Brad Pitt bought a “haunted” house for $1.7 million in 1994 and sold it this year for $39 million, probably making it one of the biggest real estate deals by incredible profit margin.
And it is necessary to point out that Brad Pitt, in addition to being a good actor, producer, philanthropist and lover of architecture, has an eagle eye for real estate businesses, because at the end of March Brad Pitt closed the sale of the house in which he lived the last 30 years in Los Angeles for 39 million dollars.
This house was bought in 1994, in the Spanish style designed by the famous architect Richard Landry in 1910, on a closed and tree-lined street in Los Feliz for around 1.7 million dollars. Since then, he has invested in the property, buying land from neighbors and adding features like a theater, art studio, skate park and swimming pool, renovating it several times.
Currently the property has 8,000 m2 and has a swimming pool, tennis court and ice rink. Brad Pitt’s former home in Los Feliz is known for its architectural style, stunning views of LA, and has been featured in various magazines and TV shows, but why call it a haunted house?
The story of the haunted house
In 1910, a Texan oil magnate bought the property and built a mansion that he opened to all the movie stars of the golden age of Hollywood and where alcohol and other types of substances flowed in abundance, but this only lasted until 1929, because with the Great Depression the tycoon went bankrupt and ended up committing suicide at home.
In the 1960s, Mark Hamill, the Star Wars actor, moved into this mansion with a friend. One night the actor found him dead in a closet. The terrible fact of suicide caused Mark to leave immediately the property he was renting.
In 1989, Cassandra Peterson, better known as Elvira from the movie “Elvira, Queen of Darkness”, bought the house, unaware of the events that had happened there. “I heard footsteps upstairs and it was uninhabited. No one slept up there. I saw women dressed as from the 30s and several men appeared at the door of the house,” Cassandra said in an interview for television. But she continued to live in the house until in 1994 Brad Pitt, who already had an important career and was a recognized actor, wanted to buy the property from her.
Cassandra told People magazine how her transaction with Brad Pitt went: she met him three times to explain that the house was haunted. “We warned him that a lot of strange things had happened since we went in there […] During the whole time that I lived there, I saw ghosts everywhere, entering my room, floating at the bottom of the pool, sitting in front of the fireplace […], they looked like scenes taken from a nightmare, from horror movies. […] I know it sounds crazy. I’m Elvira. I know it’s expected of me, right? But I’m not hallucinating, I wasn’t on drugs, and I can’t explain those things.”
Cassandra also found out that a young actress had drowned in the pool in the 30s, so she decided to bring a priest and exorcise the house, but this didn’t work either, so she decided to put it up for sale, fed up with dealing with ghosts and frights. When she told the story to Brad Pitt “he was delighted” and “he told me that everything he was telling him sounded great” and she bought the house immediately.
Brad Pitt’s million-dollar sale
The actor put the property up for sale because he “was looking for something smaller.” And he found it, because last August he bought a new 300 m2 house in Carmel Highlands (Monterrey, CA) for 40 million dollars.
With this sale, Brad Pitt has closed, not one, but many chapters in his life, since he lived there with most of his partners, from Julitete Lewis, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, to Angelina Jolié and their children.
