164 Togare arrived as a cute little cub, retiring to Tippi Hedren’s
Shambala great cat sanctuary near Los Angeles when as a 500-
lb adult his nocturnal roars kept the neighbors awake. While
he lived with them, moreover, the LaVeys had no concerns
about burglars.
- 323 -
leopard to the [social/audience] Purple Room, with
its entire-wall bookcase (concealing a secret
passage), Anton’s Charles Addamsesque oil
paintings, tombstone coffee-table, glass-encased
skeleton, and “infinity mirror”.
Here they might be greeted by Diane, described
by journalist John Godwin as a “smiling, outgoing,
hospitable little blonde”, and by Susan Atkins as
“soft-voiced, impeccably mannered, and possessed
of the longest hair I’d ever seen”. 165
As befitting Hell’s High Priest, Anton often
arrived in flames - through the fireplace:
Beyond the bookcase lay the Red Room -
master bedroom (elevated) & Anton’s office
(beneath). Hanging on the walls: animal masks for
the H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau-theme
Tierdrama (“animal play”) ceremony of the Church:
165 Godwin, John, Occult America. Garden City: Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1972, page #243. Atkins, Susan, Child of Satan,
Child of God. New York: Bantam Books #11472, 1978, page
#65. Don’t believe Susan about Diane’s hair? See page #27!
- 324 -
Another secret passage through Pharaoh
Tutankhamen’s gold mummy-case led to the famous
main Ritual Chamber, with its fireplace/altar built
after the 1906 Fire from old street cobblestones:
- 325 -
Below all the aforementioned rooms was the
ground floor, on which the two principal rooms were
the “Den of Iniquity” bar [patronized by Anton’s
Day of the Locust166 android clientele] with Satan
himself tending bar167. Alongside sat a period Rock-
Ola 45rpm vinyl jukebox.
Trough a concealed door from the Den was
6114’s most secret and exclusive venue for magical
workings, the “Council Chamber” (named for the
Church’s Council of Nine). Restricted to Anton
alone, or with one or two participants, it was also
rigged with various electromagnetic mechanisms.
Through a visible door at the back of the Den’s
bar was what had originally been called the Blue
Room. Painted in bewildering iridescence, its
interior was a forest of mirrors surrounding a raised
platform on which there rested an open trapezoidal
166 Nathaniel West’s savage 1939 novel about the “Boulevard of
Broken Dreams” human tragedies of peripheral Hollywood.
167 Wearing a commercial rubber Devil mask modeled from
Anton LaVey’s features.
- 326 -
coffin: rarely used because of its obvious
psychological dangers.
By 1973 the Blue Room had been changed to
something radically different, if not dangerous in a
different way. Now it appeared as a seedy hotel
room with old, cheap furniture; a “light-box
window” showed a dark alley with a fitfully-
flickering neon sign for the flophouse. Hanging
inside the door was Anton’s collection of famous
female movie stars’ “unmentionables”.
There remains to disclose only the darkest and
most terrifying secret of the Black House: one so
unnerving that I strongly suspect Anton never told
Diane, Karla, or Zeena about it so as not to afflict
them with frightful nightmares. 168
It had to do with an obscure, locked third door
on the east wall of the Den of Iniquity.
As far as family and aides such as John Ferro
knew, this just led to a tiny utility room that served
only two purposes: Anton’s hideaway desk & files;
and the ladder to the Purple Room’s fireplace.
It was here that Anton kept the strongbox
containing his personal Pact with Satan, as well as
items he did not trust to his formal Red Room office
or the bookshelves of the Purple Room, such as his
first edition of The King in Yellow.
But there was something else in that alcove.
One evening in early 1975, Anton and I had
been discussing H.P. Lovecraft’s novel The Case of
Charles Dexter Ward, notable for an ordinary New
England farmhouse concealing a warren of
168 It may also have been the reason Anton’s father left 6114
with his wife, though apparently unable to convince his son to
abandon it as well. By 1971 Joseph apparently decided that
Anton had deterred any immediate danger.
- 327 -
underground tunnels and caverns with the usual
HPL horrors lurking therein.
“How much do you know about this part of San
Francisco?” asked my host, then led the way from
the Purple Room through the bookcase to the Red
Room, thence into the mummy-case concealing the
ladder down into the Den of Iniquity.
