Haunted Cemeteries Page 7

  It was to that cemetery Nancy brought her beloved Bertha for final services and burial. After a short, tasteful graveside ceremony, Nancy started the sad, lonely walk back to her car.

  Nancy’s eyes swept across the placid lawn. More than forty thousand animals that had lovingly served their owners were buried there. Her eyes scanned the nameplates at her feet. Many, like the ones she had ordered for Bertha, had a generic portrait of the animal inscribed next to the pet’s name. Some had birth and death dates or a short epitaph—adored this, cherished that. But then one caught her eye that was stark in its plainness.

  She didn’t recognize the name of the dog at first, but she certainly knew his owner: Rudolph Valentino.

  As she gazed down at the bluish-green plate, Nancy felt an odd tingle on her right palm. It was as if something was licking her hand. A dog! She involuntarily jerked her wrist upward as she looked over to her side. She expected to see some pet that had managed to get away from its owner, unleashed. But nothing and nobody was there. Silent, bewildered, she slowly became aware of an unmistakable sound. It was a canine, contentedly panting away. And it was close. The invisible creature was standing next to her, somewhere, saying hello!

  Shaken, Nancy hurried to her car. Had Kabar somehow come back from across the Great Divide? Though she loved man’s best friend as much as the next person, she wasn’t prepared to hang around long enough for the phantom dog to become visible. As she hopped into the driver’s seat and turned the key, a soft disembodied barking reached her ears. Almost immediately it was drowned out by the gentle hum of the car’s engine. Soon she would be out on the freeway, the surreal haunting far behind her.

  But Nancy knew she’d be back soon enough. She couldn’t help it. She’d need to visit Bertha. Her only worry: Would Kabar be waiting there to meet her?

  Kabar doesn’t seem to want to stay in his grave; neither does his owner—although Valentino is probably not likely to lick your hand to make himself known.

  The movie star is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Founded on a hundred acres in 1899, the graveyard is one of the oldest in Los Angeles. Besides Valentino, its tenants include some of the greatest names in the history of motion pictures: Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Peter Finch, Tyrone Power, Fay Wray, and many, many more.

  For decades, a mysterious woman dressed completely in black and carrying a single red rose would visit Valentino’s crypt, usually on the anniversary of his death. Many believe that the first Woman in Black was part of a publicity stunt cooked up by a Hollywood press agent, Russell Birdwell. The veiled ladies who’ve shown up at the mausoleum in more recent times have undoubtedly been successors or imitators.

  Or are they the original mourner’s ghost? No one seems to see her come or go. And according to many witnesses, the female, when she appears, seems more ethereal than corporeal, but no one has been very successful trying to approach or talk to her.

  And she’s not the only phantom who shows up in the Cathedral Mausoleum. Supposedly, Rudy himself comes around from time to time. He never materializes, however. Visitors to his crypt merely sense the presence of the film deity. Active imaginations or actual manifestations?

  Two other ghosts are known to haunt Hollywood Forever Cemetery: character actor Clifton Webb and ingénue Virginia Rappe. Webb, who died in 1966, initially haunted his old home on North Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills, but after it was razed by subsequent owners, his spectre seems to have moved to the graveyard. Webb’s phantom can now be seen hovering next to his crypt in the Abbey of Palms Mausoleum. (The new house on his old property has had no reports of ghostly activity.)

  Rappe was a wannabe actress best known for having died after taking ill at a 1921 party thrown by movie comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. The rotund comedian was subsequently arrested for her rape and murder, but after three trials he was exonerated of all charges. Rappe’s invisible ghost is most often heard crying near her burial site, which is in the front row of graves along the eastern shore of the cemetery’s small pond. On rare occasions, she has been known to become visible as well.

  But back to Valentino. Outside the cemetery, his spirit is one of the most active in Southern California. For years his ghost tangoed its way into the lobby bar of the former Knickerbocker Hotel, which he used to frequent. The Hollywood speakeasy was a sizzling nightspot during Prohibition, and it remained a popular hangout for the movie capital cognoscenti even after liquor was once again legalized. It was one of the sex symbol’s favorite watering holes, and his spectre loved to return to it after his death, that is, until the hotel was converted into senior living apartments.

