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Madame Tussauds
2010
World Famous Grauman's Chinese Theatre sits majestically on Hollywood Boulevard just west of Highland Avenue.
Along its western wall are three massive black and white photographcs, one of which greeted me each day across the next-door parking lot: wearing classic oriental garb, a young Chinese woman with a vibrant smile stands at a doorway, her right hand stretched out in welcome...
Then someone got the bright idea to build a friggin' building that eliminates the desperately needed local parking, and blocks those decades old Hollywood references.
While I still lived near Hollywood and Highland, for months I watched the construction of the new
Madame Tussauds Wax Museum
(its original
London aspect
to which I'd twice visited, when I was nine years old and again when I was twenty-seven).
My friend
Meredith,
who used to work at the very haunted
Roosevelt Hotel,
left working at the Roosevelt
for
the new wax museum.
Oddly enough, Hollywood already had
(and as of this early 2010 entry, still has),
such a place: the famous
Hollywood Wax Museum
also on Hollywood Boulevard, just east of Highland
(being a pretty dreadful wax museum notwithstanding),
the two literally within easy walk of each other.
I visited the Hollywood Wax Museum shortly after moving to California, and was aghast at how disappointly terrible it was.
It was as though the "artists" either heard rough descriptions of the people they were sculpting, or they just stuck wax onto department store mannikins.
Long after having been there, I discovered the Hollywood Was Museum was
reputed to be haunted
(via my ghost-book author friend
Marla Brooks
series of
Haunted Hollywood
books);
I have not had the chance to return to the Hollywood Wax Museum to find out
(and not wanting to buy another ticket to that place, had little inclination to do so).
Now I'm not sure precisely where or how I heard about this
(possibly on a
para-x
show, if not on Marla's weekly online radio show
Stirring the Cauldron with Marla Brooks
itself),
but rumours began to crop up that the newly built Madade Tussauds was haunted as well...
having been built on a parking lot notwithstanding.
When I came across online discount tickets for Madade Tussauds, I notified my local ghost hunter friends.
Marla replied, conveying, "Meredith did say the place was haunted and is thinking about setting up an investigation for us... so you might want to hang on before buying the tickets and if we go and do the investigation, come along with us."
Understandably I accepted and requested being kept apprised...
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