How Glenn Danzig's cursed house became LA's strangest local landmark

[ijwthstd]

sfgate.com
LA's strangest local landmark is a creepy house owned by a rock star
Paula Mejía
11–14 minutes

In Los Feliz, a trendy Los Angeles neighborhood sitting at the base of Griffith Park, tree-lined streets hum with vintage shops, small bookstores, dive bars, florists, a movie theater and neighborhood restaurants. One major thoroughfare running through the enclave, Franklin Avenue, is flecked with mansions, charming homes and 1920s-era apartment buildings that give the place an idyllic feel.

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There is one anomaly, though: an eerie, collapsing single-family Craftsman house, which appears cobbled together by Satan himself.

Built in 1907, the home isn’t just spooky-looking; it’s famous. The property is owned by Glenn Danzig, the notoriously mercurial frontman for the legendary New Jersey horror punk band the Misfits.

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FILE: Glenn Danzig performs with Metallica during Day 3 of the band’s 30th anniversary shows at the Fillmore on Dec. 9, 2011, in San Francisco.

FILE: Glenn Danzig performs with Metallica during Day 3 of the band’s 30th anniversary shows at the Fillmore on Dec. 9, 2011, in San Francisco.
Tim Mosenfelder/WireImage

For Angeleno punk enthusiasts and out-of-towners alike, it’s now a tradition to pay homage to Danzig’s ramshackle house when they’re around Los Feliz. About 15 years ago, his home — known for its menacing wrought-iron front gate, its sagging facade and an inexplicably omnipresent pile of bricks — became enshrined as a bizarre LA landmark. It’s now as much a part of the Misfits’ mythos as their creepy-crawly discography and many musical nods to skulls, ghouls and zombies.

Naturally, it’s also become a rite of passage for fans to snap photos of themselves mugging in front of Danzig’s haunted-looking house. That includes author Dan Ozzi, whose work often focuses on punk rock provocateurs. Since moving to LA six years ago, Ozzi has become fascinated with Danzig’s house and its turn as an unsuspecting real estate icon.

“All the other houses on the street are very well maintained,” he says of Los Feliz. “And then there’s just one house that just looks like it’s being swallowed back to earth in the middle of it.”

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Brittany Zahren in front of the Danzig House in Los Angeles.

Brittany Zahren in front of the Danzig House in Los Angeles.
Dan Ozzi

A few years ago, Ozzi started snapping photos of friends standing on the sidewalk in front of the dilapidated Danzig home. He eventually culled together so many photos from this tradition that he created a zine named, accordingly, “People Standing in Front of Danzig’s House.” (It is not affiliated with Danzig himself.)

Now, after a successful first print run, Ozzi has returned to the quirky subculture zine with a new plan to support Angelenos in the wake of this month’s devastating fires. Sales from his $15 zine are being donated to MusiCares, an organization that is helping members of the music community displaced by the ongoing wildfires around Southern California. Anyone who buys a zine also gets what might be LA’s most hyper-specific postcard, featuring a photo of the hair-raising home with the words “Greetings from Danzig’s House” printed on it.

In Ozzi’s estimation, the pull of Danzig’s home is due to “a dichotomy to Danzig that really interests people,” he says. “Because on one hand, he publicly likes to portray himself as this sort of dark, mythical guy: He dresses in black. He’s quite ornery in public. He makes these terrible horror movies, and his songs are all about, like, dark art, vampire themes.”

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Dan Ozzi showing off his book in front of Glenn Danzig’s house in Los Angeles.

Dan Ozzi showing off his book in front of Glenn Danzig’s house in Los Angeles.
Dan Ozzi

“But then obviously he, Glenn Danzig, is a man who exists in real life,” he continues. And sometimes being a dark prince means still having to worry about everyday home maintenance issues. Anytime there’s “a crack in the armor for his persona,” fans take notice.

An evil pile of bricks

Although Danzig’s home had been a word-of-mouth phenomenon among die-hard fans since he bought it in 1989, it didn’t become fully cemented as a local oddity until around 2011 — when a conversation between writer Justin Halpern (now an executive producer for “Abbott Elementary”) and a friend about the infamous house went viral.

