WARNING: The Following L.A. Stories Are Not True. (Well, Maybe a Little True).

In the realm of Los Angeles, traveling over hill and vale and fiber optic cable, the line separating fact from fiction is not always straight and clear. It is along this line that urban legends get their running start. These oft-retold tales, which ignite spontaneously and are nearly impossible to trace to their sources, fall between the verifiable and the purely fantastic. Dramatic stories, they speak to fears, dreams and imaginative needs, usually with a link to some approximate truth but lacking the documentation of journalism. Often bearing the eyewitness testimony of “a friend of a friend,” urban legends appear to be more pervasive than ever, speeded perhaps by travel through cyberspace, where the authority of information is provided by anyone with access to an Internet server.

As technology proceeds apace, it has not necessarily improved the reliability of such “news” or dampened interest and belief in the paranormal, as the popularity of shows like “The X-Files” and movies like “Independence Day” would indicate. In fact, urban folklore seems to be a response to the specter of technology’s awesome forces. The sort of stories told by co-workers around the fax machine can be seen as the comforting remnants of the oral tradition, which predates both the 11 o’clock news and the daily newspaper by at least a few millennia.

“We think that in this corporate, computerized age everything is demonstrable, but it’s not,” says UCLA folklore professor Peter Tokofsky, explaining how these strange stories get started and endure. Like movie-makers, who generally regard scholarly history as a dangerous burden, folklorists are often less concerned with whether something is “true” than why certain people believe it.

Here, in the capital of celluloid dreams, folklore about ourselves would seem to have a head start. Yet the urban legends of Los Angeles reflect the increasing multiculturalism of a vast megalopolis that does not always speak the same language, let alone harbor a common culture. Searching for stories that unite us, we come to fears of earthquakes, fears of gangs and, yes, to Hollywood, whose language is (OK, sometimes sadly) universal and whose folklore perhaps provides something like a common culture.

Herewith, a collection of Los Angeles legends that won’t go away for whatever reason--most likely because too many of us don’t want to ruin a good story.

JIM MORRISON LIVED HERE--OR WAS IT HOUDINI?

A few years ago, a man researching a book about playwright and screenwriter John van Druten visited the house at Hammond and Vista Grande streets in West Hollywood where Van Druten was believed to have lived during the 1930s. When he inquired with the current owner of the house, the man had never heard of Van Druten but answered that Doors singer Jim Morrison had once lived there. “And so did Yoko Ono,” the owner said, pointing to a tiny water garden on the property that Ono had been particularly fond of. Well, if he said so, but verifying with certainty the former abodes of stars can be as challenging as determining an actress’ real age. Given the lure of celebrity dwellings, exaggeration abounds in this area. The residential rental service Home Hunters, for example, includes in its weekly newsletter descriptions of properties with such notes as “This was Brad Pitt’s first L.A. apartment” or “former residence of Lauren Hutton.” Believe it--or not.

KCET’s “California’s Gold” host Huell Howser says that when he tells people he lives in the historic El Royale apartment building in Hollywood, they often reply, “Oh, that’s where Mae West lived.” Then Howser must explain, “Mae West lived in the Ravenswood,” which is two blocks away. “But everybody thinks she lived at the Royale.”

Then there’s the location on star maps of the supposed Laurel Canyon home of magician and escape artist nonpareil Harry Houdini, which a few years ago was up for sale and advertised as the Houdini house. But there is no solid evidence that Houdini actually lived there. In fact, he may never have had a permanent residence in Los Angeles at all. Apprised of this, the real estate agent agreed to remove the Houdini pedigree. (At least for a while.)

THE NORTHRIDGE EARTHQUAKE WAS REALLY BIGGER THAN 6.7

(But the truth was suppressed for insurance purposes.) This story has persisted probably because with nothing other than the 1971 San Fernando quake (a 6.4, since upgraded to a 6.7) to compare it to, the terrible shaking that rocked L.A. for seven seconds on the morning of Jan. 17, 1994, seemed to deserve a higher magnitude.

