Featured image credit: Griffith Observatory
If there’s one neighborhood in Los Angeles that definitely lives up to its name, it’s Los Feliz. Located in close proximity to downtown and burgeoning neighborhoods like Silverlake, Glendale, Studio City, and Hollywood, it’s central to a good portion of the city’s most popular attractions. The hardest part is prying oneself away from the boutique shops and charming dining that flood Vermont and Hillhurst Avenues with a wealth of options. The sun seems to always shine on Los Feliz, catching the hues of kaleidoscopic gardens punctuated by monarch butterflies. And Griffith Park is every Los Feliz resident’s backyard: a sprawling 4,210 acre municipal park with hiking trails, an amphitheater, an observatory, and a zoo. You’d never guess it was cursed.
A Note from the Unreliable Narrator
You read that right. There’s allegedly a curse on Griffith Park. Maybe even parts of Los Feliz. But even if you believe in black magic, we should still issue a disclaimer.
This blog references popular folklore and tall tales of Los Angeles. Many of the accounts we’ll examine are open to scrutiny. So, please don’t take this as a factual historical account of the region.
The people referenced in this blog definitely existed. But the mysterious circumstances attributed to their lives and, in many cases, deaths remain open for interpretation.
Now, let’s get back to that curse!
Beginning at the End
The curse of Griffith Park begins before there even was a Griffith Park. Obviously, the land still existed. But in those days (the 1860s to be a bit more specific), people called the land Rancho Los Feliz. And its namesake was a wealthy landowner by the name of Don Antonio Feliz.
And this tale begins where Feliz’s life ends. In 1863, he was rapidly losing his battle with smallpox. Fortunately (depending on who you ask), Feliz left behind a generous Last Will and Testament so fresh that the ink was still drying as he took his final breath.
His sister, Soledad, who lived with him on the property, received some furniture. He also left some horses to his godson, Juan Sanchez.
Rumor has it that this godson was the child of Feliz’s teenage niece, Doña Petranilla, who also lived on the property. But Petranilla herself received nothing which is where the problem began.
Especially considering that Feliz had bafflingly left the entirety of Rancho Los Feliz to former Los Angeles mayor and soon-to-be California state treasurer Don Antonio Coronel.
Feliz Naiveté
No one could blame you for thinking that Feliz’s last minute decision to leave thousands of acres to Coronel was a bit fishy. Especially when you take into account that Don Innocante, Coronel’s lawyer, was present at the signing of the will as well. Allegedly, members of the Paco family, ranch workers that lived on the property but not in the main house, served as the official witnesses.
Perhaps Feliz and Coronel had history. Maybe the former mayor was exploiting the old rancher’s illness. Possibly they’d even strong-armed the elderly man into signing over his land. But the most outlandish account declares that the rascals simply attached a wooden stick to the back of the ailing old man’s head, forcing him to nod like a puppet in acceptance to the new will’s conditions.
The Curse of Griffith Park… errr, Rancho Los Feliz
Believing she was due at least a portion of Rancho Los Feliz, Petranilla felt upset to say the least. So upset that she allegedly turned to the black arts for justice. Feliz’s infuriated niece hexed Coronel, his complicit lawyer Innocante, and even the judge who upheld the will.
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But she was just getting started. In a supernatural coup de grâce, she cursed the very land of Rancho Los Feliz itself. And then, depending on who you ask, she dropped dead in a sort of occult artist’s signature.
But, upon actually checking records, it seems Petranilla lived another 34 years. People claimed she was blind too, but it also turns out that wasn’t true. See what we mean about unreliable narrators?
And normally, we’d just wrap the blog up here, because it’s obviously all bogus. Except the targets of Petranilla’s supposed curse did have an inordinate amount of bad luck. Like fatally bad.
Innocante Until Proven Guilty
Innocante was eventually shot in a bar fight, succumbing to his injury. For all we know, he was simply an innocent lawyer, but that’s possibly the most unbelievable thing we’ve written in this blog about a mysterious death curse. And any idea that he was an upstanding civil servant of the law gets a raised eyebrow when you consider again that he died in a bar fight.
Coronel himself didn’t leave this world with any real infamy. But the belief is that a long life watching his loved ones suffer around him was his punishment. Sounds a bit like the goal posts were being moved on this curse if we’re being honest.
