Out of the corner of our eye, over our shoulder, a glimpse, a glimmer, an emanation, a misty shadow, something to make us doubt we’re alone. Stories have been told for centuries around the campfire and in the trenches about men who disappear, about meeting someone and later finding out they’d died shortly before the rendezvous, about unfinished business and vengeful spirits. Richard Carradine, the founder of the Ghost Hunters of Urban Los Angeles (GHOULA) has heard them all. Traveling the world, Carradine asks everyone he meets about his or her ghost histories, and pretty much everyone has one. He’s sought ghosts the world over, but he always comes back to Los Angeles, which he believes is the spookiest place on Earth.

So tell me, in your words, what makes L.A. such a scary place?
It’s funny you ask that, because every year around Halloween, they do their top 10 haunted cities in the country, and L.A., if it does rank, it’s at the bottom. I would argue that we are the most haunted city. I mean, we have as turbulent a history as any city in the country going back to the Mission era, the enslavement of the Native Americans, the Wild West, [and] all the crime and the gangsters of the ’30s. And because it’s Hollywood, people come out here to find their dreams, and most often, their dreams are broken, and they end up in very sad stories, which lend themselves to great ghost stories and hauntings.
You’ve said you’re a bit of a skeptic, or you’re not really the conduit type.
I will say I have had experiences, but I can’t walk into a building and immediately feel that it’s haunted. If you want to hear a story: many, many, many years ago, I was at a friend’s house in Pasadena—one of those old, huge Craftsman-style mansions. They were having a late-night party. When you walked through the front door there was a little tiny door right next to it that would be hidden by the front door swinging open. Behind that tiny door, there was a little hallway that went to the kitchen, and I was told, back in the day, when they had help, that’s how the servants would answer the door. They would go through the kitchen, slip through this tunnel, answer the door and announce the guests, and then disappear back into this little door. It’s a big entryway, with a big staircase that goes up to a second landing, and, at some point, I decided that I was going to take the shortcut through the tunnel. So, I was passing through the entry and I look up and there’s this woman standing on the second floor, dressed completely in white, and she starts walking down the stairs, and the bottom of the stairs is right where that little doorway is. So, she’s walking down the stairs, and I’m walking towards that doorway, and we’re pretty much going to meet at the bottom of the stairs. I’m looking up at her as I’m crossing this big room, and as we’re about to meet face-to-face, and I’m trying to think of some small talk to say to her, because it’s kind of awkward that I’m going to run into her. She’s wearing this white, very lacy, old-fashioned dress, and so I was going to comment on the dress. ‘Nice dress,’ or whatever. And as I get face-to-face, she vanishes into thin air. The best way I can describe it is that she just blurred. Just a smear, just gone.
I feel like everybody has a ghost story.
People always say, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ To me, I think the issue is no longer, ‘Do you believe in it?,’ because people have been, for hundreds and thousands of years, seeing ghosts. Obviously, there is some phenomenon happening, and I’m willing to accept that it has nothing to do with dead people, that it’s just some natural phenomenon that we haven’t figured out yet.
What theory do you think is the closest? Is it a scientific thing?
This is what I always tell people: at one time, we didn’t understand what rain was. It would rain, and we would chalk it up to, ‘The gods are crying,’ or, ‘It’s an omen,’ and now we’re at a point where we know what rain is, we can predict it, and we look back at how naïve we were with those theories. I think that’s where we’re at with ghosts. I think that, one day, science will explain it. And it will be mundane—it’ll be like a ‘time slip’ or something—and we’ll look back at how crazy people were that they thought it was relatives or something. I don’t know what it is, but one of my favorite theories I came across in an old issue of the L.A. Times [from] the turn of the century. There was a doctor that wrote this article of what his theory was because of the whole spiritualism movement of the time. He thought that what ghosts were, were kind of like memories that float around in space, and that we intercept with them. So, it’s not [that] there is an object in front of you, a ghost, but you are intercepting somebody’s memory from long ago. So, you are seeing something that somebody saw at that exact spot, you know, 50 years ago, and you’re just kind of ‘intercepting’ it. Like your brain being an antenna and picking up radio waves.
Like a time residue.  
Right, and you pass through it, and you see these little moments, which helps to explain a lot of little problems with the ghost world that ghost hunters have wrestled with over the years. One of which being, ‘Why do ghosts wear clothes?’ Why would an inanimate object come back from the dead? Why aren’t ghosts naked?
What got you involved in ghost stories?
Like I said, I’ve had experiences that I can’t explain, and then, because of that, I’ve always been interested in stories. Whenever I’m somewhere, an old theater, or a restaurant, some place that feels like it has a history, I’ll ask, and more often than not, I’ll get a story. So, I’ve just been collecting these stories for the past couple of decades, and that led into GHOULA.
Would you ever move into a residence that you knew had a spirit or an energy about it?
Yes, actually, the apartment I live in now, I took because I asked the manager if there was a ghost story, and he said yes, told me the story, and I was like, ‘Okay, sold.’ The house I used to live in in the Hollywood Hills, I personally had never seen it, but people that would come over used to comment, ‘Who’s the guy in the other room?’ And I was like, ‘We’re the only people here.’
So, you mentioned earlier, there are a couple reasons why a ghost would have an earthly presence, and I’m wondering if there are a couple different rules that will make it a place that a ghost will stay.
I don’t know. I can’t find any rhyme or reason why ghosts haunt a certain place. It seems like just about any kind of business you can think of, you can find a place that has a ghost story—homes, apartments, condos, restaurants. I worked at Disneyworld for a summer, and they had a ghost story.
What is it?
One night, I’m talking to the security guards, and I ask them what’s the weirdest thing they’ve ever seen or heard about at the park. And he said that there was a building backstage, where the public’s not allowed, and late at night people would see a WWI aviator in a wet uniform walking down the halls. They would go to follow him, and he would always disappear—he would turn the corner and vanish. People would generally chalk it up to, ‘It’s Disneyworld, people are always wearing costumes, even though I’m not aware of anyone wearing a WWI aviator uniform in the park,’ but they would find it odd that he was drenched. They would say, ‘Can I help you? Can I get you a towel?,’ follow him, and he would just disappear. These were isolated little incidents. There were so many of them that the head of security kept a special file that was just for ‘The Aviator’ sightings. They have a newspaper that’s just for employees that’s called Eyes and Ears, and one year, for Halloween, an employee wrote an article about it. The people who had seen it over the years didn’t realize that other people had seen it. Once they realized that it was a common occurrence in that building, they demanded that management look into it. They did a full investigation. To my knowledge, the Disney Company doesn’t admit that any of their parks have any ghosts, but in this case, they had to admit it by doing an investigation. They figured out that there used to be a training camp in Florida, where they used to train pilots, and it was during the construction of that building that they did unearth an old WWI airplane. They tracked down the serial numbers and found that it was missing from the training base. One of the pilots went out and was never seen again, apparently crashed at this site. So, he’s still wandering. I wrote an entire book of Disneyland’s ghost stories.
It seems like a ghost’s life is quite lonely—they don’t talk to anyone, they wander around alone. Does it make you sad? Or does it give you a hope that when you die you don’t always disappear?
I don’t know, because we don’t really know what ghosts are, and it’s debated whether or not they even have an intelligence, or they’re aware, or whether it’s just an energy burning itself out. We may be sad looking at it, but it may not be feeling anything, like a recording simply playing itself over and over again. A lot of these stories are tragic stories, but having an emotional connection to a ghost? I don’t really feel sad or sympathetic towards them, I guess.