It includes an observatory, an amphitheater, a zoo, two museums – one dedicated to trains, one dedicated to the history of the American west, a merry-go-round, and not one but two golf courses within the boundaries of its 4,310 acres. It is the second-largest city park in California, after Mission Trails Preserve in San Diego, and, for comparison with more well-known parks in other major US cities, you could fit San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and New York City’s Central Park inside it, twice. The Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks has designated it an “urban wilderness” with many accessible attractions dotting the park’s border while its interior is rugged and remote. It is home to several ghosts. Oh, and it has been cursed since 1863.
It is, of course, Griffith Park in Los Angeles, and I lived a stone’s throw away for most of my life before moving to the desert. As a boy, step out the door onto the patio from the den of the house on Cleveland Road where I grew up in Glendale, and you could see Griffith Park’s mountainous terrain in the near distance southwest of us. As a young adult, I lived mostly in the Silverlake neighborhood, just south of and contiguous with the Los Feliz neighborhood immediately adjacent to the park.
And it is with Los Feliz that we begin. It was in the 1790s that Jose Vicente Feliz, a soldier and colonial government official who had served as the de facto mayor of the new pueblo of Los Angeles, was granted 6,677 acres of ranch land outside of the pueblo during California’s Spanish-colonial period. After Jose Vicente’s death, his heirs continued to operate and live on the rancho. Life at Rancho Los Feliz went on in tranquility and without incident through the end of the Spanish-colonial period (1821) and throughout the Mexican period (1821-1848). Following US statehood for California in 1850, much of the rancho was owned by Don Antonio Feliz, a bachelor with no children or heirs of his own. During the early 1860s, he lived a quiet life in the rancho’s main adobe with his sister, Soledad, and his 17 year-old blind niece, Petranilla, but in 1863, Don Antonio contracted a fatal case of smallpox.
Petranilla was sent to nearby Los Angeles to protect her from the smallpox outbreak. While she was away, Don Antonio’s “friend” and soon-to-be California state treasurer, the politician Don Antonio Coronel, and a lawyer named Don Inoccante, visited the dying man at his adobe. They manipulated him into changing his will, with Coronel using his friendship with Feliz to exploit the old rancher’s illness for personal gain; by the terms of the new will, Feliz left the entirety of the rancho not to his family (sister Soledad and niece Petranilla) but to Coronel. Witnesses recounted Coronel and Inoccante’s treachery, saying they attached a wooden stick to the back of Feliz’s head, forcing him to acquiesce to the new will’s terms by nodding his head in agreement like a puppet.
Soledad ended up getting some furniture. Petranilla got nothing. She was not happy, and unleashed a curse on Coronel, his complicit lawyer Innocante, and even the judge who upheld the will, as well as upon the land itself – a curse said to still be affecting the land she was swindled out of today:
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 and the other in blood and violence. A blight shall fall on this terrestrial paradise. The cattle shall sicken, the fields shall no longer respond to the tiller. I see a great flood spreading destruction. I see the grand oaks wither in the tongues of flames. The wrath of heaven and the vengeance of hell shall fall upon this place.
Then she dropped dead.
The lawyer, Inoccante, was shot soon after in a bar fight, and died from his injury. Coronel’s punishment was to live a long life watching his loved ones suffer around him, but when he finally did die, his survivors didn’t exactly have an easy go of it – his widow inherited the coveted Rancho Los Feliz land, yet when her next marriage ended in a long, acrimonious divorce, she lost the majority of it to lawyers. Subsequent owners of the land who had nothing to do with the Feliz will suffered as a result of the cursed land itself, such as Leon “Lucky” Baldwin who found the once fertile rancho he’d purchased overrun by grasshoppers who ate the crops, causing the cattle to die; he was forced to sell the land to pay its mortgage, and was, himself, later killed by an outlaw. Even brief ownership of the land was enough for the deadly curse to attach: take financier Thomas Bell – he fell down a flight of stairs in his mansion to his death, or was pushed by his mistress, depending on which story you believe.
All of which has been leading up to the stories surrounding the land’s last private owner – Colonel Griffith J. Griffith.
Hoping to lure residents to the area, Griffith engaged Frank Burkett to start an ostrich farm on his land, but the ostriches would stampede wildly at nightfall for no reason, and a great a lightning storm brought down huge stands of trees, wiped out any remaining crops, and sent a wall of water cascading through the canyons, leaving much of the rancho destroyed in its wake.
