In Brief
The Comedy Store sits at 8433 Sunset Boulevard, the old Ciro's nightclub where gangster Mickey Cohen ran his operation in the 1940s. The comics who came later describe a man in a bomber jacket, a black-suited figure they call Gus, and something in the basement nobody wants to face alone.
The Full Story
The Comedy Store, the black signature-covered club on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, has a basement the staff don't like to go into. The presence they describe down there has nothing to do with comedy. It's older than the stage — left over, they say, from the building's first life.
Before the comics, 8433 Sunset was Ciro's. From 1940 to 1957 it was a high-gloss nightclub and, as LA Times reporter Lorraine Ali put it on camera, "a hangout for mobsters" — among them Mickey Cohen, the self-styled king of the Strip. The legend that's followed the building ever since is that the basement was where Cohen's people handled the work that couldn't happen upstairs. No record confirms anyone was killed or buried down there. But the story stuck, and the figures people report all seem to belong to that era, not to this one.
There's a man in a 1940s brown leather flight jacket, seen in the upstairs office and the kitchen. There's a black-suited figure at the back of the main room the staff nicknamed Gus. And at the padlocked basement gate, the doorman and comic Blake Clark described a large dark form. Clark is the most-cited witness here: he says a chair once slid across the stage on its own, and that during a Sam Kinison set he heard voices in the showroom chanting "It's him. It's him. It's him."
The club opened in April 1972. Mitzi Shore bought the building in 1976 and ran it until she died in 2018. None of that explains the basement.
Paranormal investigators have made their own claims over the years, and a Ghost Adventures crew once came through with an EVP recorder and a spirit box and reported growling below the stage. But the oldest version of the story doesn't need the equipment. A club built for laughs, sitting on top of a room nobody wants to enter alone.
