We Tried Ghost-Hunting At That Creepy Abandoned Ranch Outside of LA

“Oh, yeah,” she replied. 

“No shit?” I said, expecting this to be a set up to a joke about how it’s haunted by obnoxious Boomers who buy $19 cups of hummingbird feed mixed in with a milkshake and don’t tip. “What’s it haunted by?”

“Ghosts,” she said simply, and that was that. Ghosts. Okay. Well, I tried. 

As we drove on Sepulveda we were nearly run off the road by two black SUVs with car horns that had been replaced with the horns of a semi. Sepulveda, by the way, is a long squiggling mountainous road composed almost entirely of one blind corner after another. In other words, exactly the worst type of terrain to drive like an enormous jackass on.

We managed to survive those two dill-weeds driving like if Speed Racer was trying to get the most reckless driving citations in Glendale and arrived in Santa Monica. After driving around aimlessly for a bit, we found the trailhead. It’s a dirt firepath plopped down in a neighborhood where people definitely use the phrase “the help.” 

We took off down the path, and man, it is incredible how quickly you’re just in the middle of nothing. In one second you’re in an expensive suburb of the world’s 23rd largest city and the next second there’s absolutely nothing to be heard but the lonely chirping of crickets and the rasping, subtle chorus of California cicadas. On the two occasions when a helicopter flew overhead it felt like an intrusion from an alien world. It was, frankly, a little eerie out here, despite being heart-stoppingly beautiful. 

There, deep in that valley, was where we were going. The belly of the beast. The path we were on wrapped around the lip of the valley, and according to the websites I’d read, there should be an easily-missable set of stairs that would take us straight down a few miles ahead of us. After about a mile on the trail, the pavement began to be cracked and splintered. Some parts were just dirt. As we walked further along the verdant canyon we eventually found the staircase, which is a really generous description of what is, in essence, a set of jagged concrete IKEA shelves strewn haphazardly down a mountain face with an incline so severe that, were it even a ball-hair steeper, these “stairs” would cross pretty rapidly into “ladder” territory.