Elvira and Brad Pitt’s Haunted House
- KP
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
What do Elvira and Brad Pitt have in common? They both lived in this haunted house in the Los Feliz foothills, Briarcliff Manor.
In 1989, Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira, and her husband bought the 1911 Craftsman—and soon realized they were not alone. In her 2021 memoir, Yours Cruelly, Elvira Memoirs Of The Mistress Of The Dark, Peterson recounted hearing footsteps on the third floor while unpacking. When she went upstairs to see who it was, there was no one there.
From that point on, she said it was “nonstop weird things”: unexplained sounds behind closed doors, objects relocating themselves around the house, her dogs growling at seemingly nothing. But then things escalated.
One evening, she walked downstairs to find a man sitting on her sofa by the fireplace. When she called out to him, he looked at her and vanished into thin air. Another night, a 1930s-era nurse stood at Peterson’s bedside and said she had come to take her sleeping husband “into the pool.”
Peterson had noticed a mysterious dark shadow at the bottom of the deep end, consistently day and night. Once, while dog-paddling in the 12-foot depth, her 70-pound German Shepherd puppy suddenly jumped on her from behind and held her underwater, nearly drowning Peterson.
The heart-shaped pool was built in 1916 by millionaire “Borax King” Thomas Thorkildsen, a serial philanderer who enjoyed humiliating his wife Selina by swimming nude in front of her friends. That same pool was also where the man who aided his cheating met his demise on June 9, 1918.
Dalton Bolton, a prominent car salesman, admitted to Selina he brought two women to the house for a “double date” with her husband. Bolton was also married and begged Selina not to tell his wife. Subsequently, when Thorkildsen left town on business, Selina invited the Bartons (plus two other married women, Gladys Harrison and Margaret Youngworth) for a late-night swim. Two hours later, Dalton was dead.
The four women gave three different accounts of his drowning: Bolton “slipped” from the four-foot shallow end to the deep end; he had boasted he could swim the length of the pool but in actuality didn’t know how to swim at all; he fainted while swimming. They all agreed he flailed so wildly he nearly drowned Selina as she valiantly tried to save him. A neighbor was summoned to fish Bolton from the bottom of the pool. When the ambulance arrived, it was determined he had been dead “for some time.” It was a tragedy so unbelievable the Los Angeles Times labeled it “grotesquely weird.”
The Thorkildsens split two months later. During their 1920 divorce trial, it was reported that “concealed” details of the drowning would be revealed, however, nothing came out publicly. The following year, it was learned that Gladys Harrison’s husband, Cleve Harrison, had secretly filed for divorce as the Thorkildsen case played out in the court. Newspapers suggested there might be a link between the two, possibly because Gladys was one of the women at Briarcliff Manor the night Dalton Bolton mysteriously died.
It doesn’t seem Peterson knew this story, as it’s not mentioned in her book. She had been told two people drowned in the pool, however, there’s no historical record of either incident (which originated from a Santa Clarita Valley Signal columnist in 1990). Noticeably, both supposed deaths borrow elements from Bolton’s own grim demise.
One day in the fall of 1994, none other than Brad Pitt rang her doorbell. He explained to Peterson that Nicholas Cage had told him about the architectural wonder at 5769 Briarcliff Road and he wanted to see it for himself. She obliged Pitt with a tour and tales of its haunted history. He was so intrigued he made her a $1.7 million offer she couldn’t refuse. Among his renovations: a new pool.
Peterson and her husband didn’t go far though… they bought the house next door. From the upstairs balcony, she could see Briarcliff Manor and every day she stared at it, mourning its loss. “I missed that house so much I physically ached,” she revealed in her book.
Pitt lived there for 29 years, until 2023 when he sold the two-acre property (containing several of the surrounding homes he had purchased over the decades) for a reported $31 million. He’s never publicly spoken of spirits, but the demise of his marriage to Angelina Jolie could be considered another casualty of Briarcliff Manor.
Comments