One of the enduring legends of Laurel Canyon is that of the so-called Houdini house—the ruins, actually, of an 11-bedroom villa at the corner of Willow Glen Road and Laurel Canyon Boulevard across the street from another storied property, the log cabin where Frank Zappa and his extended family held court in the spring and summer of ‘68—supposedly built by the illusionist at the height of his career.

Both properties are suitably mysterious, pocked with caves and traced by winding paths with stone-encrusted benches, grottos, fountains and other J.R.R. Tolkien mise-en-scene. Among other apocrypha, there’s supposedly a secret tunnel beneath Laurel Canyon Boulevard that connects the properties—”I never found out if that was true,” Zappa said.

He wasn’t alone. Everybody in the canyon, it seems, has a version of Houdini-house reality—but the real reality is that Houdini himself probably never lived there.

After driving by the Houdini property hundreds of times and wondering what the story was, I commissioned a piece by writer and photographer Bill Sharpsteen for the Los Angeles Times. Here, in part, is what Bill wrote:

The property’s earliest recorded owner was the Laurel Canyon Land Co., in 1907. Laurel Canyon Boulevard was then a narrow lane often flooded by two streams crossing near the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Avenue. R. J. Walker, who owned a major department store in downtown Los Angeles also held stock in the Laurel Canyon Land Co. Around 1915, he constructed a house at the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Willow Glen Road. (At about the same time, he built a guest house across the street next to actor Tom Mix’s log cabin).

Wanting a more continental look than the canyon’s rustic lodges, the dry-goods mogul went to Europe and imported stone masons, woodworkers, muralists and anyone else who was the best at his craft. They stayed in some cases until 1924, when the completed Mediterranean villa stood on the steep hillside like a hotel—three stories, 11 bedrooms, nine baths and a basement pool. There was a ballroom, a 15-foot stage for musicians and a ballet room–equipped with mirrors and barre—large enough for 10 dancers. For a touch of decadence, he threw in a circular staircase that turned around a marble newel post lit from inside, a huge aviary and murals of European scenes painted on ceiling-high canvases…Walker did specify one practical accessory: a turntable at the top of the narrow driveway. One drove up, parked and spun the car around, conveniently pointing it downhill for the exit.

Somehow, Walker met Houdini. The magician was in town between 1919 and 1920 to act in two movies, “The Grim Game” and “Terror Island,” and in fact, the climactic scene of “The Grim Game” was shot atop nearby Lookout Mountain. According to Houdini biographer Pat Culliton, Houdini invested in Walker’s Laurel Canyon Land Co. and moved into the boxy four-bedroom guest house next to Tom Mix’s across the street, although it’s not clear which he did first. Culliton claims that an elevator in the guest house descended to a tunnel beneath Laurel Canyon that led to the Walker mansion, so it’s hard not to believe that Houdini didn’t sneak over on occasion.

And those are the slim facts upon which the entire Houdini House folklore is based.

Bill goes on to trace the property’s sad decay in the ’50s that culminated in the mansion’s partial destruction in the Willow Glen fires of 1959. The city finally bulldozed the place in 1968, but not before it “became a theme park of sorts for ’60s teenagers looking for a supernatural interlude before cruising the Sunset Strip.”

Whether or not Houdini ever set foot in the mansion, the property, Bill writes, “will probably always be known as the Houdini house around Laurel Canyon, where belief in local legends is as tenacious as the wild fennel that grows straight out of the canyon’s granite walls.”