“People wanted it to be bigger because of what went on,” says Lucy Jones, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey at Caltech. “But then you have to come up with a reason for why we would change it.”

Insurance companies base their earthquake policy liability on damage estimates, not on magnitude scales. Yet a legend-mongering bogus fax that circulated through the city after the quake, carrying Caltech’s letterhead (though misstated as “Cal Tech”), purported to assign an “intensity scale” to different L.A. ZIP codes, with one listed at 9.5. The numbers quoted in the fax were, in fact, estimates of the intensity of the shaking around the L.A. Basin based on the modified Mercalli scale, which uses the Roman numbers I through XII. Parts of Santa Monica and the San Fernando Valley experienced Mercalli IX-level intensity, which was misconstrued on the fax to mean magnitude 9 versus the reported 6.7.

Jones points out the imprecision of the basic energy magnitude scale (the one most commonly now in use) when applied to damage sustained. The destructive power of an earthquake in a particular location is affected by the quake’s duration, distance from the fault, length of the fault, peak acceleration of the waves of motion and soil conditions.

While questioning the validity of the archaic and subjective Mercalli scale, invented in the 19th century and employed in the bogus fax, Jones nonetheless says, “Northridge was a very intense earthquake because it released a lot of energy over a small area.”

The Northridge legend is part of a larger fear-based myth, acknowledges Caltech paleoseismologist Kerry Sieh: “There’s a misconception that seismologists are holding back and not telling you the truth. But the truth is, all of us are scientific prima donnas and if any of us could predict an earthquake, you think any of us could keep our mouth shut? Impossible.”

But Sieh, who recently has focused his attention on the prehistoric fault activity under downtown Los Angeles, adds, “It’s also true that the more we learn, it’s all going in one direction, and that direction is toward scarier and scarier.” Thanks.

ACTRESSES IN DESPAIR USED TO NOSE DIVE OFF THE HOLLYWOOD SIGN

Well, at least one did. This was before Goldie and Sally and Demi had their own production companies, of course. On the night of Sept. 18, 1932, a 24-year-old Broadway actress named Peg Entwistle, who had grown despondent over her failure to crack the picture business, leaped into eternity from atop the 50-foot-high letter “H” of the sign, which at the time still read “HOLLYWOODLAND.” She wrote a suicide note, then, according to police, apparently climbed up a ladder used by workers to install electric bulbs. “No one will ever know how long she stood on that great letter ‘H,’ ” a melodramatic account in The Times read.

In his folkloric history “Hollywood Babylon,” Kenneth Anger says Entwistle jumped off the 13th letter, or the second “D” (contrary to the police report). Anger also asserted that “other disillusioned starlets followed her lead,” though he failed to mention any other names, nor have the leading filmland historians turned up others in the intervening years. But does it matter? Even if Entwistle is the only recorded Hollywood-sign suicide, her farewell gesture seems too perfect not to have been plural. Death at the base of the Hollywood sign was a legend waiting to happen.

A MAGIC SALAD AT CAIOTI CAN INDUCE LABOR

Women who have been carrying around an extra 30 pounds going on 10 months are more than ready to believe in miracles.

Which perhaps partly explains how the gourmet pizza restaurant Caioti in Laurel Canyon became a prime culinary topic in Lamaze classes when it was heavily rumored that its romaine and watercress salad could send overdue pregnant women into labor. Testimonials that began in a birthing class in Studio City in 1992 offered evidence that at least eight women who were overdue tried the salad solution and delivered soon after, sometimes within hours.

Obstetricians weighed in with opinions ranging from extreme skepticism to acknowledging that the balsamic vinegar used in the dressing might actually trigger contractions of the uterus in some women. Caioti owner Ed LaDou, once the pizza chef at Spago, insisted that he knew nothing about the whole business, but initially was glad to oblige the bulging maternity contingent at his tables. He even began bottling the dressing for expectant moms around the world who were phoning in orders.

