Los Angeles Myths:
The Cursed Ranch; Griffith Park
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Spanish Land Grants
Rancho Los Feliz
Some years back, over a period of more than a year, I consumed many of my evenings positioning whether Los Angeles would have developed in a different geographic fashion had the hilly section of Rancho Los Feliz not been donated to the city for parkland. During these times, much thought was given to the effect of the Los Feliz Curse. Ultimately, I wrote The Legend of the Lizard People which mixed together three of Los Angeles’ most famous myths one of which was the cursed ranch.
Beginning in 1784 the Spanish government began making land grants. These grants of land became known as various Ranchos. The names of these ranches exist today in street names and names of cities.
Major Horace Bell (1830-1918) was an early member of the Los Angeles bar. Georgia was his wife, and she was the namesake of Georgia Street where the Georgia Street Hospital existed through the Dragnet era. Later in life, between 1882-1888 Bell ran a newspaper called the Porcupine.
The Los Feliz Curse
Horace Bell describes the event as follows:
"The one shall die an untimely death, the other in blood and violence. A blight shall fall upon the face of this terrestrial paradise. The cattle shall no longer fatten but sicken on its own pastures, the fields shall not longer respond to the tiller. The grand oaks shall wither and die... The wrath of heaven and the vengeance of hell shall fall upon this place and the floods!"
Image of the Cursed Don Antonio Coronel
According to Bell, Don Antonio Los Feliz was a bachelor who lived with his sister and Pentranilla, a niece who he raised like a daughter. Misfortune followed the transfer of the land through various owners, including Lucky Baldwin and Thomas Bell, until it reached the hands of Colonel Griffith J. Griffith.
Griffith Park
In 1903, the curse was blamed when a temporarily insane Griffith, convinced his wife was conspiring against him, shot her in the face at the Arcadia Hotel in Santa Monica. After his release from prison, Griffith gifted the land to the city, potentially as a tax write-off or an attempt to salvage his ruined name.
Tragedy continued to haunt the park. In 1933, twenty-nine men died in a fire. Even as recently as 1985, the Foucault pendulum at the Observatory stopped due to a vandal on the same day Orson Welles died.
