What kind of guy rents a hotel room known to be the setting of a gruesome murder, hires actors to dress up in fancy clothes, and then asks them to beg for angry spirits to come out of the woodwork? That’s how photographer and historian Craig Owens likes to spend his nights. Back in 2005, while doing cinematography work in Hollywood, Owens started visiting some of the massive, historic hotels around Southern California for a period screenplay he planned on writing. One night in 2001, he went to stay at the Mission Inn in Riverside.
“I heard some coins dropping in my suite,” he says, “and then the clip-clop of a woman’s heels. So I conducted a ten-minute interview with a tape recorder running—it was my first ever, and I felt like a fool asking questions to the air. On the tape later, though, I heard a woman’s voice say, ‘I want to go home.’”
This was as turning point for Owens, who currently lives in Glendale and runs the website Bizarre Los Angeles. “While, the screenplay seemed like a Hail Mary pass in a game of nothing but Hail Mary passes, I knew I could get results in the paranormal field,” he says. “And I knew I could actually use technology and science and get away from the hocus pocus of psychics.”
It was a rabbit hole he would never return from.
Now, in the book Haunted by History: Separating the Facts and Legends of Eight Historic Hotels and Inns in Southern California, Vol. 1, Owens has collected his findings. The book includes his exhaustive research cataloging hundreds of suspicious deaths in some of the state’s most famous hotels, as well as the over-the-top, sometimes wonderfully silly, photos Owens created in the rooms and hallways where the bad stuff went down.
He follows up on every legend and rumor, sometimes setting up ghostbusting E.V.P. recorders in multiple hotel rooms in one night. He’s recorded whispering, singing, and threats to “Get out!” He’s seen ethereal apparitions while waiting for elevators. He’s heard doors mysteriously slam, and his actresses have had their toes pulled in the middle of the night. The book sports hundreds of historic photos of the hotels under construction and in their heydays, and documents attempts by hotel owners to both hide their spectral infestations (by changing room numbers, for instance) and capitalize on them (by holding Halloween parties).
But by far the biggest attraction is the re-creation photos, in which we see sexy angels and devils, handlebar moustaches and top hats, bowling-ball style bombs with fuses burning, men walking in on their wives cheating, and bodies flung willy-nilly.
“I’m kind of hard to scare,” says Owens. “Here I am playing psych games with ghosts, trying to draw them out. Sometimes after the adrenaline wears off, I’ll feel a little creeped out.”
In addition to ghostbusting, Owens has taken time to restage drag scenes from Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego where it was filmed; a historic brawl between Charlie Chaplin and Louis B. Mayer at the Hotel Alexandria in Downtown L.A.; and a 1920’s silent film featuring a wedding, a robot, and a shootout at the Pierpont Inn in Ventura.
But despite all the fun, Owens believes his research will be useful to other students of the paranormal—particularly his audio files which he is preparing to release in ebook editions.
“Sometimes I wonder, ‘Am I crazy?’” But once you exhaust all the explanations for a door opening and closing, or an object moving across the room, you can’t use mathematics or physics to explain what happened. And then it’s Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is the paranormal one. “Friends bring up Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining when talking about what I do,” continues Owens. “‘Here’s Johnny!’ and all that. But I like to think I’m a bit more stable than Jack Nicholson’s character.”
“The Banning House Lodge is a very remote place on Catalina built in 1911. This den, with its wood paneling, is so warm and rich. As I was setting up this seance shot, I saw a yellow orb that was just a light reflection in the lens; it wasn’t supernatural, though glowing orbs are a thing— ‘spirit flares.’ But I told the actors to look up, and I got the shot. People show me glowing-orb photos all the time, so this is me debunking those people. I played it to full effect.”
“This was taken just after a door slammed by itself at the Valentino suite at the Hotel Alexandria. That look of fear is genuine. I had a guy holding a spotlight for me down a hallway and he was saying, ‘Can you hurry up and get the shot? I’m not feeling too good.” When the door slammed, he screamed and I got the shot. I chose the costume just because there were a lot of flamboyant people coming and going there—wealthy people slipping in and out in disguises.”
“The closest I ever came to being really scared was when I saw a shadow man at the Mission Inn. I had never believed in shadow people, but after this I slept with the light on for about ten days. I decided I had to go back and face my fears. I rented the same room and dressed actors as shadow people in the old Hollywood style. The protagonist is me taking care of unfinished business.”
“It was after midnight at the Glen Tavern Inn, and the hotel was basically empty. I was adjusting the light and heard the doorknob rattle. So I turned and saw the door open two feet, pause, and then close. Doors don’t behave that way on their own. I turned back to the models: Ginger had been texting her boyfriend and missed it, but Angelique’s eyes were as big as saucers and she had gone pale.”
“At the Hotel Del Coronado, we did a tribute to Some Like It Hot. This picture shows the actors in drag. And we did the ’70s cult film Wicked, Wicked with a bell boy and a butcher knife. I didn’t want to scare the guests, so I waited until the middle of the night for that—that’s when a naked man with a giant belly came stumbling through. He cupped his privates like a Mel Brooks character and went running back to his room. On the tape later I could hear a voice saying, ‘Go to bed.’”
“At the Pierpont Inn, most of the ghost stories involve the family, so out of respect for them, I stayed away from that. Since silent-movie crews used to stay there, I invented my own 1910-style serial. Every time I’ve been there, I’ve heard strange sounds. This particular night, I heard three quick pops, like a riding crop. And that same night some things got rearranged in my kids’ room at home. It’s like the ghost was saying, ‘You’re going to mess around in my house, well, right back at you.’”
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