supposedly occurred north of Mount Chapel on Mount Hollywood Drive, where thirty years prior, a young couple was crushed by a falling tree while making love on a picnic table. Workers who tried to clear the tree fell ill, including a supervisor who suffered a heart attack. Although the article was a hoax (the URL for the still-online website reads “www.latirnes.com,” the column is written by “Norm Bates,” and photos are credited to “Michael Myers” and “Art Banksy”), that hasn’t stopped people from searching out the site (it has an official location on Google Maps) or reporting additional sightings.
Other hauntings in the park include ghost tigers in the Old L.A. Zoo, disappearing people at the merry-go-round and Griffith Observatory, phantom trains at Travel Town, and something known as “the Griffith Park Creature.” As the years go on and more imaginative folks move to L.A. from all over the world, you can expect even more ghost stories to pop up, but I think the best way to see ghosts in the park is to enjoy some of the real-life Halloween seasonal attractions like Boney Island, the Haunted Hayride, and the Halloween Ghost Train.
“Colonel” Griffith Jenkins Griffith, 1903 (University of Southern California Libraries, California Historical Society)
Griffith wooed and wedded Mary Agnes Christina Mesmer (often known as Tina) in 1887, had one son named Van, and turned his attention to the future of Los Angeles. When he toured Europe, he noticed that all the major cities also had major parks. Even in the growing cities of the United States, parks were an important part of civic pride—but in his adopted Los Angeles, the park situation was pretty poor. So on December 16, 1896, Griffith and Tina presented 3015 acres of Rancho Los Feliz to the City of Los Angeles as a Christmas present explicitly for use as a public park, essentially giving the town a park four times the size of New York City’s Central Park overnight. An engraved copy of the deed is visible in the Griffith Park Visitor Center.
The public’s love and admiration for Griffith was relatively short-lived—on September 3, 1903, the publicly teetotaling Griffith stumbled into the presidential suite of Santa Monica’s Hotel Arcadia, drunk. He accused his Catholic wife of trying to poison him on behalf of the pope and shot her in the face with a revolver.
Miraculously, she survived and escaped by jumping out a window to the nearby owner’s suite. The fallout was immediate—Griffith was shunned from society and became entangled in one of L.A.’s earliest celebrity trials. His lawyers used a defense of “alcoholic insanity,” and he spent two years in San Quentin Prison and paid a fine of $5000. Understandably, Tina got a divorce.
The City of Los Angeles didn’t want much to do with Griffith after this episode, although he continued to donate land for parks and money for an observatory and a Greek-style theater inside the park that bore his name. In his 1910 book Parks, Boulevards, and Playgrounds, Griffith laid out some fairly progressive ideas about city parks, including the notion that they should be free to everyone so as not to become the playgrounds of the rich. He also wrote that cities had an obligation to provide public transportation to the parks so everyone could access them—issues we are still dealing with more than a hundred years later. (He walked the walk on this, too—at various times, both Griffith and his son, Van, personally ran their own bus lines into the park when the City refused.) In that book, though, Griffith was also prickly about being excluded from society life and euphemistically described his prison time as “my forced absence from the city,” so . . . we can’t say he was totally repentant about the whole shooting-his-wife-in-the-face thing either.
Griffith died on July 6, 1919, embroiled in a court battle with a parks commission that didn’t want to accept his donations for the theater and observatory. He left the money for the park in his will as the Griffith J. Griffith Charitable Trust, which continues to actively fight for the preservation, protection, and improvement of the park today. Griffith J. Griffith is buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard.
FLORA AND FAUNA
Visitors fighting their way through the “concrete jungle” of Los Angeles are often surprised to see the vast array of wild plant and animal life that makes its home in Griffith Park. The most commonly seen mammals are mule deer, squirrels, and coyotes, although it is not uncommon to run into raccoons, opossums, rabbits, and skunks on the trails as well. Quiet and lucky visitors may be blessed with a glimpse of a bobcat (it took me years of hiking here before I spotted one while writing this book). In 2012, researchers discovered a male mountain lion, now known as P-22, living inside Griffith Park—you will most likely never see him, but if you come across tracks, consider yourself extremely lucky!
A number of lizards and snakes make their home in Griffith Park, too—you will most often encounter alligator lizards and western fence lizards in the park (the western fence lizards are the ones that look like they’re doing pushups; alligator lizards are more commonly found near water sources). These lizards often have a habit of bolting through the brush while you’re hiking nearby, spooking you into thinking something more dangerous is around. During the wet season, you may also get to see (or hear) western toads near creeks, arroyos, or the Los Angeles River. Most snakes that live inside the park are harmless, but the Southern Pacific rattlesnake is here as well and should be treated with caution (more on that in a bit).
An L.A. Conservation Corps worker helps an alligator lizard find its way back to the Los Angeles River.
Bug lovers will enjoy walking the paths and trails of the parks, where they’re almost guaranteed to see at least a stink beetle showing off its good side to humans. Praying mantises will often hang out hoping to catch a meal on branches; numerous moths and butterflies can be found depending on the season; and there’s a common, slow-moving insect with the wonderful name of diabolical ironclad beetle—known as the tank of the insect world.
Tarantulas are known to hike the trails at sunset during their mating season. These arachnids only bite in self-defense, and their venom is weaker than that of a typical bee. They burrow underground and are very sensitive to the vibration of the ground—for example, from passing feet, wheels, or hooves.
If you’re not a birder, Griffith Park may inspire you to become one. More than two hundred species of birds have been identified in the park, which is both a wintering home for many species and a pit stop on migration paths. The range of birds here is impressive—crows and ravens swipe goodies from picnickers; great blue herons slowly stalk the Los Angeles River looking for frogs and fish to eat; majestic birds of prey like red-tailed hawks, Cooper’s hawks, and peregrine falcons soar on thermals far above the park; Anna’s and Allen’s hummingbirds zip through the chaparral sipping nectar; mockingbirds and black-headed grosbeaks fill the air with song (a great reason to leave those headphones and speakers at home); acorn woodpeckers fill up trees with future meals; and California scrub jays can sometimes be spotted darting to and from their food caches—research has shown they can remember up to two hundred storage locations, along with what’s stored inside and how quickly it’s decaying.
Tarantulas may inspire fear, but they’re pretty harmless to humans. (photo by Raphael Mazor)
The main plant communities found in Griffith Park are coastal sage scrub and chaparral. I’ve used this joke before, but there’s an easy way to tell the difference: If you smell nice, you’re in sage scrub. If you’re bleeding, you’re in chaparral.
Both communities are dominated