But when Coronel did eventually move into the great beyond, his survivors didn’t exactly have an easy time of it. His widow inherited the coveted Rancho Los Feliz land. Yet, when her next marriage ended in a drawn out, acidic divorce, she lost the majority of it. Which, as you’re about to see, may have actually been a good thing.
We’re not exactly sure what happened to the Paco family, but it would seem the targets of Petranilla’s ire had met their misfortunes. Curse over, right? Wrong. Because, if you’ll recall, the land itself was cursed. And if Petranilla knew the expiration date of the curse, she wasn’t sharing.
Mo Land, Mo Problems
Subsequent owners of the land who had nothing to do with the Feliz will were suffering indiscriminately from the curse. One owner, Charles V. Howard, was killed in a shooting much akin to Innocante.
Next up was Leon “Lucky” Baldwin who may have lived up to his nickname by surviving the curse. However, his wallet got violently murdered when his dream of turning the land into a cattle ranch failed. He was forced to sell the land to pay its mortgage.
Even brief ownership of the land was enough to stir up the curse. Take financier Thomas Bell for example. He was allegedly pushed to his death down a flight of stairs in his mansion by an angry mistress.
The Curse vs. Griffith J. Griffith
But the curse of Griffith Park was building up to a grand finale with the land’s last private owner: one Colonel Griffith J. Griffith. History tells us he likely wasn’t actually a colonel, but when your last name’s the same as your first, anything goes.
A lot of landowners had tried to do a lot of things with Rancho Los Feliz. But Griffith was a visionary. Why else would his name be attached to Griffith Park to this day? Where common men might look and see pastoral hills, rustic trails, and a western paradise, Griffith saw pure potential.
And thus laborers set to work on creating his ostrich farm.
The Haunted Ostrich Farm
We’d be remiss not to mention Frank Burkett’s role in the ostrich farm. Most likely the venture was actually his idea. Griffith simply believed, for some reason, that an ostrich farm would bring residents to the area.
Interestingly, Griffith didn’t seem too comfortable around the lofty birds. It was said he’d only visit the farm during daylight hours. For one, the ostriches tended to stampede in the darkness. But then there was the ghost of Don Antonio Feliz to consider.
Long after everyone thought Feliz was out of the picture, he was witnessed amidst destructive lightning flashes in a freak storm that decimated a handful of oak trees on the property. Several laborers of the ranch claim to have seen the angry spirit at the height of the storm.
But this wasn’t a one-off reunion tour. More and more witnesses claimed to see Feliz over the years, often in close proximity to Bee Rock (near what is the Old Griffith Park Zoo today). Between the thundering feet of the ostriches and the roving spirit of Feliz, it was enough for Griffith to keep his business in the area limited to sunlit hours.
Ending the Rancho Los Feliz Era With a Bang
It likely comes as no surprise that the ostrich business wasn’t exactly booming. Eventually, Griffith read the writing on the wall and foreclosed on his ostrich farm. Burkett took it about as well as anyone in this story takes bad news. Vowing revenge, the jilted avian enthusiast loaded his shotgun and waited for Griffith outside Old Calvary Cemetery (the current site of Cathedral High School).
Fortunately for Griffith, Burkett knew more about ostriches than guns. He still injured the landowner pretty badly with a blast of birdshot (the intended buckshot would have been fatal). Burkett, believing he’d successfully murdered his former business partner, summarily committed suicide, this time using a more reliably loaded revolver. Pretty gruesome, but this is the story of a death curse.
Having had to deal with attempted murder, ghosts, and stampeding ostriches, Griffith finally reached his limit. So, in 1896, he donated the lion’s share of the remaining 3,012 acres of Rancho Los Feliz to the city. The curse was LA’s problem now.
Thus, the era of Rancho Los Feliz came to a white flag-waving end and the era of Griffith Park began. But as Griffith was about to find out, the name may have changed, but the curse remained the same.
The Poisonous Pope
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In 1898, Los Angeles’s luminaries gathered for an evening in the city’s newly acquired park; one of the biggest in the country. According to reporter Horace Bell, the vengeful apparition of Feliz materialized at the end of a banquet table, sending guests into a panicked frenzy. As they fled the scene, the ghost pursued them on horseback, chasing them from the land.
