OLD ZORBA HOUSE
Location: The Old Zorba House is located at 1313 Mulholland Drive north of Los Angeles, California. It has a secluded driveway and the house cannot be seen from the road.
Description: Two stories tall and composed of Tudor and Old English style, the house sits on a lot lined with trees against Mulholland Canyon. Composed of four bedrooms, a parlor, library and large basement, the house had an extra-added wing constructed after it was built to hold Zorba's research lab and a separate structure for a garage. The interior is Old English with fine American antiques and museum-level paintings and artifacts.
Ghostly Manifestations:
The ghosts of Zorba House are actually the collection of one Anton
Plato Zorba,
an eccentric but obscure ghost hunter who from the 1940s to the 1960s traveled Europe and
used unknown means to capture and contain several ghosts.
According, by accident or by design, he imprisoned them in
his home in Southern California up until his death in 1959 when, according to
legend, his spirit became trapped in his house by the ghosts he had collected.
Elaine
Zacharides was Zorba’s assistant and his
housekeeper for much of his career. A natural psychic and medium, she knows all
about the ghosts first hand and has experienced much phenomenon first hand. She
admits that she is not afraid of them, but she also confesses that she is
careful not to disrespect them.
"Mr. Zorba was no fool, nor was he sinister." She recalls him. "He was an intellectual with a fascination for the occult and an avid researcher for paranormal activity. He was possibly one of the first authorities to take the subject seriously and use real science to try and explain it. He was first to link paranormal energy with electromagnetic energy, but he was also foolhardy with some of his conclusions and blind to think he could explore the realm beyond death without precautions."
Zorba’s great nephew, Cyrus, inherited the
house several weeks after his death. Never a firm believer in ghosts, he does have
to admit that there was something strange going on in the house after moving in
to the old mansion. He was exploring the house a few days after moving in when
he saw four spirits in his great-uncle’s old workshop. He was trying on a set
of specially adapted infrared lenses equipped to detect invisible light when
they crossed his path. With the help of the glasses, he could see in vivid
outlines the outlines of a woman in tattered robes, the apparition of a decayed
corpse, a luminescent skeleton and a disembodied head floating through the air.
In his memoirs later in life, he said they seemed to be mulling around as if
trying to decide what to do with him just before they burst in to spectral
flames and vanished. He admits he wasn’t scared, but much more intrigued. He
later added that he wondered if the glasses allowing them to be seen also
affected them in some way.
Marion Zorba, his wife, has been much more
exasperated and angry at the poltergeist phenomenon she has to put up with in
the house. She has witnessed more than one object fly through the air at a time
and even had an object or two fly past her head. One evening she heard dishes
being smashed into the walls and ran into the kitchen and found some of the
expensive plates shattered. Flour containers have also been dumped across the
floor without any human interference and they’re usually closed up in the
cabinet. Even if they just fell, they would not leave the mess she usually
found. On one very discerning occasion, a cleaver flew across the floor and
buried itself into the wall just a few inches from her face. Fortunately, no one
has been seriously hurt yet.
Medea Zorba, eighteen at the time, had more
than a few scares after moving into the house. Now sixty-two (in 2004), she recalls a
window in her upstairs bedroom that refused to close. It seemed that every time
she thought it was closed, it would soon be open again. One evening after she
had been fighting with it and looking for a hidden mechanism that closed it, she
noticed it open again and rose to close it. As she did, a seemingly solid entity
moved out of the curtains toward her. She moved into another bedroom on the
other end of the house, but the window in that bedroom never quite closed all
the way. Carpenters, contractors and architects have looked at it over the
years, but it just won’t ever stay closed.
Cyrus’s eight-year-old son, William, had
numerous experiences as he explored the estate and grounds. Nicknamed Buck as a
boy, he later parlayed his experiences into a career as an eccentric horror writer under the
pseudonym, Ian Stark. As a boy, though, he claimed he often heard the
roaring of a lion coming from the basement and while exploring the basement, he
discovered old lion-taming equipment left abandoned in the room. He has also seen the
frightening but harmless specter of the lion tamer himself. Despite the horrific
appearance, the ghost is very benevolent and content with just puttering in the
basement.
"Oh, what a crazy, wonderful incredible house to explore as a boy." He recalls. "Pitched roof, long halls, high ceilings, the creepy back stairs, that shadowy backyard against all those woods... they're all ingredients I tried to recreate in my novels. I loved ghost stories as a boy; I still love them, but the joy of learning we had inherited this huge intimidating mansion and then learning it was haunted... I was on a high I've yet to come down from. To this day when I go home to LA, I immediately go back into the basement and look for the lion tamer's ghost. The old lion cage is gone, the whip is gone, the old circus posters are deteriorated beyond repair, but the old dingy top hat is still there displayed on a shelf, and if you listen carefully, you can still hear the distant roar of the lion and the faraway snap of the whip keeping it from going upstairs."
Buck also recalls coming across the spirit
of his Uncle Plato while poking through the man’s bedroom. He says the man’s
confused spirit doesn’t know where he is or how he died.
Buck has also seen the phantom of former
family Attorney Benjamen Rush on a few occasions. He had died upstairs during a visit.
Buck has said he has seen him standing at the
landing at the top of the stairs looking down. Sometimes he can be seen brushing
against people on the way down.
