The Comedy Store

Before it was Mitzi Shore's legendary comedy club, the building at 8433 Sunset was Ciro's nightclub, mob boss Mickey Cohen's base of operations, complete with peepholes still visible in the walls. Comedians who performed here, including Sam Kinison (who died in 1992), are now among the ghosts reported by staff, alongside men in 1940s suits, an old bouncer named Gus, and a showgirl on the balcony.

Sam Kinison was onstage in the Original Room one night in the 1980s when the lights started flickering in a way that wasn't the tech guy's fault. Blake, a manager closing up the main room, says he heard voices building in the empty showroom behind him, angry and getting louder, chanting "It's him, it's him, it's him." Kinison's set went weird. The sound cut out. When Kinison challenged whatever was doing it to show itself, every light in the club went dark at once. Kinison died in a car accident in 1992. Staff and comics at the Comedy Store have been reporting his ghost in the Original Room ever since, because apparently the dead comedians here don't stop performing either.

The building is 8433 Sunset Boulevard on the Sunset Strip, and it was something very different before Mitzi Shore got it. It opened as Club Seville in 1935, and then from 1940 to 1957 it was Ciro's, William Wilkerson's high-end nightclub where Hollywood royalty came to drink and be seen. It was also where gangster Mickey Cohen set up shop during the Sunset Wars of the 1940s.

Cohen didn't just drink at Ciro's. He basically ran it. He had peepholes drilled into the walls so his men could watch the main room, and the basement reportedly doubled as a place where Cohen handled business that couldn't happen upstairs. The persistent legend, unverified but repeated by every investigator who's ever filmed the building, is that Cohen beat, killed, and possibly buried some of his enemies in the basement. The peepholes are real. You can still see them if a staff member is willing to show you. The bodies are folklore. Probably.

The Comedy Store opened in 1972, founded by Sammy Shore, his wife Mitzi, and writer Rudy DeLuca. After Sammy and Mitzi's divorce in 1973, Mitzi took over the club and turned it into the most important comedy room in America. Robin Williams. David Letterman. Jay Leno. Jim Carrey. Andy Kaufman. Richard Pryor's famous breakdown on that stage. Mitzi ran the place with an iron hand until her death in 2018, and the building's dark history basically coexisted with the career launches happening upstairs.

The ghost stories come from comics and staff, and they're weirdly specific. Men in 1940s suits walking through the hallways. An old bouncer named Gus who still does his rounds. A showgirl on the balcony overlooking the main room. The sound of an entire applause track in an empty showroom when nobody's there to clap. Comedian Blake Clark, Iliza Shlesinger, Pauly Shore, and many other Store regulars have gone on the record with variations of these stories, and Ghost Adventures filmed a full episode here.

The most-repeated specific is the comedian ghost, supposedly a Store regular who killed himself because he couldn't get stage time, who paces the back hallway near the Original Room and whose footsteps get reported by late-night cleaning staff. Nobody has a confirmed name for him, which is suspicious, but the sightings are consistent enough that several comedians have refused to close the club alone.

The Belly Room, a smaller upstairs space Mitzi created in 1979 specifically for women comics, has its own reputation. Staff working there after hours report chilly drafts and a sense of being watched from the back booths. Some of the comics who came up in that room (Whoopi Goldberg, Sandra Bernhard, Roseanne) have mentioned the feeling in interviews over the years.

What makes the Comedy Store the best-haunted comedy club in America is the pile-up of history. Gangster hideout. High-society nightclub. The dead comedians who made their bones there. Mitzi herself, who's been reported walking the halls since her death, and a few comics have said they've felt her presence most strongly in her old office. The building has had too many lives to not keep a few of them in the walls.

Go see a show. Stand in the back of the Original Room for the late set, look at the signatures and photos on the walls, and think about everyone who has stood on that stage trying to make strangers laugh for half a century. Some of them are still trying.