DARRODE HOUSE

Location: Named after the echoes of voices from migrant workers building the reservoir in the 1880s, Echo Park is a Los Angeles community surrounded by Interstate 5, Highway 110, Highway 101 and Highway 2. Located in a tree-filled neighborhood, the former Darrode House was once located on an elevated piece of property at the corner of Chaplin and Conklin Drive, but it has since been moved to a rural residential neighborhood off Templeton Road in Canoga Park north of Los Angeles on Highway 27 in the San Fernando Valley.   

Description Of Place: Formerly a two-story Gothic Victorian in a rural neighborhood of farmhouses and ranch houses, the Darrode House now rests on a cleared tract of land outside of Canoga Park. Although it has been modernized, it still retains much of its original Old World furnishings such as 19th Century taps, three period bathrooms, gas lights converted into electrical lights and a partial basement. Now named "Dark House," the grounds have been decorated with tombstones, dead trees and grotesque statues and topiaries to create a signature "haunted house" look.  

Ghostly Manifestations: Haunted house attractions are major staples of Halloween. Horror and paranormal fans will pay as much as $15 to $20 a person to experience manufactured scares from badly lit rooms crowded with props and screaming almost-actors with greasepaint smeared to their faces. The scares can be both manually and mechanically manipulated and highlighted by flashing lights. The theme of all of them is to set a scene then exploit the gullible and the foolish with surprises and gruesome imagery. The truth is haunted houses attractions are influenced by the motion picture industry; is it no wonder that haunted attractions are filled with the stereotypical icons of madmen, zombies, werewolves, mutants and vampires with gallons of blood and guts poured inside and down the walls? It is much harder to get scared when ghosts and apparitions refuse to perform on cue. However, for every twenty to thirty attractions with fake ghosts, there is one with the real thing. Black Moon Manor near Greenfield, Indiana is located in a former Civil War Hospital. The Screamville Attraction in Forest City, Illinois is haunted by a steamship captain. The apparition of a lost heiress haunts the Fowler House in Southeast California. The Baxter Avenue Morgue is located in the site of an actual haunted morgue in Louisville, Kentucky. Murder Mansion in East Los Angeles is built over a former murder site. The Chambers of Edgar Allen Poe in Kansas City, Missouri are plagued by voices and shadows not a part of the attraction, and both the Raven's Grin Manor in Mount Carroll, Illinois and Wolfe Manor in Clovis, California are based in location rife with their own turbulent histories. 

Created by Watson Ray, the entrepreneur behind Spookville in Florida, Paranopolis in Oregon and Ghost Central in Wisconsin, the Old Darrode House is the most recent haunted location to be added to the list. Known for getting attracted to houses with history and presence, the Darrode House was the first house he acquired to already have ghosts before he even took it over.

"People often ask me, "Mr. Ray, do you believe in ghosts?"" He replies theatrically. "And I answer, "Not before, but I do now." Far from the surly and distant figure he plays for the media, he's actually an animated and jovial personality with the personality of P. T. Barnum and the creativity of Steven King.

"People like to be scared..." He continues. "And I like to create locations that have both the flavor and verb of the paranormal but with the flair of the carnival haunted house. This is not your typical serial killer blood-dripping from the chainsaw and living dead haunted attraction. I've got movie-level special effects installed on the location, and sometimes, they end up scaring even me."

On several locations, Ray has felt as if he was being watched in the house, even during the day. His employees have felt a presence here as well, and whatever it is skirting from room to room and hiding in the shadows don't like the house or their presence being trivialized. Props vanish, machines break down, computer programs act erratically and electronic locks take on a mind of their own. On their first trial run of the system, Ray and his staff got locked into the house for a few hours and had to completely shut down and reboot the system to get out of the house.

"Don't have to convince me this place is haunted." Claire Hershey plays the hostess of the house who takes the guests through the location. "On my first week working here, I heard footsteps going down the upstairs hall when I was the first one here. I'm thinking... okay, houses make noises, but what if you're standing and talking to someone in the back yard, and you catch a glimpse of someone you don't know in a bedroom window. That's when you start wondering what's going on." 

The figure of a tall thin woman with ashen brown hair has been seen wandering the house. Attired in what is described as a period floor-length pilgrim dress, she passes from room to room upstairs and vanishes, once surprising Claire one night as she was taking a tour through the house. She is believed to be Janet Darrode, the former mistress of the house.

"She's sort of a frightening, bewildering specter." Ray admittedly has never seen her, but he's felt her presence several times. "She haunts the upstairs passing from room to room as if she's looking for something. There's been several occasions by staff, and  I've felt this horrible cold in the house; I'm terrified I'm going to look up and she'll be standing there. I've felt an sensation as if something is touching me, grabbing my arm as if something was holding me. I figure she's the most sinister thing about this house." 

Despite the scares upstairs and downstairs, the kitchen area is the one part of the house that has not been touched. Acting as a break room for the human actors, it has experienced drawers popping open, cabinet doors opening and closing, the water faucet coming on and odd reconfigurations of the table and chairs. The chairs are usually left informally down on the ground. and yet, when Claire or Harris, the computer programmer, show up to take care of things on location, the chairs are placed up on the table as if someone has cleaned the floor. On October 11, 2010, Claire entered the house, headed to the kitchen to make coffee and discovered the chairs stacked atop each other to the ceiling. It terrified her so bad she rushed out and waited for someone else to show up and go in with her.