"My dad never told me that the lawyer died." Buck recounts. "It happened the same month we had moved in. I came home from school one day, I run upstairs and I saw Ben there, standing in the hall outside my room. It was like he was just visiting and looking for my dad. He looked at me, and said, 'Buck, got any new stories for me?' but I said no and that was it. I was off doing something else, but a few days went by, and I realized I hadn't seen him in a while, I asked my dad, "Hey, when's Ben coming by?" and I was told that Ben had died. It broke my heart because he was like the younger uncle or big brother I wanted, but a few days went by and I learned that he had already passed away the week before I saw him. I never saw him again after that."
In actuality, Benjamen Rush died under circumstances that were too sordid at the time to be reported in the newspapers. According to Zacharides, who passed in 1986, Rush was obsessed with Zorba's fortune and was murdered by Zorba's ghost in his bedroom shortly after Buck had found it in the house. However, the police department and corner's office don't believe in ghosts, and after a few months, his death was called a suicide. Buck reportedly saw it, but whether he has blacked out the incident or rationalized it has yet to be resolved.
Up until 2010, Medea and her
husband, Kenneth McElvey, with their three children have lived in the house,
which has since become a historic reference within the California Parks
Department. They insist that the hauntings have almost abated. Almost nothing occurs in
the house today.
“Once in a while,” Medea said in an interview for the release of the “13 Ghosts” movie. “My husband (felt) someone bump him in the hall, look behind him and no one is there. On other occasions, we’ll hear a door slam shut by itself, but the house is no where as active now as it was for our first few week.”
History: Zorba House was originally Booth House, built by an obscure actor
named Milo Amos Booth sometime between 1919 and 1924. Despite starring roles in a few
silent movies, he never became a popular actor and often tried to pass himself
off as the son of assassin John Wilkes Booth toward the end of his career.
Killed in an bar fight in 1929, he optimistically left the house to the son he
never had. His wife, Olive, left it to their daughter, Amelia, who later sold it
to Plato Zorba in 1949.
Rarely living in the house except for a few
months at a time, Zorba had an entire extra wing built so he could have a
laboratory, workshop and library. Built in his absence, the wing was built to
exact specifications that he had dictated and left with Zacharides. Traveling
through haunted sites throughout the world, he returned home for the last time
in 1959 with the personal belongings (and some says parts of the physical
bodies) belonging to the ghosts connected to them to become unwilling guests in the house.
Possibly unaware just how he was imprisoning them in the house, Zorba ended up becoming paranoid in the last months
of his life, converted his entire fortune into cash and hiding it throughout the
house.
After inheriting the house, Cyrus learned his
relative had become paranoid for a reason. Benjamin Rush was embezzling a lot of
his money and may have murdered him in his sleep to keep from being
revealed. Most of the fortune was located in niches and crannies all over the
house over the years. Some of it even being discovered as late as 1978 and 1983. In fact, it was after Rush’s strange death that most of the hauntings
stopped.
“Looking back now,” Buck confesses
today. “I don’t think the ghosts my uncle collected could leave the house
until his spirit showed them the way, but then he couldn’t leave until his
death was appeased. I think Ben unlocked the way for all of them.”
Medea Zorba returned to live in the house
after getting married. It had stood empty for a time after her parents passed
away, but she has no further qualms about the ghostly history of the house. The
2001 movie, “13 Ghosts,” merged and altered many of the facts of Medea and
Buck’s lives with that of their parent’s experiences along with several
reputed ghosts from various haunted locations across the world.
“I didn’t like that movie.” Buck confesses frankly. “I could have written it much better. It was pretty much creativity unleashed, but the gore, the violence,………. it had nothing to do with the actual atmosphere of the real house It didn't capture any of the emotion, the wonder, that... chilling feeling that comes with living in a haunted house. Nice set, though. I liked the guy who played dad.”
Identity Of Ghosts: The identities of most of the ghosts come from the extensive notes and research of Plato Zorba. From a French Restraunt in Paris, France, he retrieved the kitchen ghosts of Chef Emilio Resotti, his wife and mother-in-law whom he had murdered during an uncontrolled rage in 1903. Another was a peasant woman killed for allegedly practicing witchcraft in Sixteenth Century Italy. The basement phantom is Shadrach the Great, a lion-tamer whose lion went berserk and killed him during his act in 1890s New York City. The lion itself was shot and killed by police. Two are from the catacombs from Rome and another is from a temple in Tibet.
Several other apparitions and spirits have been erroneously connected to the mansion. Among them is mental patient, Ryan “The Jackal” Kuhn from Hellesley Sanitarium in England. Other reputed phantoms include NYC serial killer Breaker Mahoney, a railroad worker George “The Hammer” Markley, sideshow freaks Margaret and Harold Shelburne, pilgrimess Isabella Smith, slain model Dana Newman, former sports player Royce Clayton, murdered prom queen Susan Le Grow, lost housewife Jean Kriticos, gambler Jimmy Gambino and lost youth Billy Michaels, but most of these were actually borrowed from other locations or made up for the movie.
Comments: Thirteen Ghosts (1960/2001). Created by William Castle. Hauntings
loosely based on the movie. History based on various locales.