HOLLYWOOD TOWER HOTEL
Location: The twelve-story brick tower was built on purpose at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highway 2 in view of the Hollywood Sign on Mount Lee in Los Angeles, California..
Description: At one time, the Hollywood Tower Hotel was among the top most popular hotels on the west coast and its location near the Hollywood sign certainly did more to boost its popularity over any other hotel in the area. The architectural style is considered "Pueblo Deco," characterized by clean geometric shapes with elements from southwestern Native American art. The grounds were designed to represent a typical upscale hotel from 1930s California with an extensive garden of Chinese flame trees, magnolias and palm trees on a extended veranda. The top floor houses the Tip-Top Lounge, a ritzy 1920s style band and dance hall.
Ghostly Manifestations: For almost fifty years, The Hollywood Tower Hotel exuded the visage of what one expected from a haunted hotel. Left largely abandoned, the neglected and dusty lobby sat just as it looked when the doors last closed its doors to the public. Forgotten luggage rests on carts in halls, the front desk still holds keys and undelivered mail, a card game rests unfinished off to the side and abandoned cooking and baking utensils in the hotel kitchen and dining room. In fact, it looked as if whoever had departed just might be back at any second, and it is that sort of expectations that tapped into the fear and imaginations of all who visited the location.
"Is the hotel haunted..."Chris Todd, grandson of the hotel builder, ventures to make a guess. "Do birds fly? Do fish swim? Will Britney Spears make another raunchy video?"
Chris Todd is not your typical person. He's six-foot-two and almost three hundred pounds in size having worked as a carpenter, a Hollywood stuntman and a car mechanic. Chris looks like he's not scared of anything, but he does cast an imposing presence of his own, and despite his size and girth, he's one of the extroverted and out-going people in the world. He's the type of person anyone would want to call his friend. His grandfather who died in 1963 was the same sort of person.
"I did not go into the hotel for most of my life." Chris replies stating a fact. "I just couldn't. I was not scared of it, mind you, but I could only get about so far before I felt it was closing in on me. It's something about the size or the shadows or something, but I definitely feel the place is haunted. Not a Hollywood-ghost spewing creature from the depths of the underworld haunted, but life beyond death haunted. If you want to know what I mean, go spend the night in the place."
In protecting the hotel landmark from the elements, Chris once tended to the hotel grounds and veranda, and hired men to take care of the exterior, but he is constantly hiring new men. Strange noises such as knocking sounds, disembodied footsteps and distant whispering sounds emanate from the walls of the lobby, and strange visions and activity has been reported. From 1978 to 1985, Joe Veracruz worked and lived on the location as caretaker and security guard for Chris Todd. In his presence, Joe was aware that something was "not quite right" with the hotel.
"Joe was a Catholic Mexican-American, and one of the few people I really trusted to watch the place." Chris Todd confesses. "Other men I hired wandered the place for stuff to sell for drug money or took money to let people wander through or looked the other way as vandals trashed the place, but Joe was devout. He was religious, he was honest, he... didn't believe in ghosts."
Whatever opinions Joe had about ghosts must have changed shortly after he started looking over the building. Joe had made a livable home in the offices behind the walls of the front desk, and could come and go freely from the employee entrance as well as the front entrance. Somewhere a week after taking this job, Joe reflected in a story he later told the Chris that he was making dinner when he seemed to hear or become conscious of stirring noises from the floor above him. Thinking at first the noises were just his imagination, he realized that the noises were gradually becoming more obvious. Without warning, he heard the sound of a door opening and slamming shut over his head. Thinking he had prowlers, and unwilling to face them alone, he called the police and sat out of sight waiting for someone to slip up and come down the main staircase, but no on ever appeared and the police spent a fruitless hour looking for signs of a break-in or another person in the premises.
For the majority of his time at the hotel, Joe passed on other occurrences, believing they were his imagination or blaming them on likely probable causes like optical illusions. At various times, he'd look into one of the mirrors of the lobby and see a faint glimpse of a shadow behind him hurrying out of the foyer. Most of the time, he tried to give chase expecting to see or find a young kid exploring the hotel, but more often he'd find himself at the end of a locked corridor or in an empty room. Sometimes he see the face of a strange person staring out from the mirrors when he was no where near them. While coming through the front entrance with bags of groceries, he was struggling to lock the doors behind him and he saw the image of a beautiful blonde woman standing before the big mirror in the lobby as if she were checking her make-up, but when he became conscious of her and whirled around to face her, there was no one there.
