62: Old Hollywood Ghosts: Haunted Hotels, Star-Studded Seances, and more
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Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. As always, I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. You may be wondering where I am.

Well, a few weeks ago, some of you suggested we buy the Cecil Hotel to serve as the headquarters for our rogue detecting society. I thought that was a great idea. But it turns out real estate in Los Angeles is expensive, even when horrible, unspeakable things have happened there.

But I do really like the idea of us all coming together in one place to hear these stories every week, even if that space is just in our imaginations. So picture this: an old three-story Victorian mansion on a hill, the paint peeling, the wind chimes blowing on the porch, deep, scary woods behind it. It's probably haunted.

I mean, it has to be since it's our home. But anyways, that's where I am in the study surrounded by books and candles dripping wax.

It's a dark and weird place, but it's our new home, and I'm sure we'll find lots of interesting things left behind by the previous owners. This felt like the perfect place to take you on our next journey together through the dark and occasionally haunted history of Hollywood.

You're cordially invited to join me these next four episodes for tales of ghosts, scandals, curses, and murder. To kick off this series, I'm going to tell you two stories today. One is the story about the Knickerbocker Hotel, which some have called the Cecil Hotel of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

And not just because I can't afford to buy it for all of us either. It's full of old Hollywood tragedy, and the ghosts from that time are said to still walk the halls. And then I'm going to tell you about the mysterious death of a Hollywood director and the ghost sightings in his home that changed the course of Hollywood forever. But first, we're going to take a quick break. And as always, listener discretion is advised.

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Every night when I drive south on the freeway back to my apartment, I see a bright red neon sign for the Knickerbocker Hotel just off the 101. It shines brighter and bigger than anything around it. Even the red N of the Netflix building nearby looks tiny and modest in comparison.

The magnificence of the sign is a little bit misleading. The Knickerbocker today is low-income housing units for senior citizens. Many would say it's not really something that suggests its signage should shine brighter in the Hollywood cityscape than Netflix.

But let's travel back in time for a moment to the first few decades of its existence, just after the Knickerbocker first opened as a hotel in 1929, in the height of the golden age of Hollywood.

Then, the Knickerbocker was an opulent 11-story building used to house some of the biggest stars in the world when they were in town. Elvis, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland would all walk through the front doors to see the dripping chandeliers that would later be owned by Liberace, cascading from the high ceilings.

Its cocktail bar was lit by lanterns, making the dim, warm glow a perfect place to not be seen. Marilyn Monroe used to sneak through the kitchen to meet her boyfriend, Joe DiMaggio, here for a drink. But the hotel was also harboring dark secrets beyond the dates that celebrities were trying to hide from tabloids.

In 1942, Hollywood starlet Frances Farmer was dragged, kicking, and screaming through the lobby by police. Frances had come to Hollywood in 1936 after graduating college. That same year, she starred in a Western called Rhythm on the Range with Bing Crosby, and it turned her into a star overnight.

Francis's beauty and sensuous voice quickly cemented her as a rising star, but she couldn't get out of her own way. She was stubborn and evocative. She wouldn't change her hometown name, Francis Farmer, to something more glamorous, which annoyed her agents. She also hated makeup and loved unpopular political takes. It was hard to take her anywhere.

By the early 40s, her stardom was already starting to fade, nearly as quickly as it had risen. To cope, she turned to alcohol and amphetamines and was often in trouble with the law. One time she told a cop that pulled her over, you bore me.

All of that led her to the Knickerbocker in January of 1943, intoxicated on anything she could get her hands on. Police came looking for her because there was a warrant out for her arrest.

She hadn't paid half of a drunk driving fine from the year before. And actually, the only reason police discovered she hadn't paid was because earlier that day, Frances had slapped the hair and makeup woman on set of her new film so hard it dislocated her jaw. The police saw the warrant when the stylist reported Frances to them.

So then, in the wee hours of the morning, police arrived at her door. They could hear her inside, shouting and playing music, so they knocked loudly to get her attention. Frances heard them, all right, and shouted that they should go have breakfast and then come back. But these were LA cops in the 1940s. They didn't really work like that. So they knocked down her door.

only to find her wrapped in just a shower curtain, screaming. She was at least able to get into a robe before they dragged her, kicking and screaming through the lobby for all to see. And if you were to ask Frances about it, she'd probably tell you that she got a few good punches in before they threw her in the back of the cruiser.

