Joan Crawford…ghost?

Joan Crawford is still one of the most extremely famous actresses of all time. Her reputation, however, is questionable. It is no secret that Joan and Bette Davis had no love for one another, but I was shocked to find this evidence of that dislike: “Davis was nominated for an Academy Award that year for her performance as “Baby Jane” and Crawford aggressively, but secretly, campaigned against her. Unbeknown to Davis, Crawford had contacted all of the Oscar nominees beforehand to tell them that she would be happy to accept the Oscar on their behalf if they were unable to attend the ceremony. Both Davis and Crawford were backstage when the absent Anne Bancroft was announced as the winner. Crawford reportedly elbowed her way past Davis and said, “Excuse me, I have an Oscar to accept.”‘ Um, can you say “bitchy?”

I always felt that Joan Crawford had this scary look to her. Even though she was beautiful, she just seemed like the kind of broad you didn’t want to cross. It is well known that her adopted daughter, Christina wrote a memoir about her life with Joan, “Mommie Dearest.” In the book, Christina basically exposes her mother as a psychotic, cruel, selfish woman. But, what many don’t know, is that the house that Christina grew up in with her mother, was always rumored to be haunted, and continues to this day to be full of the presence of Joan Crawford.

According to Sherry Hansen-Steiger and Brad Steiger from from “Hollywood and the Supernatural,” there were rumors of haunting manifestations in Joan Crawford’s former Brentwood home.

When asked if there were manifestations or hauntings that she could remember as a child living there, Christina recounted the following:

I have vivid memories of some things, but when you are severely abused, you tend to block out other things. I’m positive that there were manifestations occurring there when I was little. I saw them! There were places in the house that were always so cold that nobody wanted to go in them.

As a child, I was always told that I had an active and vivid imagination; I was always scared by things, but people just told me that I just had an “active imagination.” Years later, I thought, oh well, maybe that was good to have had an active imagination, and I became a writer because of that.

But as a child, I saw things in the house! There was, of course, no context or framework in which to put what I saw and felt. I had nobody to speak to about the occurrences.

Any time I would become extremely frightened and would get out of my bed to try and find somebody, I was always treated as though I were just being a “bad child” that didn’t want to go to sleep. I always expressed my fear to my mother because it was she that I went to find to help me…because I would be very upset and I’d be crying.

I used to have terrible nightmares and that kind of thing, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that I saw things in the night; so the solution to that finally was just to leave the lights on everywhere. One of the things I saw seemed a bit like an apparition of a child..or children, but as I said I may have blocked out a lot.

Christina told us that she had not been back to the house since she was seventeen. “That was when I went to college [in 1956], at which point, Crawford still owned the house.”

Christina recalled her last day there:

I remember the woman who had taken care of me and my two younger sisters since I was four years old just watching me, without saying a word. I was going from room to room in the house, without saying anything, just standing in the middle of each room, then going on to the next one. She finally asked me what I was doing. I told her that I would never see this house again, therefore, I was saying goodbye to it.

Many years after I had left, we met again. She was now an elderly woman and had retired. We always had been quite close. She told me she had always remembered the look on my face when I said my goodbyes to the house. It seemed a strange thing to do, to say, ‘I’ll never see this house again,’ when at that time there was absolutely no inkling of the house being sold. In fact, it was not sold for another two and a half to three years, and, indeed, I have never been back.

Christina had learned recently that the current owners of the house had called in the Reverend Rosalyn Bruyere of the Healing Light Center to work with the house:

Rosalyn described what she had seen in the house when she went there. She picked up on some things that astounded me because they seemed to validate what I may have seen and experienced when I was little. It gave me goose bumps when Rosalyn told me that she discovered so many spirits in the house and there had been signs of ritual abuse in one of the rooms. Many of the spirits had “underworld” connections.

I was sent to boarding school when I was ten years old. I came home infrequently after that. I always believed that I was sent away partly because I was too much the eyes and ears to the world–a witness. I saw too much, I guess.

Some of the things that I saw that were going on were very violent. Her (Joan Crawford’s) relationship with men, a number of men, was extremely violent. I was getting too old, and I was beginning to understand what was going on.

