Paranormal Road Trip: Destination Los Angeles with Jamie Schultz

Come on boys and ghouls!  It's time to hop on Route 666 for a spooktacular Paranormal Road Trip.

This week's stop is Los Angeles and our special guide is Jamie Schultz, author of the Arcane Underworld urban fantasy series, including the new release SPLINTERED.

L.A.'s Top 5 Spooky Places

The Los Angeles of the Arcane Underworld is a nasty place. On the surface, it looks much like our own L.A., but peel back the top layers and you’ll find demon-fueled magic, unholy cults, and more creepy goings-on than you can shake a stick at. Here are a handful of the eeriest locations to be found.

The Gorow House – Located in the old, neglected part of Beverly Hills, you won’t find movie stars anywhere near the old Gorow House. In fact, you likely won’t find the place at all. Most people will drive right past the street it’s on, suddenly in a rush to be somewhere else. If you do manage to turn onto the street, you’ll find that the area surrounding the house is more than neglected. The whole street is full of For Sale signs, the blinds are drawn on every house, and people don’t dawdle between their house and their car. Many don’t come out of their houses much at all. Even the squirrels don’t come out during the day anymore. The whole street has a brooding lethargy about it, except for the Gorow place itself. The only activity on the street happens in the alley behind the Gorow place. Cars roll up after midnight. Doors slam. People scream and disappear behind the high fence in the back of the house. Nobody knows exactly what goes on in that house, but one thing is sure: whatever it is, it has poisoned the whole street.

Carriage Meat Processing Plant – A shuttered plant, this place is mostly an open floor with the skeletal remains of ominous meat processing equipment scattered about. The stink of blood and offal seems to have been ground into the concrete itself, which is unsettling enough, but the real weirdness is in the offices around the perimeter of the building. They have been converted into makeshift bedrooms, each with its own unsettling tableau. In one room, tiny red letters have been scrawled over every surface. If you look at just the right angle, the letters crowd together to form shapes, the largest of which seems to be a screaming face. Another contains a tuxedo and a wedding dress, pinned spreadeagle to the wall like butterflies. Yet another contains thousands of tiny animal skeletons. All evidence points to people having squatted in the building until recently, though one gets the impression these are not people you’d ever want to meet.

Harrison Women’s Correctional Facility – Another place with despair infused right into the structure itself, it’s rumored that the correctional facility is haunted. Strange noises and lights have been known to come from the place at night, and at least two teenagers have gone missing in the area, leaving no trace but a smear of abandoned graffiti and a spray can. One room deep in the basement is rumored to contain an enormous diagram of some occult purpose.

Parking Garage on Toomey and Wilds – Perhaps the least outright creepy of our tour today, this is surely the most verifiably bizarre. Reliable sources within the LAPD have verified that this parking garage is the epicenter of the so-called “plague of locusts” that buried Los Angeles in drifts of dead insects and brought traffic to a complete halt for an entire day in August of 2015. Everyone agrees that the locusts radiated from this point. Nobody can explain, however, where the locusts actually came from, given that the total biomass that emerged from the building is many times larger than the structure itself.

The Enoch Sobell Enterprises building, downtown – Enoch Sobell is a successful and widely respected businessman, but the word on the street is that he’s got a criminal empire that would put the Mafia to shame, and that he didn’t come by that through strictly natural means. His building is the pulsing heart of that unnatural empire. Everybody’s heard the rumors about what goes on in the top floors where he keeps his office and his nerve center. Depraved sex parties. Demonic rituals. Blood sacrifices. Who knows whether there’s any truth to any of that, but what is known for sure is that a massacre occurred in the top floor. Sixteen dead in what is rumored to be some sort of cult showdown, Sobell right there at the center of it, and yet he walks out without a scratch… and without an indictment. That’s gotta take the luck of the devil, right?

Thank you Jamie for giving us such a haunting tour of L.A.! 

To learn more about Jamie Schultz and his books, please visit his website.  You can add the Arcane Underworld urban fantasy series here on Goodreads.

What did you think of Jamie's picks for spooky places?

On our last Paranormal Road Trip we visited Wolfe Creek with Kaylie Newell.  Next week I will be away in Maryland for Hallowread book festival, but the following week we'll be traveling to NYC with Shanna Swendson.

Join us for another spine-tingling Paranormal Road Trip...
if you dare!