The A. Sperl Building on First Street in Little Tokyo reportedly holds about eight "entities." The company Ghost Expeditions opens the structure, and its otherworldly inhabitants, to visitors. Photo by Gary Leonard.
If there is such a thing as ghosts, Downtown should be full of them. The hundred-year-old buildings, some boarded up, some veiled behind new storefronts, are fraught with hidden histories. The phantoms of the original pueblo settlers must watch as the city evolves. The glamorous actresses who once filled the theaters of Broadway must linger on, waiting for their audiences to return.
Have you heard the one about the spirit of a lady in Victorian garb who haunts the Biltmore Hotel? Or the one about the man who walks City Hall, haggling for some long-forgotten cause?
Even Los Angeles Downtown News had its ghost: In former offices at the southeast corner of First and Spring streets, some lonely staffers, always the last to leave, would hear, say, a file drawer slam, and once someone was even pelted by a pencil flying through the air, the pitcher unseen.
With Halloween falling this week, it is appropriate that one of Los Angeles' premier paranormal expert teams (no, we're not making this up) has come home to roost.
Ghost Expeditions, headed by Dr. Larry Montz, who has a Ph.D. in parapsychology and heads the International Society for Paranormal Research, returned in August to Los Angeles, leaving post-Katrina New Orleans. The team locates and clears "entities," or paranormal activity.
Ghost Expeditions opened in 1997 in Hollywood, where the team conducted research and offered expeditions of the storied Vogue Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. The theater was haunted by the ghosts of children who died in a school fire - before the team cleared it in 2001.
A few years ago, the team cleared a Los Angeles Police Department substation in Chinatown, Montz said. Supposedly, police officers working the graveyard shift sensed a person standing behind them. Montz said they would whip out their guns, only to find nobody there. So, as the saying goes: Who did they call?
The Ghost Expedition team, according to Montz and Daena Smoller, a psychic investigator, cleared the building of all entities (by communicating with the spirits to guide them off the earthly plane). After that, said Montz, the station's officers had no more phantom visitors.
As the story goes, when Ghost Expeditions returned to Los Angeles earlier this year to look for a new home, a detective who had been working at the substation at the time of its de-haunting serendipitously called and asked if the team would like to conduct its research in his building in Little Tokyo.
The former detective is Tony Sperl, whose great grandfather was one of the early inhabitants of Los Angeles. The First Street edifice, aptly named the A. Sperl Building, dates to 1882 and hasn't left the family's hands.
Originally a blacksmith shop, the Sperl Building was most recently a Japanese video store. Before the store shut down, workers there had noticed some strange things, Montz said. For instance, customers perusing the store's large collection of pornography would be startled by an elderly man and woman standing in the corner, glaring disapprovingly. They, it should be noted, were ghostly figures, not Downtown inhabitants.
Ghost Expeditions has since learned that great grandmother Sperl's entity still resides in the building, and she was a very prudish woman. Montz said about seven other entities have moved in over the decades.
After Ghost Expeditions conducted some preliminary paranormal activity tests on the building, they decided to move in. Instead of clearing the structure, they now lead ghost-seeking expeditions on weekend nights for $75 a head.
Participants receive entity-finding tools, including a magnetometer and a thermometer. Guests clamber up a dark staircase, explore pitch-black crevices in a low-ceiling mezzanine and record their findings. At the end of the night, the team reveals the history of the building.
"People come in for all different reasons - to enhance their psychic abilities, to get scared, or to confront their fear of what goes bump in the night," Smoller said.
The entities seem to be cooperating, said Montz. So far, he said, guests have seen or felt the presence of various beings, and one participant was overcome with emotions in what is called an "emphatic episode."
Montz and Smoller are quick to say that this is not a Halloween show, that no actors will jump out and yell boo, that it is up to the entities and a participant's clairvoyant skills. In other words, there is no ghost guarantee.
"We're not paying the entities, there's no carrot we are dangling in front of them," Smoller said. "So you have to come with an open mind."
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