The Devil’s Guest List: 11 Golden Age Stars Who Walked the Line Between Fame and the Occult

The studio lights were designed to make them shine.

But behind the glitter, a shadow has always lingered—a whisper of black masses, secret memberships, and pacts sealed in San Francisco basements.

Some of these stories come with photographs, signatures, and membership cards.

Others are pure tabloid legend, repeated so often that nobody remembers where they started.

What follows is a mix of both—the documented and the whispered.

Some names belong together for obvious reasons: the same church, the same rituals, the same address.

Others share nothing but a rumor that started at the right party and never quite went away.

Judge for yourself where the truth ends and the legend begins.

Jayne Mansfield wasn’t just a sex symbol.

She was a woman drawn to extremes—fame, indulgence, and, as some claim, the occult.

In 1966, she met Anton LaVey, the shaven-headed founder of the Church of Satan, at the San Francisco Film Festival.

LaVey gave her a medallion, performed a small ceremony, and announced to the press that she was now the high priestess of his church.

Photographs from the period show them together at his black Victorian house on California Street.

Rumors swirled that the relationship went far beyond friendship.

One persistent legend insists LaVey placed a curse on her lover, attorney Sam Brody, after Brody publicly mocked his beliefs.

Not long after, in June 1967, Mansfield and Brody were killed together in a horrific car accident outside New Orleans.

Skeptics call it a tragic coincidence.

Others still whisper that it was the price of a bargain—fame and fortune traded for something far darker.

Mansfield herself never settled the question before she died at just 34.

Was she a true believer?

A savvy publicity seeker who knew exactly what a photograph with the devil’s priest was worth?

Or something in between?

Even LaVey’s own family couldn’t agree.

His daughter Karla later claimed Mansfield had genuinely joined the church in her final year, while others insist she was quietly converting to Judaism for Brody.

Two people who claim to know her best told two completely different stories, and neither one ever got the chance to settle it with her directly.

Sammy Davis Jr. dazzled audiences as a singer, dancer, and actor—a cornerstone of the Rat Pack alongside Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

But behind the tuxedos and Vegas marquees, Davis carried a secret that was, for once, not just rumor.

In 1973, after starring in a short-lived NBC pilot called Poor Devil, he was formally offered an honorary membership in the Church of Satan by Anton LaVey himself.

Davis accepted in writing, was ordained a warlock, and received a medallion bearing the sigil of Baphomet, which he reportedly wore on stage in front of thousands.

Legend has added its own flourishes over the years—whispers of private ceremonies lit only by black candles, chanting alongside robed figures.

Friends at the time brushed it off as one more example of his restless curiosity.

Others suggested he saw something during those years that unsettled him enough to quietly walk away, which he eventually did, drifting back toward the Jewish faith he’d adopted years earlier.

Unlike almost everyone else on this list, Davis remains the rare Hollywood name with an actual signature attached to the legend.

Church records show he kept his honorary title for nearly two decades before quietly stepping away in his later years.

Whether that return was spiritual, superstitious, or simply the natural drift of a man who was always chasing the next new experience, Davis never fully explained it.

What he did leave behind was an audience of thousands who watched him wear that medallion on stage night after night—which is more than can be said for almost anyone else whose name gets casually tossed onto lists like this one.

While LaVey’s Church of Satan collected its share of famous faces, one man in Hollywood’s orbit belonged to something older and, by his own account, far more serious.

Kenneth Anger, a former child actor who once shared a dance school with Shirley Temple, grew up to become the most influential underground filmmaker in America—and a lifelong devotee of the British occultist Aleister Crowley.

Anger joined Crowley’s order, the Ordo Templi Orientis, had his own chest tattooed with an image of Lucifer, and built his most famous films, including Lucifer Rising, around real ceremonial rituals rather than simple performances for the camera.

Stories about Anger only grew stranger with time.

When he moved to London, he reportedly drew Mick Jagger and Keith Richards into his occult circle, feeding directly into the writing of the Rolling Stones song “Sympathy for the Devil.” He also wrote Hollywood Babylon, a scandal-soaked book of old studio gossip so lurid that some of Hollywood’s biggest names spent years trying to distance themselves from it.

Unlike almost everyone else on this list, Anger never denied any of it.

He practiced his beliefs openly until his death in 2023, making him, by most accounts, the one name here who wasn’t playing a part.

Even the making of Lucifer Rising became wrapped in its own legend.

One actor Anger cast in an early version, Bobby Beausoleil, later drifted into the orbit of Charles Manson and was convicted of a murder committed that same summer—a coincidence that only deepened the film’s reputation as something touched by real darkness rather than simple cinema.

To this day, film historians still debate how much of Hollywood Babylon was genuine reporting and how much was Anger settling old scores against an industry that never fully accepted him.

Few casual film fans have ever heard her name, but Marjorie Cameron’s story might be the strangest one in all of Golden Age Hollywood’s occult lore—mostly because so much of it actually happened.

Cameron was a Navy veteran turned artist and occasional actress who married Jack Parsons, a brilliant rocket fuel scientist and devoted follower of Aleister Crowley.

Parsons believed Cameron was the very woman summoned through a set of rituals he called the Babylon Working, performed in 1946 with the help of a young Navy veteran named L.