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A general view of the exterior of the home of Misfits rocker Glenn Danzig is seen on Jan. 17, 2025, in Los Angeles.

A general view of the exterior of the home of Misfits rocker Glenn Danzig is seen on Jan. 17, 2025, in Los Angeles.
Jessie Alcheh/SFGATE
A detail view of bricks seen outside the home of Misfits rocker Glenn Danzig is seen on Jan. 17, 2025, in Los Angeles.

A detail view of bricks seen outside the home of Misfits rocker Glenn Danzig is seen on Jan. 17, 2025, in Los Angeles.
Jessie Alcheh/SFGATE

In the exchange, Halpern, who said he lived down the street from Danzig at the time, recounted how the punk legend lived in a “s—thole” that looked like an “evil Pixar house.” To make matters weirder, Danzig had a massive pile of bricks resting on his front lawn for years. Apparently, they had tumbled down when the home and its chimney were partially damaged during the Northridge earthquake; he’d never bothered to clean them up.

In Halpern’s retelling, the trouble started when a neighbor told Danzig that he was bringing down property values by not cleaning up the bricks. According to Halpern’s wild story, that exchange prompted Danzig to start “hurling bricks into the dumpster” while wailing, “Here I am, motherf—ker, just cleaning up my motherf—king bricks!”

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The story happened to come on the heels of two well-circulated photos that helped further solidify the myth of Danzig’s LA house, in Ozzi’s estimation. A year earlier, Danzig had been snapped leaving the supermarket with heaving grocery bags presumably full of kitty litter. The images instantly made the rounds online, prompting many a Photoshop job and remixed music videos. Around then, someone also noticed that Google Street View had serendipitously snapped Danzig washing his Jaguar in his driveway. It was visible on the Myspace page someone had made from the perspective of Danzig’s house itself.
A view of the home of Misfits rocker Glenn Danzig is seen on January 17, 2025 in Los Angeles, Calif.

A view of the home of Misfits rocker Glenn Danzig is seen on January 17, 2025 in Los Angeles, Calif.
Jessie Alcheh/SFGATE
A general view of the exterior of the home of Misfits rocker Glenn Danzig is seen on Jan. 17, 2025, in Los Angeles.

A general view of the exterior of the home of Misfits rocker Glenn Danzig is seen on Jan. 17, 2025, in Los Angeles.
Jessie Alcheh/SFGATE

The ultimate nail in the coffin, so to speak, happened when Danzig put his home on the market in 2017. (He wasn’t living there at the time; he’d moved to the Cheviot Hills neighborhood and into a Cape Cod-style home once owned by Lucille Ball.) The Los Feliz listing mentioned some of the historic Craftsman’s original flourishes and an accessory dwelling unit out back and offered a $1.2 million price tag. It also acknowledged that whoever bought the home would need some “imagination and creative talents,” because Danzig was selling his slumping house as is.

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The house never ended up in new hands. But before the listing was taken down, Death and Taxes magazine managed to shoot a video of the interior that’s since become apocryphal in its sheer weirdness. For starters, the interior entryway of the home seems to be guarded by massive “Looney Tunes” figurines of Marvin the Martian and the Tasmanian Devil, two of many action figures and toys strewn about. Moving into the kitchen, you’ll see boxes of — what else? — Count Chocula and Franken Berry cereal. It also showed that Danzig does not have an ordinary candle dish but rather a “double gargoyle candle dish.” And one of the two messy bedrooms sees an ordinary-looking bed (no bed frame) and a skull figurine beside an adjacent TV.

While fans lapped it up, those events in tandem “put it on the map,” Ozzi says. In the years since, the home has become even more of a destination for the punk-inclined, and it’s not uncommon to see area punks playing Misfits songs as they curiously look on at the house.
The Dirty Nil in front of the Danzig House in Los Angeles.