"To this day," Chris Todd adds. "Housekeepers cleaning that mirror say they have seen the image of a woman standing behind them as they clean the mirror. When they step back to let her to the mirror, she's no longer there."
On one occasion, Joe was vacuuming the lobby at the bottom of the main staircase when he became conscious of sounds of music and partying from somewhere in the hotel. At first, he reckoned they were from a building on the same block, but as he tried tuning his attention to the direction of the sounds, he realized he was hearing old Big Band music integrated with sounds of hearty male laughter and phantom piano music. It was then that he started rationalizing that he might have ghosts in the hotel and had close friends and even his girlfriend stay the night with him to try and back up what he was experiencing, but like so many cases, the spirits did not perform on cue or interact on schedule.
During one night playing cards in the lobby with several friends, Joe and his friends realized they were hearing the sound of a woman sobbing on the second floor. In looking to see what was making the noise, one of the members of Joe's retinue claimed it sounded more like a bird trapped in the upstairs hallway, and on the way down after failing to find a source for the noise, they realized the sound had moved to the kitchen area, but now it sounded like the voice of a small child singing. Neither scared or perturbed by the noises, the motley gathering had become an impromptu game as they followed odd and indistinct noises from one end of the hotel to the other without catching up with their merry guest.
At Joe's suggestion, Chris allowed him to rent the downstairs ballroom for private gatherings and meetings. People were allowed to enter the hotel through a side entrance and were barred from exploring the rest of the hotel. The local Kiwanis Club at oft times rented the hotel basement as a Halloween attraction to raise money. The basement resembled a medieval catacombs with several corridors and large rooms perfect for plying the imaginations and advanced preconceptions of the supernatural. During this time, several small groups were allowed to get access to the hotel for both amateur and professional paranormal investigations, and usually just walked away with photos of orbs and glowing balls. Cold spots were frequent, and odd noises nearly a constant. During one Halloween, a guest in the basement stepped away from a doorway to catch a cigarette smoke in private and heard the sound of a man chuckling behind her. She looked up to the room behind her and noticed what seemed to be a man in a dark suit or tuxedo, but when she looked at his face, she realized he could not be real. He didn't have a head.
"I don't think she was that perturbed by the sighting." Chris Todd recalls the manifestation as if it had occurred just a few days ago. "She noticed it, acknowledged it and turned away, later coming outside still smoking her cigarette to describe what she had seen. Surrounded by what seemed to be ten to twenty people, I went along to see what room she had been, figuring she had seen one of the Halloween props or a dressmaker dummy, but that room was empty. Nothing in it but for old luggage carts and doors stacked against the wall."
Joe meanwhile still saw and experiencing things. Curtains in the windows of upstairs rooms parted on his approach, and inside, he would hear the noise of a small child pattering through the location. The place never really bothered him, but at times, he did admit he was scared of what he didn't see. He never really felt alone in the place and often described the sensation he was being watched. His girlfriend, a struggling actress in her own right, finally convinced him to leave what had been an easy and comfortable if but unnerving job. Staying the weekend with him to keep him company, she wanted to make him dinner and the hotel kitchen was the best place. Everything still worked and the cooking area was sterile enough to cook in. As she casually lit up the stove to cook some pork chops, she began hearing the sounds and voices of a phantom kitchen staff around her. There was nothing to see, but she was experiencing the faint echoes of people moving around her, clanking pots and pans and the sounds of things being cooked. A faint voice next to her supposedly whispered, "Flip the chops so they don't burn." and she completely lost it. Storming out to never return, Joe tried to calm her down, but she would never enter the old hotel again. Clearing out, Joe left less than a week afterward.
Chris Todd never had another permanent caretaker after Joe moved on, but he still talks to him when they cross paths. Later highly superstitious caretakers left after only a few days while others were fired for being disreputable. Only one guy lasted longer than usual, nearly a full month, but he left quickly one night after someone smelling of French perfume jumped in bed with him. Very little poltergeist activity has been claimed on site, but another would-be caretaker said the furniture was changing location in the lobby and the plates and cups in the kitchen rattled on their shelves. While Chris Todd was grounds keeping outside the kitchen employee entrance, he heard a crash as if all the plates and cups had fallen and shattered en masse inside the hotel. He sent two gardeners inside to view the damage for him, but they found a thing.
