MUNSTER HOUSE
Location: Located at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, the Munster House is possibly one of the oldest structures in Los Angeles County. It stands in the historic district of Mockingbird Heights, California, a former community west of Los Angeles on U.S. Highway 1.
Description: The Munster House is an intimidating Gothic Victorian edifice hidden behind a wrought iron gate and stone walls around over-grown foliage and dead trees. Details of the interior include an open foyer with a balcony and grand staircase decorated with wooden sculptures and columns. A suit of armor stands in an alcove at the top of the stairs. The living room and the study on either side both have fireplaces and an arch separates the living room from the breakfast nook. A formal dining room is off the back hallway to the kitchen, which has an old wood-burning stove. There are four bedrooms upstairs in addition to the master bedroom; two of which have small balconies over the front yard. The interior is infested with dust, cobwebs and deserted furniture. As one researcher points out, "it looks as if Frank Lloyd Wright met Boris Karloff!"
Ghostly Manifestations:
The Munster House is located in one of these picturesque neighborhoods only seen
in a TV series from the 1950s. All the homes are neatly trimmed and mowed, and
all the trees reach proudly to the sky. Some of the houses even resemble each
other, but as you walk down the sidewalk and come to along a stone wall that
feels as if it’s hiding something, you’re suddenly hit with a blast of wind
and cold air as if you’ve just entered another world. Known as the local
haunted house, the house might not even stand out if it wasn’t in such a dire
need of paint and repair.
There have been no stories of hauntings from
the old house from present or former tenants. However, the neighbors on the block have kept personal
many stories concerning the old ruined edifice, and the gamut of activity seems
to practically describe the activity of a family of ghouls living in the house
that once in a while seem to take physical form. It is the other phenomenon
that seems to take precedent over all the rest.
One story that most of the men seem to prefer
sharing notes on concerns the local “phantom hitchhiker” story of a
beautiful blonde siren seen around the town. Unlike Chicago’s Resurrection
Mary who is picked up around a cemetery, the beautiful blonde apparition of
Mockingbird Heights has been picked up all over town. It’s only until drivers
drop her off at the Munster House do they realize they’ve been sharing time
with a ghost. Usually seen as solid as any other girl, she was first described
as almost a younger version of Marilyn Monroe during the Sixties, but then sometime after 1964, men
who gave her a ride said she was almost an exact ringer for TV star Pat Priest.
Anyone who has given the beautiful young lady a ride has always remarked on her
very friendly demeanor and often can’t help but not refuse her invitation to
come inside and meet her “family.” That’s just before the neighbors hear a
scream and see the young driver running from the house and driving away faster than he arrived. No one is
quite sure from what these young men are being frightened, but one witness likened
it to an old urban legend where a young man took a beautiful girl to her home
only to discover she was a vampire once she got him there. One young man who had
encountered the girl in 1962 said, while in an inebriated state, that as soon as
he got through the door, she turned into a giant and tried to eat him!
The more entrenched local residents have seen
and heard other things. One neighbor who prefers to remain nameless has seen a
hearse parked outside of the house on more than one occasion. He remarks that
the back is always opened as if it were ready to pick someone up or drop someone
off.
The houses on either side of the dilapidated
edifice have been more privy to the noises and phenomenon. One former resident
who later moved across town said he always heard a loud roaring laughter as if
someone was having a good time in the empty house. The people who bought his
house described the laughter much different. They said it was more like the
cackling laughter of a mad scientist as from the old late monster movies at
night.
Strange flashes of light sometimes go off in
the house as if from small explosions. Sometimes, it’s as if a flashbulb was going
off bright enough to light up a room. On rare occasions, the sounds rattle the
whole neighborhood.
Other ghosts have been connected to the
Munster House. Pedestrians have
randomly seen a young boy in very old clothing running down the sidewalk and
vanishing in through the front gate or disappearing inside through the back door
from the front yard. An employee from the telephone company working on the lines
outside the house once described him as “Little Lord Fauntleroy as a
werewolf.” Several residents over the years have claimed to have played ball
with this boy in the neighborhood as kids, and that he seemed to act like a real boy in strange clothing up until he
vanished for home.
At one point in the Sixties, rumors were the
house was up for sale. People reportedly came round to look inside out of
interest, but no one decided to buy the crumbling edifice to live there. It was
briefly sold
to a wrecking company to demolish, but those plans never reached fruition. Neighbors at the time recall seeing
construction crews arrive to knock down the place, but they then left later that
afternoon never to return. Rumors are that something in the house scared them
off from knocking the place down.
