Est. 1897 · Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument · LA's First Electricity and Telephone Hotel · Otto Stephen Wilson 1944 Murders · Vaughn Greenwood Skid Row Slasher 1975
Real estate developer Isaac Newton Van Nuys commissioned the Van Nuys Hotel as a statement of civic ambition. The Morgan and Walls architectural firm delivered a six-story Beaux-Arts building at the corner of 4th and Main Streets — a deliberate power corner in what was then Los Angeles's commercial center. When it opened in 1897, it was the only hotel in the city with electricity and a private telephone in every room; high-profile guests made it a social landmark.
The hotel's trajectory tracked the neighborhood's. As downtown Los Angeles shifted south and west across the 20th century, the Van Nuys Hotel declined from luxury to transient housing, rebranded as the Barclay Hotel, and eventually became a fixture at the edge of the Skid Row district.
On November 14, 1944, ex-Naval corpsman Otto Stephen Wilson checked in under the name 'Mr. and Mrs. O. S. Wilson' though he was alone. He later encountered Virgie Lee Griffin, intoxicated, at a nearby bar and brought her to his room. Griffin's body was found in the room's closet, with a large butcher knife and razor nearby. Wilson was ultimately linked to additional killings and prosecuted as what newspapers called the 'L.A. Ripper.'
On January 25, 1975, a vagrant named Samuel Suarez was murdered in the hotel by Vaughn Orrin Greenwood — known as the Skid Row Slasher — who targeted homeless alcoholic men throughout the Los Angeles area. Greenwood's crimes incorporated ritualistic staging: victims were posed with cups of blood, salt patterns, and cryptic markings nearby. He was eventually convicted of 11 murders and sentenced to life in prison.
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation rededicated the building as low-income residential housing in 2021 following an extensive renovation. The building is recognized as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barclay_Hotel_(Los_Angeles)
- https://www.laconservancy.org/locations/barclay-hotel
- https://derangedlacrimes.com/?tag=otto-stephen-wilson
- https://ahf.org/ahf-rededicates-l-a-s-barclay-hotel-as-low-income-housing
Shadow figuresUnexplained movement in peripheral vision
The Barclay's paranormal reputation is diffuse rather than localized — which makes sense for a building where documented violent deaths occurred in separate incidents across 30 years and multiple floors. There is no specific room number associated with the hauntings, no named entity that recurs across accounts.
What gets reported: shadow figures seen moving in peripheral vision in hallways and rooms, described by former residents and visitors to the building during its residential-hotel years. The Barclay's ground-floor common areas and upper corridors both appear in these accounts. The reports are low-intensity — not the elaborate phenomena that trail a single dramatic incident, but the background-level strangeness that accumulates in a building with multiple documented deaths.
The building's conversion to low-income housing in 2021 has reduced the volume of new reports; current residents are not a tourist audience and the building is not publicly accessible.
