The Walking Dead, Vampires, and Johhny Depp: A Story of an Ominous Hollywood Mansion
by Greg King
Most of the old Hollywood mansions reflected the aspirations and personalities of their owners. They wanted visible expression of their achievements and financial success, in which they could live surrounded by the luxury their public envisioned. The houses that went up in Beverly Hills and Hollywood in the 1920s offered a variety of styles, from “rustic hunting lodge” (Pickfair, the estate of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks) to Mediterranean palazzo (Harold Lloyd’s Greenacres and Valentino’s Falcon Lair). But one mansion struck out in an entirely different direction. A massive limestone castle, replete with Gothic arches, intricate wrought-iron grilles, spidery towers, and steep roofs, it looks – well, ominous. There’s nothing homey about it. Yet I’ve been obsessed with it since I was a little kid. It served as the backdrop to one of my favorite horror movies, one that scared me for years and which even now I think is quite capable of raising goosebumps. It also cropped up in my favorite horror television series, and in yet another eerie film, adding to its appeal. Until recently, I had no idea where it was located. Now, having learned about its actual grim history, it seems even more sinister.
It sits just above Sunset Boulevard on Hollywood’s North Sweetzer Avenue, hidden behind a screen of trees and foliage. Once, though, it was visible to anyone passing along Sunset; guides would point it out to naïve tourists as the home of actor Bela Lugosi: given his portrayal of the vampiric count in Universal’s 1931 Dracula, it seemed entirely appropriate that the Hungarian expat would live in such a forbidding castle.1 Unfortunately for this tale, Lugosi never lived here.
The actual history of the mansion starts in 1931. It owes it existence to an eccentric former Louisiana schoolteacher named Hersee Moody. Ambitious and enamored of the trappings of wealth, she earned her fortune the old-fashioned way: she married a succession of rich husbands. By the 1920s she was living in Beverly Hills, after husband No. 3, businessman Peter Gross, committed suicide when the couple’s housekeeper threatened him with blackmail over their illicit affair. Husband No. 4, George Carson, was a barely literate former coalminer – scarcely the sort of social background that Hersee found promising. But when Carson won a $20 million lawsuit against a mining company, Hersee moved quickly. The couple married although a disillusioned Hersee soon tried to have George declared insane and committed to an asylum. His doctors warned that Hersee was out to get control of his money but, when she learned that her husband was receiving marriage proposals from women across America, she quickly reconciled, apparently not wanting to lose her golden goose.2
As part of the reconciliation, Carson purchased a four-acre plot of land above Sunset Boulevard on which Hersee could build her dream house. Soon the couple was off to Europe, where Hersee spent a significant portion of her husband’s fortune buying antique furniture, tapestries, and art to adorn the new mansion.3
Hersee apparently designed the mansion herself. Construction began in 1929 and took four years, with hundreds laboring to bring it to life. Completed at an estimated cost of $500,000 (roughly $40 million today), the mansion, which Hersee named Mount Kalmia after the mountain flower, encompassed some 7,500 square feet centered around a central, two-story hall with a circular staircase ascending beneath a stained-glass dome. Open archways led to the drawing room, dining room, ballroom, morning room, library, and sunroom, with walls covered in tinted plaster or hand-painted papers and boasting some 125 stained glass windows. Intricate wrought-iron grilles and cages covered windows and fringed arched terraces. The second floor was given over to six bedrooms and baths, a reception room, and accommodation for staff. Oddly, although the roof sported tall chimneys, not a single fireplace was included within. As the house was built at the edge of a steep hillside above Sunset Boulevard, Hersee even had a conveyer belt installed in the basement, so that merchants could unload their goods without having to clutter up the mansion’s forecourt.4
The Carsons moved into the finished mansion in 1933. By this time the marriage had again faltered: George divorced Hersee the following year and he died shortly afterward, but not before he had changed his will and cut his ex-wife completely out of his estate. Not one to go quietly, Hersee sued: she was eventually awarded Mount Kalmia, but with no money for its upkeep she was soon reduced to selling its furniture and fittings to make ends meet. Unable to afford the mansion, she tried to sell it but there were no buyers. By 1940, she owed the government years of unpaid taxes, and the IRS seized the property, forcing Hersee to vacate her mansion. She relocated to Orange County, where she lived until her death in 1972 at the age of ninety-three.5
