Griffith Park

A 4,310-acre urban park donated to Los Angeles in 1896 by Griffith J. Griffith, a man who later shot his wife in the face and served two years at San Quentin. Actress Peg Entwistle jumped from the Hollywood sign in 1932 and is the park's most famous ghost. Hikers, rangers, and groundskeepers report her, the ghost of Griffith himself, and a cursed 19th-century niece on a white horse.

On September 16, 1932, a 24-year-old Welsh-born actress named Peg Entwistle walked up Beachwood Drive, climbed the maintenance ladder on the back of the letter "H" of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, and jumped. She left a suicide note in her jacket pocket that ended, "I am afraid, I am a coward. I am sorry for everything." A hiker found her body two days later. She had just been cut from most of her scenes in the RKO film Thirteen Women.

That's Griffith Park's foundational ghost story, and nearly a century later it's still the one people come here trying to see. Hikers climbing the Mount Lee trails after dusk have reported a woman in 1930s clothing — dress, beret, the works — walking the path between the sign and her old residence on Beachwood Drive. Some say she smells like gardenias, which was her perfume. Some say she jumps from the H and vanishes before she hits the ground. Park rangers have gotten reports so consistent over the decades that "the Peg sighting" is practically a Griffith Park folklore subgenre.

But Peg is only one piece of why this park is called cursed. The 4,310 acres were deeded to Los Angeles in 1896 by Griffith J. Griffith, a Welsh immigrant, mining speculator, and violent alcoholic who in 1903 shot his wife Christina in the face at the Arcadia Hotel in Santa Monica. She survived — lost an eye, jumped out a second-floor window to escape him — and Griffith served two years at San Quentin. When he later tried to donate money to Los Angeles to build the observatory, the city refused the money until he died. The observatory opened in 1935, four years after his death. His ghost, according to groundskeepers, has been reported on the observatory grounds ever since, usually as an old man in a long coat seen from the corner of the eye near the main entrance.

The "curse" goes back further than Griffith. The land that became the park was originally part of Rancho Los Feliz, owned by Don Antonio Feliz. When he died of smallpox in 1863, his niece Petranilla was allegedly cheated out of her inheritance by a corrupt lawyer. The story goes that she stood on the property and laid a curse on everyone involved, and nearly everyone connected to the land-grab died within a few years: shot, trampled, disease, a major flood. Dona Petranilla now gets reported as a white figure on a white horse, riding the trails, particularly near the Old Zoo and in the ravines below the observatory.

The Old Zoo Picnic Area is probably the creepiest spot in the park on its own merits. From 1912 to 1966 this was the Griffith Park Zoo. When it closed (inadequate cages, animals in distress, bad press), the cages were left standing. You can walk through them today. They're just off the main picnic area, rusted, graffitied, and maybe thirty yards from where families eat sandwiches on Saturdays. People report animal sounds coming from the empty cages, kids' voices, and occasionally the sense of being watched from inside the bars. The cages are a genuine curiosity regardless of ghost belief — they look like a movie set for a horror film, and several have been used as one.

And then there's the LaBianca murders, which most people don't know happened a short walk from the park's eastern edge. On August 10, 1969, Charles Manson and his followers broke into the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca at 3301 Waverly Drive, in the Los Feliz neighborhood that's essentially folded into the park's southeast corner. That crime scene is permanently glued to the Griffith Park ghost-story ecosystem, mentioned in every tour and every "haunted LA" roundup, even though it happened outside park boundaries.

The park is open sunrise to sunset. The observatory is open later, and the parking lots on Mount Hollywood Drive are as close as most visitors get to the sign. That's where the Peg stories cluster. Go up at dusk, stand where you can see the H from the back, and watch the letters turn into silhouettes against the sky. If you spend enough time with this park, you stop being surprised that people see things here. What's surprising is that they all see the same things.