Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Haunted by History, Vol. 1
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://bizarrela.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
Phone: 626-241-4906
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1965.
EDUCATION:Southern Methodist University, B.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Photographer. Has worked in film and television industry; Century City Chamber of Commerce, Los Angeles, CA, on staff; International Cinematographers Guild, on staff; freelance photographer. Has appeared on My Ghost Story: Caught on Film.
MEMBER:SAG/AFTRA, Greater Los Angeles Writers Society, San Fernando Valley Historical Society, Temecula Valley Historical Society, Culver City Historical Society, Art Deco Society of Los Angeles, Sons of the Golden West, Ramona Parlor.
WRITINGS
Also author of History of Century City.
SIDELIGHTS
Craig Owens is a Los Angeles-based photographer. He graduated from Southern Methodist University and moved to California to pursue a career in the film and television industry on the production side of business. Owens started an Old Hollywood themed project in 2009 where he staged vintage style photo shoots at haunted hotels for photography sessions. These experiences led to a number of paranormal encounters, leaving him curious about the connection between the location and his staging of the photo shoot.
Owens published the first volume of Haunted by History: Separating the Facts and Legends of Eight Historic Hotels and Inns in Southern California in 2017. The account looks into eight historic hotels in Southern California to disentangle fact from myth with their paranormal back stories. Owens focuses his study on San Diego County’s Hotel del Coronado and Julian Gold Rush Hotel; Ventura’s Victorian Rose B&B and Wyndham Garden Pierpont Inn; Riverside’s Mission Inn; Los Angeles’s Hotel Alexandria; Catalina Island’s Banning House Lodge; and Santa Paula’s Glen Tavern Inn. Drawing on six years worth of research into the hotels, their historical documents and photographs, and attempting to restage recorded paranormal encounters, Owens aims to debunk many of the myths that surround many of the ghost stories while leaving space open for legitimate encounters. Among the hotels, Owens discovered that they were all founded around the same time—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and they all changed ownership numerous times, often due to their financial difficulties.
In an article in Los Angeles Magazine, Owens talked with Gwynedd Stuart about his interest in haunted places and his own experience with the paranormal. He recalled seeing a “shadow person” in Riverside, California’s Mission Inn. He had a difficult time understanding what it was exactly, but he was impacted by the experience. Owens recalled: “I slept with the light on in my house for ten days because I knew what I saw.” This got him interested in places that are supposedly haunted, but he was adamant to make sure the histories of the locations were consistent with the stories associated with them. Owens admitted that “there’s a lot to say and there’s a lot of misinformation and mischaracterization of the paranormal stories,” adding that “a lot of ghost stories are based on inaccurate historical data that renders the ghost story false.”
A contributor to Publishers Weekly stated: “Lavishly illustrated and handsomely produced, the book’s entertaining and informative narrative dwells on the documented facts while dispelling most” myths. The same reviewer called the book “stimulating.” In a review in Los Angeles Magazine, Stuart noted that “apart from photoshoots and poring over late-night audio recordings, parsing history was Owens’s most grueling task.” Stuart pointed out that the hotels covered in the book “aren’t backdrops but, rather, characters in the photos.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Los Angeles Magazine, January 18, 2018, Gwynedd Stuart, review of Haunted by History: Separating the Facts and Legends of Eight Historic Hotels and Inns in Southern California.
Publishers Weekly, February 19, 2018, review of Haunted by History, p. 68.
ONLINE
Craig Owens website, https://bizarrela.com (June 20, 2018).
ABOUT CRAIG OWENS
Los Angeles-based photographer Craig Owens first fell in love with history and the paranormal in 1972. At that time, he was as a seven-year-old boy playing on the grounds of a Southern plantation known as Waverley, located outside of West Point, Mississippi. While Waverley's owners admitted to seeing and hearing the ghost of a young female child, Craig never encountered her. Yet the atmosphere and history of Waverley stayed with him long after his family moved to Texas.
