There are maybe one or two Friday 13ths every calendar year – sometimes there are none – but on this Friday 13th September 2024, I thought I would list some of my favorite (and most mysterious) mysteries from Gourmet Ghosts. What do you think happened?

The “Ghost Woman Sought” headline is from November 1922, when rancher Vaden Elwynne Boge was poisoned at the Alexandria Hotel. Police searched for his wife, who was suspected of the crime, but never found her…..

The man in the collar and tie is Ludwig Steiner, a clerk and resident at the Barclay Hotel in 1915 – until he disappeared suddenly among rumors that he was German spy. Steiner spoke seven languages, and among the possessions he left behind was a picture of him in the uniform of the Austrian army. He said he had been arrested while in Japan and charged with espionage too… but was all that true?

A severed leg? One was found in 1895, wrapped in pages from a newspaper, at the downtown LA address that’s now the STILE Hotel (and was built as the United Artists Theater in 1927). The United Theater still operates there as an events venue – and it is said to be haunted (but by any one-legged ghosts?).

Also below is a picture Chinese-Canadian tourist Elisa Lam, and the Cecil Hotel. If you don’t know about her bizarre 2013 death here in the water tank – then just Google it!

That sad picture of that kid praying to Santa (?) is from December 1925, and poor “Buzz” Reeve, 3, wants his dad, Raymond, who had gone from LA to meet a business contact at the Hoover Dam, near Las Vegas, to discuss a lucrative contact – and had not been seen since. It had emerged that this meeting seemed to be a scam – or a trap….

Finally, that’s a picture of Elizabeth Short from the Historic Corridor at the Biltmore Hotel, the last place she was officially seen alive in 1947. A few days later, she was found brutally murdered – and is known to his history now as “The Black Dahlia.”

You can read more about all of them, of course, in the Gourmet Ghosts books….