It's a moment that today would have probably been filmed and uploaded to the internet for everyone to laugh at. I see videos like this all of the time on Reddit. Someone, no context, having the worst day of their life. You never know their name, their mental health status, if they're struggling to get clean and you just caught them at a bad time. And really, you don't know how the moment goes on to affect the rest of their life.

But for Frances, that incident would kick off a new, horrible phase for her. She'd go on to be trapped in the confines of the 20th century mental health industry and subjected to pharmaceutical, physical, and sexual abuse while she was kept as a prisoner inside. Many have suggested she was lobotomized while there, though there's not enough evidence to definitively say.

Her life would be forever divided into a before and after her night at the Knickerbocker. Before, she was a movie star. And after, she was just another starlet who burned out and went mad.

The incident seemed to only get darker after Frances's. A few years after her arrest in 1948, director D.W. Griffith, known for his film Birth of a Nation, was walking through the lobby under the million-dollar Liberace chandelier when he dropped dead from a cerebral hemorrhage.

And then in 1966, William Frawley, who played Fred on I Love Lucy, dropped dead of a heart attack right outside of the doors of the Knickerbocker. He was dragged inside so revival could be attempted, but unfortunately he didn't make it. Frances also wasn't the only woman to suffer a psychological break while she was staying at the hotel.

On the night of November 15th, 1962, a costume designer named Irene Gibbons, so iconic in her day that she was known just by her first name, booked a room on the top floor of the Knickerbocker. Irene was a costumer to the stars. She dressed Doris Day, Ingrid Bergman, and other leading ladies in the 30s and 40s. But by the 1960s, work was drying up for her.

Reports from the night of November 15th say that Irene was facing extreme emotional turmoil. Her business manager claimed that her husband had been sick for a few months and the stress of that was weighing on her. Her friend, however, said that her husband was hardly in the picture and that she was, in fact, in love with another man, actor Gary Cooper, who had died the year before.

Others say it was just a bad mix of money problems and alcoholism. We'll maybe never know for sure. But what we do know is that night, Irene wrote a note apologizing for what she was about to do and asked that her husband be taken care of. And with that, she leapt out of her 11th floor window.

The room Irene had checked into, room 1129, has somewhat of a reputation now within the Knickerbocker. Guests have said there's always a chill in the room. In 2013, a maintenance worker named Hector Garcia told The Hollywood Reporter that guests have complained about seeing a ghostly woman they believe is Irene. Some

Some say they have seen the silhouette of a woman in an outlandish outfit with her hair in disarray, sitting by a window, gazing out into the city. Hector also claimed that when he worked in the basement of the Knickerbocker, doors would open and close on their own, and he often saw shadows darting around.

People have also mentioned seeing what they believe is the ghost of D.W. Griffith in the lobby, a man in a 1920s-style suit, sitting under the chandelier and humming to himself.

But the real ghost story of the Knickerbocker isn't about the celebrities who still linger in the lobby or sit by the windows in their rooms. It's about the man who was summoned to the hotel during the most famous seance to ever take place in Hollywood after the break. You slept through your alarm, missed the train and your breakfast sandwich cold. Sounds like you could use some luck.

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On Halloween night, 1936, a woman named Bess pushed her way through a crowd of people standing outside of the Knickerbocker to get to the hotel doors. Flashbulbs exploded on all sides of her head, trying to catch an image as she entered. Bess paid them no mind. She was at the hotel for a reason, and no one was going to get in her way. She walked through the lobby, underneath the Liberace chandelier, and got into the elevator.

"'The roof, please,' she told the operator, and they started climbing up. The night was cloudless and cool. From the roof, she would have had a perfect view of the Hollywood sign on the hill, which still would have read Hollywoodland at that time. Bess was 60, and even though she had traveled to Hollywood many times with her late husband, she wouldn't live to see the sign read anything other than Hollywoodland.

Once she got to the rooftop, she was reminded why she was there. On a big wooden table sat a candle that had been burning for 10 years. It was brought to the roof for this very special occasion. All around it were the best mediums in America.

The candle had been lit shortly after her husband died, and on each anniversary of his death, for the last 10 years, she held a seance, hoping to be reunited with her love. But each time they had called out into the void, he had never answered. Tonight was going to be the last night she would try to reach him. Her love, her husband of 32 years, Harry Houdini.