  Valentino is said to haunt three other places, including Falcon Lair (the Bel Air estate where Kabar bayed uncontrollably the night he died) and its stables. The other two venues were getaways far outside Hollywood. The first, a beach house where he sometimes stayed in Oxnard, is now a private residence. The other, Santa Maria Inn, is eighty miles farther up the coast. There, Valentino is most often felt and sometimes heard in Suite 201, the room he occupied most.

  Unfortunately, you never know where Valentino’s spirit may be on any given day. Not so with Kabar. Drive out to Calabasas and look for the large white rocks on the hillside spelling out “L.A. Pet Park.” If you’re lucky, Valentino’s four-legged pal will be there to welcome you.

  Chapter 10

  Simply Marilyn

  Marilyn. A single name says it all. Eternally beautiful; eternally young. Marilyn Monroe is one of the greatest film icons of all time. Her spirit haunts all sorts of places she frequented during her short time on earth, perhaps none more so than the crypt in which she lies.

  It was a good day to be there. Most of the Marilyn Monroe fanatics—the other Marilyn Monroe fanatics, Amy corrected herself—came on August 5, the anniversary of the actress’s death. Amy, instead, chose to visit the cemetery on June 1, the day Monroe was born. (Her birth name, of course, was Norma Jeane Mortenson; she was then baptized Norma Jean Baker.)

  Sure, others had already stopped by that day, lots of people. (That was obvious from the number of bright-red lip prints left behind where her admirers had tenderly kissed the crypt.) But it was nowhere near the number that descends on Pierce Bros. Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary every August.

  Once upon a time, Amy had made ends meet as a Marilyn impersonator on the sidewalk in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. She had been told since her teens back in the Midwest that she bore a striking resemblance to the screen idol. The first time she heard it, Amy didn’t really have a clear idea of what the legend looked like. But after a little research and hours of staring in the mirror, she had to agree: If she had blond hair, the right color lipstick, some prudent plucking of the eyebrows, and a carefully applied beauty mark beneath her left cheek, she would bear an uncanny resemblance to the late movie actress. If she were to put herself in a billowing white dress and stand over a ventilated grate, well, it would be magic time.

  Her public “debut” as Marilyn was at a Halloween dance during her senior year of high school. Her boyfriend Bobby borrowed a baseball uniform and went as Joe DiMaggio, Monroe’s second husband.

  How sad, Amy thought, standing there in California a decade later. Monroe’s marriage to the ballplayer survived a brief eleven months. (Amy’s love affair back home didn’t last that long.) But DiMaggio continued to carry a torch for Marilyn after their breakup.

  The slugger and the siren had gotten divorced in large part because he couldn’t come to terms with having to share Marilyn with the world. Nevertheless, he still loved her and never remarried. When she was admitted to Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in February 1961 following the breakup of her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller, it was the Yankee Clipper she turned to for help. From then on, they remained close, officially “just friends,” but on August 1, 1962, he allegedly made plans to travel to the West Coast to ask her to remarry him. Before he could get there, she was dead.

  It was DiMaggio who claime
d her body from the coroner and made all her funeral arrangements. He kept the service small and quiet, with the ravenous public and press held outside the cemetery gates. Marilyn’s acting coach, Lee Strasberg, delivered the graveside eulogy.

  For the next twenty years, DiMaggio had six fresh red roses placed by her crypt three times a week. To the day he died, he never spoke about Marilyn to the media, keeping the memories private in his heart. Thirty-seven years after Monroe passed over, the power hitter faced his own final hours. His last words were reputedly “I’ll finally get to see Marilyn.”

  Amy stood facing the tomb in the Corridor of Memories, her own red rose in hand. Dozens more were scattered on the ground in front of the crypt, left behind by the many mourners earlier that day.

  DiMaggio had picked the cemetery in the Westwood district of Los Angeles partly because it was not the graveyard that drew tourists. That distinction belonged to Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery (now Hollywood Forever Cemetery) or perhaps Forest Lawn–Glendale.

