Tombstone Tour : Halloween: Visitors tread carefully at resting places for Hollywood stars and legends.

Suzanne Cooper had barely finished driving a stake into the grave of one of the town’s most celebrated murder victims on Saturday when she heard creaking footsteps coming from an empty cemetery mausoleum behind her.

She jumped with fright when a figure materialized next to the remains of monster movie actor Peter Lorre, who died 26 years ago.

It was only her husband. Frank Cooper was checking to make sure that things were ready for one of Hollywood’s most unusual Halloween rituals: A graveyard tour that reveals true-life tales from the crypts.

More than 300 curious visitors stepped among tombstones at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery for this year’s tour. They gazed at the final resting places of celebrities and listened to stories that might have sent some of them spinning in their graves.

The tour was organized by Cooper, 30, vice president of the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles. He selected three-dozen graves from the 73,000 at the Santa Monica Boulevard cemetery and marked them with orange-and-black stakes for the two-hour visit.

Society members find the cemetery fascinating because of its hundreds of elaborate marble and granite mausoleums and markers. Many have been built in architectural styles ranging from Romanesque to beaux-arts and Art Deco.

Most of Saturday’s visitors seemed more fascinated by the lives of the cemetery’s celebrities. And, of course, by their deaths.

At a memorial marker for actress Jayne Mansfield, decapitated in a 1967 automobile crash, they learned that vandals have beheaded the tombstone--ripping away a picture of the blonde bombshell.

They crowded around the grave of silent-screen actress Virginia Rappe, who died in a 1926 sex party scandal involving actor Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle. They listened somberly at matinee idol William Desmond Taylor’s tomb as they were told that his 1922 murder has never been solved.

Other parts of the tour were more lively.

“You’d die if somebody inside answered,” shouted Dawn Jacobs of Westchester as Richard Halpern of Hollywood knocked on a locked door to the cemetery’s largest private mausoleum, that of 1930s entrepreneur William A. Clark Jr.

Lyda Anderson of Hollywood read the card attached to fresh flowers at the grave of actress Marion Davies, who died in 1961. “Dear Marion, You’re still loved and missed--Always, Gary,” stated the inscription.

Anderson, who sported a dangling plastic Halloween skeleton earring on her right ear, shook her head. “Somebody needs to get a life!” she shrugged to a friend, Andrea Press of North Hollywood.

Near actor Paul Muni’s grave, 9-year-old Adam Frank of Culver City admitted that he had worried that his mother, Susan, was bringing him to a nighttime cemetery tour. “That would be spooky. People might be hiding behind the graves,” shuddered Adam--who plans to dress up as a tooth for conventional Halloween trick or treating.

On the way to Rudolph Valentino’s crypt--which was decorated with bright red lipstick kisses on its marble slab--visitors walked past the grave of one of the screen idol’s most mysterious admirers, the famous Lady in Black. She was Marquesa Di Lara Anna Ma Schott Fonz Abreaw De Carrascosa, who frequently visited Valentino’s grave after his death in 1926, until she herself died 17 years ago.

Watching Saturday from a distance was another woman dressed in black, Estrellita Del Regil. She is De Carrascosa’s daughter. Each day she travels to the cemetery to place flowers on the graves of both Valentino and her mother.

“I don’t mind tourists,” Del Regil said. “They love my mother and Valentino.

“But I get mad about the lipstick. I get furious. Only my mother and I should kiss him. We are the ones like family to him.”