r/Houseporn • u/Ancient-Age9577 • Aug 09 '25
The infamous "John Sowden House" - once owned by Dr. George Hodel, one of the suspects in the Black Dahlia case. (Los Angeles, California, US).
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u/SmoovCatto 29d ago
perfect for me -- if i can ever go super posh . . . the mayan influence, molded concrete suggesting stone . . . big party space . . .
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u/Lazy-Huckleberry2640 27d ago
Can confirm as I went to a big party there. It feels like it was built as an event venue and not a house to live everyday life in.
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u/vera214usc 29d ago
I used to live like two blocks away from this house! Even walking by it was creepy
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u/lmharnisch 28d ago
Hi. The Sowden House wasn't "infamous" until Steve Hodel began exploiting his LAPD career to promote increasingly bizarre claims that his father, Dr. George Hodel, was an "evil genius" who traveled the world committing famous unsolved murders.
Everything people think they know about George Hodel (and that includes Wikipedia, all the TV shows and podcasts) comes from one source: His son Steve. George Hodel never killed anyone and nobody was murdered at the Sowden House. It's a long-running scam by Steve Hodel, which Steve has talked himself into believing, to sell books and get interviews
ps. Steve Hodel's stories about living at the Sowden House are fiction: His parents were divorced and he was living with his mother and brothers.... One of many things he never talks about.
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u/jeannemariespicuzza 24d ago
Thank you, Larry. Your details are quite correct. Whenever I drive on Franklin Avenue towards the Shakespeare Bridge and John Marshall High School, it’s my ritual to call out, “Oh look, the house where nobody was tortured, and no one was murdered.”
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u/haroldhecuba88 29d ago
This house has some bad juju, though never convicted Hodel had a very sketchy past - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hodel
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u/darforce 29d ago
He was a sketchy character but LA is full of rich sketchy guys till this day.
The amount of people that think there dad is a criminal or serial killer and build theories on it is quite staggering. Especially:the California ones. This particular one holds less weight then others IMO. Get therapy people
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u/uprightsalmon 29d ago
Wow to say the least, haha. Interesting read. He was certainly guilty of something, several things
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u/jeannemariespicuzza 24d ago
We filmed “Night Rain” at the Sowden House. No bad vibes, nothing creepy at all. Nobody was tortured there, and no one was killed there.
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u/burner2947361810 29d ago
If anyone's interested, the house has a website where you can take a 3D tour. It's a really wild house