The Dirty Nil in front of the Danzig House in Los Angeles.
Dan Ozzi

The enduring appeal, Ozzi explains, lies in that the “house is proof that this man lives in the real world, that this man is a homeowner who exists in the city of Los Angeles. It feels almost like a physical monument to the idea that this is an actual man and not the vampire character that he portrays.”

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Of course, upholding a vampire veneer is much harder to maintain when most people have cameras embedded in their cellphones. “In the ’70s when the Misfits started, it was probably a lot easier to maintain this aura, or even just to, like, publicly cultivate your own image,” he says. As such, Ozzi suspects that part of the allure is rooted in a reversal of the power dynamic. “For a while, he really portrayed himself as this untouchable omnipotent goth.”

But by sharing photos of Danzig doing ordinary things, “It’s almost this weird stripping away of his power, which is kind of dark,” Ozzi says.
FILE: Glenn Danzig guest hosts on SiriusXM, Oct. 7, 2015, in Memphis, Tenn.

FILE: Glenn Danzig guest hosts on SiriusXM, Oct. 7, 2015, in Memphis, Tenn.
Greg Campbell/Getty Images for SiriusXM

This impulse may also be a reaction to the reality that Danzig has espoused troubling views in recent years. “Is it disappointing to hear Danzig say awful boomer shit? No, because the thing that he created, I think, almost out of his control, has become so much bigger than one person,” Ozzi says.

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‘A magician’s trick’

When the wildfires started several weeks ago, Ozzi received boxes containing dozens of his Danzig zines. Culled together from many photographs showing people posing in front of the home, with an eye toward details making the house that much more peculiar, the zine struck Ozzi as a way to help out with fire relief causes. As of right now, he’s donated over $1,000 to MusiCares from zine sales and counting, along with sales of his books and other ephemera on his website.

“Everybody is scrambling to figure out what they have of value that they can donate,” he says. “For some people, it’s their time or volunteering. Some people are wealthy, and it’s money. For me, I have a little bit of a platform, and I have this stupid art project that I've been doing. And when those arrived the other day, I said, ‘Obviously I should just sell these and give the money away.’”

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A detail view of a chained-off gate is seen outside the home of Misfits rocker Glenn Danzig on Jan. 17, 2025, in Los Angeles.

A detail view of a chained-off gate is seen outside the home of Misfits rocker Glenn Danzig on Jan. 17, 2025, in Los Angeles.
Jessie Alcheh/SFGATE

This zine hardly marks the end of the Danzig project, though. Due to demand and an abundance of photographs he’s got in his arsenal, Ozzi is already working on a second volume of the zine dedicated to one of LA’s weirdest destinations.

He sees the lore surrounding Danzig’s house as a bit of mocking, yes, but ultimately it stems from love. “I actually don’t think that anybody who engages in this sort of behavior of demystifying him, myself included, hates [Danzig],” Ozzi says. “I don’t think it’s a malicious thing. I actually think it’s almost like pulling your pompous friend back to earth.”

Jan 25, 2025
Photo of Paula Mejía

Contributing LA Culture Editor

Paula Mejía is a Colombian American writer and editor from Houston, Texas. She is a contributing culture editor at SFGATE, and was formerly the arts editor at the Los Angeles Times and a Senior Editor at Texas Monthly. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, GQ, Rolling Stone and more. A co-founding editor of “Turning the Tables,” NPR Music’s Gracie Award–winning series about centering women and nonbinary artists in the musical canon, she is also the author of a 33⅓ series installment on the Jesus and Mary Chain’s 1985 album Psychocandy. She teaches graduate arts writing at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and lives in Los Angeles.

https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/glenn ... 039110.php

[TravisBicklesMohawk]

This is very cool. Thanks for finding and sharing!

[EzyRider]

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[Anthrax442]

I wonder why he gave up on selling it? I mean, maybe he couldn't get what he wanted, but still, some money is better than nothing.

[TREVERLAST]

I just ordered two copies of the zine. Money goes to wildfire cause. Now I'll have to go check out the house.

[NeonKnite]

Funny stuff