Location: Located in a high-criminal neighborhood in East Los Angeles, the former Ritter Boarding House rests at 1300 Los Palomas Avenue in the residential district of San DiFrangeles where Highway 60 crosses Interstate 160.

Description Of House: Barred behind a seven foot tall chain link fence and obscured by a yard of weeds and vines of poison ivy, the Ritter House is a two story Federal-style wood edifice with eight bedrooms and a converted attic over a brick and stone foundation. The Old American interior is decorated frugally with old antiques, Early American pieces and mahogany furnishings. Several personal belongings such as clothes, mail and books have been left behind in the rooms. Over the years, the house has been heavily vandalized inside and out by street gangs, drug-users, taggers and bored teenagers.

Ghostly Manifestations: In it's seventy years of operation, the Old Ritter House operated as a peaceful boarding house for thousands of travelers and merchants, but in it's twilight, it became the final resting place for twelve guests who vanished within its walls. It has been resting empty for over thirty years since the reclusive and psychopathic Ada Ritter poisoned then hacked up her tenants in a gory bloodbath of murders the neighborhood is still reeling away from.

At any given time in its past, the Ritter house always had between eight to ten guests living here. Publicly, Ada was a wonderful homemaker, a graceful cook and a genial landlord, but behind the scenes, she was poisoning her boarders and hacking them up in the basement to obtain their social security checks and military pensions. Rumors were she was even feeding parts of the dead bodies to her other guests, but this was never confirmed. The other tenants were often told that the missing boarders were often off visiting relatives or taking trips, but eventually, the lies caught up with eighty-three year Ada Ritter and the police and authorities moved in, carrying out the partial remains of twelve people from the cellar, garden and back yard. According to rumor, there are still remains on the property.

"I don't deny there could still be remains on the location." Jacob Pratt was one of the surviving boarders of the debacle. "There were a lot of places in that cellar to hide bodies. Ada's caretaker was almost constantly hauling in bricks to wall up parts of the basement, and no body was ever allowed down there, yet, Ada was always coming up and down storing her preserves. God know what else she was carrying up and down those bloody stairs."

In April 1989, Jacob was being interviewed about the murders by crime historian Chris Packard during the tour of the house. During the interview, their sound man kept reporting that creaking noises were coming from someone walking around upstairs. Although the house had been locked up and a preliminary walk-through confirmed the location was empty, the creaking continued. After several takes, Chris challenged Jacob to enter the cellar to do so, but less than five minutes into the discussion of the murders, a loose brick flew between them from an empty hole in the wall and the documentary very quickly moved outside to the sidewalk.

"I think we offended someone by being down there." Packard was the first person to allude to the hauntings in the house. "I had my article, but the footage of the flying brick was too good to just scrap for the floor of the editing room. As a footnote, we added it as an addendum to the finale of the documentary. Now, I've never believed in ghosts, and I'm not sure if I believe in them, but since then, I have not been able to explain what made that brick fly across the room."

Since the news documentary, people have been caught going by the house looking for faces in the windows. Cars slow down going past it hoping to get a glimpse of something. Bored teenagers climbing over the fence have been heard trying to break into the house or climbing up on to the porch roof to get in through the upstairs windows. One enterprising entrepreneur living across the street aimed a 24-hour web-cam on the house from the front and televised it over the Internet after a five-dollar monthly enlistment fee. Found guilty of contributing to the delinquency of minors, he was forced to take it down after eight months and taking in close to eleven thousand dollars.

Over the years, locals have claimed to seeing several things like figures wandering around the house and faces peeking out through the curtains. Lights reportedly come on in the back bedroom that was Ada's room. Others claimed that kids that broke into the house never came out alive, yet, whether any of these names belong to actual real individuals is a matter of doubt.

At the height of the alleged stories, Los Angeles tabloid news host Horton Rivers in October 1994 declared he would spend Halloween night with just his cameraman in the house. Known for hurling obscenities and his long conspiracy-ridden speeches, Rivers was going to bust the myth that the Ritter House was haunted by except by "a bad taste in decorators" and the memory of a "crazy old lady whose only contact with her boarders was by the end of an axe and her fingers in their bank accounts." Filmed live, the episode was promoted more heavily than Rivers' attack on the Warren Commission and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

From the start, the episode was turning out to be the biggest ratings hit for Horton Rivers. Psychic Roland Wortshafter was in attendance to add his expertese, but he never entered the house. Thousands tuned in to see Rivers the loud-mouth jerk scared out of his mind as he nervously entered the house, and cameraman Trip Henderson scanned the interior with his camera. From the start, there were a few creaking noises as Rivers explored the cellar where Ada Ritter sealed up her victims. A soundman in the network truck recorded an EVP ("Help Me.") that neither Horton or Trip heard. The sound of water dripping was heard despite the fact that all the water was shut off. A chandelier swayed, a door slammed shut and a very stressed out Trip dropped his camera and fled the house. Trying to film and narrate by himself, Rivers tried to film the upstairs and actually caught eight seconds of film that to date has yet to be explained. Reporting that he was hearing voices, he swung around to catch who it was and caught a strange shadowy figure in a doorway before stumbling backward out the window over the front door and falling to the ground

Although he'd swear he proved the house was not haunted, it would be the last episode of his controversial TV show.

