Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary is a compact private cemetery and mortuary at 1218 Glendon Avenue in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, adjacent to the UCLA campus. It covers roughly 2.5 acres. The site saw informal burials in the 1880s; it was formally established as Sunset Cemetery in 1905 and renamed Westwood Memorial Park in 1926. It later became known as Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park after the Pierce family mortuary business acquired it. The first mausoleum was added in the 1950s. The cemetery is designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. Despite its small size, it contains the graves or crypts of numerous entertainment-industry figures, including Marilyn Monroe (Crypt 24, Corridor of Memories), Natalie Wood, Dean Martin, Farrah Fawcett, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Billy Wilder, Truman Capote, Ray Bradbury, Peter Falk, Roy Orbison (unmarked), Frank Zappa (unmarked), Kirk Douglas, and many others. Joe DiMaggio arranged Monroe’s interment here in 1962 because the cemetery was quiet and out of the way at the time; her crypt niche has become one of the most visited graves in Los Angeles and is often marked by lipstick kisses and flowers. Hugh Hefner later purchased the adjacent crypt. The cemetery remains active and open to respectful visitors during daytime hours.
Reported Hauntings and Folklore
Unlike some older cemeteries with long-standing ghost legends, Westwood Memorial Park has relatively few published accounts of specific paranormal activity on the grounds themselves. Marilyn Monroe’s alleged ghost is more commonly reported at other locations associated with her life (such as the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel) than at her crypt. The presence of Dominique Dunne (strangled by an ex-boyfriend in 1982) and Heather O’Rourke (died at age 12 in 1988), both connected to the Poltergeist films, has led some writers and fans to note the “Poltergeist curse” folklore in connection with the cemetery; these remain popular-culture associations rather than documented hauntings. Occasional visitor comments describe a general sense of atmosphere or unease, but systematic investigations or consistent eyewitness reports of apparitions, voices, or other phenomena at the cemetery are not widely recorded in published sources. The site’s primary reputation is historical and cultural rather than paranormal.