"To me," Chris recalls. "It sounded like a shelf or cabinet had been pushed over and everything breakable had shattered in one large crash. When they came out claiming to have not found a thing, I was dumbstruck. I was like -" He does a double take. "I was convinced someone or something was trying to get my attention."
Today, the hotel still remains a frightening landmark to visit. Casual by-standers looking through the gates of the driveway have noticed a short figure waving to them from the front of the hotel. Described as short, jovial, friendly and dressed in one of those stereotypical bell boy uniforms, the apparition stands and waves and everyone he sees, somehow knowing in advance he's being watched. One jogger says she saw the otherworldly beneficent bell boy accompanied by a young girl.
"I get a chill every time someone describes that ghost, because all the descriptions sound the same." Chris adds. "A short, jovial-friendly bell boy with wire glasses happily and friendlily waving at people without malice, they all match old pictures of my grandfather, Dewey Todd, Jr. in his bell boy uniform. At the time of his death in the elevator, he was only four-feet-eight-inches tall.
"And the girl, I'm positive it's Sally Shine..."
History: It is said that the Hollywood Tower died with the innocence of Hollywood. That's almost true as it actually served as the site of the death of Sally Shine, a pre-Shirley Temple child star who had appeared in less than twenty short silent films before her first talking picture in 1939. Built in 1917 by Dewey Todd Sr. , whose son worked the location as a bellhop, the hotel was the preferred hotel for most of Hollywood's elite because if its location, and it once stood as a home for actors such as Errol Flynn, W. C. Fields, Mae West, Bert Lahr and John Barrymore. Unfortunately, the hotel had short-lived grandeur when Sally Shine arrived for a party in the top floor ballroom. Attended by her nanny, Emmeline Partridge, she boarded an elevator with bell hop Dewey Todd Jr. and aspiring actress Carolyn Crosson with her male admirer, Gilbert London. The elevator started ascending and as it reached somewhere between the twelfth and fifteenth floors, it suddenly exploded and crashed into the basement killing everyone inside. Sally Shine, borne Sally Gregory, was now a legend. The bodies of the victims were moved in secrecy to avoid reporters and Dewey Todd Sr., distraught over the death of his son and a promising young actress, spiritually died as a result, closing up the hotel and refusing to reopen its doors.
Identity of Ghosts: While everyone agrees that the ghost of Sally Shine walks the hotel, the names of her other ghostly confederates are not as well known and are often omitted from reported versions of the ghost stories and descriptions of manifestations from the place. Among the other ghosts are Dewey Todd Jr., still appearing in his bellhop uniform, and that of Carolyn Crosson (born Claire Poulet), Gilbert London and nanny Emmeline Partridge. While several of the ghosts seem alarming and disconcerting, Partridge's ghost seems to be the most dangerous, obviously still trying to protect Sally from her "fans." It is also believed that at least some of the sights and sounds experienced by witnesses might be holdovers or place memories of events imbedded in the atmosphere.
Investigations: In 1999, while pursuing research material for a Halloween article on the ghosts of the hotel, a tabloid reporter named Robert "Buzzy" Crocker teamed up with Chris Todd, the grandson of Dewey Todd Sr., and Abigail Gregory, the sister of Sally Shine to try and contact the ghosts of the Hollywood Tower. For years, Abigail claimed that Sally was murdered by her irate nanny and that the others were accidental victims, but this is contrary to actual Hollywood stories that Emmeline loved and treated Sally, even treating her as if she was her own daughter. Aided by a psychic and a paranormal investigator, Crocker's investigative team experienced both sounds of whispers and knocking in the hotel as well as a gamut of sensory and visual manifestations caught on video tape. In one segment of footage, the shadowy figure of a man passes in and out of camera range as Chris Todd describes the night of the elevator crash. During the séance, Anna Priddy, Crocker's niece and assistant, believing herself filled with Sally's essence, claimed that the elevator had been dropped by a previously unaware lightning strike that night. Backed by forensic analyzation of the elevator circuits proving his grandfather was not negligent, Chris Todd has secured funding and support and has since reopened the hotel to the public. Much of the bottom floors and the Tip-Top Lounge are open to the public with about twelve floors closed off for restoration. Stories of alleged hauntings still continue...
Source/Comments: Tower of Terror (1999), Hauntings based and patterned on the Grant Corner Inn in Taos, New Mexico, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California and the Miami Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida as well as from accounts depicted in the movie.