And yet another murder house falls in our lap on this spooktacular Halloween--the listing says this house in the Hills once belonged to Bela Lugosi, the most famous horror film actor of all time, but it actually has a stranger and darker horror film past. In the early eighties it belonged to criminal lawyer Frank R. Saletri, who wrote, produced, and provided special effects for the 1973 film Blackenstein (he also directed a possibly apocryphal 1975 movie called Black the Ripper, according to IMDb, and it's highly coveted by people who covet possibly apocryphal 1970s horror movies). In 1982, Saletri was found shot to death in the house (as far as we can find, the murder was never solved). A probably-totally-reliable commenter on the Classic Horror Film Board wrote in 2010 that he knew Saletri and visited the house a couple times in the 1970s: "it was a very cool place. spiral staircase from floor to floor; secret passage from room to room which you would access by pulling open a coffin that was on the wall." If that was ever there, it seems to all be totally gone now--the 1924 house has just been flipped and today is looking a little bland (And carpeted! Why??), although not completely stripped of original character. The current owners bought the house in June for $1.066 million; today they're selling for $1.5999 million.
· 6216 Primrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA [Estately]
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