Later, LaDou grew tired of the publicity and recently said that while the myth lives on, “I’m not happy about it,” as it has saddled the restaurant with a one-sided image and put a dent in the single, unmarried couple trade.

“It’s the doctors who are perpetuating this,” LaDou complained. “Let’s put it to rest and say it doesn’t work.”

Yeah, easy for him to say.

RICH CHINESE IMMIGRANTS SETTLED IN MONTEREY PARK BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT IT WAS BEVERLY HILLS

An ethnic joke as acute in its own misbegotten logic as in its intended xenophobic slur, the story no doubt grew out of Anglo L.A.’s anxiety at watching certain neighborhoods transformed by immigrants in the ‘70s and ‘80s, made possible in part by the liberal Immigration Act of 1965.

The number of Chinese moving to the United States under the law multiplied more than threefold, reaching almost 390,000, in the years between 1981 and 1989. And Monterey Park, only 25 years ago a largely Latino and Anglo enclave east of downtown, metamorphosed into a 65% Asian community, a kind of suburban Chinatown.

It’s true that some Chinese American real estate developers did go to Taiwan, Hong Kong and China in the 1970s or took out ads in Chinese newspapers promoting Monterey Park as “a Chinese Beverly Hills,” says Mandarin Realty’s Fred Hsieh, a key player in the area’s ethnic transformation.

But as Monterey Park Chamber of Commerce executive director Kurt Aanensen says: “I don’t think the concept of Beverly Hills was that well known in Asia, and Monterey Park did not attempt to be as high-end as the real Beverly Hills. [But] they knew it wasn’t the same as Beverly Hills. I would give the Asians more credit than that.”

FLASHING YOUR HEADLIGHTS SOUTH OF PICO CAN GET YOU KILLED

Possibly inspired by post-riots paranoia, the story has it that gang members, looking for new and random provocations (or new initiation rites, in one version) to kill innocent people, hit upon the idea to drive with their headlights off at night. If any oncoming car flashed its lights in the customary reminder, they would attack the friendly driver with a full arsenal of automatic firepower.

The story was widely circulated (a nearly identical version sprouted in Chicago), even though no particular incident had suggested such behavior, according to Los Angeles police. Joey Hill, chief of staff to state Assemblyman Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles), says he heard the story from friends as recently as a year ago and decided to put it to a test.

“That part of me that is pure renegade and foolhardy couldn’t resist,” says Hill. “I made sure I didn’t have my little girl with me, and I was driving near Buckingham Road and Martin Luther King [Jr. Boulevard], and I saw a car coming without its lights on. So I blinked my lights and I have to say I started to get down. I was ready.

“And then, I saw the driver and it was a little old lady, smiling and thanking me.”

THE GHOST OF THE COLORADO STREET BRIDGE

During construction of the great bridge in Pasadena in 1913 (stretching Colorado Street across the yawning Arroyo Seco), legend has it that a Mexican worker lost his balance and tumbled into the wet concrete that was filling a form for one of the huge supporting pillars. The worker’s absence was not noticed immediately by the foreman, and subsequently it was decided the body could not be recovered. In the ensuing years, the spirit of the departed worker was thought to have lured almost 200 of those who “were low in spirit” to hurl themselves from the magnificent span, according to a 1945 issue of the California Folklore Quarterly. (Pasadena police estimate the number of jumpers to date at 100.)

Today it is said in Pasadena that one of the street lights on “Suicide Bridge” turns blue on nights when the ghost of the interred laborer is particularly active. Tania Rizzo, the archivist with the Pasadena Historical Museum, admits she’s heard the blue light legend but notes, “It’s never been substantiated.”

“I WAS INVITED TO SHARON TATE’S HOUSE THAT NIGHT.”

