CORONA DEL MAR TODAY

Five Crowns and Its Ghostly History

Five Crowns is haunted — just ask the people who work there.

About a week ago, manager Rose Stone was pulling on a locker room door when she felt something on the other side push it toward her.

“I screamed,” Stone said. “It catches me sometimes, but I’m very aware of it.”

The ghosts, she said, normally come out during the holiday season. Once she saw a man in black holding onto a string of colored lights, but the bulbs between his outstretched hands were dark. Then he disappeared.

Other employees have seen faces in powder room mirrors, had wine glasses shatter for no reason while sitting on trolleys, or have seen a ghostly lady in the garden area during dinner service.

“One young couple was sitting on the patio,” Stone said. “They ran out and paid and left suddenly. They had seen a vision of two people across the garden.”

Chef Dennis Brask has said he was mysteriously locked inside a walk-in freezer. The wine captain was locked out of his wine room. Something inside knocked at him, but when police came to open the door, no one was there.

Lights go on suddenly at times, a portrait’s eyes seem to follow you around the room, things move. Images have been reported in the garden, the kitchen, the upstairs ladies’ room. Thumps and bumps are heard all over the place.

“It’s not an evil feeling,” Stone said. “It’s friendly. A little mischievous.”

Stone said she grew up in Massachusetts in a house more than 100 years old and spent time playing in a graveyard as a child, a graveyard that also was more than a century old. She said she never senses ghosts anywhere else, but she wonders if the ghosts at Five Crowns perhaps feel comfortable around her.

“Sometimes, they make a nice little tapping noise,” she said. “There will be nobody there, and I’ll think, ‘O.K….Hi!’ ”

According to company sources, Five Crowns was built in 1936 and modeled after one of England’s oldest inns, Ye Olde Bell at Hurley-on-Thames. Matilda MacCulloch and her daughter, Marguerite, lived there for the first four years.

In 1940, two Los Angeles restaurateurs leased the building for use as a restaurant. But Corona del Mar was so remote, and the partners disagreed about permitting diners to gambling. Ultimately, they closed the place after three years. The original mother and daughter owners returned and opened it as the Hurley Bell Inn.

“In the mid 1940s, the inn became a hideaway for Hollywood stars and their playmates,” according to a restaurant statement. “Howard Hughes and Rita Hayworth escaped to the inn for their ill-fated love affair, Peter Lorre and his wife spent their honeymoon there, and Lana Turner, Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were also visitors.”

After Matilda died in 1948, her daughter leased the building. But the Hurley Bell began to attain a dubious reputation. It was leased in 1964 and eventually purchased by the Lawry’s Restaurant company. They filled the place with antiques, added an English garden and dressed the staff in “wenchy” uniforms. Five Crowns as we know it opened in April 1965.

Some employees say they never noticed the ghosts. Others like Stone say they often are aware.

“You have the feeling someone’s there,” she said. “You can feel your hair standing up. It’s the most real but unreal feeling.”