LOS ANGELES—Playboy founder and editor Hugh Hefner not only created a legend around himself and the sexually liberated lifestyle he espoused a decade in advance of the 1960s and 1970s “sexual revolution,” he also created a legend around the house in which he lived—the Playboy Mansion, in the high-end Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. And now one of Hefner’s former girlfriends has added to the mansion’s legend, claiming that the spot where Hollywood celebrities came to indulge in over-the-top hedonistic parties for decades is actually a haunted house, according to The Daily Mail newspaper.
Hefner moved into his first Playboy Mansion in 1959, a palatial 42-room estate in the upscale Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago, the city where Hefner founded Playboy Magazine and launched his publishing empire, and the lifestyle revolution that went with it.
But apparently craving the Hollywood glamor and hedonism that perhaps better befitted the Playboy ethos, Hefner ditched his Midwestern digs and headed to Southern California, purchasing what became the iconic Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles for $1.1 million in 1971, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Hefner sold the Playboy Mansion in 2016 for a cool $100 million, but under an agreement with the buyer, he continued to live there until his death at age 91 a year later.
Before the sale and death of its owner, the Playboy Mansion was also the site of the mid-2000s-era reality TV show The Girls Next Door that focused on Hefner’s harem of girlfriends who lived with him in the mansion.
One of those former reality TV star gal-pals, Bridget Marquardt, dropped the revelation of the mansion’s until-now-unknown supernatural elements on Monday, appearing on an Australian morning TV show.
On the show, Marquardt claimed that during her time as a resident in the mansion, she once saw the “spirit” of a woman standing in a bedroom doorway. The sighting had a chilling effect on the friend who was with Marquardt at the time, she said, causing the woman to burst into tears.
But Marquardt said that she picked up a “positive vibe” from the apparition, and did not sense that it was one of Hefner’s previous girlfriends who may have since passed on.
“I think that it might have been a former employee of Hef's just coming to see the new addition to the family,” Marquardt speculated.
Though Hefner lived in the Los Angeles Playboy Mansion for 43 years, the lavish home was constructed in 1927, 44 years before Hefner bought the place—meaning that the woman whose ghost allegedly haunts the mansion may not have anything to do with Hefner at all, but could date from an earlier era in the house’s history.
Photo By Glenn Francis / Wikimedia Commons