Another thing is that the kitchen is stocked like an office break room. There is no metal silverware, cooking ware or objects for cooking and preparing food. They have plastic ware and Styrofoam cups in the drawers and cabinets, and yet while two employees were talking in the kitchen over a delivered pizza, a drawer slid open and a cutting knife shot out and imbedded itself in the wall behind them. They had never seen the knife before, they knew it wasn't in the drawer before and they have no idea where it came from. 

"The standing theory is that the knife was imbedded in the underside of the counter out of view, and the drawer popped it loose with the momentum carrying it across the room." Ray sits slightly and skeptically nodding his head. "My response to that is... Whatever gets you by..."

Even with the electronic gear and animatronics in unison with the special effects in the house, human actors are hired for the house to create a top horror experience. Carly Stetson was a young actress hired to dress in a period dress and have her skin painted a pasty white. It was her position to hide in a closet with a mechanized door that opened by herself and reach to the guests passing through the house with a murder victim on the bed in the room. On one occasion, she heard breathing behind her and a presence in the closet with her and jumped cue screaming when something stroked her neck. Calling it "a very unnerving experience," she asked to switch roles with Marley Hammersmith, the hostess who had replaced Claire in Canoga Park.

During a systems update in February 2010, Ray and Harris heard the noises of children screaming and running upstairs while the systems were off. At the time, Bernadette Forbisher, the location manager was doing the books in the kitchen and didn't hear anything, yet, she was in the kitchen at the top of the stairs to the basement. They've not been the only ones to hear this. Groundskeeper working on the property have heard kids on location and faces peeking out of the windows, and yet, when they unlock the house and do a walk through, the house is empty.

Lights are sometimes left on. Admittedly, the security lights around the property are on timers to deter trespassing, but inside the house, the light on the desk of the haunted study has been found on and so has the light in the attic. Those lights are not on timers, but are controlled through the fuse box in the cellar. They can all be turned on at once, and off by the fuse box, but they can't be flipped on separately without entering the basement and turning on the power.

Since the Darrode House has been relocated, it has been renamed "Dark House," but Ray and staff still catch themselves calling it the Darrode House at times. The furnishings are intact, but another wing has been added to the back to accompany more ghastly scenes and horrifying tableaus for the guests. Since it has been moved, the house phone has inexplicably been heard ringing inside. People on tours, staff and employees have heard it ringing and ringing and ringing, but when anyone picks it up, no one is there.

"It's one of those turn-of-the-century phones, and its only meant for decoration." Ray adds. "You know, the kind where they used to just slip down the handle to get the operator? It's wired into the wall, but there's no phone line to the house at all, but yet, we'll be at the end of the driveway and hear it ringing. I don't know if I want to know who's calling, but the weird thing is; someone got a call out. No phone line to the house at all, and yet, I heard the police has been here at least twice because someone calling 911..." He leans forward dramatically. "Did I mention there's no phone line to the house?"    

History: Originally named Edendale, Echo Park was the center of the Los Angeles film industry before it moved to Hollywood. Mack Sennett's original studios were in Echo Park, and Silent Film stars such as Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, The Little Rascals, Fatty Arbuckle, Charley Chase and the Three Stooges filmed on the hillsides here. Gloria Swanson and Tom Mix once had homes here. Built in the 1890s on the site of a former vineyard, the Darrode House had several owners in it's history, but it really established its history as the home of Janet Cooper-Darrode, a widow. After her husband died in 1991, she opened the residence as a foster home for small children, but on June 13, 1994, she had a complete meltdown and attacked all the kids in a bloody massacre before taking her own life. Only one child survived by hiding in the pantry. However, due to this event, the house stayed empty for several years until Watson Ray, the former business partner of Steven Price and owner of thirty-six haunted attractions, purchased the house to exploit the location by converting into a local haunted attraction. The local neighborhood union and Echo Park Zoning Committee barred his attempt to open the attraction and he had the house moved to Canoga Park where it now sits.

Despite the house's absence, locals claim they still hear sounds from the location... like children playing...

Identity Of Ghosts: Many believe the house is haunted by the ghost of Janet Darrode as well as by the seven children she murdered in the house. The children are basically harmless but mischievous. They tend to move things and hide objects, while many people are terrified by Darrode's specter in the house. Her presence is often felt as negative and overwhelming.

Investigations: There has never been a serious investigation of the house. However, the reality company who owned the house during the time it sat empty did contact the TV-series, "Sinister Sites," to debunk the ghosts in the house. During their investigation, the team captured orbs, incoherent EVPs, creaking noises and a small figure rushing past a doorway on a infrared camera in the upstairs bedroom.

In 2010, another TV series, "PI: Paranormal Investigations," investigated the house after it had been moved to Canoga Park and found in addition to warped floors, asbestos and corroded pipes that the special effects equipment was running on an electrical system creating electromagnetic field around the house that caused headaches, nausea and hallucinations. They also debunked the knife incident, but as far as the "Sinister Sites" footage, they attributed it to car headlights distorted by the quality of the film used by the team.   

Source/Ghosts: Dark House (2008) - Loosely based on Wolfe Manor in Clovis, California, the Phelps Mansion in Stratford, Connecticut and Old Metz Elementary in San Antonio, Texas.

Jeffrey Combs (Watson Ray) also played Milton Dammers ("The Frighteners") and Dr. Richard Vannacutt {"House On Haunted Hill")

"Sinister Sites" from the movie, House Of Bones (2008)

 "PI: Paranormal Investigations" from the movie, Episode 50 (2011) 

Old Metz Elementary was featured on the TV-Series, "Haunted Lives" (1995)


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