Ghost Hunting in Hollywood
Spot the Black Dahlia, Marilyn Monroe,
and Other Glamorous Ghosts
Episode Description
Here’s your star map to haunted Hollywood. On this ghost tour of Los Angeles, you’ll spy Marilyn Monroe’s spirit in a hotel mirror, step inside the grand hotel lobby where the Black Dahlia was last seen alive, and breathe in the lingering perfume of the 1930s starlet (and Kirsten Dunst doppelgänger) who haunts the Hollywood sign. Go beyond tourist territory—Tinseltown’s haunted hotels, mysterious mansions, and celebrity-filled cemeteries are jam-packed with unsolved mysteries and creepy chronicles from on and off the silver screen.
Historian and journalist Hadley Hall Meares joins our hosts to discuss Hollywood’s spookiest lore, with plenty of celebrity ghost sightings around each shadowy corner. Learn how to respectfully visit sites of real-world tragedy and treat victims’ stories with sensitivity, and discover why ghost stories can sometimes teach us more about a place and its culture than official records. You’ll never see—or sense—L.A. the same way again.
Haunted hot spots include:
- Millennium Biltmore Hotel, Downtown Los Angeles: The hotel where the Black Dahlia was last seen alive—and where guests still spot her riding the elevator.
- Sowden House, Los Feliz: Lloyd Wright’s Mayan Revival mansion, tied to a dark theory about the Black Dahlia case.
- Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel: Marilyn Monroe checks her reflection in a full-length mirror here, and Montgomery Clift’s ghost runs lines—and practices the bugle—in Room 928.
- Hollywood Sign and Beachwood Canyon: Haunted by Peg Entwistle, the 1930s starlet whose signature gardenia perfume drifts over the trail at night.
- Hollywood Forever Cemetery: Judy Garland, Rudolph Valentino, and David Lynch rest here, a weeping specter keeps vigil by the lake, and the peacocks are the real menace.
Guest
Hadley Hall Meares is a Los Angeles-based journalist, historian, and expert on Hollywood lore. She spent over a decade leading tours to haunted hotels, saloons, and alleys throughout L.A., and now writes about old Hollywood for a variety of publications, including Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, and Los Angeles Magazine. She’s also the co-writer of the Adam McKay-hosted podcast Death on the Lot, which explores 1950s Hollywood and the untimely deaths of stars like James Dean and Hattie McDaniel. Meares makes frequent media appearances as an expert on Discovery, NPR, CNN, History, and the Travel Channel. Her book about Maria Rasputin (daughter of famed Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin) is forthcoming in 2027.
In addition to her work as a Hollywood historian, she was also Amy Poehler’s stand-in on Parks and Recreation, a job she describes as being “a crash test dummy with a working mouth.”
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