Mavens of the Macabre

Dave Hogan’s favorite place to spend his lunch hour is at a cemetery.

Not any old graveyard, mind you, but Forest Lawn Memorial Park-Hollywood Hills. It’s both a haven for faded stars and a place where Hogan can pay homage to his fascination with Tinseltown’s gory past.

“When you work in fantasy, you relax in reality,” said Hogan, a computer animation technician and co-founder of the Grim Society, an online historical group devoted to what it describes as “gruesome recreation and intentional morbidity.”

The group’s expansive World Wide Web site is devoted to regional true crime tales and unsettling excess. Though darkly humorous, the site also serves as a tribute to artists who shaped the entertainment industry, Hogan said. Chopin’s “Funeral March” drones in the background as visitors discover how, for example, Grim members literally stumbled across Eva Gabor’s final resting place as they were wandering through Westwood Memorial Park.

The ghoulish group started in 1994, when Hogan and several artist friends all worked for a Burbank studio called Rich Animation. Over coffee breaks, the crew played a trivia game using anecdotes from bloody Los Angeles events.

What really, they wondered, caused the St. Francis Dam disaster in 1928? And whatever happened to Fatty Arbuckle’s body?

“We’re data-holics,” said animator and society member Bronwen Barry. “When we took the Grave Line Tour [of sites of L.A.’s more ghoulish occurrences] and realized we knew more trivia than the tour guide, we joked that we should start a historical society.”

The wisecrack slowly evolved into the Web site. Hoping to preserve this information and share it with the morbidly curious worldwide, the group regularly updates the site with new findings.

The site also offers detailed maps of Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills, Hollywood Memorial Park, Westwood Memorial Park and North Hollywood’s Pierce Bros. Valhalla Memorial Park.

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Each map details who lies where and points out players long forgotten by today’s glitterati, such as composer Haven Gillespie, who penned “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” and Leon Schlesinger, producer of the famous Warner Bros. “Looney Tunes” and “Merrie Melodies” cartoons.

The crew relies both on computer databases and the dusty public record archives at city offices to uncover ghoulish tidbits. At least once a week, society member Joe Campana takes a long lunch from his job as a film editor and pops by the Los Angeles Public Library, where he scrounges through microfiche and old phone books. He carries his prized possession--a copy of Walt Disney’s death certificate--around in his leather-bound organizer.

Those who want to join the group must reveal undiscovered tales or new details from famous cases. So far, Hogan said, hundreds of people have e-mailed him. But only a couple dozen have been able to stump the society.

“Every once in a while we’ll get a retired police officer who writes in with a tidbit,” Hogan said. “But mostly we get these strange messages from people who just don’t get it. They always seem to start out with, ‘You’ll never be a good necrophilia site unless you show autopsy photos.’ ”