The City of Los Angeles bought the property in 1941 for a paltry $9,000. The following year, authorities leased it to Patricia Noblesse Hogan, a former Ziegfield Follies girl, who established a boarding house here for young women described as burlesque dancers, would-be actresses, and various Hollywood hopefuls. Some time back, I ran across a claim that Elizabeth Short, destined to enter history as the unfortunate Black Dahlia and whose bisected corpse was discovered in a vacant Los Angeles lot on January 15, 1947, may have briefly lived here during her peripatetic and doomed existence in Hollywood. Unfortunately, I didn’t make a note of this at the time, and now cannot find the reference. What is known is that the boarding house proved to be an unsuccessful endeavor: the mansion was put up for auction five times before a doctor finally purchased it in 1946. Hogan refused to vacate the premises: in early January 1947 (apparently the same week that Elizabeth Short disappeared!) police raided the property and forcibly evicted Hogan and her tenants.6
The new owner, Dr. Manuel Haig, lived at Mount Kalmia for a time, but in the 1950s he seems to have sold the property to Noah Dietrich, who served as aide and confidant to reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes.7 In the 1970s record producer Gary Kellgren, who had recorded such diverse artists as Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, John Lennon, Carole King, and the Rolling Stones, leased the mansion and hoped to build a studio complex there.8
Writer Lucian K. Truscott IV visited Kellgren in 1977 as the producer was fighting the city over zoning issues. “There were only a few days left on his lease,” Truscott wrote, “for which Gary had been paying $4,500 a month. All of the furniture had been moved out of the mansion, and the place had a dusty, decaying feel. None of its half-dozen or so bathroom had been cleaned in weeks, and the kitchen looked like something out of a Dennis Hopper movie about the grooviness of communes. Everywhere there was garbage and filth, the silent remains of defeat.”9 Shortly after this encounter, Kellgren moved out of Mount Kalmia. A few weeks later, he and his girlfriend Kristianne were found dead in the swimming pool of his rented house nearby; police ruled this a case of double accidental drowning.10 There was no evidence of foul play. Gary Kellgren, whose Dream Castle project also died that day, was 38 years old.11
Mount Kalmia’s next owner was famed attorney Marvin Mitchelson, who won fame by bringing the first case of “palimony” against actor Lee Marvin on behalf of his live-in girlfriend. But, like most occupants of the mansion, he, too, suffered a downward spiral and was convicted of tax fraud and sent to prison. He lost the estate to creditors and for a time it sat empty. Then, in either 1995 or 1996, actor Johnny Depp purchased Mount Kalmia for a reported $2.3 million. It became his principal Los Angeles residence and cell phone footage shot by his then wife actress Amber Heard at the house, showing a violent and apparently intoxicated Depp, became a central fixture during their recent defamation case.12
It would be easy to say that the place almost seems cursed. Almost all of the owners or residents have lived through scandal and tragedy, bankruptcy or suffered sudden deaths. But this dark history was unknown to me when I first encountered Mount Kalmia. That would have been on the night of February 21, 1973, when NBC Television aired a movie called The Norliss Tapes that left me traumatized. The work of producer Dan Curtis, the man responsible for the popular Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, The Norliss Tapes told the story of Ellen Cort, played by Angie Dickinson, who seeks the help of paranormal investigator David Norliss (Roy Thinnes) after being awakened at her remote mansion one night by the walking corpse of her recently deceased husband. It turns out that sculptor husband James, on learning that he had a fatal illness, had made a pact with a San Francisco occultist that would allow him to rise from his coffin each night to create a statue of a demon named Sargoth using clay mixed with human blood from Cort’s string of victims. Once the sculpture is completed and brought to life through some howled incantations, James Cort will be granted immortality.
So it’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo, but this movie scared the hell out of eight-year-old me (as I have written previously, why my parents ever let me watch this stuff is a mystery). The undead James isn’t some shuffling zombie: blue faced and yellow-eyed, grunting and uttering guttural moans, he tears around killing people, ripping the doors off cars, and popping up at unexpected moments to terrorize everyone. The damn thing is still utterly creepy, with more than its share of jolts. But the movie wouldn’t be nearly as effective if the Cort estate, where much of the action takes place, wasn’t so eerie itself. Of course, Curtis used Mount Kalmia, offering viewers some rare glimpses of the interior at the time Kellgren lived there.
The Norliss Tapes was my first exposure to the mansion but not my last. On November 24, 1973 – the day after I turned nine – I saw the place again in another made for TV movie called Scream Pretty Peggy. This was a long way from the terror of The Norliss Tapes. Actress Sian Barbara Allen – a fixture of 1970s film – starred as the titular Peggy, who gets a job working at the eerie mansion (Mount Kalmia again) of Bette Davis and her sculptor son Ted Bessell (best known as Marlo Thomas’s boyfriend Donald in the 1960s TV series That Girl). Bad idea. Turns out that Ted has seen Psycho one too many times and has not only taken to dressing as his dead sister Jennifer (who he’s killed and encased in one of his blood-red life-sized grotesque sculptures) but also killing those he becomes attracted to.
