Tales Of Haunted Hollywood Part I

With Halloween growing near, it's a good time for a ghost stories. My brother and I were trading ghost stories when he recalled something he'd seen on TV as a child. There were no History, Travel or Syfy channels in the late 60s, but the program was definitely a documentary. It featured haunted houses and the people who lived in them. One of the interviews was with German-born actress, Elke Sommer, who played opposite Peter Sellers in a Pink Panther movie called "A Shot in the Dark".

Elke Sommer and her husband, Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams, lived in Benedict Canyon in North Beverly Hills, California. They claimed that a ghost was living in their house. I can remember feeling spooked after watching this program. Sommer and her husband reported that they had a ghost in their dining room. The chairs would move around at night. Marks were put on the floor below the chairs before they went to bed, and in the morning the chairs wouldn't be standing on the marks anymore. The chairs would be all over the place.

In the middle of the night, Sommer and her husband would wake up to what sounded like a dinner party going on downstairs in the dining room. They heard voices, chairs scooting, glasses tinkling, and silverware clanging. Yet when they would venture downstairs, no one was there. Sommer said, "Things would move all the time and it would be very noisy and the usual poltergeist nonsense, you know." The ghost was described as being a middle-aged man wearing a white shirt.

After attempting to battle the spirits themselves with no relief, Sommer called in some help, contacting the Parapsychological Institute at UCLA. When Life photographer Allan Grant arrived at the house to take some pictures, he was a skeptic - but not so when he left. He said:

"Something happened that spooked me. On one roll of film that I shot in a particular room where they first spotted the ghost there were about four or five frames of film that were progressively fogged down to the end of the frame, giving it a ghostlike appearance, especially (of) Joe Hyams, who was in the shot. When that was processed and I took a look at it, I thought, there's no way that would happen...in the center of a roll...something else had happened that I couldn't explain and I've spent years as a photographer and that had never happened to me before....Something did happen in that house. "

The haunting continued. One night, awakened by a knocking on their bedroom door, Hyams opened the door to discover that a mysterious fire had broken out. He and Sommer managed to escape through a window. Shortly thereafter, they moved out of the house permanently. Hyams wrote a book about the haunting experience called "The Day I Gave Up the Ghost. "Evidently, though, the ghost didn't give up. The "severely haunted house" at 2633 Benedict Canyon was bought and sold more than seventeen times since Sommers vacated it, and many have reported ghostly phenomena.

Oddly enough, this ghost story made it to the pages of a 1965 and 1966 Jehovah's Witness publications, "AWAKE!" and "THE WATCHTOWER". Yet to be found, are the results of the investigation conducted by UCLA.