Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel

A 1925 Beaux-Arts hotel on Ivar Avenue where Rudolph Valentino drank in the bar, Elvis lived during filming, D.W. Griffith collapsed of a hemorrhage in 1948, and Irene Lentz jumped from a fourteenth-floor window in 1962. Bess Houdini held her 1936 rooftop séance for Harry here. The building is now senior apartments but the lobby is still open, and Griffith is reportedly still in it.

On Halloween night 1936, Bess Houdini held a séance on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel. She was trying to reach her dead husband, Harry, who had told her before his death that if any part of him survived, he'd come back on the tenth anniversary of his passing to prove it. She lit candles. She said the code word they'd agreed on: "Rosabelle, believe." The storm that rolled in over Hollywood Boulevard drowned out the rest. Nobody heard from Harry. Bess declared the experiment over and went home, and the Knickerbocker had its first real ghost story before any ghosts had even arrived.

A lot of ghosts arrived after.

The Knickerbocker opened on Ivar Avenue in 1925, just north of Hollywood Boulevard, as a luxury residential hotel for the movie industry's newly wealthy. Its list of residents reads like the cast of a silent film studio in forced retirement: Rudolph Valentino drank in the lobby bar, Cecil B. DeMille kept a suite, Mae West lived here, Elvis stayed during filming in the late 1950s. But the building earned its reputation by being the place Hollywood came when its golden age ended badly.

D.W. Griffith is the best example. The director of "The Birth of a Nation" (and the inventor of most of the visual grammar of modern film) spent his final years in a corner suite at the Knickerbocker, broke, mostly forgotten, and drinking heavily. On July 23, 1948, he collapsed of a cerebral hemorrhage in the lobby and died the next morning at the age of 73. The spot where he fell, roughly where the lobby bar sits today, has generated decades of sightings: an elderly man in a long coat and old-fashioned clothes, sometimes swinging a cane, sometimes humming to himself, usually seen from the corner of the eye and gone before you can look directly at him.

Irene Lentz, the costume designer known as "Irene," had a worse ending. On November 15, 1962, she rented a room on the fourteenth floor, drank most of a bottle of vodka, and jumped from the window. She'd been spiraling for years after the death of Gary Cooper, whom she was widely believed to have loved. Staff have reported the sound of a woman crying in the stairwells near that floor. A few guests have described seeing a well-dressed woman at the window, facing out.

Frances Farmer, the actress whose life became one of Hollywood's cruelest cautionary tales, was dragged out of a room at the Knickerbocker by police in 1943 and committed to a psychiatric facility. Her story has stayed attached to the building. People report a woman's voice in the old hallways shouting words you can't quite catch. Nobody's ever put a name on her.

There's also a child. The Knickerbocker ghost folklore includes a little girl in the basement, reported running and laughing, sometimes heard sobbing. Her origin is a mystery — no documented death of a child in the building has turned up in the newspaper archives — but the story is persistent enough that building maintenance staff mention her by reputation.

The Knickerbocker stopped being a hotel in 1972, when the building was converted into a senior apartment complex. You can still walk into the lobby. It's open to non-residents, and the old woodwork, the marble floors, and the same bar Valentino drank at are still there, mostly intact. The exterior retains its original 1925 Beaux-Arts face, and if you walk around to Ivar Avenue and look up, you can still see the rooftop where Bess Houdini tried to call her husband back.

The single best way to experience the building is to walk in through the lobby at dusk, sit at the bar for twenty minutes, and watch who else walks in. Most of the people who come in will be elderly residents from the apartments upstairs. A few will be tourists. Somewhere, if you believe the folklore, there's D.W. Griffith in the corner, still hearing the music cue from a film nobody watches anymore.