Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island?

Jane Gaskin did exactly that,

trading in the family home to begin a new life in the tropics.

But she soon discovers that Paradise has its secrets.

I'm Alice Levine, and this is the price of Paradise,

the island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption, and murder.

Wish you were here.

Follow the price of Paradise Now, wherever you listen to podcasts.

We can't talk about Hollywood without talking about the Hollywood sign. It's looked

over LA from up on a mountain for 101 years now.

It's on postcards, t-shirts, movie posters.

But what if I told you that the land the Hollywood sign sits on,

a large mountainous piece of the city known as Griffith Park is actually

cursed.

Long before the sign went up, a family, the Los Valis' owned Griffith Park and placed a curse on the land so

vitriolic, it's believed that it still affects the land today. The story goes that back in the

1860s a man named Antonio Los Felice was heir to the Los Felice Ranch, a plot of land that included all 4,300 square acres of Griffith Park.

Antonio was a perpetual bachelor and had no children of his own but treated his teenage niece

Petra Neelos felis like his own daughter. But one night in 1863

Antonio lay in his bed, dying of smallpox.

Though he wanted to be near his family, it had been decided that Petronia should go into

the city to avoid getting her uncle's illness.

...