Anton unlocked the alcove door, and we went
inside, where he pulled up the carpet on the rough
cement floor, revealing an obviously very old iron
manhole-cover:
Without touching it, Anton replaced the rug.
Shortly before his parents had moved out, he said,
his father had shown him this feature in what
originally was just unfinished basement crawlspace.
Young Tony had been told just to leave it alone,
which he did.
Years later, when remodeling the house to its
present exotica, he’d come across it again while
constructing the Purple Room’s fireplace-ladder. He
opened it, revealing a vertical tunnel of utter
darkness beneath. There was no ladder or the
remains of one, and a flashlight beam was not strong
enough to illuminate its lower terminus. He’d then
replaced the iron lid and hadn’t disturbed it since.
- 328 -
From a drawer of the alcove’s desk, Anton
retrieved a document. Back in the Purple Room he
spread it out on the tombstone-coffeetable.
“This is the storm-drain network beneath the
Richmond District, Sea Cliff, and Land’s End. After
the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, there was a great deal
of engineering effort put into the city’s water-supply
and -drainage systems. Apparently the old North
Beach and Financial Districts just needed repairs to
their existing networks, but out in the Avenues,
Sunset, and Richmond there was major excavation.
“As best I can determine from these old charts,
6114’s sitting slightly off-center above the main
storm-drain artery, a gigantic spillway called the
‘Mile Rock Tunnel’. It’s about 300 feet down and
several thousand feet long, ending in the Land’s End
crags below the Sutro Baths.
“A great many tributaries, both planned and
‘encountered’, were connected to Mile Rock.
- 329 -
“So this entire district is sitting over a labyrinth
that would put Lovecraft to shame.
“I think it’s obvious that the pit below this
house is one of those, if not part of Mile Rock itself.
“In the Chronicle archives,” - he produced
another paper from the desk - “I found just this one
old photo of it before it was sealed off from sight:
“The main tunnel was so huge that the
engineers celebrated its completion by driving a car
through it all the way to the cliffs. Ironically they’d
forgotten there was no place to turn around, so the
car had then to reverse all the way back.
“But this certainly solves the mystery of the
gigantic sinkholes that have regularly plagued this
district during severe storms: various collapses of
the tributaries. I hate to think what might happen if
the main tunnel beneath this house ever experiences
a whole or even partial collapse. Look at this photo
from the last such sinkhole, just a few blocks away:
- 330 -
“Judging from the bewilderment at such times,
I don’t think anyone but myself knows the existence
or extent of the abandoned subterra, else they’d be
terrified to live here. And it also lays bare the
blighted devastation haunting the ruins of the Sutro
Baths.” 169
Anton paused, pulled a moldering volume from
the highest corner of the bookshelf. Its cover seemed
to be some sort of aged leather or skin, crudely
branded or burned on the front only:
al-Azif
I knew immediately with a thrill of shocked
incredulity that it was indeed the abhorred
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred ...
but it was well-known that this terrible tome was
169 Concerning the Sutro Baths, see Appendix #3 of my Ghost
Rides (2018), in which Eric Kauschen examines their
catastrophic fate, and relates how he and a fellow spelunker
nearly didn’t survive an exploration of one of the now-sealed
burrows beneath those spectral ruins. Do not venture therein!
- 331 -
merely a whimsical invention by Lovecraft. So how
on Earth [or out of it] could Anton LaVey possibly
possess it?!
Undeterred, indeed apparently driven by some
subtle madness emanating from the iron-sealed
chasm below us, my host feverishly pawed through
the disintegrating pages, then intoned in a voice
alternately maniacally triumphant and quaveringly
hysterical:
“The nethermost caverns are not for the
fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are
strange and terrific.
“Cursed the ground where dead thoughts
live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that
is held by no head.
“Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is
the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the
town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is
of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought
hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and
instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of
corruption horrid life springs, and the dull
scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell
monstrous to plague it.
“Great holes secretly are digged where
earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have
learnt to walk that ought to crawl.” 170
Anton slammed that blasphemous book closed
and stared wild-eyed into the Infinity Mirror across
the room; innumerable metaphysical monstrosities
glared and gibbered mockingly back at him as I ran
shrieking mindlessly from that hideous house and
the labyrinthian loathsomeness biding beneath.
