On a quiet Sunday night in early December 1959, an 11 year old girl name Debbie awoke to a scream and some strange noises coming from her sister’s room. She got up to see what the fuss was about, and, sleepy eyed, walked down the dark hallway when her frightened and bleeding older sister, Judye, ran screaming down the stairs. “Go back to bed, this is a nightmare,” her father, who held a blood-soaked ball-peen hammer, told her. It was not a bad dream. It was real. Such was the beginning of the legend of the Los Feliz Murder Mansion.

Judye managed to survive the brutal attack with a fractured skull, and in an apparent change of mind, their father did not attack Debbie or their younger brother who was also in the house. Their mother was not so lucky—she was beaten to death with the hammer before the assault on Judye. Shortly after the encounter with Debbie, her father, a cardiologist named Dr. Harold Perelson, took a handful of tranquilizers and sedatives, laid on the floor next to his dead wife and went to sleep with the hammer still in his hand. He was dead by the time the police and ambulance arrived.

The house was foreclosed and auctioned off within a year of the horrific night. The legend goes that the new owners never moved into the house and everything inside the house remained exactly as it was left in the aftermath of the murder-suicide for the next 60 years. Quite naturally, this spawned tales of the spectral form of Dr. Perelson walking past the windows and ghostly screams emanating from the abandoned mansion.

Also as expected, the ghost stories of the admittedly creepy looking house drew curious teenagers and later ghost hunters to check out the place for themselves. Many decided to break in, but most were content to just peer in through the windows and wander around the property, to the chagrin of neighbors in this posh neighborhood.

The mansion was indeed privately owned since 1960; however, it may not have been uninhabited. The Enrique family, which owned the murder mansion until 2015, may have lived in it briefly and according to Rudy Enrique, who eventually inherited the house from his parents, it was in fact their own furniture that filled the house. The Perelson family’s belongs were moved out prior to the auction.

Ghosts or no ghosts, the murder mansion was cleaned out and put on the market in March, 2016. In July, a young couple, Lisa Bloom and her husband Braden Pollock, purchased the murder mansion and stated that they plan to fully renovate and move into the house. As can be seen in the photos, a fence has been put up around the house and repairs should begin soon, if they have not begun already. At a sale price of $2.289 million it was a steal for that neighborhood, even accounting for all that would need to be done to fix the house up. Similar sized homes in good condition in the area usually sell in the $5 million range, so this could be a very smart investment. There is some speculation that they may simply demolish the house and build an entirely new one on the lot, but that remains to be seen.

With a promising future, it looks like the murder mansion may finally be able to move past the terrible incident of that fateful night in 1959 at long last. If you want to see the house before it is either altered or rebuilt, you can find it at 2475 Glendower Place. However, keep in mind this is a residential area and it is on a narrow dead end street. All of the neighbors have surveillance cameras pointed at the street as a result of unscrupulous ghost hunters and thrill seekers that have broken into the house over the years. It is a public road though, so it is fine to gawk at it from the street and take a few photos of it if you so wish. I just wouldn’t recommend staying too long or succumbing to the temptation to see if any screams can still be heard there late at night.

For more about the murder-suicide that spawned this urban legend, there is an excellent article on medium.com that I highly recommend.