  All that changed after Monroe’s interment, however. A pilgrimage to Marilyn’s grave became one of the must-do activities on many first-timers’ trips to La-La Land. Once at the cemetery, sightseers—especially those who wanted to “get within six feet of their favorite stars,” as the now-defunct Grave Line Tours used to advertise—would discover that the Westwood graveyard is a veritable Who’s Who of Hollywood.

  But most day-trippers make a beeline to Marilyn.

  After Amy’s move to Hollywood and her brief stint as an impersonator, she had settled into a “real job,” as her mother called it, and hung up her pleated white dress and blond wig for good.

  But she never lost her fascination, her sense of kinship, with the actress. She came to the crypt several times a year, and almost always on Marilyn’s birthday. She liked to be there late in the day, when the sun ducked behind the tall towers surrounding the grounds, their long shadows stretching across the carefully manicured grass.

  It was getting late. Amy took a long last look over the small cemetery. The place was empty. She turned to say her farewell to Marilyn, as she had so many times before. “See you soon,” she whispered softly.

  To Amy’s amazement, as she stared at the crypt, a light, glowing mist seemed to take shape, suspending itself in the air directly in front of the brass plate bearing the actress’s name. The cloud moved slightly left, then back to the right, almost as if it had a life of its own. Amy had never seen anything like it. Then, as quickly as the haze had appeared, it was gone.

  Amy stayed glued to the spot, unable to move. She had heard the legends about Marilyn’s ghost appearing all over the city. Her apparition was sometimes seen in one of the mirrors inside the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel as well as poolside. Her spectre also showed up for years in the ladies’ room adjacent to the lobby bar in the Knickerbocker Hotel. (Monroe used to sneak in the back doors of the building to meet DiMaggio at the popular nightspot.) Her phantom has also been spied pacing the sidewalk in front of the house where she died.

  And her spirit was rumored to occasionally materialize there at her crypt. Some people have said that they’ve taken pictures of the shimmering vapor and, when they later checked the photos, Marilyn’s faint image could be seen floating inside it.

  Amy couldn’t be sure what she’d seen. But, oddly, she was comforted by the vision rather than being afraid. She had felt a welcoming presence as it appeared, an indefinable but warm, caring radiance.

  Amy wouldn’t tell many of her friends about the experience. She was sure that even those who knew her best would think she’d been hallucinating. But over time, she came to accept what true believers could have told her from the start: Marilyn had dropped by to say hello.

  Besides Marilyn’s crypt, four other graves in the cemetery are of special interest to fans of the paranormal, even though they’re not haunted.

  Victor Kilian, a popular character actor in films until he was caught up in the 1950s blacklist, is among those interred in the graveyard. In 1979, at the age of eighty-eight, he was beaten to death by a stranger he had invited back to his Hollywood apartment. Kilian’s ghost is said to haunt the sidewalk in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. It’s thought that he either met his assailant there or they took that route on the way to where Kilian lived.

  Richard Conte, also found in the memorial park, is most remembered for his work in B movies and film noir. What’s fascinating to ghost aficionados is his tombstone. There’s an engraving of a mystic pyramid in each of the four corners and an inscription that reads:

  RICHARD NICHOLAS PETER CONTE

  1910–1975–?

  A question mark? Was he talking about Judgment Day? Reincarnation? Or was he planning to return as a ghost?

  There have always been rumors that paranormal events frequently take place on the sets of movies dealing with evil spirits and the supernatural, including Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen, The Amityville Horror, and The Entity.

  The Poltergeist trilogy was also supposedly cursed. The two young female stars of the movies, Heather O’Rourke and Dominique Dunne, died unnaturally young, and both are buried in Westwood.

  Tobe Hooper directed the original Poltergeist in 1982 from a story and screenplay by Steven Spielberg. The tale centered on an average American family, the Freelings, who begin to have trouble after the younger daughter, the angelic Carol Anne (played by O’Rourke), sees a demonic hand shoot out of a static-filled television screen to rock the house. (The girl’s creepy cry “They’re here!” became the movie’s catchphrase.) As the story unfolds, a hellish creature attempts to suck her into the Netherworld, using a closet as its portal to the Unknown.

