The World's Most Famous Park is Cursed
Just how haunted IS Griffith Park?
(This piece originally appeared in Dark Recesses magazine circa 2017 but I’ve never seen a copy of it - message me if you have!)
In March of 1884 unprecedented storms swept Southern California, causing avalanches, mudslides and severe flooding; thunder shook the new houses of Los Angeles, and lightning bolts split ancient oaks. Mexican vaqueros who still worked on the remains of the once-great ranchos rode out of the hills that night, claiming they’d seen the ghost of one of the last great Californios leading hordes of demons and dancing furiously atop the wreckage left in the storm’s wake. Griffith Jenkins Griffith, an eccentric Welshman who owned the estate that eventually became Griffith Park, supposedly fled his land at midnight and never again returned to it after dusk.
The appearance of the spectre and the spirits with him was a terrifying tale, but hardly a surprising one – since it was well-known that Griffith’s land had been cursed more than twenty years earlier.
While the history of Los Angeles is commonly believed to begin almost entirely with the birth of the movie business (which has its own share of notorious hauntings!), in truth it had a fascinating and occasionally downright spooky past that preceded show biz by centuries. Originally inhabited by various Native American tribes, the area was colonized by Mexican settlers in the late 18th century; among the settlers was a soldier named Jose Vicente Feliz, who received a Spanish land grant to occupy 6,647 acres, including the future Griffith Park. By 1863, the Feliz estate had passed to Don Jose Antonio Feliz, who fell ill when a small pox epidemic raged through the area that spring. Don Antonio, a confirmed gambler, drinker and bachelor, left no heir, but doted on his niece, a 17-year old blind girl named Petranilla. According to legend, Don Antonio’s lawyers cooked up a false will and manipulated the dying Don into signing it (one version of the story even suggests that they tied ropes to his arms and manipulated him like a grotesque puppet); the will left nothing to Petranilla, and in her fury she cursed the land: “This is what I hurl upon your head: Your falsity shall be your ruin! The substance of the Feliz family shall be your curse! The lawyer that assisted you in your infamy, and the judge, shall fall beneath the same curse! The one shall die an untimely death, the other in blood and violence!...A blight shall fall upon the face of this terrestrial paradise, the cattle shall no longer fatten but sicken on its pastures, the fields shall not longer respond to the toil of the tiller, the grand oaks shall wither and die! The wrath of heaven and the vengeance of hell shall fall upon this place and the floods - !”
Petranilla’s malediction is reported by Major Horace Bell, who holds his own place in Los Angeles history. Bell, whose flamboyant storytelling made him something of a western Mark Twain, was a former Ranger and newspaperman whose 1930 book On the Old West Coast features chapters on the Feliz curse, the ghost of Joaquin Murrieta, and a water monster in Lake Elizabeth described as being “larger than the greatest whale, with enormous bat-like wings”.
As tall as Bell’s tales were, there’s actually a chance that his description of Petranilla’s curse is at least partly accurate, since there’s good reason to believe he knew the real Petranilla – although Bell certainly embellished his story, since Petranilla was neither blind nor an innocent 17-year old, but was in fact a healthy (and already married) adult. Bell also claims Petranilla died very dramatically after uttering the famous curse, but she actually lived for nearly 30 years after.
The history of Griffith Park following Petranilla’s curse certainly sounds like the fiction of a great horror novel. As she’d predicted, the two lawyers involved came to bad ends – one of the lawyers quickly ceded his land rights to the other and was consequently treated badly by his descendents, while the other was shot and killed a few years later. The first rancher to acquire the land, John M. Baldwin, really did find his cattle mysteriously dying and his crops failing; not long after he sold the property at a loss, Baldwin was shot to death by bandits. When Griffith bought the land (now hacked down to 4,071 acres) in 1882, he, too, soon discovered that livestock and plantings refused to thrive there, as did his other projects, including an ostrich farm and a housing development.
Was the curse keeping potential buyers away?
There were certainly those who believed that to be the case when, on December 16, 1896, Griffith J. Griffith gave 3,015 acres to the city of Los Angeles. The truth is likelier to be that Griffith was simply tired of paying property taxes on the land; but whatever the reason, Petranilla’s curse hadn’t run its course yet.
Because of some negotiations over water rights (Griffith’s land included a stretch of riverfront, and Los Angeles was always a thirsty city), the gift wasn’t officially accepted by the city until 1898, at which point Horace Bell describes possibly the most terrifying scene yet:
The city councilmen decided to celebrate the grant by adjourning to the old Feliz ranchhouse on the land for a dinner party. They wined and dined there until midnight, at which point “a gaunt, sepulchral figure with fleshless face” entered the room. This nightmarish apparition named itself Antonio Feliz, and announced that it had “come to invite you to dine with me in hell”. All lights in the room were suddenly extinguished, and the panicked city fathers heard the screeching of demons. They fled the room, and Bell notes that when they reached home the final morning “they were already men turned old and gray”.
The Feliz curse seemed to subside somewhat after that, although it had one last revenge to exact on Griffith: On September 3, 1903, Griffith, his wife Tina (whose maiden name had been, hypnotically, Mesmer), and their son Van were vacationing at the Arcadia Hotel in Santa Monica when violence broke out. Griffith and Tina had been arguing about religion when Griffith pulled a gun and shot his wife in the head. Blinded in one eye but still alive, Tina promptly hurled herself out a second-floor window and miraculously survived. Griffith’s attorney created the somewhat novel defense of “alcoholic insanity”, and Griffith eventually served two years in San Quentin prison.
In the 20th century, Griffith Park seemed to thrive in its new role as one of the world’s great municipal playgrounds, and some suggested that perhaps Petranilla’s lust for vengeance had been sated at last. However, in 1933 when a fire claimed at least 29 lives, whispers of “the curse” appeared again.
And they haven’t disappeared since. Bee Rock, a large natural formation near the center of the park, is still described by some as looking like Petranilla’s face in profile. There are frequent sightings of spectral figures roaming the grounds of Griffith Park; witnesses most frequently describe a short Latina in a flowing white dress, who is presumed to be Petranilla. Occasionally a man on horseback (Don Antonio?) is spotted, as are a group of Native Americans who seem to be on the run. Weirdest of all was the sighting of a bigfoot-like creature with “transparent green skin”. Even a popular 2006 Halloween hoax about a haunted picnic table that killed all who ventured too near it was set in Griffith Park.
The actual Petranilla – whose real loss of her ancestral estate may have marked the end of the era of the Mexican Californios – would undoubtedly be thrilled to know that her curse is still alive nearly 150 years later.