In 1994, he moved to Los Angeles and began to work freelance in the film and television industry. His production credits include Fudge (1995), The Christmas Box (1995), Wag the Dog (1997), Phone Booth (2002), and The Gilmore Girls (2000-2001). In 2002, Craig left film production to work for the Century City Chamber of Commerce and later the International Cinematographers Guild, I.A.T.S.E. Local 600. While working for the chamber of commerce, he contributed articles for the Century City View and wrote the History of Century City.
In 2009, Craig began staging vintage style photo shoots at haunted hotels as an idea for an Old Hollywood themed project. While on location, he experienced paranormal activity. This left him wondering if his photo shoots were somehow triggering it.
The following year, he started his Facebook blog, Bizarre Los Angeles, a page dedicated to Los Angeles’ forgotten history. He also continued to hold vintage photos shoots at haunted locations. Little did he know that his love for haunted hotels would bring media attention. In 2013, he appeared on My Ghost Story: Caught on Film after he unintentionally photographed an apparition at the Palomar Inn in Old Town Temecula, California. The following year, the online magazine, The Verge, published an article on his paranormal experiences at the Aztec Hotel in Monrovia, California.
Craig Owens has now gained notoriety for his photography and his passion for historical research. He has also appeared in other people's books, including Gourmet Ghosts 2 by James T. Bartlett and Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey. While he firmly believes that ghosts do exist, he is reluctant to accept all paranormal stories. He instead approaches the subject with a good deal of skepticism, preferring to err on the side of not believing enough. He also encourages his readers to form their own opinions as to whether ghosts exist, and warns people not to believe in ghost legends unless the legends are supported by historical fact.
Craig Owens is a graduate from Southern Methodist University with a B.F.A. in Communications.
FUN FACTS
Fifth cousin to country and western legend Ernest Tubb.
Went to Permian High School (of Friday Night Lights fame). One of his closest friends in high school was Mark S. Allen, currently a well-known local television personality in Sacramento, CA.
Was part of a medical study on the anti-acne drug Accutane (now called Isotretinoin) in 1981-82 prior to its approval by the FDA.
National Dean's List recipient in 1986-87.
Dislikes catsup...intensely.
A teetotaler.
Favorite food: chili con queso and chips.
Once took acting lessons from Spencer Milligan (Land of the Lost) and Richard Hatch (Battlestar Gallactica).
In the early 1990s, Owens wrote, directed, and starred in a silent comedy short Blind Man's Bluff, shot in the historic town square of Lancaster, Texas, with a Bolex 16 mm camera. After the film's completion, a series of tornadoes destroyed many of the old buildings used as locations (including a bank that was once allegedly robbed by Bonnie & Clyde). Years later, a clip from that film was featured in the Made-For-TV film Going Home (2000). In the TV movie, Jason Robards watches the film and laughs uproariously.
In 2011, Owens accidentally photographed an apparition in a photo at the Palomar Inn, but is reluctant to post it on social media because it undermines his overall skepticism of ghost photos.
Does not use Ghost Boxes, Ovilus's, tracking cameras, seances, psychic impressions, Ouija boards, divining rods, and most other occult practices when conducting paranormal investigations. He prefers EVP tests using high quality recorders, camera monitoring, and historic research because he has found that these methods produce a higher level of accuracy.
Favorite film genres: Noir, Western, Silent, Horror, Satirical Comedy, and Science Fiction.
Favorite Book: Venus on the Half-Shell by Kilgore Trout (Philip José Farmer).
Favorite Paranormal Book: An Experience of Phantoms by D. Scott Rogo.
Most Influential Author: Kurt Vonnegut.
Most Influential Artistic Style: German Expressionism.
Favorite Movie: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (1967).
Favorite Television Show: The Monkees.
Favorite Song: "Happy Together" by The Turtles.
Favorite Musical Group: The Beatles.
Favorite Old Hollywood male movie star: George Raft.
Favorite Old Hollywood female movie star: Marlene Dietrich.
Favorite Comedian: Buster Keaton.
Favorite star of the past 50 years: Clint Eastwood.
Favorite photographer: William Mortensen.