Scream Pretty Peggy is diverting enough, I suppose, but the real attraction is seeing more of Mount Kalmia. While The Norliss Tapes offered limited views of the interior, Scream Pretty Peggy offers better glimpses into multiple rooms. That alone makes it a worthwhile watch.
Then we come to film number three, which isn’t really a film at all. Back to producer Dan Curtis. In 1972 he’d done an ABC-Television movie of the week called The Night Stalker about a vampire in modern-day Las Vegas. The movie starred Darren McGavin as reporter Carl Kolchak who, through sheer dogged determination manages to outwit the local authorities, trace the vampire to his moldering old house, and drive a wooden stake through his heart. The movie was a huge success, and a year later Curtis and McGavin followed up with The Night Strangler, another ABC movie of the week. This time, Kolchak was a reporter in Seattle who stumbles on a demented killer who, every twenty-one years, creeps out from the city’s real underground to murder five women. He needs their blood for the elixir that guarantees him eternal life. Like The Night Stalker, The Night Strangler was a ratings hit, and led to a television series the following year.
Premiering on ABC in September 1974, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, repeated the premise of the two films: dedicated reporter chasing stories of the paranormal, ranging from a very living Jack the Ripper and aliens to a headless motorcyclist, zombies, werewolves, and witches. Although it only lasted for one season due to poor ratings and constant scheduling changes, Kolchak: The Night Stalker enjoys a cult following and served as an admitted influence for the popular X-Files series.
And sure enough, Mount Kalmia pops up again; Curtis knew a good, eerie, ready-made location when he saw one. This time, it’s episode No. 4, The Vampire, which aired on October 4, 1974. This finds Kolchak, now a Chicago-based reporter, sent to Los Angeles to write an article about a visiting guru. True to bumbling form, he misses the interviewee but stumbles upon a bizarre series of murders in which the victims have been drained of blood. Experience has taught Kolchak that vampires really exist, and it turns out that Catherine Rawlins, a victim of the Las Vegas creature from The Night Stalker has transferred operations to the City of Angels. Kolchak tracks her down to her “baronial estate” in the Hollywood hills (Mount Kalmia) where, after a chase, he manages to kill her by trapping her beneath a large cross he has set on fire and again pounding a stake through her heart.
Unfortunately, Curtis didn’t film any interiors at Mount Kalmia for The Vampire, though he does have Kolchak lurking in and out of the loggias, scaling the intricate wrought-iron grilles, and being chased around the exterior of the mansion by a hissing Catherine.
I don’t know if Mount Kalmia has appeared in any additional productions – I suspect it has, given its close proximity to Hollywood’s studios and ready-made castle/haunted house look. But The Norliss Tapes, Scream Pretty Peggy, and The Vampire episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker at least offered me pre-internet glimpses of a building that holds a very special place in my childhood imagination.
Notes:
1.https://www.westhollywoodhistory.org/johnny-depps-hidden-castle/draculas-castle/
2.https://www.westhollywoodhistory.org/johnny-depps-hidden-castle/draculas-castle/; https://nypost.com/2022/05/02/wild-history-of-johnny-depps-west-hollywood-castle/
3.https://nypost.com/2022/05/02/wild-history-of-johnny-depps-west-hollywood-castle/
4.https://nypost.com/2022/05/02/wild-history-of-johnny-depps-west-hollywood-castle/; https://www.westhollywoodhistory.org/johnny-depps-hidden-castle/draculas-castle/
5.https://www.westhollywoodhistory.org/johnny-depps-hidden-castle/draculas-castle/; https://nypost.com/2022/05/02/wild-history-of-johnny-depps-west-hollywood-castle/
6.https://nypost.com/2022/05/02/wild-history-of-johnny-depps-west-hollywood-castle/
7.https://nypost.com/2022/05/02/wild-history-of-johnny-depps-west-hollywood-castle/
8.https://www.westhollywoodhistory.org/johnny-depps-hidden-castle/draculas-castle/
9.https://dyingofabrokenheart.wordpress.com/page/2/
10.Gary was in the water, paddling around, when an underwater speaker went dead. When he swam down to look at it, something went horribly wrong. It’s unclear exactly how it happened, but Gary Kellgren drowned. Desperate to help, Kristianne dropped into the water. But when she tried to dive down to rescue him, she also drowned.
11.https://www.westhollywoodhistory.org/johnny-depps-hidden-castle/draculas-castle/
12.https://nypost.com/2022/05/02/wild-history-of-johnny-depps-west-hollywood-castle/