"What I caught was not a ghost." Rivers told reporter Geraldo Riviera later that year from a wheelchair. "It was a trick of the light!"

"But there was no light on in the house." Riviera pointed out. "The house didn't even have any power."

"We had TV lights all over the front of the house!"

Since the Live Halloween event, the old Ritter House has turned from being a local haunted house to a derelict house with some history. No one slows down anymore to try and see any ghosts, but neighbors still report vandals trying to break into the house to the police. The smell or urine fills the front room, gang and occult symbols mark up the walls, scorch marks from small fires are on furniture and in sinks, doors and walls have been destroyed and trash consisting of beer cans, junk food wrappers, used condoms and drug paraphernalia litter the floors. What was once on of the most respectable homes in town is now a derelict house. Although no one wants to live in it, the house is now being exploited for fake ghosts and cheap thrills.

"Is the house haunted?" Chris Yagher is the owner and creator of Murder Mansion, the on-site horror attraction on the premises. "Let me just say that the spirits here are very hands on." While working on the house, Chris says he's been touched by something several times. He's heard voices and felt strange energy in the house.

Chris reports that a shadowy presence lurks through the basement. People have heard cooking noises from the empty kitchen, and witnesses once described an upstairs door that has repeatedly slammed shut, perhaps by an angry guest from long ago days.

"I've got twelve actors who play ghosts, vampires and werewolves here during the Halloween season." Yagher insists. "I might have a small production team, but we sure make up for it in intensity. There are lighting effects, smoke effects, mechanical effects and sound effects. I have a big industrial fuse box in the basement to handle all the voltage and for some reason, it still shuts down. Guests in the dark have been touched and had their hair pulled. The staff has seen people upstairs before opening, and furniture gets moved. One day after shutting down, a loud scream echoed through the house, and I never figured out what caused it."

Yagher likes to keep the interior dark for guests and the ghosts. His conventional Halloween season tour lasts about an hour and starts in the creepy gloom of the cellar and works up to the attic while his traditional paranormal tours operate with a guide pointing out where others have reported supernatural activity. After the tour, visitors are allowed to select a room in the hotel and wait in stillness for something to happen. Visitors have reported hearing footsteps on empty stairs, seen unexplainable shadows or even touched by unseen hands. Overnight guests are invited to hang out with local ghost hunters who will seek out the paranormal with scientific equipment. Experienced paranormal groups can arrange for a private stay who want to make a day of their visit.

History: Some of the house's history has been lost over time, but it is known that Joseph Matthew Ritter built his home and the old former sugar mill in the 1870s. After Ritter died, the place became a boarding house under his wife and had several hundred guests between the 1880s and the 1950s when San DiFrangeles was absorbed into Los Angeles as a residential district. Remaining a boarding house for several years, it passed into the custody of Ada Borden-Ritter in 1968 with the death of Franklin H. Ritter, Joseph's grandson. Although it was speculated he was murdered by arsenic, nothing was ever proved, and by time Ada was arrested and tried for murdering and defrauding her boarders in 1989, there was no evidence to prove foul play. The residence fell to the custody of the county until Chris Yagher purchased it to build his haunted attraction. Sentenced to the Los Angeles Correctional Institute for fifty years, Ada Ruth Ritter died of pneumonia in January 1991.

Identity of Ghosts: Ada Ritter murdered and mutilated twelve men in the house she chose as boarders. Her criteria was basically for male boarders with no family and a sustainable income who did not keep guests. Most of her murder trial's attention was focused on remains identified by the dental records of Edgar Downey, a retired firefighter whose decapitated skull was pulled out from behind her furnace, Raymond Gainey, a retired Air Force sergeant found buried in the garden, cellar and backyard and Alfred M. Neumann, whose partial remains from the cellar were identified by a war wound to his back. Downey's ghost has been seen several times, while Gainey's voice still screams from the bathtub where Ada dismembered him with a chainsaw.

Source/Comments: Tales From the Crypt (Episode: "Television Terror") - Activity loosely based on the Morse Mill Hotel in Morse Mill, Missouri, Hannah House in Indianapolis, Indiana, Ham House in Dubuque, Iowa and Wolfe Manor in Clovis, California

San DiFrangelos from the TV-Series, "Scrubs" (2005 - 2010)