CITY OF FALLEN ANGELS: What's Up With L.A.'s 'Cursed' Griffith Park?
Two More Strange Death Scenes In Los Angeles's Weirdest Wilderness
“We Dance on the H of the Hollywood sign / ‘Til we run out of breath, gonna dance ‘til we die / A lust for life keeps us alive, keeps us alive…” Lana Del Ray & The Weakened, “Lust for Life” (2017)
“I'm worth a million in prizes with my torture film / Your skin starts itching once you buy the gimmick / Love, love, love, it’s like hypnotizing chickens / I'm just a modern guy and I've got a lust for life / Lust for life…” - Iggy Pop, “Lust for Life” (1977)
“L.A. is run by Satan.” - Kanye West
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Another year, another strange death/suicide/human sacrifice inside L.A.’s cursed/haunted Griffith Park, the sprawling mostly untamed region across the 5 from Glendale and lodged roughly six miles directly east of legendary/notorious Laurel Canyon, then six miles further east from The Getty Art Museum.
The body of a woman who apparently took her own life was found burning and hanging from a tree in Griffith Park Tuesday, authorities said.
Firefighters were sent to the area near the park’s Merry Go Round at about 12:30 p.m. The body was that of a woman, a spokesperson confirmed.
Information on the woman’s age and identity was not immediately available, though her body was on fire at the time of the discovery.
The death has been classified as an apparent suicide, pending the results of a coroner’s investigation.
Ooooo-kay. Suicide by hanging + self-immolation sounds like it’s right up there with suicide by two gunshots to the back of the head, but you can trust the LAPD/LAFD on this if you want. Maybe we’ll get more clarity after the woman is identified. If she’s ever identified. So far, she’s still “Jane Doe 100” (wait…does that mean the LAPD’s got 99 prior mystery victims in 2022? Yikes!).
This latest mystery woman’s death follows the discovery of a different unidentified dead woman found in Griffith Park, last week of July. There’s been barely any reporting about that one, though the closing paragraph in L.A. Mag about the hanging/burning notes the earlier body “was discovered in some underbrush and has not been identified and the case is closed. LAPD said that the deaths are unconnected.”
Sounds like we’re never going to find out who these women were. Sounds like the Curse of Griffith Park churns on. Some backstory:
As L.A.’s largest and best-known urban recreational area, Griffith Park is often compared to NYC’s Central Park, but that’s mostly by West Coast types who’ve never been to Central Park. Griffith Park is much, much bigger, far less built out and corporatized, and waaaay more rugged and remote. You can literally get lost in Griffith Park, or not see another person while roaming its 4,310 acres; by comparison, Central Park is 843 acres.
Griffith Park is home to the Hollywood Sign, the Old Los Angeles Zoo, the Autry Museum of the American West, the Griffith Observatory, and the Greek Theater. Caves on the land were used to depict the entrance to Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and the Batcave in ABC’s campy 1966-69 Batman series. Location shooting for other films and TV shows are too numerous to list, but the most legendary are the enormous battle sequences for D.W. Griffith’s racist pro-KKK epic The Birth of a Nation, the road scenes of Sunset Boulevard and, most recently, the “Lovely Night” dance sequence in La La Land.
That all sounds very nice (well, other than the KKK stuff), but Griffith Park is not always so nice. Lots of strange and spooky shit goes down there, all starting back in the 1860s, when wealthy Hispanic land baron Don Antonio Feliz broke his promise to give his niece the land upon his death, and instead changed his will at the last moment to give it to a different L.A. luminary, Don Antonio Coronel—former mayor of Los Angeles, future State Treasurer—under shady circumstances.
Legend claims the infuriated young woman, who some have alleged to be a member of a fledgling L.A. coven of young witches, cast a curse upon the land—at the time, open fields of cattle and other farm animals—and every man involved in the swindling of her rightful heirship.
Within a year, Don Innocante, the attorney who rewrote Don Feliz’s will to Don Coronel’s benefit, then successfully fought in court to uphold its last-minute revisions despite the Feliz family contesting, was shot dead. The judge who ruled in Don Coronel’s favor over the Feliz family’s protests got sick and he died, too.
Don Antonio Coronel didn’t die of any sickness, but either all his kids did or he had no children, because there’s no record of them. But when Don Coronel finally did die, in 1894, his much younger widow (34 years younger) swiftly married another man. That marriage imploded in five years, and during the divorce, lawyers ate up most of the family money and the widow had to sell the land’s water rights to a guy named C.V. Howard, who promptly flipped them at a good profit to the city but then got shot dead while celebrating his financial windfall at a L.A. saloon.
With the finances and property in disarray, the land got snapped up by a West Coast businessman and land speculator named Elias "Lucky" Baldwin (who had a thing for 16-year old girls, married two of ‘em, but that’s another story that you can get the gist of from his Wikipedo bio). “Lucky”’s nickname got inverted when he launched a cattle ranch and cow dairy on the land. There was an infestation of grasshoppers and locusts that devoured all the crops, then there were several bad fires that destroyed grain holdings. All the cattle on the land died. “Lucky” Baldwin was forced to sell the property.
It next went to a San Francisco financier named Thomas Bell, who saw it as a smart investment and quickly re-sold it to journalist-turned-goldigger Colonel Griffith J. Griffith, who’d gained his fortune by marrying a daughter of L.A.’s wealthy Mesmer family, Tina.
Then things started getting REEEEEALLLY weird. Weirder than having the same name twice, even.
First of all, “Colonel” Griffith J. Griffith was no more a Colonel than Elvis Presley’s notorious fraud of a manager (and possible murderer) Colonel Tom Parker, née Andreas Cornelis Dries van Kuijk, of The Netherlands. Both men presumed their military titles, but there is no record of Griffith being in any branch of the military beyond the California National Guard (Parker/van Kujik had his title honorifically bestowed upon him by Louisiana Governor Jimmy Davis, who he helped get elected).
