The Los Feliz Murder House: The Home Frozen in Time Since 1959

The Night of December 6, 1959

On a December night in 1959, Dr. Harold Perelson — a 40-year-old physician who had recently suffered significant financial reversals — rose from his bed in the Los Feliz home at 2475 Glendower Place, took a ball-peen hammer, and beat his sleeping wife, Lillian Perelson, to death in their bedroom. He then entered the room of his 18-year-old daughter, Judye, and struck her with the hammer as well before she was able to fight him off and escape the house. His two younger daughters were unharmed. Dr. Perelson returned to his room, swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, and died before morning. The murder was reported in contemporaneous Los Angeles Times coverage and is documented in Los Angeles County coroner and police records. The cause — whether financial desperation, mental illness, or some combination — was never fully established.

The New Owners Who Never Moved In

A couple — Emily and Julian Enriquez — purchased the house sometime in the early 1960s. They never lived in it. By all accounts, they used the property as a storage facility, occasionally adding boxes and furniture, but otherwise leaving the home exactly as it had been left on the night of the murder: the Christmas tree still decorated, the ornaments still on the branches, the furniture in place, Lillian Perelson's personal items on the dressing table, dishes still in the cabinets. The house sat like a photograph of 1959, falling slowly into dusty stasis behind locked doors for more than five decades. Neighbors, journalists, and eventually urban explorers confirmed the state of the house through windows and, in some cases, through brief entries over the years. The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, and Curbed LA all documented the house's condition and history.

Why Did They Leave It?

No definitive answer to this question has ever been established. Emily Enriquez reportedly said simply that she found the house "too depressing" to occupy. Whether she was aware of what had happened there when she purchased it, and whether that knowledge shaped her decision, is unknown. Some accounts suggest she bought the property as an investment and simply never found a reason to renovate or rent it. Others have speculated, without documentation, that she or Julian experienced something in the house that discouraged habitation. Whatever the reason, the result was one of the most extraordinary instances of a residence being left untouched after a violent death in modern American history.

The Urban Legend Grows

By the 1980s and 1990s, the house had achieved legendary status in Los Feliz and the broader Los Angeles paranormal community. Its physical appearance — a vine-covered 1920s home clearly uninhabited but full of visible life through the windows — was striking enough to attract steady attention. Ghost sightings reported in the vicinity include a woman in a nightgown seen in the downstairs windows after dark, lights appearing in rooms that have no working electrical connection, and the sound of movement on the upper floors heard by people outside the house. Whether these reports reflect genuine paranormal phenomena, the ordinary sounds of a decaying structure, or the vivid imagination of visitors primed by the house's history is impossible to determine from the outside.

The House Today

In the mid-2010s, the house was finally sold after Emily Enriquez's death, and new owners undertook a full renovation. The house at 2475 Glendower Place is now a private residence. The Christmas decorations, the furniture, and the objects that had sat untouched for 50 years were removed. The structure was restored to habitable condition. The legend, however, has not faded — the house remains one of the most-discussed addresses in the history of Los Angeles true crime and paranormal folklore, a story that blends documented historical violence with decades of genuine, verified strangeness.