Bloody Christmas 1951 and the Empty Lincoln Heights Jail

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 26, 2026 · How we verify

Lincoln Heights Jail sits beside the Los Angeles River in California, a slab of 1920s Art Deco concrete that has been empty of prisoners for longer than it ever held them. It is one of the most filmed buildings in the city and one of the least visited, a place most Angelenos have seen on screen without knowing what they were looking at. It also carries a reputation, entirely anecdotal, for being haunted by the men who passed through its cellblocks.

What follows separates what is documented from what is merely said.

Five Million Dollars and Five Stories of Concrete

Construction began in 1927 at a cost of five million dollars, and the jail opened in 1931. A police station went up next door. The original five-story building was designed to hold 625 prisoners, a figure that says a good deal about how much smaller Los Angeles was when the plans were drawn.

It did not stay that size. In the early 1950s the complex was expanded to accommodate 2,800 prisoners, more than four times its original capacity. The whole site now covers roughly 229,000 square feet.

The names logged through its doors track the city’s own turbulence. Al Capone was among the notable detainees. So were people arrested during the Zoot Suit Riots, and later, people arrested during the Watts riots. The jail was, for several decades, where Los Angeles put the consequences of its own unrest.

Bloody Christmas, 1951

The incident that fixed Lincoln Heights Jail in the public memory happened in 1951, when LAPD officers carried out an unprovoked beating of seven prisoners inside the building. It became known as “Bloody Christmas”, and it remains the single darkest documented episode associated with the site.

It also gave the jail a second life in fiction. The novel L.A. Confidential and the film adapted from it were inspired by the Bloody Christmas incident, and part of the film was shot in the building itself. That overlap, a real beating and a movie about a fictionalised version of it, filmed on the same floor, is unusual even by Los Angeles standards.

Decommissioned in 1965, Then a Theatre

The jail was decommissioned in 1965 after the Los Angeles City Council and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed to consolidate inmates in a nearby county jail as a cost-efficiency measure. It was a budget decision, not a scandal, whatever the building’s reputation suggests.

The structure did not sit idle for long. From 1979 until 2014 it was home to the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, which meant that for thirty-five years a former jail with a violent record was operating as a theatre company. On 30 November 1993 the building was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, formal recognition of the Art Deco original.

What People Report Inside the Cellblocks

None of the ghost accounts attached to Lincoln Heights Jail come with verified names, dates or documentation. They circulate among paranormal enthusiasts, film crews and urban explorers, and they are consistent mostly in their vagueness.

Visitors describe sudden drops in temperature, the sensation of being touched by something they cannot see, and the persistent feeling of being watched in the empty corridors. Others report unexplained noises carrying through the abandoned cell tiers, and occasional claimed sightings of figures. Those who believe the place is haunted tend to attribute the activity to former inmates.

There is a straightforward alternative reading. A vast, hollow concrete building with hard surfaces, no occupants and a widely known history of violence will generate echoes, drafts and unease in almost anyone who walks it after dark. Nothing reported here has been substantiated. Take it as folklore attached to a building with a genuinely grim record, not as evidence.

The Most Filmed Jail in Los Angeles

If the corridors feel familiar, that is because you have probably seen them. The boiler room scenes in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) were shot here. So was the 1983 women-in-prison film Chained Heat. Some prison scenes in American History X were shot on the roof, the opening jail scenes of Con Air (1997) were filmed at Lincoln Heights, and the sequence in Iron Man 2 where Ivan Vanko breaks out of prison was shot at the location. Cagney & Lacey used it, and it appears in the “Jailbreak” episode of the Jack Palance series Bronk.

Music video crews found it too. Blink-182’s “Feeling This”, Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” and “Good Girls” by 5 Seconds of Summer all used the building.

Visiting Lincoln Heights Jail

There is no public access. The complex is closed, secured and awaiting redevelopment, and the ghost stories attached to it come almost entirely from people working on film shoots or entering without permission. Trespassing on a fenced industrial site next to the Los Angeles River is a poor idea for reasons that have nothing to do with spirits.

The exterior can be viewed from the surrounding streets, and the Art Deco frontage is the point: it is the reason the building was landmarked. The site sits about 0.7 miles northeast of the Lincoln/Cypress station, making it reachable without a car.

The future is still unsettled. In 2016 the City of Los Angeles issued a Request for Interest seeking ideas to revitalise the complex, and in 2017 Lincoln Property Company and Fifteen Group were selected to redevelop it into the Lincoln Heights Makers District, a scheme taking in commercial and manufacturing space, a public market, creative offices, live-work housing, an amphitheatre with green space, recreation areas and a communal rooftop deck. As of March 2020 the project had been delayed over environmental issues with the site. Anyone hoping to walk those corridors legally should check the current status before travelling.

Sources

• A Tough Cell
• Lincoln Heights Jail
• Historic Landmarks – Northeast Los Angeles
• Lincoln Heights Police Station Contract Let
• Creepy Old Lincoln Heights Jail to Be Revived
• Wikipedia: Lincoln Heights Jail

Address: 401 N Avenue 19

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