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Picnic Table still there 37 years later |
Minus
the blood and gore and crushed corpses and police caution tape, not
much has changed in many years.
High up and deep within Griffith Park
the scene remains otherwise no different from how it looked on
the evening
of October 31, 1976, when tragedy literally befell a young Hollywood
couple,
inconceivably
crushed by a nearby tree that toppled over upon them while they made
love upon a picnic table just off winding Mt. Hollywood Drive.
As
lurid as it was inexplicable,
the deaths of 22-year-old musician Rand Garrett and aspring actress
Nancy Jeanson, 20, were nonetheless a brief blip on the radars of local
newscasts
and newspapers, by and large laid to rest after their cremated remains
were scattered upon the table and surroundings where the childhood
sweethearts died in each others' arms.
Though
their ashes have long since blown away,
what hasn't been so quick to dissipate is the legend that has grown
up around strange
events and eerie occurences — especially around the
anniversary of their demise — that witnesses claim began happening
shortly after their deaths and purportedly continue to occur to this
day, bolstering
a belief that the anguished spirits of Rand and Nancy are wandering
never too far away from the picnic table that simultaneously brought
them together and tore them apart.
"People
thought I was damn crazy," says retired city tree trimmer Morris
Carl when he tried to explain what happened to him a few days after
authorization had been given to clear the fallen tree and he was
tapped for the duty. "I
drove up there with a job to do and I aimed to do it. What I didn't
figure on was getting scared out of my wits!"
Carl
is quick to add that up to that day he never gave much thought to whether
ghosts were real. "But from that point on
I certainly don't give any thought that they aren't," he says.