Urban legends swirl around a beautiful but creepy Spanish Revival mansion at 2475 Glendower Place in Los Feliz, and some of those legends are rooted in truth: A physician murdered his wife there in 1959, then took his own life. But the grisly murder-suicide wasn’t enough to deter one couple who saw its potential. They threw down $2.289 million for the place in a probate sale, and escrow closed this week, said listing agent Nancy Sanborn.
"With all of the activity, all of the people coming to look at it, only one couple came to court," Sanborn said.
Built in 1925, the four-bedroom house has a "grand entrance," a formal dining room, a library, and a "ballroom with a bar." It was put up for sale late in March for the first time in five decades.
From Curbed LA’s archives:
It was here that, in 1959, physician Harold Perelson murdered his wife Lillian in her sleep with a ball-peen hammer. He then attempted to do the same to his oldest daughter, Judye, who managed to escape to a neighbor's house. Telling his other children to go back to bed, Perelson retreated into the bathroom and killed himself with a concoction of Nembutal and tranquilizers. No one has ever really understood why, although there were money troubles.
The story has become the stuff of local legend (and the basis for an upcoming film), with fascination over the house and its history growing the longer it sat empty. Though the house was purchased shortly after the murder-suicide by a Lincoln Heights couple named Emily and Julian Enriquez, by all appearances it has been uninhabited since the 1960s. Eerie photos taken as recently as 2012 suggest that the home was abruptly abandoned, with food, home goods, and pieces of furniture left behind.
But the new owners aren’t afraid of no ghosts. They intend to fix up the home and live there, Sanborn said.
"It was the perfect haunted house," she said. "As a real estate agent, it was an interesting challenge."
- The Mysterious Los Feliz Murder House is for Sale [Curbed LA]
- First Photos Inside the Abandoned Los Feliz Murder House [Curbed LA]
- The Real Story Behind LA’s Most Famous and Mysterious Murder House [Curbed LA]
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