That night, of course, was actually the predawn hours of Saturday, Aug. 9, 1969, when Charles Manson’s addled disciples broke into the rented Benedict Canyon home of director Roman Polanski and murdered his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, and Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Jay Sebring and Steven Parent. Of the many weird details surrounding the sensational killings--for example, that Tate’s abdomen was sliced open (it was not)--has been the curiously large number of people in Hollywood who in years since have claimed (or were claimed by others) to have been invited to the house that night, “almost” attended and thereby presumably just averted death. The list includes the late writer Jerzy Kosinski, Candice Bergen and musician “Papa” John Phillips.

Phillips wrote in his 1986 autobiography that he and television writer Marshall Brickman were thinking about going over to Tate’s, but that Brickman had heard it was the right time of the year to see the phosphorescent plankton in the waves at Malibu. So the two went to the beach instead--suggesting a supermarket tabloid headline never written: “Phosphorescent Plankton Saves ‘California Dreamin’ ’ Writer From Nightmare Slaughter.”

Former deputy district attorney and “Helter Skelter” author Vincent Bugliosi says he has heard mentioned the names of as many as 50 people who claim to have been near-miss guests at Tate’s. “You know, it’s kind of a conversation piece,” Bugliosi says by way of explanation. “But an investigation revealed there was no party scheduled that night. The LAPD checked into that thoroughly.”

UCLA’S BUNCHE HALL WAS RAISED ON STILTS TO APPEASE DRIVERS ON THE 405

At the northeast end of the Westwood campus, the university’s 12-story social science building is partially supported by pillars. Its legend, commonly repeated by students leading orientation tours, is that Bunche was originally built flat to the ground, but that the sun’s glare from its reflective windows was blinding drivers on the 405 Freeway, and the building had to be raised (on stilts) and rotated to correct the hazard.

The fact that you can still see the sun reflecting off Bunche Hall’s windows from the 405 at dusk is a detail conspicuous in its absence. “Invariably on every campus there’s a narrative about some building that was built wrong,” observes UCLA folklore archivist Patrick Polk. “It reassures nervous incoming students that even the people running the university are capable of screw-ups.”

Meanwhile, over at USC there’s a stone gargoyle of a monkey on the east facade of the Student Union building that appears to be thumbing its nose at a neighboring likeness of former university President Rufus B. von KleinSmid, the visionary autocrat who ruled USC from 1922 to 1947. The sculpted gesture is considered nothing more than a coincidence, says university archivist Paul Christopher, “but students today don’t really know who Von KleinSmid was.” Yet he is a legend: The administrator being mocked for all time by a monkey.

WALT DISNEY’S BODY IS STORED IN A CRYOGENIC TANK

Possibly on the remote slopes of the Matterhorn. Maybe even underneath the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. Something about Uncle Walt evidently suggests he couldn’t go the way of all flesh when he departed this realm on Dec. 15, 1966. He was said to have avoided funerals whenever possible and during his last years became fascinated with the science of cryogenics, or freezing the dead for later re-animation (so to speak). The story was strong enough to spawn a series of unkind jokes, including the one attributed to an unadmiring Disney artist who said, “Freezing was Walt’s attempt to make himself a warmer human being.” But the official record is thoroughly uncryogenic and indicates that Disney was, in fact, cremated. Following a private ceremony, his ashes were interred at Forest Lawn, Glendale.

A SUNDAY TIMES THROWN BY A NEWSBOY KILLED A DOG

The unusual size and heft of the newspaper you are now reading became so pronounced in the mid-1980s that a popular story circulated that one particularly massive pre-Christmas edition--hurled by a carrier onto a front stoop--landed on a small dog and crushed it to death.

The story originated with “Mission: Impossible” actress Barbara Bain, whose pooch was the alleged victim of the unintended bomb of award-winning newsprint. Writer Gregg Kilday, then a columnist for the Herald Examiner, says he heard Bain give a first-person account of the incident during a party at producer Allan Carr’s Hollywood home. Kilday reported the story a day later in print, and it quickly spread across the country and into myth.