That house is so weird! Now, evidently, the walls are starting to catch fire! Other people have heard childrens cries in the walls! Every single owner has had trouble.

The first one was Crawford. She built the majority of the house. It was a small cottage when she bought it, but most of the house, she built. She sold it to Donald O’Connor, who sold it to the Anthony Newleys. They sold it, I think, to the current owner, who is a friend of the Revrend Rosalyn Bruyere, and they asked her to “work” on the house.

Every single family that has lived in that house has had horrible things happen…illnesses, alcoholism, addictions, relationship problems, and now, evidently with the current owner, the walls are breaking out in flames! I’ve heard that in particular it’s the wall that was behind Crawford’s bed.

Although the scene is in her book, Mommie Dearest, Christina reminded us that the last words that Joan Crawford uttered were to a woman who was kneeling at the foot of her bed, praying for her.

“As she was dying,” Christina said, “Crawford opened her eyes and said directly to the woman, ‘Don’t you dare ask God to help me!’ …and then she died.” It was such arrogance, Christina said, that she believes is a major part of the difficulty with the seemingly accursed house.

And that has nothing to do with me! So it would not surprise me in the least if the “haunting” spirit that is in the house is Crawford! She was capable of real evil. If you have never experienced that “look” from another human being, it is almost impossible to believe that such an experience could even exisit! I think perhaps that’s why so many people are unwilling to deal with the shadow side because they can’t really get themselves to believe that such a dimension exists.

My brother and I were absolutely terrified of her. In fact, there is a passage in “Mommie Dearest” that describes (“the look” on her face) when she tried to kill me when I was thirteen. We all saw “that look.” My brother and I talked about it extensively…it was not of an ordinary human being!

Later, we were able to contact the Reverend Rosalyn Bruyere of the Healing Light Center, who kindly agreed to share her thoughts on the manifestations in Joan Crawford’s former home.

“It is true that the house was afflicted with spontaneous fires, primarily in the wall behind where Joan Crawford’s bed used to be. However, I did not pick up that Joan Crawford’s ghost was there.”

The Reverend Bruyere expressed her opinion that the house had been poisoned in some way before Crawford had moved into the place but that the evil in the house had added to Joan’s neuroses. The actress had apparently built onto a pre-existing cottage in a very chaotic manner.

“Nothing is where it should be,” Rosalyn commented. “She added dining rooms and hallways that led to other dining rooms. It all combines to form an H-shaped house. Turn a corner and you’re lost.”

The noted healer, who in this case served as an exorcist to clear the home, said that she found the haunting existing in levels.

“It was a place of conspicuous negativity. I called it an ‘Astral Central,’ a gathering of spirits that were attracted to the negative vibrations. People had been tied up and tortured in that house. I picked up on gangland figures, corrupt politicians. There is an area in the house where a child [not Christina] had been tortured and molested. Terrible things went on in that house.”

The Reverend felt that ghosts themselves were trying to burn the house down.

“Once the Beverly Hills Fire Department spent four days there attempting to solve the mystery of the spontaneous fires that would break out on the walls,” she said. “I feel the spirits were trying to burn the house down to protect some horrible secret. There is something hidden there. I am certain that there are bodies buried in that basement.”

She said that there had only been one recurrence in the house after she had exorcised and cleared it. “The house had become an astral dumping ground, but it seems clean now.”

When we [authors Brad and Sherry] visited the former Crawford home in the early 1990s, the current owners graciously allowed us to enter to film a segment for an HBO special on haunted Hollywood. The couple told us that they had experienced some mysterious pyrotechnic phenomena and had witnessed quite a number of apparitions of quite a wide variety of entities in various parts of the home. The couple said that the small cottage next to the swimming pool very often seemed to be center of haunting phenomena.

We kept in touch with the couple for quite some time. It was not long after we had filmed in the Crawford home that they decided to move. We have no comment from them whether or not it was because of any haunting phenomena.

It would seem over the past decade that the once haunted mansion of Joan Crawford has found peace, for we have heard of no further ghostly activity occurring in the home.

Hmmm…it seems that maybe I was right to dislike Crawford? What do you think? Oh well, here are some “haunting” images of Ms. Crawford in all her glory. Enjoy!

Date: Wed, 28