Touring the Dark Side of Los Angeles

A tour through Los Angeles can be a bit like driving through one big, palm tree-lined cemetery. Lurking about the city’s grimy streets, manicured lawns and dusty canyons are homages to Hollywood’s dark past, from long-abandoned mansions to the iconic Hollywood sign itself where the aspiring starlet Peg Entwistle leapt to her death from the “H” in 1932, back when it still read Hollywoodland. (Her spirit is said to wander the nearby Griffith Park trails.) Perhaps because so many travel to Los Angeles with soaring expectations, the city — unwilling to embrace every fresh, new face — feels suffused with melancholy.

Ms. Entwistle’s short career as siren and her untimely death at the age of 24 are emblematic of the strange dichotomy of the city: sparkling, yet dark; seductive, yet scary. Just beneath a shiny surface lies a graveyard of secrets and dirt. All around the city, from Hollywood to Compton, the duality of glitter in the dark is on view; you just have to know where to look. Fortunately for the noir-curious, an entire branch of tourism trafficks in the city’s underbelly. Call it Morbid Los Angeles.

For the bookish fan of the macabre, there’s Esotouric (esotouric.com), a company run by Kim Cooper and Richard Schave, local social historians and true-crime enthusiasts. Their crime scene bus tours, which began in 2005, grew out of a mutual love of Raymond Chandler and forgotten scandals.

Today, on a charter bus, the couple hosts tours with titles like “Blood and Dumplings” and “The Echo Park Book of the Dead.” The former tour takes passengers through the San Gabriel Valley to sites like the Alhambra chateau where the music producer Phil Spector shot the actress Lana Clarkson in 2003; a dumpling course from one of the many Chinese restaurants in the area is included. For the devotee of true crime, Esotouric’s excursions dive deep into cold case files, like the bizarre 1922 “Bat Man” case in which a housewife hid her lover and husband’s murderer in the attic.

But Ms. Cooper and Mr. Schave also devote a fair amount of time to infamous tragedies like the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, the young actress known as the Black Dahlia and one of the city’s oldest cold cases. Instead of theorizing about her killer, Esotouric’s Real Black Dahlia Tour portrays Ms. Short through the lens of the era, visiting her regular haunts (including the site where her body, torso cut in two, was discovered). To Ms. Cooper, Ms. Short is a case of an interesting nobody whose story is told only “when terrible things happen.”

If Esotouric is for students of the arcane, then Dearly Departed (dearlydepartedtours.com) is for those who appreciate a bit of humor alongside a drive-by of Marilyn Monroe’s grave site. “It’s a lighthearted look at the dark side of Hollywood,” said the owner, Scott Michaels, whose decade-old company specializes in celebrity-focused dark matter including the notorious Manson family murders. His popular Manson-focused Helter Skelter Tour includes a circuit of the infamous Laurel Canyon murder site. For several years, chunks of Sharon Tate’s fireplace were distributed as unsettling souvenirs until the supply ran out.

If a self-guided tour is preferred, Creepy LA (creepyla.com), a website about the city’s supernatural happenings, has a Google map dedicated to documenting hauntings. Within a few short blocks, ghost chasers can visit the ritzy Roosevelt Hotel where Montgomery Clift’s spirit is said to carouse with Marilyn Monroe’s, and pause outside the Knickerbocker Hotel, now apartments, where Rudolph Valentino was said to be a habitué of the bar. Bess Houdini, Harry Houdini’s widow, held a séance in 1936 on the Knickerbocker’s rooftop in a final attempt to communicate with the dead magician.

Just down Hollywood Boulevard, another self-guided tour can be had at the Museum of Death (www.museumofdeath.net). This truly dreadful menagerie of dusty, death-soaked knickknacks includes the severed head of the Parisian serial killer Henri Landru; a collection of letters and art from serial killers; a diorama of a bunkroom of Heaven’s Gate, the San Diego-based U.F.O. cult, with an actual bunk bed acquired from the members’ mass suicide (Nike-clad mannequins included); and a faded quilt adorned with floral swastikas sewn by the Manson family, which guests brush by on their way out.

Even the Los Angeles Coroner’s office finds currency in creepiness, opening a gift shop called Skeletons in the Closet, which sells body-silhouette mouse pads ($8), coroner cotton tote bags ($5) and Los Angeles County medical-examiner compact cooler totes ($18) perfect for a picnic lunch among the headstones in the idyllic Hollywood Forever Cemetery. (Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino, to name a few, reside here.) And, spooky as it may sound, an al fresco meal so close to Tinseltown’s oldest masters is very Los Angeles.