California's Most Haunted Destinations! A Brothel ,Theme Park And Governor's Home!

Welcome to Pat Patterson's Best of California. This episode is all about the best of haunted California. I'm Pat Patterson and I love California. So I'm here with John Cotter, owner of the Tudor House, which turns out had a mob history to it. The builders borrowed their money from the Los Angeles mob and Great Depression came along, they couldn't pay back, so the mob did take it over and turned it into one of the three or four places in all of Southern California where you could gamble, you could drink, you could do other activities, and you were very remote. Nobody's going to see you. There's an underground tunnel. Tunnel was used so they could come and go and not be seen. You could go from the Hotel Brothel underground under this building, so you could come and go, nobody saw you. So John, this is the hotel, and remind me the name. Brackenfern Manor, yeah. Brackenfern Manor, and you said it was built based on? Well, this design element of this building, East Coast Connecticut Seaside Hotel Cottage. So we're walking down the hallway and I stop John and I say, it says Violet on here, what does that mean? So tell me why a woman's name is on the door. Well, I'm glad you asked. He's not glad I asked. When the mob was running it, this building was the brothel, and so you decided which room you're going to go to when you saw the brochures across the street. You picked a room and then you came here and you found it. So Violet has more of our, more of the ghost stories. Some of the prostitute's presence is still felt. You can smell Violet's perfume. Our associate producer Leanna Romero claims she saw Violet. Let's hear it from her. So I'm so excited I've got Leanna Romero, our associate producer of the show, and after shooting the Brackenfern Manor up there at Lake Arrowhead, Leanna mentioned that she had stayed there and you had a haunted experience. Leanna, tell me what the hell happened up there. So yeah, we were staying there for two nights and on the second night we were up in the attic. We went there because of the ghost experience. We were amateur ghost hunters back then and the room that we stayed at was known to be the most haunted room. So I'm laying in bed and all the lights are off and there was a window directly in front of the bed and lights were, there was like a street light that was coming in from the window and I was looking at the curtains and it appeared the curtains were moving and as I gained focus what was actually moving was a big ball of vapor. And so as I gained focus and I noticed, you know, this thing walking in front of the curtain back and forth, it looked like it was just going to the bathroom and to the wall, to the bathroom and to the wall. And the gentleman that I was with at the time was really big into ghost hunting and he decided to jump up and get his camera and to try to take a picture of this because we could both see it. And when he went to take the picture and the flash went off, we very clearly saw some type of reaction to the figure or, you know, the spirit or, but it panicked and it seemed like it started, it ran to the right, it ran to the left into the bathroom and out of the bathroom it ran kind of straight ahead because the door was there and as it was running from the bathroom to the door we could actually hear the footsteps on the ground. Oh my gosh, that had to scare the bejesus out of you. What did you do? I just laid in bed like, you know, when something like that happens you, you're kind of dumbfounded, you're just, you can't really believe it happened Of course, that's what you're there to see, right? Yeah, you are, but you don't expect to have like a visual experience like that, you know. Be careful what you wish for. Right, right. There are many places in the Golden State rumored to be haunted, but there are few places like the Pike where the dead actually resided, quietly watching guests, and if those dead could only have moved they would have thrown a scare into the public more effective than any Halloween haunt ever conceived. This is one of those places. The Pike was at one time the fifth most popular amusement park in the United States, but by the 70s it had fallen on hard times and was running out space for film locations. It happened in 1976. A film crew was filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man and the Laugh in the Dark Scare Ride. These dummies and fake skeletons had been looking at guests for decades. The director of the episode didn't like the way one of these dummies was crafting his shot, so he asked the crew to take it down. When the crew went to take the dummy down, his arm broke off and a human bone was revealed in the arm. This was no dummy, this was a real cadaver killed by a .32 caliber bullet, but who was he and how did he get here? Believe it or not, a ticket from the LA Crime Museum was found in the cadaver's mouth. This allowed investigators to eventually identify the body as that of outlaw Elmer McCurdy of Oklahoma. Poor Elmer's body had traveled the country as a bizarre artifact that crime doesn't pay, and like a sad Hollywood has been, he somehow ended up in the Laugh in the Dark Ride at the Pike. Elmer eventually got to stop being a sideshow amusement and was returned to Oklahoma where he got a proper Old West funeral and internment. You hear these things every place we go, somebody sees a woman in white, somebody sees something. This is one that I might actually get to see myself. I'm Pat Patterson and I love California. So we're here at Pio Pico State Historic Park in Whittier and it might be haunted, oh my gosh. Kathy, tell me the story. The story is when I started working here, I had a docent who told me that he saw somebody up in the upstairs when he first, when they reopened the adobe and he went up there and there was no one there except, except a rocking chair that was rocking back and forth. I'm getting, the skin's crawling. Oh my gosh. So Barbara, I think that's, I think that's him. Let's go look. Okay. What if he, what if he's, what if he's mad at us? What? Ouija board. Mr. Pico. Mr. Hey, wait a minute. That's a cutout. You guys, did you prank me? Oh my god. Oh my god. They pranked me. Happy Halloween.