Griffith Park

The land that became Griffith Park in Los Angeles is supposed to be cursed, and the figure people report seeing on the trails near midnight is the girl who is said to have cursed it. They describe a woman in a white gown on a white horse, sometimes watching from a window of the old Feliz Adobe — the oldest building still standing in the park. Her name, in the legend, is Petranilla.

Here's the story they tell. This was once Rancho Los Feliz, and when its owner Don Antonio Feliz died of smallpox in 1863, a deathbed will handed almost all his land to a former mayor of Los Angeles and a lawyer, leaving his teenage niece nothing. The legend adds a stick fastened behind the dying man's head to make him nod assent to the document. Petranilla, the story goes, stood and damned them all — the new owners, the judge who upheld the will, and the land itself. "I see a great flood spreading destruction," runs the version LAist quotes. "I see the grand oaks wither in the tongues of flames."

Then the misfortunes came, if you follow the lore. The lawyer was shot dead. Later owners were ruined — one was gunned down in a saloon, one lost his cattle to fire and grasshoppers, another fell from his own banister. At an 1898 banquet in the adobe celebrating the city's new park, the tellers say the ghost of Antonio Feliz appeared at the head of the table: "I come to invite you to dine with me in hell."

None of it is in the record. Every version traces back to one writer, Horace Bell, who set the curse down decades later. The historian Hadley Meares went looking and found the land changed hands legitimately and Petranilla was never cheated — she lived on for decades, not dropping dead at the curse as the legend has it.

"But it's a great story," Meares said. People still ride past the adobe at night, watching the windows.