[CURIOUS COLONIAL ASIDE: I’m wondering why “Colonel” is so often taken by men as an honorific title. Colonel Sanders, too, for instance. I can’t find anything to explain it, but if you’ve got any clues, please LMK.]
Let’s chronicle the many sufferings of Griffith J. Griffith after he bought the land that became Griffith Park:
First, he got shot by a business rival with a shotgun, but managed to survive. Then, even though he publicly claimed to be a teetotaler, Griffith decided to go on a bender while vacationing in Santa Monica and inexplicably shot his wife, nearly killing her. Forensics of the time determined she was shot in the face while kneeling before him. She lost her left eye and was left permanently disfigured.
During the court case, Griffith pled desperately that he had no idea what came over him, it was as if he had been possessed, and the judge ruled the crime resulted from temporary “Alcoholic Insanity.” He was sentenced to a mere two years in jail in San Quentin, but was out in even less than that.
Even before he shot his wife, Griffith J. Griffith had been complaining to anybody who would listen around L.A. that he thought the curse on the land was real, haunted by the ghost of Don Antonio Feliz and his niece, and he needed to unload the property. Except now other people believed the curse, too, and he couldn’t sell it. Griffith J. Griffith began donating large parcels of land to the city, chunk by chunk.
After he shot his wife and got out of jail, however, GG became a societal pariah and the city eschewed any more donations. Still, GG set up a trust fund for the land and further improvements that he envisioned. After his death (from liver disease…hmmmm) in 1919, the city finally accepted the land and began to build what Griffith had hoped to see constructed, primarily its beautiful amphitheater, the Greek Theatre (completed in 1930), and the iconic Griffith Observatory (1935).
If Don Antonio Feliz haunts the area, locals say that Griffith J. Griffith’s unsettled spirit does too; both trapped by the area’s curse and their bad karma. But the hoodoo hardly ends there.
Many people have died or been found dead inside Griffith Park, often in strange ways. L.A.’s 1970s serial killer ‘The Hillside Strangler’ (which later turned out to be ‘Stranglers’) dumped several of his/their victims’ bodies there. In 1990, the L.A. Times reported that ten dead bodies had been found in the park since 1988, not always intact. Body parts continue to be found from time to time, most notoriously a decapitated head found next to the Hollywood sign in 2012. And another decapitated head in 2019. Plus now two found dead in the past three weeks.
It’s actually nothing new. Ugly deaths have been going on inside Griffith Park for pretty much a century. The most deaths all at once occurred during a huge brushfire that broke out on Oct 3, 1933 (10/3/33 for you numerology fans), killing 29 and injuring 150. There were also major fires in 1961, 1971, and three in 2007.
Some but hardly all of the other notable deaths and ghosts that allegedly hang around in Griffith Park:
In 1932, the accomplished British actress Peg Entwistle committed suicide by leaping from the “H” in the Hollywood Sign. She was 24, and her self-delete occurred less than a month before the release of her first American film Thirteen Women. She was going to be co-starring with two of the period’s major female movie stars, Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne. Thirteen Women oddly ends with one of the female characters leaping to her death (tho not Entwistle’s).
Further synchronistic oddness surrounding Peg Entwistle, FWIW: She became a breakout stage star in the States for her theatrical work on Broadway in a 1927 comedy titled Tommy. 42 years later, A guy named John Entwistle (no relation that I can discern) was bassist for The Who on their classic concept album that sported the same monicker.
Peg Entwistle’s ghost has long been said to haunt the area around the Hollywood Sign, and her legend has lived longer than the lady herself: As recently as 2020, over-rated show runner and creepy weirdo Ryan Murphy put a fictional film biography of Entwistle, called Peg (then Meg) as the central unifying project of his lousy Netflix revisionist “re-imagining” of Old Hollywood. Peg Entwistle’s Wiki entry has a long list of pop culture tributes to her, many of them musical, and a fictionalized short film about her death was produced in 2017.
A pair of ghosts allegedly haunt the area where another strange tragedy inside the park took place: Hallowe’en, 1976, when a large tree fell upon a young couple who were making passionate love atop a picnic table just off the ironically named Mount Hollywood Drive. The bodies were identified as 22-year-old musician Rand Garrett and 20-year old aspiring actress Nancy Jeanson, and numerous people have claimed to see and hear their ghosts in the area (Picnic Table #29, if you want to explore for yourself).
In August 1981, veteran stuntman Jack Tyree accidentally killed himself when he jumped from an 80-foot Griffith Park cliff during the filming of B-movie director Albert Pyum’s The Sword and the Sorcerer for an action sequence and missed the airbag below.
There’s also long been reporting of satanic rituals inside Griffith Park, including animal sacrifice. So many that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) started raising awareness of it, to the point where even the L.A. Times started writing about it.
Police and the SPCA have found the mutilated remains of cats and dogs at the scenes of satanic rituals in remote sections of Griffith Park. The animals are usually disemboweled, beheaded or burned…
In two separate incidents in the last two years, cult members have stolen heads, leg bones and other human body parts from mausoleums at the Calvary Catholic Cemetery and the Home of Peace Jewish Cemetery…
There were also the remains of an unidentified “Hollywood couple,” found in a deep ravine next to the observatory, discovered six years after their “satanic suicide pact” occurred, which gives you an idea of how remote and rural the place can be.
But, to bring us full circle, this latest burning/hanging suicide was right out in the open, near the park’s popular Merry-Go-Round. Perhaps some regular visitors consider Griffith Park a kind of inverted amusement park, a place for the darkest of obscene occult pleasures and secret surprises. La La Land, indeed.
