Los Angeles Times Ghost

Twenty years ago the press crews at the Los Angeles Times began the migration from Times Mirror Square to our current production facility called Olympic, which is located at 8th and Alameda. My crew was the first night crew to begin production at the new facility and iron out the bugs of the new printing presses, and many nights we produced nothing as everyone became accustomed to the new equipment.

One particular night twenty years ago still stands out among the others as different than the norm as a security guard questioned the pressmen regarding seeing an old man walking within the building. Seems a cafeteria worker had witnessed an old man walk into a wall and disappear, she was so distraught she refused to re-enter the building to retrieve her belongings, and never returned to work at the Olympic Facility again.

As the days turned to weeks and the weeks into months we have heard of many additional sightings within the confines of our building, with several colleagues coming forward with the agreement their names not be revealed.

One of our machinists told me he was working on the third floor of the building with a metal cart holding his tools in the chiller room, which is rather noisy, and as he turned to grab a tool discovered the cart was thirty feet away from him. This startled him and made him wonder how the cart could move so far away as the floors are very level.

Another machinist (Chuck Hart) has actually seen our guest on two occasions when he felt someone was looking at him, and did what we all do, turned his head and caught sight of an old man with a white beard staring at him from around a corner.

The machinists are not the only ones to have seen our guest, Times Security Guards revealed their sighting in the early morning hours of a Sunday morning, after everyone had left the building. As the two guards entered the hallway that surrounds the pressroom they spotted a man at the far end of the southeast hallway. One guard headed directly toward our guest while the other guard ran through the pressroom to cutoff his getaway. They found no one after searching for over an hour.

The majority of the sightings have occurred on the second and third floors at the southeast portion of the building. According to Brady Westwater the property was once a slum many years ago, and before that he was not sure?

I have no idea whom our guest could be and hope I never see him myself, but after running across the video below I thought I would share that the Times Olympic Facility could be haunted.


Hello ... from the pressroom of the York News-Times. The old pressroom is the place in which resides the print and type machinery of yesteryear.

From within this space pressmen loaded ink and attached the type, securing rolls and rolls of newsprint into place. But it has been abandoned. The newspaper industry has turned its back on this green dinosaur. Yellowed papyrus now hangs forlornly from the skeleton which was once the heartbeat of the News-Times. And here at the daily paper, we fear someone is angry at that fact. For the building seems wrought with strange happenings.

"I usually hear it after 3 p.m. Last week it happened. I shut it off and it was back on within five minutes. I guess I thought it was a little odd ... the faucet was turned fully on -- it wasn't just a leak," says Patrick Checketts.