Houdini, of course, was a famed escape artist of the early 20th century, known for being able to effortlessly break out of the most complicated entrapments. Handcuffs, chains, straitjackets, none of them were enough to hold Houdini.

Of course, as we've come to know, Houdini did this with sleight of hand tricks, sometimes hiding keys around his body. But audiences were never privy to his deception. He was a master at making the mundane look like a miracle.

But as Houdini was making his name in the art of illusion, there was another form of illusion gaining popularity in America, spiritualism. Long-term listeners are quite familiar with the spiritualism movement at this point. But as a reminder, spiritualism was a movement that said there were ways for us to communicate with the spirit world. And it brought with it a slew of mediums and clairvoyants who claimed they could speak with the other side.

Houdini knew their game, though. He had done fake spirit communication in his early days of vaudeville. He knew it was all an illusion, and it bothered him to see mediums play tricks on grieving mothers and children. He publicly called these people frauds, fakes, and scam artists, and even made it a life goal to debunk as many of these mediums as he could.

So, how did we get here, with Harry's widow sitting on the roof of the Knickerbocker and a dozen mediums holding hands trying to channel his spirit? Well, in 1926, Houdini's health had taken a turn. He was performing on stage in Detroit when he collapsed. His fever was hovering around 104 degrees Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius.

A few days prior, he had been punched in the stomach by a man who had heard punches didn't hurt Houdini. His doctors didn't know if his current condition was from injuries stemming from that incident or from appendicitis. Regardless, it only took a few days for Houdini to be on death's door. He was only 52 years old. But as he was lying on his deathbed, he asked for Bess to come over.

Mustering up the little strength he had, he told her to not worry. No matter what, if there was a way to contact her from the afterlife, he would figure it out. After a lifetime of debunking those who tried to contact the spirit world, he now privately hoped he was wrong. Then he told her a code that only the two of them would ever know. "That's how you'll know it's me," he said. And shortly after,

He died. On the 10-year anniversary of that night, as Beth sat on the roof of the Knickerbocker, holding the hands of mediums around the candle that had burned since her husband's death, she repeated the code to herself over and over in her head. If a medium could channel Harry's spirit, she knew what he would say. A medium started the ceremony with a prayer. Oh, thou mastermind of universes,

Please let the spirit of understanding descend upon us that are gathered here in the inner circle tonight. We are each in his own way seekers after truth. Please let thy spirit of understanding guide us and bring the light of truth to the many friends that have earnestly formed psychic circles and gatherings throughout the entire world. Aid us.

He then asked Houdini to let himself be known. Everyone held their breath. The people down on the street 11 stories below remained perfectly still, hoping to hear a sign from Houdini that he was on the other side. But no sign came through. So the man started begging a little louder. I will hear it.

Are you here, Houdini? Please manifest yourself in any way possible. Take from this earnest gathering any strength that may be necessary for you to use. Please manifest yourself by speaking to the trumpet. Levitate the table. Move it. Lift the table. Move it around on it. On any chord, Houdini. Please ring the bell. If there was anything that could be done to let them know he was there, now was the time to do it.

"'Please,' Bess prayed to herself silently. "'She had been trying for 10 years "'to hear from her late husband. "'If he didn't reach out to her tonight, "'she didn't know how much longer she could do this for. "'Still, there was no sign, "'just the echoey voice of the medium "'booming off the rooftop, "'getting more desperate the longer the silence lasted. "'No one from the roof moved a muscle, "'afraid to make any noise.'

Bess stared down at the bell. Come on, Harry, ring the bell. Ring the bell, Harry, please. But still, nothing. Eventually, enough time had passed that the medium called it. Houdini had, for the last time, not contacted Bess. He asked Bess if there was anything she would like to say.

The widow collected herself. She had lost her husband so long ago, but that night, she felt the loss all over again. My last hope is gone. It is now my personal and positive belief that communication in any form is impossible. I do not believe that ghosts or spirits exist. The Houdini Shrine has burned for 10 years.

I now reverently turn out the light. It is finished. Good night, Eric. And with that, she blew out the candle. That was the last time Bess ever tried to contact Houdini. If he couldn't escape the spirit world to see her, then no one could. She passed away in 1943.

Our last story takes place just a few miles away from the Knickerbocker Hotel, where the streets get more narrow and winding in Beverly Hills.

