The Hollywood Sign and Peg Entwistle

The Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles, where British actress Peg Entwistle died by suicide in 1932. Hikers and others have since said they saw her ghost near it.

The sign went up in 1923 as Hollywoodland, the Hollywood Sign Trust says: a $21,000 advertisement for Harry Chandler's property development, meant to stand for 18 months.

Peg Entwistle was a British actress of stage and screen who began acting on stage in 1925 and appeared in several Broadway shows, Wikipedia says. Wikipedia dates her death at the sign to 16 September 1932; the Hollywood Sign Trust's account gives the year only. Slate notes that Bette Davis credited Entwistle's 1925 performance in The Wild Duck with inspiring her to act, and that her one film was RKO's Thirteen Women.

Braudy told Smithsonian magazine in 2023 that her death was soon made into a lesson about Hollywood ambition, though her suicide note did not mention show business. Smithsonian says a Los Angeles Times article of 19 September spread the idea by blaming her death on a film jinx and dashed screen hopes.

The ghost story came later. Hello! magazine reported in 2020, around Netflix's series Hollywood, that hikers had reported odd events near the sign. It cited jogger Megan Santos, who told Vanity Fair she saw a blonde woman who seemed to walk on air, a couple who said a young woman dressed in period clothes disappeared before their eyes, and park rangers who claimed sightings of the sign's ghost.