Hollywood Forever Cemetery

The cemetery opened in 1899 as Hollywood Cemetery, became Hollywood Memorial Park in 1939, and took its present name in 1998. Rudolph Valentino died on 23 August 1926, aged thirty-one, and the grief was such that his New York funeral mass nearly turned into a riot. The Lady in Black is not a ghost, and the origin is worth knowing. Ditra Flame was a sickly child whose mother was a friend of Valentino's; when she was in hospital he visited, and each time he brought her a single red rose. After his death she kept the debt, returning every year on 23 August to leave roses at his crypt, and when she stopped, other women took it up. The Rudolph Valentino Memorial Service still runs on that date, with a designated Lady in Black laying a rose — the longest-running annual tribute in film history, and a living tradition rather than a haunting. Visitors to the grounds and mausoleum do report their own unexplained sightings, separately from her. Judy Garland, Cecil B. DeMille, Mickey Rooney and Tyrone Power are buried here too.