Favorite photographic themes: mirror reflections, shadows, humor, surrealism, isolation, role/gender reversals, vamps, implied horror.
Favorite directors: Stanley Kubrik, Sergio Leone, and Fritz Lang.
CONTACT & SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
Facebook
Goodreads
IMDb
Contact: Craig@bizarrela.com
MEMBERSHIP
Art Deco Society of Los Angeles
San Fernando Valley Historical Society
Culver City Historical Society
Temecula Valley Historical Society
Sons of the Golden West, Ramona Parlor
SAG/AFTRA
Greater Los Angeles Writers Society
BOOK REVIEWS
"Owens’s gorgeous photo stagings recreate the romantic and heady days of each lodging while adding dashes of visual humor, subtle sensuality, and haunting atmosphere. Lavishly illustrated and handsomely produced, the book’s entertaining and informative narrative dwells on the documented facts while dispelling most of the colorful myths." -- Publishers Weekly Starred Review
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A Plethora of Perfectly Put-together Pages to Please People with Paranormal Persuasions (who also like Pa..hotography)
By John Cason on February 16, 2018
"As co-hosts of the podcast Ghosting Around with Kathleen DeRose and John Cason, Kathleen and I are always looking for entertaining -- yet, more importantly, reliable -- sources of information for the haunted places that we cover. After attending a talk by Craig and picking up this book, it has immediately become our primary source for all SOCAL hauntings. We've already recorded one episode on the Mission Inn based primarily on Craig's coverage and will likely be using this book extensively in future episodes. More than just a collection of ghost stories, Craig has put together an encyclopedic history of haunted hotels in southern California that don't just draw from pre-existing sources or travel guides but rather from his own research, immersion, and (gulp!) first-hand encounters. Not simply satisfied with the pre-existing (often over-embellished or outright made-up) stories about these haunted places, Craig deep-dives into their respective histories seeking to verify, correct, or outright ghost-bust some of the established stories while also uncovering a few of his own. But that's only half of what makes this book so novel (pun intended)! Actually staging and photographing historical scenes in the hotels themselves brings the stories to life in a way that few (if any to my knowledge) have. Kathleen and I both highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the paranormal or photography. Don't be afraid to add this book to your collection and make your bookshelf or coffee table just a little bit spooooOOOOooookier."
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“This is one of the most fascinating books I own. Researched to within an inch of its life – the goosebumps will rise because the stories are true. The new photos in old places are created with inspiration and outstanding talent. Be warned – you might sleep with the lights on for weeks! Enjoy!” — James Radford, author of Adventures on the Queen Mary
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“A must have coffee table centerpiece for lovers of history and all things haunted! This is not your average ‘haunted’ history book. This is one of the most well researched, in depth books on eight of Southern California’s famous and historic hotels and inns. Yes, at the end of each chapter he has a follow up chapter on documented hauntings of each location, but how the author encapsulates both the facts surrounding the history first, and then follows up with the stories or urban legends of each place next, is simply magnificent.” — J’aime Rubio, author of If These Walls Could Talk: More Preston Castle History
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“You don’t want to miss this one. It is an excellent account of history and all that entails for the Glen Tavern Inn/Santa Paula and all the other historical inns and hotels in Southern California.” — Glen Tavern Inn
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Jan 20, 2018 Sara rated it 5 out of 5 stars on Good Reads
"This is now one of my favorite books. Owens dissects the history of some of Southern California’s most historic and haunted hotels and photographically recreates some of the occurrences that have resulted in hauntings of those spaces. He pulls together actors and actresses in period costumes and photographs them in the actual locations of their deaths and tells the stories of those people and the locations. This large, heavy book is full of historic photos and well-written text. I highly recommend it as a coffee table book or a gift for someone who is a history and ghost geek like me." -- Sara Robertson
Biography
Los Angeles-based photographer Craig Owens first fell in love with history and the paranormal in 1972. At that time, he was as a seven-year-old boy playing on the grounds of a Southern plantation known as Waverley, located outside of West Point, Mississippi. While Waverley's owners admitted to seeing and hearing the ghost of a young female child, Craig never encountered her. Yet the atmosphere and history of Waverley stayed with him long after his family moved to Texas.
