MUNSTER HOUSE

Location: The Munster House is located on 1313 Mockingbird Lane in Mockingbird Heights, California, a suburb west of Los Angelos on U.S. Highway 1.

Description: The Munster House is an intimidating Gothic Victorian edifice hidden behind a wrought iron gate and stone walls around over-grown foliage and dead trees. Details of the interior include an open foyeur with a balcony and grand staircase decorated with wooden sculptures and columns. A suit of armor stands in an alcove at the top of the stairs. The living room and the study on either side both have fireplaces and an arch separates the living room from the breakfast nook. A formal dining room is off the hallway to the kitchen, which has an old wood-burning stove. There are four bedrooms upstairs in addition to the master bedroom; two of which have small balconies over the front yard. The interior is infested with dust, cobwebs and deserted furniture.

Ghostly Manifestations: The Munster House is located in one of these picturesque neighborhoods only seen in a TV series from the 1950s. All the homes are neatly trimmed and mowed and all the trees reach proudly to the sky. Some of the houses even resemble each other, but as you walk down the sidewalk and come to along a stone wall that feels as if it’s hiding something, you’re suddenly hit with a blast of wind and cold air as if you’ve just entered another world. Known as the local haunted house, the house might not even stand out if it wasn’t in such a dire need of paint and repair.

The neighbors on the block have kept personal many stories concerning the old ruined edifice and the gamut of activity seems to practically describe the activity of a family of ghouls living in the house that once in a while seem to take physical form. It’s the other phenomenon that seems to take precedent over all the rest.

One story that most of the men seem to prefer sharing notes on concerns the local “phantom hitchhiker” story of a beautiful blonde seen around the town. Unlike Chicago’s Resurrection Mary who is picked up around a cemetery, the beautiful blonde phantom of Mockingbird Heights has been picked up all over town. It’s only until drivers drop her off at the Munster House do they realize they’ve been sharing time with a ghost. Usually seen as solid as any other girl, she was first described as almost a younger version of Marilyn Monroe, but then sometime after 1964, men who gave her a ride said she was almost an exact ringer for TV star Pat Priest. Anyone who has given the beautiful young lady a ride has always remarked on her very friendly demeanor and often can’t help but not refuse her invitation to come inside and meet her “family.” That’s just before the neighbors hear a scream and see the young driver driving away faster than he arrived. No one is quite sure what these young men are being frightened by but one witness likened it to an old urban legend where a young man took a beautiful girl to her home only to discover she was a vampire once she got him there. One young man who had encountered the girl in 1962 said, while in an inebriated state, that as soon as he got through the door, she turned into a giant and tried to eat him!

The more entrenched local residents have seen and heard other things. One neighbor who prefers to remain nameless has seen a hearse parked outside of the house on more than one occasion. He remarks that the back is always opened as if it were ready to pick someone up or drop someone off.

The houses on either side of the delapidated edifice have been more privy to the noises and phenomenon. One former resident who later moved across town said he always heard a loud roaring laughter as if someone was having a good time in the empty house. The people who bought his house described the laughter much different. They said it was more like the cackling laughter of a mad scientist as from the old late monster movies at night.

Strange flashes of light sometimes go off in the house as if from small explosions. Sometimes, it’s like a flashbulb going off bright enough to light up a room. On rare occasions, the sounds rattle the whole neighborhood.

Other ghosts have been connected to the Munster House. Pedestrians have randomly seen a young man in very old clothing running over the yard and disappearing inside. An employee from the telephone company working on the lines outside the house once described him as “Little Lord Fauntleroy as a werewolf.” Several of the neighborhood kids have invited him to play games with them and he seems to act like a real boy in strange clothing up until he vanishes for home.

1n September 1966, several college boys broke into the house looking to see if the phantom hitchhiker was real. While they didn’t see her, they did see the phantom visage of a beautiful woman bathed in a green light. Wearing a long white dress and carrying a candelabra to light her way, she was coming down the front steps in the foyeur as they didn’t stay around to meet her.

“She looked like the ghost of Yvonne DeCarlo in one of her old zombie flicks.” One unidentified young man reported.

The only public record in the town hall of the strange goings on comes from 1965 when the City Water Department were laying a pipe deep underground at a level of twelve feet below ground. At that level, they would have avoided the few homes with basements, but nevertheless, they sent out flyers to inform the residents of the pipes being laid. The month long job went on without an ounce of trouble until they got into the vicinity of the Munster House. As the sewer workers broke through a stone barrier, they suddenly found themselves looking at an open dungeon made up like a mad scientist’s laboratory. On a platform was the Frankenstein Monster being tended by Count Dracula himself!

They later reported in court they had not been drinking alcohol until AFTER they fled the tunnel.

Despite the tomfoolery of these sorts of sightings, other witnesses have also used non-haunted house related visages of Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster and even a fire-breathing dragon to describe the sights and entities they have seen. During a lull in activity in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the local newspaper sent two reporters and a local amateur ghost hunter to explore the house in October 1971 and document what if anything they saw and encountered. Nothing occurred and no trace of a doorway to any “dungeon lab” was found, but they did note on the excessive deserted nature of the house. Nevertheless, the celebrity monster likenesses seen in the house became so popular that the Mockingbird Heights Wax Museum decided to feature the images in their Chamber of Horrors. In 1981, five months after the feature opened, activity at the Munster house started up again as people from all over town reported seeing creatures all over the city!

History: Mockingbird Heights was founded in 1881 and the house at 1313 Mockingbird Drive was built on the foundation left behind by an Old Spanish fortress (Notorious privateer Captain Charles Morgan was once kept here.). There are no records as to previous tenants, but the Munster Family acquired the house around 1955. No one has seen anyone close to human actually living in the house, but in light of the startling entities and specters seen round the house, they likely live somewhere else.

Identity of Ghosts: No one is quite sure of the identities of the spirits of the house, but one theory posed from the uneventful 1977 investigation when the house was dormant suggested they were holdovers from when the property was a prison. That might explain the ghoulish appearances of some of the ghosts.

Comments: The Munsters (1964-1966 Series, 1981 movie, 1988-1991 Series). Hauntings loosely based on the series.