted. As a result, the boat is now voted one of the ten most haunted spots by Time Magazine. Some of the ghosts that have reportedly been seen are an engineer, a “lady in white,” and many different ghost children.

The grand cruise ship has not set sail since 1960, but these days it operates as a tourist attraction where people can eat, drink, and stay overnight on board the vessel as part of the hotel. The boat is known for its art deco glory but needs millions of dollars in repairs to keep it from capsizing. So, the city of Long Beach took over the boat and now even offers ghost tours.

1126 Queens Hwy
Los Angeles

Yamashiro

This iconic Japanese restaurant in Hollywood hills is famous for its incredible sweeping views and perfect vantage point of L.A. But, with any old iconic Los Angeles venue, it comes with haunting ghost stories. The restaurant also serves as a venue for events and weddings, and there have been reports of crying from brides inside the building. Also, guests have seen a woman in white lurking in the rooms. Legend says the former owner Thomas O. Glover is buried under the inner courtyard. Rumors say he still enjoys a drink and watches over his famous restaurant. There have also been sounds of crashing plates not coming from clumsy servers.

The building was built as a private art museum in 1920 before transforming into a beautiful restaurant overlooking Hollywood. The restaurant serves traditional Japanese, Korean, and Chinese items alongside fusion dishes. You may even get seated next to a ghost or goblin!

1999 N Sycamore Ave
Los Angeles
90068

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