I recall naught else of that noxious night -
170 al-Hazred, Abdul, Al Azif (“the Necronomicon”), rashly
reproduced by H.P. Lovecraft in The Festival (1923).
- 332 -
An obviously mystified Park Service Police
report said I’d been found at Land’s End howling
something like “Ee-yah Yogsohthoth! Suhthulooh
fuhtaggin!”. I was finally subdued by several taser-
shots and gentle mauling by a K-9 wooficer.
Then came a time which pulled down
antiquities. Then the words were spoken: The
house must die.
But the house was stronger than the words,
as it was stronger than the centuries. With
suddenly-falling stones it slew those who laid
hands on its walls. It opened the floor under their
feet, dragging them down into a shaft, of which no
man had previously had any knowledge.
It was as though the plague, which had
formerly wandered in the wake of the red shoes of
the magician, still crouched in the corners of the
narrow house, springing out at men from behind,
to seize them by the neck. They died, and no
doctor knew the illness.
The house resisted its destruction with so
great a force that word of its malignity went out
over the borders of the city, spreading far over the
land, that, at last, there was no honest man to be
found who would have ventured to make war
against it.
Yes, even the thieves and the rogues, who
were promised remission of their sentence
provided that they declared themselves ready to
pull down the magician’s house, preferred to go to
the pillory, or even to the scaffold, rather than to
enter within these spiteful walls, these latchless
d o o r s , w h i c h w e r e s e a l e d w i t h S a t a n ’ s
pentagram. 171
171 von Harbou, op.cit. , page #48.
- 333 -
Over the next score of years the house endured,
gradually falling into disrepair after first Diane, then
Anton LaVey abandoned it. Finally it was past
restoration: As the commercial firm acquiring the
property put it, “That house is just held up by the
buildings on both sides.”
6114 California Street ended its existence,
impudently enough, on my birthday, October
16th, in the year 2001.
The newspapers ignorantly assumed and
reported that it had been a routine demolition, but
they had not been there just after mid-night to hear
- as incredulous neighbors later put it - that obscene
sucking sound as the black spectre shuddered, then
collapsed horrifyingly inward, until nothing
remained but a small, pulsing Darkness adjacent to
a flung-aside circlet of cold iron. A Mr. Fred
Farnsworth, visiting friends at 6135 California, took
the only known photograph, though he was quickly
accused of faking it:
The inexplicably-sheered lot was immediately
concealed for months behind a hastily-erected
chainlink fence, behind which the weeds and bushes
overgrew with certain peculiar mutations as
glimpsed through cracks in the slatted fencing.
- 334 -
A year later Lilith and I were invited to the
open house-showing of the condominiums which
had been built on the site.
For reasons t
he agents could [or, more
probably, would] not explain, it was now named
“611[]” - not “6114”. It appeared that the Other Gods
had decreed that not only the original structure, but
even its very address, should cease ever to have
been.
I was somehow not surprised to see that the
new building also had no excavated basement, but
rested on a freshly-poured, curiously thicker cement
slab. The ground-level area previously containing
the alcove and its surrounds was now a large,
ordinary recreation room. There was no sign of the
iron lid.
It was only then, reassuringly convinced by the
soothing banality of the condominiums, that I could
finally put those mocking memories of that terrible
night to rest.
Well, almost. One thing persists in vaguely
disquieting my last glimpse of Anton LaVey as I ran
desperately for the door.
He had no business laughing while he
screamed.
... And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door;
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh - but smile no more.
- Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher
- 335 -
18: Ninth Solstice
Arise! Hear! See with the brilliance of my
Flame that has been brought before my
darkened and blasted temple these long
years. I am Satan, and again the great
angles of the Universe are conjoined that I
may manifest my Will to this plane of Earth. I
have constrained the forces of time that I
may do this, yet even so I am not full master
of inertia, as the Cosmos is not entirely a
thing of my creation.
I and the High Daimons of Infernus - that is
Hell - have looked upon the workings of my
Earthly Church with pleasure and the pride
that is our nectar. And we too have drawn
life afresh from this Church. Did I not say
that we had chosen to invest man with our
own life essence - that which, being not of
the natural order of things, we cannot
recreate from other matter? In giving man
conscious life, we of the Daimonic race
The Satanic Bible Page 26