Now a writer with Entertainment Weekly, Kilday says, “She did tell it as a real story. There may have been an element of exaggeration in the way that actresses are capable of, but the story was so good I didn’t press her on it.”

Bain’s business manager at the time phoned The Times to say that Kilday’s version was not true. Times’ officials later determined that it was possibly the carrier’s car, not the paper itself, that had killed the dog, whose exact size and breed were never revealed. Bain has declined to comment further on the incident that became the source of the story.

Says Kilday: “It was a time when you were hearing people complaining about the Sunday paper, how fat it was, how it landed with such a thud, and [the story] definitely played into that.”

SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAPPENED AT THE SPANISH KITCHEN

Not really. But then again, something must have, right? Just look at the place. The long-broken neon sign and peeling paint of the Beverly Boulevard restaurant, shuttered and abandoned since 1961, present a freakish two-story facade lodged, as it is, in a row of thriving businesses near La Brea Avenue. The mere fact that place settings and menus remained on the tables supposedly untouched for three decades qualifies the former Mexican restaurant for a listing in the “Twilight Zone” directory.

In a twist on the “Field of Dreams” maxim, the Spanish Kitchen is proof that if you just leave a building closed long enough, the myths will come. One enduring story purports that the restaurant was the lifelong dream of a young couple, but that on its opening night the husband was murdered inside and the wife, since deceased, had stipulated in the will that it remain completely undisturbed until the killer was caught.

History records instead that the Spanish Kitchen opened in 1932 and was operated by the husband-and-wife team of John and Pearl Caretto, who lived in an apartment over the restaurant. It survived successfully for nearly three decades, attracting Hollywood people like Mary Pickford, John and Lionel Barrymore and Bob Hope. But when John, who did much of the cooking, got Parkinson’s disease, Pearl closed the place to take care of him, hoping he would recover and return to the kitchen. He never did, so she never did. John is believed to have died in 1967, but Pearl continued to live in reclusion above the abandoned dining room until 1980, when the building was vandalized and she moved to another part of the city.

Pearl has since died, and the building was finally sold last year to investors who plan to turn it into a restaurant and piano bar. Before she died, Pearl was tracked down by a Times reporter in 1989 but would only answer questions through a barred window and offered little clue to the mystery of why she hadn’t sold the building, other than a faint suggestion that its frozen-in-time appearance stood as a symbol of her love for her departed husband. “There is no mystery in that place,” she said. “There’s no story here.” That’s a good one.

A CONSPIRACY OF AUTOMOBILE, OIL AND RUBBER COMPANIES SECRETLY DESTROYED THE RED CAR TROLLEYS

Sounds plausible, even if it was used as the noir subplot of the 1988 comedy “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” (Christopher Lloyd was the villainous megalomaniac who bought up the train lines only to dismantle them.) A more sober version of this story emerged from a 1974 report presented to the Senate Judiciary Committee by legislative analyst and automobile critic Bradford Snell, who determined that General Motors and other automobile-related manufacturers invested in a company, National City Lines, that purchased various urban electric streetcar lines in the 1940s. A subsidiary of National, American City Lines, bought the Los Angeles Railway (LARY), once owned by Henry Huntington. American City Lines then began to replace the streetcars with fume-spewing diesel buses, which presumably led to public acceptance of the automobile and the freeway as the preferred means of urban transportation (and securing the fortunes of General Motors et al.).

But Snell’s thesis was seriously questioned in a 1987 book, “Los Angeles and the Automobile,” by Scott L. Bottles. Writing his doctoral dissertation in history at UCLA, Bottles discovered that while it was true the automobile interests had bought into National City Lines, it was also true that National City’s stockholders divested these interests two years later as a result of antitrust prosecution. More important, he pointed out that LARY had decided to replace the company’s trolleys with buses four years before American City purchased the train network.

