The Petranilla Curse

(I am currently finishing up a book on Griffith Park, and while parts of the the following tale are undoubtedly false, it’s just too good a tale to keep from retelling here.)

As anyone who has ever jogged along its paths after dark can tell you, L.A.’s Griffith Park can be a pretty eerie place.

But did you know that some say the park actually exists because of a curse?

The story begins during the Mexican era when the land that eventually became the park was part of the Rancho Los Feliz. Antonio Feliz inherited the property and lived on it with his blind niece Petranilla.

When Antonio died in 1863, the land was said to have been swindled away by a neighbor and his crooked lawyer, leaving the girl with nothing.

Petranilla then placed a curse on the chiselers as well as on the land, which she punctuated by promptly dropping dead.

If the stories are to be believed, everyone connected with the con met untimely ends. A few years later the property passed into the hands of Col. Griffith Jenkins Griffith.

Griffith J. Griffith, a man with the same first and last names to go along with a dubious military rank, was born in Wales in 1850 and emigrated to the U.S. around the end of the Civil War. Six years later he became a publisher in San Francisco and within a short time was the mining correspondent for the newspaper Alta California.

Griffith was able to glean enough knowledge about mining to become an expert at discovering gold and silver. He netted a large fortune which he and his wife Christina used to purchase the former rancho.

Griffith created an ostrich farm on the site, which was run by a man named Frank Burkett. Sometime around 1884, there was a lightning storm which severely damaged the property, but what really frayed the ranch hands’ nerves that night was the appearance of the ghost of Antonio Feliz on horseback.

Griffith soon closed down the farm, which enraged Burkett enough for him to shoot Griffith down before turning the gun on himself.

The Colonel survived, but the curse wasn’t quite through with him yet.

Griffith, trying to rid himself of the haunted property, donated it to the city of Los Angeles in 1896. After this, he became increasingly paranoid, believing that his Catholic wife was conspiring with the Pope to poison him. In 1903, while staying in Santa Monica, he shot her in the eye. She too survived, but Griffith ended up spending two years in San Quentin after pleading insanity.

After he was released from prison, the city spurned his additional attempts at gift-giving. It was only following his death in 1919 that the city accepted a $1.5 million fund from his estate to build the Griffith Park Observatory and the Greek Theater.

So, the next time you’re out jogging past dark along the park’s equestrian trails, make sure the horse and rider ahead of you are real, and that it’s not Antonio Feliz out looking for some swindlers.

(Like I said, much of the story about the curse is to be taken with a grain of salt the size of a Prius … but a friend of a friend, who works in the park, swears he met up with the ghost of Petranilla one night.)

Something of Value

Some Hollywood stories are so unbelievable …  they can only be true.

I was reminded of this recently because I’m currently writing a book on Griffith Park – the eight-square-mile wooded and chaparral-covered oasis that’s surrounded on all sides by L.A.’s urban sprawl.

Because of its proximity to Hollywood (the Hollywood sign is actually on park property), the park has appeared in thousands of films and television shows over the years.

While conducting research on some of these films, I’ve discovered some truly stunning coincidences.

Take, for example, the back story to the film Something of Value from 1957, which was partly shot in the park’s Bronson Canyon. This film co-starred Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier, as boyhood friends growing up in British colonial Kenya, who as adults get caught on opposite sides of the Mau Mau racial uprising in the 50s that tore their nation apart.

Two years earlier, Bahamian Poitier had his breakout performance in Blackboard Jungle, and would earn his first Academy Award nomination in 1958 for The Defiant Ones. Five years later he became the first African-American man to win the Oscar for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field. Over the next several years, he would star in, and occasionally direct, several more successful films, and would for a time serve as a Bahamian diplomat.

In 2009, Poitier was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

But back to Kenya for a moment.

Our President’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was one of the millions of Kenyans who lived through the bloody Mau Mau uprising. Obama Sr.’s father Onyango had been jailed and tortured by the British during a previous independence movement, sustaining  injuries that affected him for the rest of his life.

In 1959 – as one of his country’s best and brightest – the President’s father was awarded a scholarship to study economics in America. He came to the University of Hawaii, becoming the first African national on campus.

He met and married President Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, although he was still married to a woman in Kenya at the time. The marriage soon ended, but not before the August 4, 1961 birth of Barack Obama II in Honolulu. Just over 47 years later, he would become our nation’s first African-American President.

After a time in Harvard, the President’s father ended up back in Kenya, where accidents and alcoholism ended his life prematurely.

But did you know who helped fund the 1959 scholarship that brought Barack Obama Sr. to America in the first place?

Sidney Poitier.

(I would like to congratulate my stepdaughter Mariah, who will earn "something of value" tonight, when she is awarded her high school diploma!)

Griffith Park: Born of a Curse?

 

The obelisk in the center of the picture marks the grave of Col. Griffith J. Griffith at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Griffith Park Observatory, which he donated to the city of Los Angeles, hovers overhead.

As anyone who has ever jogged there after dark can tell you, L.A.’s Griffith Park can be a pretty eerie place. But did you know that the park actually exists because of a curse?

The story begins during the Mexican era when the land that eventually became the park was part of the Rancho Los Feliz. Don Antonio Feliz inherited the property and lived on it with his blind niece Dona Petranilla. When Antonio died in 1863 the land was swindled away by a neighbor and his crooked lawyer, leaving the girl with nothing. Petranilla was said to place a curse on the chiselers as well as on the land, which she punctuated by promptly dropping dead.

If the stories are to be believed, everyone connected with the con met untimely ends and the land passed down to “Lucky” Baldwin, whose luck quickly ran out, when the ranch and dairy he started on the property went bankrupt and he was shot to death by bandits. A few years later the property passed into the hands of Col. Griffith Jenkins Griffith.

Griffith J. Griffith, a man with the same first and last names to go along with a dubious military rank, was born in Wales in 1850 and emigrated to the U.S. around the end of the Civil War. Six years later he became a publisher in San Francisco and within a short time was the mining correspondent for the newspaper Alta California. He was able to glean enough knowledge about mining to become an expert at discovering gold and silver. He netted a large fortune which he and his wife Christina used to purchase the former rancho.

Griffith created an ostrich farm on the site, which was run by a man named Frank Burkett. Sometime around 1884, there was a lightning storm which severely damaged the property, but what really frayed the ranch hands’ nerves that night was the appearance of the ghost of Don Antonio Feliz on horseback. Griffith soon closed down the farm, which enraged Burkett enough for him to shoot Griffith down before turning the gun on himself. Griffith survived, but the curse wasn’t quite through with him yet.

Griffith, trying to rid himself of the haunted property, donated it to the city of Los Angeles in 1896. After this, he became increasingly paranoid, believing that his Catholic wife was conspiring with the Pope to poison him. In 1903, while staying in Santa Monica, he shot her in the eye. She too survived, but Griffith ended up spending two years in San Quentin after pleading insanity.

After he was released from prison, the city spurned his gift-giving. It was only following his death in 1919 that the city accepted a $1.5 million fund from his estate to build the Griffith Park Observatory and the Greek Theater.

So, the next time you are out jogging past dark along the park’s equestrian trails, make sure the horse and rider ahead of you are real, and that it’s not Don Antonio out looking for some swindlers.

(FYI – Marc Wanamaker and I started work this week on an Arcadia Publishing book entitled Images of America: Griffith Park. Look for it in 2011.)