Thanks to the Ghost Hunters Of Urban Los Angeles organization, I participated in an investigation of the Stella Adler Theatre in Hollywood. The building itself houses the theatre, the Hollywood Wax Museum and the Snow White Cafe, all of which have their own fascinating stories to tell, paranormal and otherwise.
This building has been home to a variety of businesses over the years. Before the Wax Museum moved in, the building was home to a luggage company, and the museum's current Operations Manager, was told that the luggage company might have been a front for organized crime. "And during the 1920s," he said, "the basement of the building was used as a speakeasy, so who's to say who might be buried beneath us that we're not aware of."
The Embassy Club was opened in February of 1930. A new, exclusive club where the celebrities would not be mobbed by unruly fans. The Embassy featured a rooftop promenade and a glass enclosed lounge with a sweeping view of the Hollywood Hills.
Membership was restricted to 300 of the proprieter’s closest friends including Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and Sid Grauman. As the years went on the Embassy was run by Bruce Cabot who brought in Delores Del Rio and David O Selznick and Mary Pickford hosted all of the Motion Picture Relief Fund dinners here. Soon after, Embassy owner Brandstatter allowed the public entry ensuring it’s failure.
The Stella Adler Theatre moved into the location in 1993. Students, teachers, staff and guests have claimed to experience numerous, possibly paranormal phenomena.
We used to live in a duplex when I was little. My mother's parents lived on one side of the structure and my father on the other side. My bedroom was in the middle of the two houses. While my father was out at work, which was every weekday twelve to eighteen hours a day, my grandparents were my primary caretakers. So, at bedtime if my father was still at work, I would be put to bed at the proper time by my grandmother.
On this particular night I had been put to bed and my father, just arriving home from work, came in to see me and tell me goodnight. I remember his silhouette moving across the room in the dark, around the bed and kissing me, whilst reaching over to turn on the light. Turning on the light was a mistake.
As the light from my little lamp flooded the room and my eyes adjusted, I saw my father standing over me, covered , from head to foot, in blood.
I was told I screamed and cried. I don't remember that, (I was no more than a toddler and my family is amazed I can remember anything at all), but I do remember the feeling of fear. It took him a few moments to understand my reaction as he had forgotten all about his appearance.
My father had just come home from filming the famous pig blood scene in the movie Carrie . As a child, and even now as an adult I have grown up among the most amusing images. Some tangible, some pictorial. There is a series of photographs, (my father has a couple of them and I know some of the others appeared in magazines), of my father and Sissy Spacek, covered in blood, arms around one another, big smiles, looking as though they are posing for their prom picture.
I am told that the following day, fascinated, I begged to be taken to the set. So began the macabre fancies of a little girl, now grown, living in LA. Today, I play with puppets, hunt down evidence of things paranormal, and long for a place where its always Halloween.
