Greystone mansion

Hmm, Teapot Dome or just plain mystery? From Times Online UK:

It was appropriate that the final scenes of the Oscar-winning film There Will Be Blood were shot at Greystone, which Jeffrey Hyland calls “the grandest estate ever built in southern California”. At the end of the film, Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, by then a very rich and very crazy old oil magnate, is hurling bowling balls down a bowling alley. That two-lane bowling alley in Greystone was specially restored by the film-makers so those scenes could be shot.

What was perfect about the setting was that Greystone had been built by Edward L Doheny Sr, once one of the world’s richest oilmen. Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, from which There Will Be Blood was adapted, was loosely based on the life of Doheny. Doheny built Greystone as a wedding gift for his son Edward “Ned” Doheny Jr.

But in February 1929, just four months after the couple had moved into the 55-room, 46,000-square-foot Tudor-style mansion, a tragedy occurred. Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett, his long-time personal secretary, both died in what was later ruled a murder-suicide. An apparently agitated Plunkett, who had a history of mental instability, had arrived at the house one evening and was taken by Doheny into a quiet room where they argued loudly. At one point Doheny had called his personal physician, asking him to come to the house. When he arrived, Plunkett slammed the door in his face and shots rang out. The doctor ran into the room to find Plunkett dead, lying face-down in a pool of blood, and Doheny dying nearby. Doheny’s wife, Lucy, and their five children were in the house at the time.

Although there were inconsistencies in the doctor’s account, fingerprints had been wiped off the gun and the bodies appeared to have been tampered with. The police closed the case after just 36 hours, ruling that Plunkett had shot Doheny and then killed himself.

The deaths remain a mystery. Some believe that the two men, who had been close for years and often travelled together, were lovers. Others thought the deaths may have had something to do with the notorious Teapot Dome political scandal, in which the Doheny family was involved. Whatever the truth, many claim that Greystone, now open to the public and used as a set for films such as Indecent Proposal, is haunted.