In 1994, Craig moved to Los Angeles and began to work freelance in the film and television industry. His production credits include Wag the Dog (1997), Phone Booth (2000), and The Gilmore Girls (2000-2001). In 2002, Craig left film production to work for the Century City Chamber of Commerce and later the International Cinematographers Guild, I.A.T.S.E. Local 600. While working for the chamber of commerce, he contributed articles for the Century City View and wrote the History of Century City.
In 2009, Craig began staging vintage style photo shoots at haunted hotels as an idea for an Old Hollywood themed project. While on location, he saw what appeared to be a "ghost." This left him wondering if his photo shoots were somehow triggering paranormal activity.
The following year, he started his Facebook blog, Bizarre Los Angeles, a page dedicated to Los Angeles’ forgotten history. He also continued to hold vintage photos shoots at haunted locations. Little did he know that his love for haunted hotels would bring media attention. In 2013, he appeared on My Ghost Story: Caught on Film after he unintentionally photographed an apparition at the Palomar Inn in Old Town Temecula. The following year, the online magazine, The Verge, published an article on his paranormal experiences at the Aztec Hotel. Since that time, he's been quoted in James Bartlett's book, "Gourmet Ghosts 2," and Colin Dickey's book: "Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places." More recently, he has appeared on Nerdist's popular "Bizarre States" online podcast.
Craig Owens has now gained notoriety for his photography and his passion for historical research. While he firmly believes that ghosts exist, he is reluctant to accept all paranormal theories, superstitions, and ghost hunting techniques. He instead approaches the subject with a good deal of skepticism, critical thinking, common sense, and a sense of humor.
Haunted by History: Separating the Facts and Legends of Eight Historic Hotels and Inns in Southern California
Publishers Weekly. 265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p68+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Haunted by History: Separating the Facts and Legends of Eight Historic Hotels and Inns in Southern California
Craig Owens. Sad Hill, $50 (410p) ISBN 978-09976881-0-8
Photographer Owens distinguishes fact from fiction in this stimulating, heavily illustrated account of the supposed hauntings of eight historic Southern California hotels. Pulling together historical photographs and original documents as well as firsthand accounts, the author attempts to verify the ghost stories associated with each inn, dissecting their origins (often in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and recreating the ghostly encounters in glamorously staged vignette photos. Owens s research reveals that each hotel survived financial hardships and frequently changed owners, yet in many cases the reported sightings continued. There have been numerous sightings over the years of a young woman in Victorian-era clothing roaming the Hotel Del Coronado, believed by some to be the ghost of Kate Morgan, a hotel guest who killed herself in 1892. Owens suggests that the ghosts said to be in the Alexandria Hotel in downtown Los Angeles may be connected to a series of bizarre deaths that occurred there between 1913 and 1922. Owens's gorgeous photo stagings recreate the romantic and heady days of each lodging while adding dashes of visual humor, subtle sensuality, and haunting atmosphere. Lavishly illustrated and handsomely produced, the book's entertaining and informative narrative dwells on the documented facts while dispelling most of the colorful myths. Photos. (BookLife)
Caption: A staged photo of a ghostly encounter in Room 213 at the Glen Tavern Inn in Santa Paula, Calif., from Craig Owen's Haunted by History (reviewed on p. 71).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Haunted by History: Separating the Facts and Legends of Eight Historic Hotels and Inns in Southern California." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 68+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357567/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9acb61b1. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357567
This Guy Stayed in SoCal’s Most Haunted Hotels to Separate Fact From Fiction
Hotel Alexandria, Hotel del Coronado, the Mission Inn, and more
January 18, 2018 Gwynedd Stuart Books, L.A. History, Travel 4 Comments
Photographer and author Craig Owens refers to himself as a “reluctant believer in the paranormal.” But he’s confident that in 2009, he saw a ghost.
