The Venice Historical Society's third annual Halloween walking tour is filled with the kind of timeless human tragedies and perversities that daily fill the pages of a thousand newspapers and television news broadcasts. With a distance provided by time and entertaining reenactments, ghost stories on the tour show a farcical irreverence in the face of death and a celebration of the wandering spirits who have gone before us - in short, all that Halloween is traditionally about.   - Story by Ted Shaffrey - Photos by Bryan McLellan

Venice's fanciful but true past and present proves the perfect setting for such a trip.

The two-hour tours, which will include historical tales about Venice that are not Halloween-related, will begin at 9AM Saturday and Sunday where Washington Boulevard meets the Venice canls at Strongs Drive.

One highlight is a matronly monologue by Venice High School English teacher Wendy Fairbanks, who dresses and plays the wife of an early 20th century man who was murdered by his mistress-tenant. The widow fell into despair after unearthing a ghastly discovery in the house after the death. Her spirit now supposedly haunts the Venice Pier, bottle of Scotch in hand.

Other stories conjurd by society President Elayne Alexander include a tale of a teenage witch, the ghost of a prostitute and bootlegger, and how a Venice automobile accident led to legendary stage actress Sarah Bernhardt dying from gangrene.

"Almost no one sees these spirits. You have to be particularly attune to it," Alexander, dressed as a sorceress, said in her best spooky voice, as similarly dressed historical society members Sonya Davis and Regina Barton Cackled.

Davis said her grandfather worked as a desiger for the town's founder, Abbot Kinney, whose story is part of the tour.

An Eastern transplant, Kinney made his fortune as a mass producer of prerolled cigarettes and bought what is now Venice with a group of partners. They decided to divide the land with a coin toss around 1900. Kinney surprised everyone by choosing the undeveloped southern marshland instead of the developed northern area.

In a plan that was ridiculed as "Kinney's Folly", he had the crude canals dug and then built a resort town reminiscent of Venice, Italy, encouraging the community's quirkiness as a draw for tourists, later incorporing it as a city.

In the late 1920's, just a few years after Kinney's death from lung cancer, Venice bacame part of the city of Los Angeles because of financial considerations.

Soon after, the canals that had made Venice famous were filled in againt Kinney's dying wishes. The ramining canals were built and owned by the Shortline Railway; all of Kinney's are now gone.

In the early years, lots of traveling circuses used to winter in Venice, Alexander said.

"The circuses probably came here for the same reason the homeless do today - the [residents] put up with them"' she said.

But after a beautiful lion tamer was mauled, a 522-pund woman married a local boy and a Filipino headhunter named Chy-Ann applied for the position of Venice dogcatcher - stipulating that he would do the job for free if he was allowed to keep the dogs - city fathers decided they's had enough.

The wintering circuses were thrown out of Venice by the town council for "spreading disease and low moral character."

Venice, according to the Halloween tour, also is responsible for literally sending out little devils to the rest of the country.

In the first half of the 20th century, a man named Harry Miller operated a successful sandwich-making business of Windward Avenue.

Just as Miller made plans to expand his business by adding a bakery, a forger was running around Venice writing bad checks, signingthem "Julius".

Miller, apparently, was fingered by someone as the forger and was hauled into the police station. He was cleared of the charges but in a fit of smirking humor decided to name his new store "Julius' Bakery".

It was here that Miller concocted the orange juice, milk and sugar drink that he called the Orange Julius, Alexander said. The drink was served in a cup with a little devil on it.

Although Orange Julius's current corporate parent has in recent years largely done away with the logo, the little devils from Venice flashed their grins in shopping malls across the nation for decades.