Griffith had to be feeling pretty good about his decision to ditch the cursed land. But that was likely all he was feeling good about. He’d developed a hunch that his wife, Christina Mesmer, was working closely with the Pope to poison him and inherit his riches. The paranoia seemed heavily steeped in faith considering Griffith was a Protestant and Mesmer was a Catholic.
In response to his suspicions, Griffith began switching plates with Mesmer at every meal. Eventually, Griffith decided to handle the situation the same way so many people in this story took care of their problems. With murder.
In the Mood for Murder
Mesmer, coming from a wealthy background herself, probably didn’t know the true depth of Griffith’s building paranoia. But she knew he was a closet alcoholic, prone to delusions highlighting a radical insecurity.
Still, when they checked into the Hotel Arcadia in Santa Monica together, she likely never imagined she’d be leaping for her life from the establishment’s window as he shot at her. She landed on an awning before scrambling through tentative safety in another of the hotel’s windows. While she’d survived the harrowing ideal, it left her blind in one eye and permanently disfigured.
This wasn’t “pistols at dawn outside of the cemetery”. This was a bona fide attempt to murder a woman from a family of wealth and community standing. In 1903, Griffith was officially convicted of the attempted murder of Christina Mesmer. Even then, his own wealth and standing seemed to buy him a light sentence. Ultimately, he served just two years in San Quentin.
Plans for Griffith Park
With such a weak sentence, you might wonder if Griffith was actually blessed instead of cursed. Yet, though he was a free man, his reputation was ultimately in tatters.
During his final years, he drew up plans for a Greek-style theater and an observatory among other ideas to better Griffith Park. He even attempted to donate $100,000 toward their construction.
But the city rejected the offer. They also changed Mount Griffith’s name to Mount Hollywood. Still, the Griffith Park name remained, tying the disgraced tycoon to the allegedly cursed land.
When Griffith died in 1919, the city reconsidered their decision and accepted the $100,000 donation from his estate. And, as anyone familiar with the area can attest, Griffith’s plans for a Greek theater and observatory in Griffith Park were brought to fruition.
Griffith Joins the Gallery of Ghosts
Today, “Colonel” Griffith J. Griffith is laid to rest beneath a towering obelisk in Hollywood Forever Cemetery. We use “rest” tentatively, as some witnesses have reported seeing Griffith patrolling his former land on horseback.
Likewise, Doña Petranilla, the alleged originator of the Griffith Park curse, is said to haunt the grounds to this day, peering from the darkened windows of the Crystal Springs Ranger Headquarters on rare Los Angeles stormy nights. Sometimes, she’s said to even stroll out onto the grounds, always draped in her white gown. Others have reported seeing her riding a white horse near the midnight hour.
The Curse Dispersed
As for the supposed curse of Griffith Park, some say it’s become less focused since Griffith gifted his land to the city. The beauty of the land is undeniable. But it’s also been the site of great loss and pain.
Take for example the infamous suicide of aspiring actress Peg Entwistle. Doomed to a death more renowned than her life, she plunged from the “H” of the Hollywood sign… and is said to repeat her final performance to shocked witnesses to this day.
In 1933, a wildfire claimed the lives of 29 men (a conservative figure) as they unsuccessfully battled the blaze erupting from Mineral Wells Canyon. Until September 11, 2001, it was the second deadliest firefighter tragedy in the history of our nation.
In the 1970s, Griffith Park was frequently used by the Hillside Stranglers to dispose of their victims’ bodies. It’s a trend that’s remained strong among those inclined to murder. In recent years, a blanket-wrapped corpse was found off a trail, bodies were discovered in public bathrooms and near transmission towers. In one instance, a coroner’s dog dutifully recovered a severed head, among other body parts.
Just last year, a burning body was found hanging from a tree limb in broad daylight near the Griffith Park Carousel. It was ruled a suicide.
Even when you move out of Griffith Park into the adjacent neighborhood of Los Feliz, you’ll find dark accents to the sunkissed edifices. There’s the notorious Los Feliz Murder Mansion where a dentist attempted to massacre his family before swallowing a beaker of acid. Or the Sowden House which is rumored to be the murder site of Elizabeth Short, the infamous Black Dahlia.
Is this the dispersed curse of Doña Petranilla? Or just the price of a vast nature park in one of the country’s biggest cities? We’ll let you take a wander along the Griffith Park trails at midnight to decide for yourself. Who knows, maybe you’ll see a stampeding herd of ghost ostriches.
