Mar 28, 2020
Join co-ghosts Clark Canez and Jen Curcio with special guest, comedian and storyteller Lucé Tomlin Brenner on a tour of Boyle Heights. We go to seven places of historical and paranormal significance and learn about the cultures that make up the community. The places we explored include:
1. The Linda Vista Hospital - America's most haunted hospital because the working class Latinx patients were given such poor care that many of them died. Botched surgeries that under normal circumstances should be easy to recover from are enough to haunt anyone.
2. Hollenbeck Park - A gorgeous park with a pond, swans, a beautiful bridge and the specter of a woman dressed in black.
3. The Sanatorium and Orphans Home - Sometimes it's not only spirits that leave their trace on a building. That's right, radium was taken by the spoonful and administered by a madman doctor in this former health spa.
4. Breed Street Elementary - School can be scary enough; lunch time cliques, popularity contests, but add the fact that your school was built on top of a graveyard and oh boy, good luck!
5. The Shrere Synagogue - We stopped here to learn about Jewish mourning rituals and others surrounding death.
6. Japanese Hospital - Japanese-Americans had to fight the Supreme Court to open this institution in 1927 and continued to have to fight for it through the years of the Japanese internment in America.
7. The Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged - At a first glance, this looked like an odd decor choice in the parking lot of a Food4Less. But of course, we dug deeper on the tour to find that it used to be a charity home for local senior citizens who would have been destitute otherwise.
A big thank you to the Shmuel Gonzales of the Boyle Heights History Tours for giving us the best tour we have ever taken. We cannot recommend doing this enough. Please support this great organization at bhhistorytours.com and go on a tour.
As always, thank you for listening and have a spoOoOoky weekend!
Available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.