LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles is rife with ghosts, and paranormal investigator Zak Bagans is on the hunt. The host of the Travel Channel's "Ghost Adventures" and his crew of spirit sleuths have roamed the city, capturing all manner of unexplained phenomena on camera. Among the haunted places they've explored are the dreaded Cecil Hotel, the Black Dahlia house, Hollywood's American Legion Post 43 building, downtown L.A.'s Roxie Theatre, Pasadena's Ritual House and the Los Angeles Police Museum.
"We focus on Los Angeles because the locations here offer so much in the form of hauntings and mysterious history," Bagans says. "It's a smorgasbord of pure, haunted dreams."
Today we're at the Comedy Store, the Sunset Strip club known for two things: launching the careers of such comedians as Richard Pryor, Jay Leno and Roseanne Barr and scaring the bejesus out of countless performers and patrons during its half-century run. Demonic growls in the basement, flickering lights on stage and manifestations of a man dressed in a World War II-era military uniform are accredited to the building's former life, when the cavernous structure was home to Ciro's nightclub. Celebrities and mafia bigwigs like Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen frequented the venue throughout the 1940s and '50s. Legend has it that the place was used to extort, torture and kill those who crossed the mob, and the spirits of those unlucky victims still haunt the place today.
