Southern California’s cutthroat real estate market has a famous new listing — the Murder House of Los Feliz.
The reportedly haunted mansion that’s been frozen in time since a shocking 1959 murder-suicide is on the block for a staggering $2.75 million, according to luxury real estate firm Berkshire Hathaway Home Services.
Perched on a well-heeled hill in the shadow of Griffith Park, the dilapidated dwelling is where New York-born Dr. Harold Perelson, 50, bludgeoned his sleeping 42-year-old wife Lillian to death with a ball peen hammer on Dec. 6, 1959.
Perelson also viciously attacked his 18-year-old daughter Judye, who managed to escape, and then told his younger daughter Debbie, 11, that the whole scene was a “nightmare” before he killed himself with a cocktail of drugs.
Former neighbor Cheri Lewis was about 12 years old at the time of the slaying and said she was able to walk through the house in recent years when some painters were working on the property.
She confirmed it had been sold not long after the murder-suicide but said the couple who purchased it owned lots of property and simply left it uninhabited for decades.
“About 10 years ago, we went into Judye’s old room, and the nameplate on the light switch cover was still there with her name on it,” Lewis, now a dentist in Beverly Hills, told the Daily News.
She recalled seeing the Perelson family’s furniture still in the house under protective covering and boxes of women’s shoes that she believed belonged to Judye.
“I remember,” Lewis said, referring to the noise that woke her up the night of the doctor's bloody rampage. “She was screaming. At first I thought it was a wild animal, but then it was something like, ‘Don’t kill me!’ It was like a horror movie.”
Lewis said the family had been struggling financially and that Dr. Perelson apparently tried to kill himself during a hospital stay prior to the bloodbath, at least according to neighborhood lore.
“We were told he tried to commit suicide in a psych ward. He had a lot of issues. There was talk that either the wife or the doctors he worked with were going to have him committed,” she said. “This may have been the trigger.”
Lewis said she never saw the Christmas tree and wrapped presents from 1959 that other neighbors and thrill-seekers reported seeing through windows during unauthorized visits to the house over the years.
The creepy crib finally went on the market because the couple who purchased it after the murder — Emily and Julian Enriquez — left it to their son, and the son recently died.
The pictures show empty rooms stripped of any personal possessions. A large wall mural in one room showing a bird resting on a tree is the only evidence of a former tenant’s personal touch.
The 5,000-square foot Spanish revival property at 2475 Glendower Place was the subject of a lengthy article by Jeff Maysh on Medium.com that reportedly led to a script deal for Joshua Malkin, the screenwriter of the 2009 horror flick "Cabin Fever 2."
The film is in development at The Coalition Group, according to a report last October on TheWrap.com.
Lewis said she believes the $2.75 million price tag is based on the property's luxury location, not the creepy crib.
“It’s probably a tear-down,” she told The News.
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