Ranch hands saw both Don Antonio and Petranilla’s ghosts riding the waves of water like undead demonic surfers, laughing maniacally at Griffith’s misfortune.
Ostrich feathers were commonly used in making women’s hats in the late 19th century, but his ostrich farming business wasn’t exactly booming so Griffith was forced to foreclose on the ostrich farm. Burkett did not take it well – he loaded his shotgun with birdshot and waited for Griffith outside Old Calvary Cemetery (modern-day Cathedral High School). When Burkett encountered him, he shot Griffith, injuring him badly but not fatally (buckshot would have killed him), then, believing he’d successfully carried out his murderous revenge, committed suicide with a revolver to his temple. Pretty gruesome stuff, but this is the story of a death curse!
Workers on the ranch, terrified of the curse, refused to be on the property after nightfall, as did an increasingly paranoid Griffith. After the property rush had peaked, Griffith found himself saddled with land on which nothing would grow and people refused to visit due to the well-known curse and its effects, so Griffith decided in 1896 to donate what was left of the once flourishing and tranquil Rancho Los Feliz (approximately 3,015 acres) to the city of Los Angeles for use as a public park. City officials and luminaries gathered in the old Feliz adobe for a banquet to celebrate the gift, when, at the stroke of midnight, they were joined by the ghost of Don Antonio, who declared:
Señores, I am Antonio Feliz, come to invite you to dine with me in hell. In your great honor, I have brought an escort of subdemons.
According to reporter Horace Bell, the ghostly apparition of Feliz materialized at the end of a banquet table, causing frightened guests to flee the scene, with the ghost of Don Antonio pursuing them on horseback, chasing them from the land. By 1903, Griffith (a protestant), no longer owning the land but still subject to its curse, became convinced his wife, Christina Mesmer (a Catholic), was working closely with the Pope to poison him and inherit his riches. He began switching plates with her at every meal, and eventually tried to shoot her in their room during a stay at the Hotel Arcadia in Santa Monica. Mesmer leapt out the window for her life, landing on an awning before scrambling to safety through another of the hotel’s windows. While she survived, the ordeal left her blind in one eye and permanently disfigured. And it earned Griffith a conviction for attempted murder and a two-year prison sentence at San Quentin.
After he was released from prison, Griffith drew up plans for a Greek-style amphitheater, an observatory, and a planetarium among other ideas for the betterment of what was now known as Griffith Park; he even tried to donate $100,000 toward these projects. But, Griffith’s reputation in tatters and still fearing the curse, the city of Los Angeles rejected his offer. They also changed Mount Griffith’s name to Mount Hollywood in an attempt to distance the land from a disgraced convict and the curse he bore.
When Griffith died in 1919, the city had a change of heart and accepted the $100,000 donation from his estate, using it to make good on Griffith’s plans for what today is known as the Greek Theater and the Griffith Observatory in Griffith’s eponymous Park.
After Griffith’s death, it is said the curse, while still active, became less focused. Take the suicide of aspiring actress Peg Entwistle in 1932. She plunged to her death from the ‘H’ of the Hollywood sign; she is said to roam beneath the landmark, her signature gardenia perfume trailing behind her. In 1933, a wildfire in the park claimed the lives of 29 men as they unsuccessfully battled a blaze erupting in Mineral Wells Canyon; until September 11, 2001, it was the second deadliest firefighter tragedy in the history of the United States. Ghost-girl has been seen wandering throughout the park and seems to be looking for her parents who abandoned her there where she eventually died from exposure. A ghost, said to be Walt Disney, lurks near the merry-go-round, having been seen descending steps nearby and disappearing as he reaches the last step.
And we can’t forget the park’s resident ghosts: Don Antonio Feliz and Petranilla. Don Antonio has been seen riding the parks trails on horseback, stopping to laugh vengefully atop promontories overlooking the park such as Bee Rock, while Petranilla has been seen wandering the park dressed all in white as a Spanish señorita – she appears occasionally in an old adobe used for the park headquarters and has been known to ride a white horse along its trails around midnight. They are joined by an additional mounted ghost riding in the park believed to be Griffith J. Griffith himself, as the style of the rider does not match that of a Spanish Don.
Nor can we forget haunted picnic table #29 where Rand Garrett and his high school sweetheart Nancy Jeanson were crushed to death by a falling tree branch while making out in 1976.
The last victims of Petranilla’s curse. Or just the latest?