Brad Pitt ain’t afraid of no ghost, allegedly. News recently surfaced that the actor sold the compound in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles where he’d lived for nearly 30 years to oil heiress Aileen Getty for $33 million. (In turn, Pitt purchased Getty’s midcentury-modern pad for $5.5 million.) In light of the Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood actor’s big move, People magazine spoke to a somewhat unlikely source about Pitt‘s longtime home: Cassandra Peterson, better known as her alter ego, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.
Peterson is the one who sold Pitt the 1910-built Craftsman style mansion that would form the start of his Los Feliz compound for $1.7 million in 1994. At the time, she told People, she and her ex-husband had seen numerous apparitions in the dwelling, and they were fully transparent with their potential buyer about its haunted nature, but it did not deter him.
“I’ve seen people walking around upstairs, for example, real people just walking. One time [a ghost was] sitting downstairs in front of the fireplace, once walking into my bedroom and back out. We saw a person floating around at the bottom of the pool, things like that,” Peterson told the publication. When she told Pitt, he allegedly said, “Oh, that’s so awesome.”
We don’t know if Pitt is an enthusiast of the paranormal, but we do know that he has a deep love of architecture and design, and it seems like his fondness for the home outweighed any misgivings he may have had about ghosts. “He just couldn’t get over” the dwelling’s mahogany panels and copper ceilings, Peterson shared.
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The self-professed Queen of Halloween then moved into the house next door and was Pitt’s neighbor for many years. She watched him renovate the original house extensively (did this drive out the spirits? or did it perhaps stir them up?), and purchase numerous surrounding homes, turning the property into a full compound. Another anecdote that Peterson shared with People is that Pitt allowed an inhabitant of one of the neighboring dwellings he purchased to continue living there, rent-free. Peterson says the man was in his early nineties when the deal was struck, and continued living there until his death at age 105. “I imagine Brad was thinking well, you know, he can live there till he dies, which might be any minute now,” she said. We can only hope Pitt’s new neighbors will someday be this talkative.
