Hollywood Forever Cemetery
6000 Santa Monica Blvd, Hollywood, CA 90038
History | Pictures | Video | EVP
6-6-2010
We
made another trip out to Hollywood Forever Cemetery on 6-6-2010,
a week and a day later, and this time had a whopping 50 minutes
to do that which would take between an hour and a day to do.
Needless to say, we got straight to work.
Some odd personal experiences to document. The first is equipment malfunctions, such as our digital recorder shutting itself off several times, as well as our video camera. We know our equipment, so we're not doing it ourselves, and this plagued us all day long. Hollywood Forever Cemetery was only our first stop of the day, and it was followed by a daytime ghost hunt below Pasadena's Suicide Bridge, and that in turn was followed by a night hunt on top of Suicide Bridge. These same malfunctions occurred again and again, and like last time out, Justin's camera battery died unexpectedly at Suicide Bridge.
At Hollywood Forever, we started out in the same place as last time after doing a quick video intro in front of the mausoleum by the lake. We then entered the mausoleum which houses Rudolph Valentino's crypt as well as many others, and it was there that the sound recorder first shut off by itself, and at Valentino's that the video camera first stopped working.
After spending about 20 minutes in that mausoleum, we headed over to the lakeside by Hattie McDaniels cenotaph, then off to the children's section, the saddest place on the property. By this point we had about 10 minutes remaining before the place closed, so we thought we make a mad dash to the mausoleum which houses Darla Hood and Clifton Webb. By the time we got there the guard was locking the mausoleum up, so we opted to cruise around the lake to see if we could find Don Adams grave. We didn't, but we did see Cecil B. DeMille's resting place before leaving the property for Suicide Bridge.
Status: Partial Walk Through
We did a quick walk through on 5-29-10, but Due to poor planning, getting
stuck behind an accident, and a missed freeway connection, we
did not arrive until 4:50 in the afternoon, their hours being
8AM to 5PM, so we only really had time to snap a few pictures
and enter one mausoleum. What we didn't know at the time is
that the
mausoleum we stumbled into was exactly the mausoleum we were
looking for, the one containing Rudolph Valentino's crypt. We didn't know it was the correct
mausoleum, and so we didn't find Valentino's crypt. We gave up
looking for anything that we recognized when we realized that we had
no clue where we were, all of the marble facades looking
exactly like each other one was also discouraging in light of
the limited time we had. Talk about death being the great
equalizer...Justin says he saw two people standing down at the end of the first left corridor as you enter while he was sitting on a bench at the end of the right corridor, and snapped a picture. He later asked if it was Steve down that corridor, but no, Steve was at the far end of the building at that time.
Other people Steve wanted to look up were former "Little
Rascals" Darla Hood and Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, both because he
grew up watching them, and because his second cousin was Wheezer on the
show, played by Robert Hutchins, thus he has a tenuous
connection. Next on the list was Get Smart
agent 86, Don Adams, who played Maxwell Smart. He was followed
by Mel Blanc and Benjamin Siegel (a.k.a Bugsy), Clifton Webb,
who's said to haunt the mausoleum he's interred in as well as
his former home. We did not get to any of these, though we did
get to see Douglas Fairbanks' grave / memorial. Another thing we
saw, and it was very touching, was the "gone too soon" section,
which is along a wall by Valentino's Mausoleum. These are all
young children taken much, much too soon.
If anybody has a story about Hollywood Forever Cemetery, please write us and tell us your story
at
team@claranormal.com.
People interred here include:
Don Adams
Hattie McDaniel
Douglas Fairbanks
Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
Rudolph Valentino
Clifton Webb
Darla Hood
Carl "Alfalfa Swtizer
Joan Hackett
Charlie Chaplin Jr.
Iron Eyes Cody
Victor Fleming
Jesse Lasky
Johnny Ramone
Dee Dee Ramone
Norma, Constance and Natalie Talmadge
Tyrone Power
Peter Lorre
Cecil B DeMille
Richard Blackwell
Mel Blanc
Lana Clarkson
Marion Davies
Peter Finch
Griffith J. Griffith
John Huston
Paul Muni
Tyrone Power
The Ritz Brothers
Benjamin Siegel
and so many more....