Adam Levine is like a kid in a candy shop as he walks through Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles. He pulls out his phone to document the 142-year-old, gothic stone chapel with crawling ivy in front of him while marveling over its beauty.
Clean shaven and wearing white khaki shorts and a T-shirt, Levine’s appearance doesn’t scream “man who studies serial killers for a living.” But as the owner of Graveline Tours, a haunted crime tour company, he has been fascinated with death since childhood.
That’s when he hopped into a hearse and learned the grisly details and locations of murder victims in the city with Dearly Departed Tours, a company run by Scott Michaels, an expert on Charles Manson. Although the hearse looked like any you might see from the outside, the inside contained benches made specifically for tour guests.
“I remember never being able to forget that I was in the same vehicle used to transport corpses,” Levine said. “It gave you the feeling that you were inextricable with something grotesque and macabre. It was always in the back of my mind, and I loved it.”
Levine remembers clearly the binders full of black and white crime scene photos that we passed around to the tour guests.
“It lent this aura of authenticity to it. That’s part of why the tour was so special,” Levine said. “It was hard to duplicate because it was really weird in the first place.”
Levine’s interest in the macabre was not exactly celebrated in his family.
“They did not get it out of me, but I probably questioned it more than I needed to because there was a lot of talk in my family like, ‘What’s going on with Adam?’ That was just nonsense,” Levine said.
It never crossed his mind that one day he would be running his own haunted tour company. After graduating college with a degree in fine arts, Levine wound up working construction, restoring old houses in Los Angeles.
But the pandemic caused Dearly Departed Tours to close its doors, and Levine decided to take a chance.
“It was the kid-ness of it that really gave me the passion,” he said. “It was a really delible memory that went straight to my heart.”
He didn’t think about whether or not it would be hard work, and instead he focused on how exciting it could be.
So Graveline Tours was born. And while he enjoyed starting the new business, the frightening part wasn’t detailing the crimes.
“I didn’t take it very seriously. Now it’s scary because I’m doing it,” Levine said. “There’s this pressure I put on myself to get to where we need to be in order to be successful. It’s a lot less stressful when you’re first starting than when you’re actually in the game and time’s going by.”
Levine chose to replace the hearse he loved with a funeral limo because his friends told him they didn’t want to ride in a hearse. Although Graveline doesn’t have binders of crime scene photos, they offer a QR code guests can scan while on the tour that will show a list of every tour stop with photos and details about the events that happened there.
Guests are driven by the tour guide, who tells the stories of the victims of the crimes, and shares clips of news announcements, significant songs from the time, and audio of interviews from both victims and their murderers.
“I wanted it to be everything the bus tours are not,” he said. “I don’t want it to be impersonal. I don’t want it to be an afterthought.”
Levine doesn’t typically run the tours. The woman guests will most likely get to know is Blaze Lovejoy, a screenwriter from London who has been with Graveline Tours for two years.
Prior to being a tour guide, she worked as a realtor who came across her share of haunted houses. While at lunch with guests on a recent tour, she told them the story of taking a photo that was left behind at a house she was selling and she tells them that “something” followed her home because of it.
The idea of ghosts and haunted places is universal, according to Tok Thompson. With a master’s degree in folklore and a doctorate in anthropology, Thompson has studied the history of ghost stories in various cultures.
“Every major city around the world I’ve been to have ghost tours,” he said. “Haunted tours are always very local, specific to the history of the city you are in. It’s an alternative history for the most part, which is a big part of what ghost stories are.”
Thompson said that most Americans believe in ghosts.
“This is the human condition,” he explained. “The basis for all religion. How do we get around this mortality thing? If you believe in ghosts, you sort of believe in life after death in some form.”
A recent Graveline tour included a mother and daughter from South Carolina who take haunted tours each year and an LA local who wanted to “celebrate” Friday the 13th with a Manson Family excursion.
Trevor Bodie from Canada said he is “morbidly interested” to visit various haunted locations. On his way to Los Angeles, he stopped at the Winchester House in San Jose and Alcatraz in San Francisco.
After leaving Los Angeles, he had plans to travel to a haunted ghost town in Bodie, Calif., a place that is reputedly so haunted the security guards dust off their shoes to avoid bringing dust back home with them. Legend has it that any visitor who takes anything from the abandoned town will be plagued with bad luck.
“I haven’t decided if I’m going to take anything yet,” Bodie said.
Although Graveline Tours is about famous crimes and killers, the focus is on respecting the memory of the victims and being highly critical of their murderers. Lovejoy repeatedly makes fun of Manson, calling him insane, criticizing his music and pointing out his delusions.
When guests stop for lunch at an infamous hotdog stand that Manson frequented, Lovejoy jokes about the type of person he was.
“He thinks he’s the Messiah, but he’s so bored waiting for his stripper [a member of his family who worked across the street] that he graffitis on the hot dog stand,” she said.
Levine’s work with Graveline has led him to find kindred spirits who understand his interest in the macabre and it has given him a community and a new perspective.
“When I was 13, it was seen as abnormal to be interested in serial killers, true crime, death – things that were basically just grotesque and gory,” he said. “You were seen as being weird. And then, with the internet, that quickly went away because people realized there were a lot of other people like us. And we found each other.”