1n September 1966, several college boys broke
into the house looking to see if the phantom hitchhiker was real. While they
didn’t see her, they did see the phantom visage of a beautiful woman bathed in
a green light. Wearing a long white dress and carrying a candelabrum to light
her way, she was coming down the front steps in the foyer, and they didn’t stay
around to meet her.
“She looked like the ghost of Yvonne DeCarlo
in one of her old zombie flicks.” One unidentified young man reported.
The only public record in the town hall of the
strange goings on comes from 1965 when the City Water Department were laying a
pipe deep underground at a level of twelve feet below ground. At that level,
they would have avoided the few homes with basements, but nevertheless, they
sent out flyers to inform the residents of the pipes being laid underground. The
five-month long
job went on without an ounce of trouble until they got into the vicinity of the
Munster House. As the city workers broke through a strange stone barrier in
their way, they suddenly
found themselves looking at an open dungeon made up to look like a mad scientist’s
laboratory. In the subterranean chamber, they reported seeing the Frankenstein Monster
on a table being tended by Count
Dracula himself!
They later reported to their supervisors they had not been
drinking alcohol until AFTER they fled the tunnel.
Despite the tomfoolery of these sorts of sightings, other witnesses have also used non-haunted house related visages of Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster and even a fire-breathing dragon to describe the sights and entities they have seen lurking around the house. In fact, in October 1964, several terrified locals reported seeing a huge terrifying corpse-like creature ambling through Central Park in the direction of the house. During a lull in activity in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the local newspaper sent two reporters and a local amateur ghost hunter to explore the house in October 1971 and document what if anything they saw and encountered. However, nothing occurred and no trace of a doorway to any “dungeon lab” as reported by the utility workers was found, but they did note on the excessive deserted nature of the house. Nevertheless, the celebrity monster likenesses seen in the house became so popular that the Mockingbird Heights Wax Museum decided to feature the images in their Chamber of Horrors. In 1981, five months after the feature opened, activity at the Munster house started up again as people from all over town reported seeing creatures all over the city, but it was later decided that these might have just been been over-zealous actors promoting the museum.
Over the years, activity around the house has been few and far between. The only truly occurring phenomenon and confirmed apparition has been the recurring blonde apparition reported by motorists. However, most of theses stories can likely be attributed to the house's sole current resident, Marilyn Munster, a local schoolteacher. Adopted by her aunt as a mere child, she took the family name out of what she calls a family necessity. She dismisses most of the outrageous claims of the location being haunted, only confirming that some of the "ghostly hitch-hiker" tales might have been based on her comings and goings from the house. However, she cannot be linked to the majority of the tales as over the years, the blonde apparition's description has involved her being around college age in the 60s and becoming younger to around high school age during the late 90s.
History: Originally the site of a Spanish port, Mockingbird Heights was founded as a city in 1881 and named after the indigenous birds that once filled the area, but it was absorbed as a residential district of Los Angeles in 1933 along with all the smaller local towns of the area.
The Munster House is possibly one of the oldest houses in Mockingbird Heights. Built somewhere between 1850 and 1860 when the area was a small wine community, it was constructed on the foundation of an old Spanish Fortress once used to imprison pirates, Indians and assorted criminals. (Notorious privateer Captain William Charles Morgan was reported as once kept here.) In fact, much of the fort's old bricks in its foundation were used in nearby Mockingbird Heights Grammar School and the former Episcopal Church, whose location is now marked by a dental office. Over the years, however, what was then a huge estate covered by vineyards was chopped up parcel by parcel until the house was surrounded by blocks and blocks of suburban homes during the housing booms in the 1920s and 1950s. There are no known records as to previous tenants before the Munster Family acquired the house in 1955.
Identity of Ghosts: No one is quite sure of the identities of the spirits of the house, but one theory posed from the uneventful 1977 investigation during when the house was dormant suggested they were holdovers from when the property was a prison. That might explain the ghoulish appearances of some of the ghosts. An alternate urban legend from the local neighborhood claims the house isn't haunted at all, just the home of a Romanian family from the area of Transylvania with radical appearances following a different lifestyle. Clyde Thornton, an employee from the former Gateman, Goodbury and Graves Funeral Home comments:
"I've known Herman Munster for years. He's one of my best friends in the world. I know he's scary looking, but under those looks, he's one of the nicest guys on the planet.... On the other hand, every time I meet his niece, she looks like a completely different young lady."
Comments: The Munsters (1964-1966 series, 1981 movie, 1988-1991 series) - Hauntings loosely based multiple episodes in the original series and random locations such as the McPike Mansion in Alton, Illinois, Franklin Castle in Cleveland, Ohio, Rengstorff House in Mountain View, California and other cases.