  Success at the box office resulted in two sequels. Reports surfaced from the beginning that paranormal activity regularly occurred while the movies were being made. Most of the phenomena were the kinds of playful pranks known to be typical of poltergeists, such as chairs moving and desktop objects shifting around on their own. JoBeth Williams, who portrayed Carol Anne’s mother, supposedly reported that she’d return home each night to find that photos on her walls had tilted. During filming of the second feature, many of the cast members complained of chronic headaches. But none of the incidents seemed life threatening or particularly dangerous.

  Six years after the series ended, the Simi Valley house used for exterior shots of the Freelings’ home was hit by the powerful Northridge earthquake. But with twenty billion dollars in property losses caused by the quake throughout Greater Los Angeles, the damage to the actual “Freeling house” was hardly unique.

  Probably the main reason the creepy legends have persisted about Poltergeist was the death of four cast members between the time the first and third movies were released. Dunne, who played the older sister in the original Poltergeist, was choked to death by her boyfriend, John Thomas Sweeney, in 1982 when she was twenty-two. The third film was awaiting release in 1988 when O’Rourke, who was only twelve years old, died of cardiac arrest from septic shock following surgery to repair an obstructed bowel. As for the other two actors, Julian Beck died of stomach cancer in 1985, and Will Sampson passed away in 1987 after an operation for kidney failure. (Beck and Sampson are not buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park.)

  Clearly the death of four Poltergeist actors, all within such a short period, was just a coincidence. Wasn’t it?

  In an interview, the late Zelda Rubinstein, who played the medium Tangina Barrons in all three movies, said she didn’t believe there were Unseen Forces at work. She personally never witnessed any of the unexplainable disruptions that purportedly took place during filming. “All those animated skeletons and spirited spooks you saw in our films,” she insisted, “were special effects for the screen.”

  Perhaps the ghostly activity was nothing more than the work of a publicist. But you still have to wonder.

  Chapter 11

  The Seventh Gate

  of Hell

  It’s best to be far away from Stull Cemetery near Lawrenc
e, Kansas, on the spring equinox or Halloween. Devil worshippers, thrill seekers, and the souls of murder victims from around the world are said to show up at the graveyard, which many believe to be the final resting place of the son of Satan.

  He could tell it was getting close to Halloween. Everywhere Jim went in town, there seemed to be pictures of black cats, witches on broomsticks, and jack-o’-lanterns. And ghosts. Plenty of ghosts.

  And now he was assigned to drive out to Stull Cemetery to write yet another story on the old haunted graveyard. It could be worse. Half the newspapers in the country were in trouble or going out of business. So far, the Topeka Capital-Journal seemed to be doing okay. And if his boss wanted a little “local color” for the October 31 issue, well, who was he to say no?

  Stull was about midway between Topeka and Lawrence, maybe a little closer to the latter, on an extension of State Road 40. Jim visited friends in Lawrence all the time, but he seldom went through Stull. He usually sped the twenty-odd miles across Interstate 70 rather than drive the old county roads. If Jim passed through Stull at all, it was on his way to the state park at Clinton Lake.

  But today Jim was on a quest. He had to find out if the stories about the devil baby were true.

  Until 1899 the settlement where the cemetery is located was known as Deer Creek Community. It then renamed itself for the postmaster, Sylvester Stull. The post office was closed in 1903—Stull is too tiny to have its own zip code!—but the town kept the postmaster’s name.

  The little burial grounds, also known as Emmanuel Hill on Deer Creek, was established in 1867 on a rise just off the two-lane county road that goes through town—if Stull can even be called a town. (Fewer than two dozen people live in the small collection of houses along the highway.) A man named Jacob Hildebrand donated the land for the graveyard. Ironically, when one of his children later passed away and he needed a plot, the cemetery board wanted to charge him for it, so he wound up burying the youngster on an adjacent piece of property.