{"id":330418,"date":"2026-05-24T11:27:40","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T11:27:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/330418\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T11:27:40","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T11:27:40","slug":"once-las-crown-jewel-a-decaying-mansion-has-become-a-horror-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/330418\/","title":{"rendered":"Once LA’s crown jewel, a decaying mansion has become a horror star"},"content":{"rendered":"

The smash anthology series \u201cAmerican Horror Story\u201d first premiered in 2011 with a season revolving around a terrifying\u00a0turn-of-the-century mansion<\/a> known as the \u201cMurder House.\u201d The property \u2014 a sprawling estate bedecked with Tiffany glass, mahogany ceilings and a ballroom with soaring ceilings \u2014 factors heavily into the plot detailing a couple\u2019s move from Boston to a mysterious Los Angeles home whose shadowy past is creeping into the present.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The actual \u201cMurder House,\u201d as seen in \u201cAHS,\u201d is a historically protected property known as the Rosenheim Mansion, which sits near LA\u2019s Koreatown neighborhood. Named after its architect, Alfred Rosenheim, who built it as his personal residence, the six-bedroom home was considered the finest in the city upon its completion in 1908. Yet over the last thirty years, the\u00a0Rosenheim Mansion has become better known as the de facto house of horrors for film and TV location scouts<\/a>. Beyond \u201cAmerican Horror Story,\u201d the home has been used in genre staples including \u201cThe Twilight Zone,\u201d \u201cThe X-Files,\u201d \u201cBuffy the Vampire Slayer,\u201d \u201cSix Feet Under\u201d and \u201cDexter,\u201d as well as two later seasons of \u201cAHS.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a turn that seems fated to live in a script, the \u201cMurder House\u201d has changed hands acrimoniously in recent years, as the current owners claim that the home is both hellish to live in, given its fame, and genuinely haunted.<\/p>\n

1120\u00a0Westchester Place was not always known for its association with the creepy-crawly. Rosenheim, an architect who hailed from the Midwest, moved to Los Angeles in the early 1900s to build commercial and residential estates for deep-pocketed Angelenos, including the oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny. In 1908, he designed a stunning home just off Country Club Drive that threaded together various strains of popular architectural styles, notably Victorian and Craftsman<\/a>. The windows and interior cabinets twinkled with Tiffany glass, and the fireplace included tile work by the famed local maker Ernest Batchelder, leading the Los Angeles Times<\/a> to declare it \u201cone of the most elaborately finished places\u201d in the city.<\/p>\n

Over the next near-century, the mansion cycled through owners and nabbed a distinction as a historic-cultural monument in the late 1990s. Later, when the home needed about $250,000 in repairs to continue to pass muster with that historical distinction, then-owner Greta Von Steinbauer leased the home to the \u201cAHS\u201d film crew, according to the Hollywood Reporter<\/a>. In 2015, Von Steinbauer sold the home<\/a> entirely for $3.2 million \u2014 down quite a bit from the initial asking price<\/a> of $17 million.<\/p>\n

But the new owners, cardiologist Dr. Ernst von Schwarz and Pier Angela Oakenfold, were not pleased with the outsized attention the home received from horror fans. In 2018, the couple sued the Rosenheim Mansion\u2019s former owner, as well as the realtors, for allegedly failing<\/a> to mention that the home had become a \u201cmacabre tourist attraction.\u201d Oakenfold later said<\/a> that sometimes, hundreds of fans would gather before the home, with some apparently trying to bust into the house to see it for themselves. As part of the suit, the new owners also insisted that the home itself was haunted. The lawsuit appears to have been later dismissed.<\/p>\n

Eventually, the couple decided to quit warding off fans. In October 2020, the owners gave away a stay in the infamous basement \u2014 the site of many a murder in the fictitious show \u2014 to a lucky horror fan. That year, the owners also installed 14 cameras to do a continuous, three-day livestream<\/a> over Halloween weekend that included demonstrations from an exorcist, a vampire expert, a tarot reader and von Schwarz himself, who gave a lecture about \u201cmedieval torture techniques.\u201d When asked why they decided to heel-turn and embrace the house\u2019s horror bona fides,\u00a0Oakenfold put it succinctly to We Like L.A.:<\/a> \u201cLemons, lemonade.\u201d<\/p>\n

These days, the house looks a little out of sorts. On a recent visit, I spotted a tarp that seemed to be covering a decent swath of a caved-in roof, and some of the Tiffany glass windows out front appeared broken.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But perhaps because of its derelict glamour, it still has a gravitational pull with fans. On the same day that I went by the home, two \u201cAHS\u201d diehards, who did not know each other, had converged before it. They peered excitedly past the overgrown grass and chain-link fence to catch a glimpse of the spooky site of so much on-screen horror \u2014 and film a TikTok video together, where they pantomimed screaming in its presence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The smash anthology series \u201cAmerican Horror Story\u201d first premiered in 2011 with a season revolving around a terrifying\u00a0turn-of-the-century…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330419,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[48,52,51,47,50,49,2008,2009],"class_list":["post-330418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-sfgla","tag-sfglaculture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}