I don't have to tell you what Beverly Hills is. It's almost as much of a household name as Hollywood, but it serves a much different purpose. Beverly Hills, at least the hills part and not the touristy shopping area, serves as a respite from the chaos of Hollywood. Houses are often nestled in between the hills, under shady trees and down large driveways, hidden in plain sight.

And that's where our next story takes place. In a quiet, Bavarian-style home tucked away in the hills. There, Paul Byrne, an MGM director and executive, was living with his actress wife, who was exactly one half of his age, Jean Harlow.

Jean Harlow's name has left the zeitgeist in the nearly 90 years since her death, but the term bombshell blonde was coined for her. She was a force to be reckoned with, and the toxic, undiluted bleach she used on her hair made her the blondest woman in Hollywood.

Jean became a star after the 1930 film Hell's Angels, in which her curvaceous body and platinum hair was put on display more than her acting chops. After that movie, everyone wanted to hire her, but no one wanted to take her seriously as an actress.

That is, until she met Paul Byrne, who saw her as more than arm candy and promised her a serious career. The two married after a short courtship in 1932. But within two months of their marriage, Paul would be found dead in their home, a gunshot wound to the head, and a suspicious suicide note were all that were left behind.

Jean wasn't home the night of September 4th, 1932. She was staying at a relative's house that was closer to the filming location where she had to be the next morning. So she was shocked when she received a call telling her her new husband was dead. The caller then told Jean there was a note found in a guest book near his body.

It read, "'Dearest dear, unfortunately, this is the only way to make good the frightful wrong I have done to you and wipe out my abject humiliation. I love you, Paul. You understand that last night was only a comedy.'" Gene had no idea what that meant. Last night was only a comedy? Also, were they even sure if it was a suicide note, if it was buried in a guest book and not out by his body?

Paul's body was found on the morning of September 5th by his house staff. But the first phone call they made was not to police. No, it was to the head of MGM, the studio where Paul worked. MGM executives went to Paul's house to deal with the crime scene for two hours before police were called.

There, they cleaned up the scene and hid anything that might look incriminating to Paul. The full extent of what they did may never be known.

But 60 years later, one of those executives' friends, a man named Sam Marks, who worked at MGM at the time, would confess what he was told had happened. He said that one of the executives had rearranged the evidence to look like a suicide. The truth of what happened would ruin Jean's career if it ever got out. And she was currently the studio's meal ticket.

What really happened, Sam said, was that Paul was in fact still married to a woman in New York, Dorothy Millette Byrne. He had come out to LA to be a big wig studio exec and left his wife at home. When she found out two months prior that he had married Harlow, she came out to Beverly Hills and killed him in cold blood. Then she snuck up to San Francisco and took her own life.

And that part is true. Dorothy Millette Byrne, Paul's actual legal wife, was found dead in San Francisco just a few days after Paul's death. Jean Harlow would go on to marry again the next year, but her life would be tragically cut short a few years later when she died under mysterious circumstances at the age of just 26.

Paul's death is still ruled a suicide, and we may never know what happened. People have publicly wished that the walls of the house on Easton Drive could talk. What would they say? What clues could they give us about what really happened? Well, according to one woman who frequented the house years later, the house was trying to tell us something.

The ghosts and the terrifying premonition seen at Paul Burns' house after a short break. You slept through your alarm, missed the train, and your breakfast sandwich, cold. Sounds like you could use some luck. I'm Victoria Cash, and Lucky Land is where people go every day to get lucky. At Lucky Land, you can play over 100 casino-style games for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Go to LuckyLandSlots.com today.

And get lucky today. No purchase necessary. VGW group. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply. The house on Easton Drive was sold in 1963 to a celebrity hairstylist who had heard about what happened to Paul Byrne, but didn't seem bothered by it. When he moved in, he was dating a young, aspiring actress who frequented the home. Eventually, the two broke up, but remained really close friends.

One night in 1967, the young woman was upstairs sleeping in the room that would have been Paul in jeans. It was the room where Paul's body was found. At night, it was so dark in the house. The trees and foliage that shrouded the home from sight also prevented any outside light from getting in, making it hard to see your own hand in front of your face.

The woman was staying there by herself. The hairstylist was in New York for business. So earlier that night, she had made herself some tea and read a few magazines before going off to bed. But she later said the whole time she had a funny feeling. She kept referring to it as just that, a funny feeling. She was woken from her sleep in the dead of night by that same feeling, the feeling that something was off.