“Old myths die hard,” Bottles wrote. Indeed, given the tangled mess of stop-and-start freeways and lung-clogging auto emissions that became modern-day Los Angeles, it’s more than tempting to believe that evil forces must be to blame. But the author goes to great pains to explain how the decentralized layout of Los Angeles even early in the century created unusual transportation problems that the trains did not solve, and that the public grew disenchanted with the Red Cars as early as the 1930s while looking toward the freeway dream. “By 1944,” he wrote, “the city’s streetcars and interurban systems were mere shadows of their former selves. Their decline began with the belief that the automobile could solve pressing urban problems and create a kind of utopia.” Oops.

LANA TURNER WAS DISCOVERED AT SCHWAB’S

She was not. But the story offered poetic proof that magic can reach down and touch any beautiful girl on Sunset Boulevard. Schwab’s drugstore was just the right location for such a heavenly intervention before it closed in 1983 and was replaced by the 8000 Sunset Building at Crescent Heights. According to a 1971 biography of the ‘40s screen siren by Joe Morella and Edward Epstein, Turner was “discovered” on a January day in 1936 at Currie’s Ice Cream Parlor at Sunset and Highland Avenue across from Hollywood High School, where she was a student, then 15 years old. (In other versions, Currie’s is the Top Hat Malt Shop, and Turner was 16.) The man who did the discovering was not a producer but Billy Wilkerson, founder of the Hollywood Reporter, who helped her get an agent. Her big screen debut? A $25 extra in “A Star Is Born.” A year passed before director Mervyn LeRoy gave her a real role in “They Won’t Forget.” LeRoy later said he doubted the story: “I always thought it was a publicity stunt, that soda fountain discovery.”

It remains unclear how Schwab’s for decades managed to be credited for a story that itself was disputed from the beginning. Bill Welsh, president emeritus of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, offers a simple theory: “It put more glamour into it, rather than saying she was discovered across the street from Hollywood High at a hamburger stand.”

L.A. STOLE WATER FROM THE OWENS VALLEY

Probably no movie has had a bigger impact on popular notions of the city’s history than “Chinatown,” written by L.A. native and most-favored screenwriter Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski. Although updated to Raymond Chandler’s 1930s, “Chinatown” would appear to be based on the real events of 1905-1913 leading up to the building of the 235-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct bringing billions of gallons of water annually from the Owens River south to L.A., which at the time only had enough water to supply a population of 250,000. While Towne has said he didn’t base a single character on the real Owens Valley episode, the Oscar-winning 1974 film’s depiction of a conspiracy of corrupt robber barons to “steal” water from distant farmers to privately develop the San Fernando Valley with public money has nevertheless assumed the weight of history.

Towne wasn’t the first to offer this version of events, only the most successful. City histories written by Morrow Mayo (1933) and Carey McWilliams (1946) posit much the same story. There have been other accounts by scholars seriously challenging the conspiracy theory, but they have not easily served the purposes of drama and folklore. Two books in progress will suggest “Chinatown” is anything but history--one by UC San Diego political science professor Steve Erie and another by Catherine Mulholland, granddaughter of the man who designed the aqueduct.

“The rest of California hates us because we stole the water and enriched a few investors,” says Erie. “The problem is that they really didn’t steal the water. They were forced to be secret because there was no money to build the aqueduct. If they’d gone public, Owens Valley landowners would have tripled and quadrupled their demands. Mulholland brought the project in right at the bonding limit of the city. And the idea that only land speculators out in the Valley benefited is ridiculous. This is the founding of modern L.A. No water, there would be no modern L.A., simple as that.

“Furthermore,” Erie continues, “farmers were actually very well paid for their land, and people have forgotten there was very little agricultural potential in the Owens Valley because it’s 4,000 feet up with a very short growing season. McWilliams got it wrong, and his book is the bible so it keeps getting repeated.”

Says Catherine Mulholland, who has finished writing a biography of her controversial grandfather, “I mean, it’s a good script, it’s a good movie, but it makes Oliver Stone look like a great historian as far as the facts are concerned. It’s Hollywood, it isn’t ‘Chinatown.’ ” Robert Towne, alert your local library.