That year, he’d set out to research, write, and take pictures for a book that would celebrate the historic Southern California hotels that had survived the Great Recession. In old hotels and rooming houses, for every creaky floorboard or square foot of water-stained ceiling tile there’s a ghost story. In fact, if an old hotel doesn’t have any paranormal associations, Owens asserts that “there must be something wrong with you or your business.”
His project became to investigate the veracity of the hotels’ various legends, to uncover previously unknown details about their histories, and to use the hotels’ most beautiful, most “haunted” spaces as sets for a series of staged photos of models in period dress. The hotels aren’t backdrops but, rather, characters in the photos, which he’s compiled, along with his historical research, in the recently released book Haunted by History, Vol. 1.
He and his crew were shooting at the Mission Inn in Riverside when Owens says he saw a “shadow person” for the first time. According to Owens, it was an inky-black, two-dimensional figure—roughly five-foot-two—wearing a cowl. Once the figure caught Owens’s eye, it immediately darted around a corner.
“When I checked out, I drove home and wrote everyone I knew to ask [what a shadow person is]. None of the stories made any sense. Are they aliens? Time travelers from another dimension? Someone’s dream self? The best I can make out, it’s a very low- to middle-range manifestation of a ghost—that’s the best I can come up with,” Owens says. “I slept with the light on in my house for ten days because I knew what I saw.”
Model Ruby Mae Collins in “Lade in Black” at Hotel Alexandria in downtown L.A.
PHOTO BY CRAIG OWENS
Over the course of roughly six years, Owens and his crew stayed overnight and shot at 16 SoCal hotels, 8 of which are featured in Haunted by History, Vol. 1: Hotel del Coronado and Julian Gold Rush Hotel in San Diego County; Victorian Rose B&B and Wyndham Garden Pierpont Inn in Ventura; Mission Inn in Riverside; Hotel Alexandria in downtown L.A.; Banning House Lodge on Catalina Island; and Glen Tavern Inn in Santa Paula.
Owens didn’t have paranormal experiences in all of the hotels he visited, but otherwise inexplicable stuff happened in a lot of them. At the Pierpont Inn, Owens says doors opened and closed at will, and, after shooting wrapped, a recording device picked up the sound of women’s high heels walking from one end of the corridor to the other, entering the bathroom, but never emerging. At the Hotel del Coronado, Owens says a recorder captured voices, footsteps, and a loud crash inside the room after the shoot (he stresses that it was November, the hotel’s off season). And at Palomar Inn in Temecula, Owens says he accidentally photographed a humanoid entity in a pinstripe suit swiping travel brochures from a parlor table.
Apart from photoshoots and poring over late-night audio recordings, parsing history was Owens’s most grueling task. “There’s a lot to say and there’s a lot of misinformation and mischaracterization of the paranormal stories,” he says. “A lot of ghost stories are based on inaccurate historical data that renders the ghost story false.”
For instance, it’s long been rumored that the Glen Tavern Inn, which opened in 1911, had a brothel on the third floor. As Owens points out, the story doesn’t add up. “That’s a falsehood that was made up in 1988, as far as I can tell,” he says. “It made no common sense for one to exist there. Most speakeasies had to have an escape route…you wouldn’t put it on a top floor where you could hear everything moving around on the floor below. I think a lot of people who write and repeat this are people who didn’t think it through or never stayed there, and were basically writing from other sources. I tested everything. I looked under every rock I could possibly find.”
He also claims to have discovered that the Julian Gold Rush hotel was established in 1902, despite that all current brochures and periodicals date it to 1897. That might not sound like a blockbuster revelation, but it’s a step toward fostering a more accurate, more complete understanding of the region and its past—whether or not you believe in ghosts.
“There’s a lot of mystery in history,” Owens says. He’s cracking the case one hotel at a time.
Craig Owens appears for a podcast taping and book signing with LA Meekly and Bizarre Los Angeles at Bearded Lady’s Mystic Museum, 3204 W. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank; Sat., Jan. 20, 1-4 p.m.; free.