Dan Aykroyd has claimed that he once lived in a house that might have been haunted by a member of folk group The Mamas and the Papas.
The 72-year-old Canadian actor is best known for playing Dr Raymond Stantz in the Ghostbusters franchise.
The Blues Brothers star, who has previously claimed to have seen a UFO, was asked whether he had ever lived in a haunted house, which he believed he had but said that he had never witnessed the ghost himself.
“My friend Gary saw a spirit in the Hollywood Hills, North Hollywood, on Mama Cass’s old estate,” he said in a recent interview with The Guardian. “You know the great Mamas and the Papas? A great band. This was Mama Cass’s house. Jimi Hendrix stayed there, as did John Lennon and Ringo Starr; Harry Nilsson owned it for a while.”
Aykroyd went on to explain that he and his ex-wife, fellow actor and model Donna Dixon, bought the house in the 1980s and raised their three daughters, Vera, Belle and Stella, on the property.
Going back to the ghost, the actor said that people who stayed with them claimed to have seen a “big, dark shape along the top stairway”.
He continued: “I remember the housekeeper saying she heard the Stairmaster going when no one was there. Her name would be called, she felt touches on the shoulder. I remember vividly one night when Donna had some jewellery sitting there and the bracelets started to do this little whirlwind.
“Now, maybe that’s the energy between us, who knows? But it might have been Mama Cass.”
In May 2024, Cass’s own daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, debunked a long-standing rumour that her mother had died from choking on a ham sandwich.
Cass Elliot was an influential figure in the Los Angeles-based Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1960s. She died from a heart attack in London on 29 July 1974, at the age of 32.
Speaking to People, she said she put up with years of jokes and innuendos about her mother’s death, which happened when Elliot-Kugell was just 7 years old.
“In my younger years, when people would talk to me about my mom, it was always about the stupid sandwich,” she recalled.
While researching her memoir, Elliot-Kugell spoke to one of her mother’s friends, the former Hollywood Reporter columnist Sue Cameron, who wrote in her book Hollywood Secrets and Scandals that Cass died from choking on a sandwich.
Cameron explained that she had called the apartment where Cass was staying in London and the singer’s manager Allan Carr answered and told her that Cass had died. In a panic, he suggested: “You have to do this. Just say she died choking on the sandwich.”
Carr wanted to ensure that the singer’s death wasn’t attributed to drug use.
“I really believe they were protecting her legacy,” said Elliot-Kugell. “And they were trying to protect me. And in a weird way, I’m grateful for that crazy story. As much as it caused me grief, and people made jokes, I now realise it kept her relevant and ready to shine again.”
