Los Angeles has never had quite the association with hauntings that, say, New Orleans or London has, but it still has a fairly long history of ghosts. It’s famous for its haunted hotels in particular — the Biltmore, the Knickerbocker, the Roosevelt, the Ambassador — home to the ghosts of Marilyn Monroe, Rudolph Valentino, and Montgomery Clift among many other lesser-known ghosts. If the hotel has become emblematic of LA’s haunted past, it’s because the city’s history lies in transience: it’s a temporary city that depends on a constant influx of new dreamers, more than a few of whom end up ground up beneath the sidewalks and buried in the subconscious of Los Angeles. Such a place can’t help but leave behind a ghost or two.

At the Aztec, Craig Owens and Bobby Garcia went looking for those forgotten stories; they wanted to go beyond the Marilyn Monroes and Rudolph Valentinos. What evolved at the Aztec was a marriage between Owens’ charisma and Garcia’s expertise; together, along with a few other members of Garcia’s crew, they began spending more and more time at the Aztec Hotel. They’d show up in the evening, get the keys to the basement, and head down there. They spent three or four nights a week at the hotel, sometimes with others, sometimes not; then they’d go to their respective homes, go to work, listen to what they’d recorded, and come right back again. Owens discovered the name of one former Monrovia chief constable, James Scott, and one evening got the other investigators he was with to ask for him — only he screwed up the name and told them "Frank Little" instead. "When I listened to the audio," he says, "I get this weird voice going, ‘Frank Scott’… so it’s like we were corrected. The mistake actually makes the evidence more compelling." (The veracity of an EVP is often in the ear of the listener: Richard Carradine listened to Owens’ recordings and told me he’s highly dubious of Owens’ interpretation.)

LA is a temporary city that depends on a constant influx of new dreamers

Owens and Garcia spent most of their time in the basement, where they found the majority of the psychic activity, but most psychics and ghost hunters will tell you that the Aztec is haunted primarily in Room 120 by a ghost named "Razzle Dazzle," a name divined by psychics who’ve visited the room over the years. According to the story, Razzle Dazzle was either a prostitute who was murdered in that room by her john or an aspiring actress, newly married, who fell on her wedding night and fatally hit her head on the heater. Searching the Monrovia city archives, Owens found no mention of any prostitute or actress killed at the Aztec. "The room does appear to be haunted, but her name was never Razzle Dazzle, if in fact someone died there," he says.

But he did find something else: when the hotel opened, the local Elks Lodge operated an illegal monthly night of gambling and drinking in the hotel’s basement; those monthly parties, Owens learned, had an informal name. They called them Razzle Dazzle Nights. ("No one would know that," he says, "unless they went through those darn Monrovia papers.")

At the time Owens and Garcia were both still actively involved with GHOULA, and because of Owens’ close contact with the owners of the Aztec he was able to arrange a GHOULA "Spirits with Spirits" event in June 2010 at the Aztec Hotel. It was by all accounts a circus, but according to Lisa Strouss, "It was so much fun, it was like a big party … all these LA people running around — in this building which is so forgotten and so cool." To Owens, on the other hand, it was agony. "We had way too many people ... They were walking in on people in their rooms." He’s no longer bitter at Strouss or Carradine, but it’s clear that the memory still rankles. "I was having to do damage control with the hotel afterwards because they were very upset."

For GHOULA it was one of their best events ever. For the Aztec, though, it was the beginning of the end.