Monday, July 13, 2015

Paranormal Road Trip: Destination Los Angeles with Kate Danley

Paranormal Road Trip: Destination Los Angeles with Kate Danley

Come on boys and ghouls!  It's time to hop on Route 666 for a spooktacular Paranormal Road Trip.

This week's stop is Los Angeles, California and our special guide is Kate Danley, author of the MAGGIE MACKAY urban fantasy series.

L.A.'s Top 5 Spooky Places

Most people would say the scariest thing about Hollywood is the botched plastic surgery, and they may be right, but there are a couple of spooky haunts of the more paranormal variety.  My character, Maggie MacKay, roams Los Angeles taking down vampires and monsters and ghosts.  Here are a couple of spots featured in my Maggie MacKay series and a few bonus locations to send a chill up your spine.

1.  Hollywood Tower
Thought that the Tower of Terror was something just in Disneyland?  Oh no, my friends.  The Hollywood Tower is an actual place.  Though it has recently been renovated and now mostly features terrifyingly expensive apartments, this used to be a hotel where young starlets with stars in their eyes would stay… and many reportedly committed suicide.  The Tower is haunted by a multitude of ghosts, including a dapper gent on the 7th floor who stares out at the Hollywood Hills and then disappears.

2.  The Queen Mary
If you've read Maggie on the Bounty, it takes place on a fictionalized ocean liner called the Empress Adelaide.  The REAL haunted ocean liner is docked in Long Beach.  The Queen Mary started off as a posh cruise ship bringing Hollywood's elite across the ocean, but when WWII hit, she got a name change and became The Grey Ghost, shuttled soldiers across the Atlantic.  Now she's retired in Long Beach and sits as a permanent hotel.  One of the rooms is so haunted, they stopped renting it out.  There are crying ghost babies in a storage closet that was once the 2nd class nursery.  People report seeing water and bathers in the empty swimming pool.  Ghost hunters have been on board and found several vortexes.  If you're in a ghost hunting mood, they offer one thrills-and-chills "haunted boat" tour that will make you laugh and scream.  But if you want the facts about the hauntings, they have one of a more serious nature which will tell you the who/what/where of the boat's spookiest unregistered guests.

3.  The Hollywood Sign
In 1932, a young actress named Peg Entwistle felt her acting career was going nowhere and that she was better off if she ended her life.  She climbed up to the top of the Hollywood sign and threw herself off the "H."  Little did she know that the day after she committed suicide, one of the studios desperately kept trying to reach her to offer her a role.

4.  Hollywood Cemetery
Welcome to the final resting place of Rudoph Valentino, Mickey Rooney, and Douglas Fairbanks.  While no more haunted than any other cemetery, during the summer, you can bring a picnic and watch movies among the tombstones, some of the flicks featuring the actors and actresses buried there.

5.  Old Griffith Park Zoo
Sitting in Griffith Park is a zoo built in 1912, except no one lives there anymore.  It is nothing but empty cages, empty enclosures, all left abandoned since the 1960s.  The bars have been removed and now you can climb around inside and get your taste of what it might feel like if the whole world was watching you.  Visitors have described it as just… creepy

Thank you Kate for giving us such a haunting tour of L.A.!  

To learn more about Kate Danley and her books, please visit her website.  You can add the Maggie MacKay, Magical Tracker series here on Goodreads.


The M-Team Maggie MacKay urban fantasy by Kate Danley

Have you ever visited Los Angeles?  Ever had a paranormal experience in Los Angeles?

What did you think of Kate's picks for spooky places?

Last week on Paranormal Road Trip we visited Maradaine with Marshall Ryan Maresca.  Next week we'll be traveling to Tangle Lake, MN with Michele Hauf.

Join us for another spine-tingling Paranormal Road Trip...
if you dare!

No comments:

Post a Comment