That's when she heard a sound coming from just outside of the open door to the room. Through the dark, she could barely make out what looked like the form of a man, not moving, just standing in the doorway. It was too dark to really see, but what little light made it into the house bounced off of the white of his eyes, which were looking right at her.

The figure then took a step forward into the room and started walking around with an abnormal amount of speed. He was no longer looking at the woman. His focus was on the floor as he shuffled about. That's when the woman noticed his receding hairline, black hair and mustache. She had heard stories about what happened in this house and she had looked at pictures of those involved. This was Paul Byrne.

Frightened, she jumped out of bed, threw on a robe and ran down the stairs, almost tripping over something on the way down. She turned to see what was blocking her path and nearly screamed in horror at the sight. There, a disheveled person was tied to the railing, a big slash across their neck.

The scene was so grisly, she couldn't tell who it was or even if it was a man or a woman, but she got the overwhelming sense that she was looking at herself. Upstairs, she could still hear the man rummaging around, so she started pinching herself. "This must be a bad dream. This must be a bad dream. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up." Nothing worked though, so she did the next best thing. She ran over to the bar and slammed a shot of whiskey to calm her nerves.

That seemed to quiet the demons. When she looked back at the stairs, there was no one tied to the railing, and the footsteps from upstairs had stopped. She forced herself to go back into the room and sleep. This must just be a dream, she told herself. The next morning, she awoke to a man's voice booming from downstairs. "'Hello? Hey, are you upstairs?'

Her friend had made it back from his trip and the house was empty except for the two of them. She told him exactly what she had experienced the night before, the man, the blood, but he just laughed. "'You're okay,' he said. "'Nothing is going to get you.'"

Two years after this event, life would take these two friends to another house just a mile away from Paul Byrne's old residence to a home that the young actress was renting with her new husband on Cielo Drive in the hills. That night, as the two slept with their two other friends in another room, four drug-fueled assailants would break into the house and brutally murder the friend group.

They belonged to a psychedelic, paranoid, Hollywood hippie cult known as the Manson family. The woman who had seen a premonition of someone tied to a railing with their throat slashed was Sharon Tate, and she was found tied by the neck to her friend, Hollywood hairstylist Jay Sebring. She

like Jean Harlow, was a bombshell blonde, young Hollywood starlet on the precipice of a long, successful career as an actress. And she, just like Jean Harlow, had her life tragically ripped away at just 26 years old. Some have wondered if what Sharon saw in the house was a premonition of what was to come. Others wonder if there's some kind of curse to the house that follows its inhabitants.

Today, an elderly couple lives in the home and say they haven't experienced anything paranormal. But if another young 26-year-old starlet moved in, who knows what would happen? I think about the Houdini story quite frequently, and it breaks my heart to think he wasn't able to reach out to Bess. Of anyone who has ever existed, if there was a backdoor way to contact someone from the spirit world, Houdini would have been able to do it.

I cried when I read this old book here in the study about Bess's story. But what if I told you there is a chance that Houdini was able to contact Bess? So word quickly spread around the world that Bess Houdini was doing seances to contact her late husband. So mediums everywhere tried to pitch in to help. Many contacted her with code words they received from the great illusionist, but Bess never confirmed any of them were right.

That is, until a medium named Arthur Ford came forward. Arthur traveled to Bess's home so he could recite the following code to her. Rosabelle, answer, tell, pray, answer, look, tell, answer, answer, tell. It translated to Rosabelle, believe. Rosabelle was the song that Bess sang the night she and Harry met. It was their secret code.

Beth still tried for years to contact Harry herself through seances. But perhaps, like all great magicians, Harry wasn't willing to perform the same trick twice. That's all for this week. Time for me to take a flashlight and go check out the crawlspaces in our new headquarters.

I was told no one had lived here for years, but the mailbox had recent letters addressed to a name I didn't recognize. Seems like we might already have a guest. If you would like to hear more on this episode, like some more information on the Houdini seance, or even hear about my own haunted Hollywood ghost encounter, head over to our High Council on Patreon and listen to the Footnotes episode that accompanies this one.

This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kaylin Moore. Additional producing by Matt Brown. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Special thanks to our new patrons. You will be thanked by name in the newsletter. Have a heart-pounding story or a case request? You can check us out at heartstartspounding.com. Until next time...

Stay curious.

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