Hollywood Forever Cemetery

At Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, a woman in black used to appear at Rudolph Valentino's crypt every August 23 — the day the actor died — and lay down a single red rose. She lifted no veil. The story goes she came at 12:10 p.m., the minute he died in 1926, to the alcove of the Cathedral Mausoleum where he's interred, though that exact timing is the version the tour guides tell rather than anything in the record.

They called her the Lady in Black.

The most credible one was Ditra Flame. By her own account, Valentino had visited her hospital bedside when she was a sick teenager around 1919 — he was a friend of her mother — and handed her a red rose, told her she'd recover, and asked that if he died first, she come visit so he wouldn't be lonely. He died first. She started coming.

Valentino's death in New York at 31 set off mass public mourning. And the grief that followed him to the grave didn't stay private. Other women began appearing in black. Rumors named the actress Pola Negri, who said she'd been engaged to him. A Marian Watson came forward in the 1940s. Estrellita del Regil carried the role from the 1970s into the early 1990s. Flame, by her account, retired the public ritual in 1954, disgusted that it had become a "circus" of "publicity hounds," then returned in her later years before she died in 1984.

No one ever settled who the real first one was.

The cemetery still holds the memorial every August 23, where a designated Lady in Black places the rose. And the ghost that grew out of all of it isn't her — it's him. The owner, Tyler Cassity, said of Valentino: "He was said to be moving back and forth." A restless figure, drifting near his own crypt, where the woman in black kept her promise long after anyone could say whose promise it was.