OLD ZORBA HOUSE

Location: The Old Zorba House is located at 1313 Mulholland Drive north of Los Angeles, California. It has a secluded driveway and the house cannot be seen from the road.

Description:  Two stories tall and composed of Tudor and Old English style, the house sits on a lot lined with trees. The house has an extra-added wing constructed after it was built and a separate structure for a garage. The interior is Old English with fine American antiques.

Ghostly Manifestations:  The ghosts of Zorba House are actually the collection of one Plato Zorba, an eccentric but obscure ghost hunter who from 1942 to 1959 traveled Europe and used unknown means to capture and contain several ghosts. He imprisoned them in his home in Southern California up until his death in 1959 when, according to legend, his spirit became trapped in his house by the ghosts he had collected.

Elaine Borden was Zorba’s assistant and his housekeeper for much of his career. A natural psychic and medium, she knows all about the ghosts first hand and has experienced much phenomenon first hand. She admits that she is not afraid of them, but she also confesses that she is careful not to disrespect them.

Zorba’s great nephew, Cyrus, inherited the house a few weeks after his death. Never a firm believer in ghosts, he does have to admit that there is something strange going on in the house after moving in to the old mansion. He was exploring the house a few days after moving in when he saw four spirits in his great-uncle’s old workshop. He was trying on a set of specially adapted infrared lenses equipped to detect invisible light when they crossed his path. With the help of the glasses, he could see in vivid outlines the outlines of a woman in tattered robes, the apparition of a decayed corpse, a luminescent skeleton and a disembodied head floating through the air. In his memoirs later in life, he said they seemed to be mulling around as if trying to decide what to do with him just before they burst in to spectral flames and vanished. He admits he wasn’t scared, but much more intrigued. He later added that he wondered if the glasses allowing them to be seen also affected them in some way.

Marion Zorba, his wife, has been much more exasperated and angry at the poltergeist phenomenon she has to put up with in the house. She has witnessed more than one object fly through the air at a time and even had an object or two fly past her head. One evening she heard dishes being smashed into the walls and ran into the kitchen and found some of the expensive plates shattered. Flour containers have also been dumped across the floor without any human interference and they’re usually closed up in the cabinet. Even if they just fell, they would not leave the mess she usually found. On one very discerning occasion, a cleaver flew across the floor and buried itself into the wall just a few inches from her face. Fortunately, no one has been seriously hurt yet.

Medea Zorba, eighteen at the time, had more than a few scares after moving into the house. Now sixty-two, she recalls a window in her upstairs bedroom that refused to close. It seemed that every time she thought it was closed, it would soon be open again. One evening after she had been fighting with it and looking for a hidden mechanism that closed it, she noticed it open again and rose to close it. As she did, a seemingly solid entity moved out of the curtains toward her. She moved into another bedroom on the other end of the house, but the window in that bedroom never quite closed all the way. Carpenters, contractors and architects have looked at it over the years, but it just won’t close.

Cyrus’s eight-year-old son, Arthur, has had numerous experiences as he explored the estate and grounds. Nicknamed Buck as a boy, he laid parlayed his experiences into a career as a horror writer under the brief pseudonym, Ian Stark. As a boy, though, he claimed he often heard the roaring of a lion coming from the basement and then while exploring he discovered old lion-taming equipment in the basement. He has also seen the frightening but harmless specter of the lion tamer himself. Despite the horrific appearance, the ghost is very benevolent content with just puttering in the basement.

Arthur also recalls coming across the spirit of his Uncle Plato while poking through the man’s bedroom. He says the man’s confused spirit doesn’t know where he is or how he died.

Arthur has also seen the phantom of former family Attorney Benjamin Rush on a few occasions. He died of a strange heartattack upstairs during a visit. Arthur said he has seen him standing at the landing at the top of the stairs looking down. Sometimes he can be seen brushing against people on the way down.

Today, Medea and her family live in the house, but they insist that the hauntings have almost abated. Almost nothing occurs in the house today.

“Once in a while,” Medea said in an interview for the release of the “13 Ghosts” movie. “My husband will feel someone bump him in the hall, look behind him and no one is there. On other occasions, we’ll hear a door slam shut by itself, but the house is no where as active as it was for our first few weeks.”  

History: Zorba House was originally Booth House, built by an obscure actor named Amos Booth sometime between 1919 and 1924. Despite starring roles in a few silent movies, he never became a popular actor and often tried to pass himself off as the son of assassin John Wilkes Booth toward the end of his career. Killed in an bar fight in 1929, he optimistically left the house to the son he never had. His wife, Olive, left it to their daughter, Amelia, who later sold it to Plato Zorba in 1949.

Rarely living in the house except for a few months at a time, Zorba had an entire extra wing built so he could have a laboratory, workshop and library. Built in his absence, the wing was built to exact specifications that he had dictated and left with Borden. Traveling through haunted sites throughout the world, he returned home for the last time in 1959 with the personal belongings (and some says parts of the physical bodies) belonging to the ghosts he kept as guests in the house. Somehow imprisoning them in the house, he ended up becoming paranoid in the last months of his life, converted his entire fortune into cash and hid it throughout the house.

After inheriting the house, Cyrus learned his relative had become paranoid for a reason. Benjamin Rush was embezzling a lot of his money and may have somehow murdered him in his sleep to keep from being revealed. Most of the fortune was located in niches and crannies all over the house. In fact, it was after Rush’s strange death that most of the hauntings stopped.

“Looking back now,” Arthur confesses today. “I don’t think the ghosts my uncle collected could not leave the house until his spirit showed them the way, but then he couldn’t leave until his death was appeased. I think Ben unlocked the way for all of them.”

Medea Zorba returned to live in the house after getting married. It had stood empty for a time after her parents passed away, but she has no further qualms about the ghostly history of the house. The 2001 movie, “13 Ghosts,” merged and altered many of the facts of Medea and Arthur’s lives with that of their parent’s experiences with that several reputed ghosts from various haunted locations across the world.

“I didn’t like that movie.” Arthur confesses frankly. “I could have written it much better. It was pretty much creativity unleashed, but the gore, the violence,……….  it had nothing to do with the actual atmosphere of the real house. Nice set, though. I liked the guy who played dad.”

Identity Of Ghosts: The identities of most of the ghosts come from the extensive notes and research of Plato Zorba. From a French Restraunt in Paris, France, he retrieved the kitchen ghosts of Emilio, a chef, and his wife and mother-in-law whom he had murdered. Another was a peasant woman killed for allegedly practicing witchcraft in Sixteenth Century Italy. The basement phantom is Shadrach the Great, a lion-tamer whose lion went berserk and killed him during his act in New York City. The lion itself was shot and killed by police. Two are from the catacombs from Rome and another is from a temple in Tibet. Another is mental patient, Ryan “The Jackal” Kuhn from nearby Vannacutt Sanitarium. Other reputed phantoms include serial killer Breaker Mahoney, a railroad worker George “The Hammer” Markley, sideshow freaks Margaret and Harold Shelburne, pilgrimess Isabella Smith, slain model Dana Newman, former sports player Royce Clayton, murdered prom queen Susan Le Grow, housewife Jean Kriticos, gambler Jimmy Gambino and lost youth Billy Michaels, but most of these were actually borrowed from other locations or made up for the movie.    

Comments: Thirteen Ghosts (1960/2001). Created by William Castle. Hauntings loosely based on the movie. History based on various locales.

Ian Stark from the short-lived (!) NBC-TV Series “Stark Raving Mad”