Ron Hubbard—who would later found Scientology.

Cameron appeared as a mysterious sea witch in the 1961 film Night Tide and worked with Kenneth Anger, embodying pagan goddesses in his ritual-heavy productions.

After Parsons died in a mysterious 1952 explosion at his own home, Cameron didn’t distance herself from his beliefs.

She went further into them, coming to believe she had become the living incarnation of the goddess Babylon herself—a role she carried for the rest of her life as an artist and occultist until her death in 1995.

Real rocket science, real ritual magic, and a real Hollywood career all tangled together in one of the strangest true stories the era ever produced.

Parsons’ death only added fuel to the legend.

He was killed in a home laboratory explosion, officially ruled an accident involving mishandled chemicals, though conspiracy theories about foul play or a ritual gone wrong have circulated for decades.

Cameron rarely spoke publicly about what she believed really happened that day.

For decades, her paintings sat mostly forgotten outside a small circle of collectors—until a career retrospective in recent years introduced her esoteric artwork, and the strange true story behind it, to an entirely new generation who had never once heard of the Babylon Working.

Errol Flynn was Hollywood’s swashbuckling hero on screen—dashing and irresistible in every frame.

Off screen, his hedonistic reputation gave rise to endless rumors, including whispers that his legendary yacht parties occasionally slipped into something darker.

According to tabloid legend, black candles and cryptic symbols occasionally appeared amid the late-night festivities aboard his boat, and guests spoke in hushed tones about an extensive private library covering alchemy and ceremonial magic that Flynn supposedly kept close at hand.

None of this has ever been backed by hard evidence, and Flynn himself never spoke publicly of any occult interest.

But his reputation as Hollywood’s ultimate rule-breaker made the rumors stick regardless.

He flaunted every social convention of his era, and for a certain kind of storyteller, that rebellious streak was easy to dress up as something more sinister—especially once the same tabloids that covered his string of scandals and lawsuits started reaching for darker language to describe a man they’d already decided was beyond redemption.

Some versions of the legend go even further, claiming Flynn kept a hidden altar aboard his yacht, the Zaca, used for private ceremonies he never once spoke about publicly.

No photograph or written account has ever surfaced to confirm it, and most biographers treat it as exactly the kind of story that grows around a man who never denied anything the tabloids said about him.

His own memoir, My Wicked Wicked Ways, did little to calm things down, leaning into the scandal instead of denying it—which only convinced skeptics that Flynn understood his own legend better than anyone trying to debunk it ever would.

Bela Lugosi became the definitive Count Dracula in 1931, and for decades afterward, fans couldn’t quite convince themselves the performance was only acting.

Legend holds that Lugosi harbored a genuine fascination with the occult, attending seances and collecting old grimoires on ritual magic that he studied for inspiration.

Some accounts claim his brooding, hypnotic performances drew directly from real esoteric knowledge rather than a script.

The truth behind the man is sadder and more human than any legend.

Lugosi’s career collapsed under the weight of typecasting, and years of chronic pain from stage touring led to a real and devastating morphine addiction.

By the 1950s, he was earning humiliating paychecks in low-budget films just to survive.

In 1955, he voluntarily committed himself to a hospital to fight the addiction—a moment of real vulnerability that drew a personal visit and a check from Frank Sinatra.

He died in 1956 with almost nothing left and was buried, at his family’s request, in his Dracula cape.

Some fans point to his final screen role, cobbled together after his death by director Ed Wood from unused footage never intended to form a finished film, as a fittingly eerie postscript to a career that always seemed to blur the line between the man and the monster he played.

Long before Dracula, Lugosi had played the role on Broadway, and by the time Universal brought him to Hollywood to reprise it on film, friends said he’d started answering to the name almost as easily as his own.

Vincent Price’s silky voice and sinister screen presence in classics like House on Haunted Hill made him horror royalty, and fans have long wondered whether his fascination with the macabre went beyond performance.

Rumor holds that Price kept an extensive personal library of books on demonology and witchcraft alongside his famous art and cookbook collections, and that he occasionally lectured on the history of witch trials with a little too much familiarity for comfort.

Price himself always insisted his interest was purely historical and academic—a natural extension of his genuine scholarship in art and cultural history.

He never once claimed any personal occult practice, and no credible account has ever placed him inside a ritual circle.

Still, the eloquence and eeriness he brought to every interview made it easy for fans to wonder whether some of his most chilling performances were built on more than just craft.

His daughter later described her father’s fascination as genuine but entirely scholarly, noting he was just as likely to lecture a dinner party on Renaissance art as on the Salem witch trials.

Even so, fans have never quite let go of the idea that a voice that unsettling had to come from somewhere real.

Price spent decades quietly building one of the most respected private art collections in Hollywood, even lending his name to a nationwide fine art program sold through department stores—a detail admirers still point to as proof his real passion was beauty, not darkness, however good he was at playing otherwise.

Barbara Steele’s wide-eyed stare made her gothic horror’s defining face, and rumors held that her fascination with the eerie ran deeper than her filmography—Crowley studies, candlelit gatherings, notebooks filled with runes.

Steele never confirmed any of it, once joking she’d been cast as a witch so often she felt like an honorary one.

Fans still quote that line as either self-deprecation or confession, depending who you ask.James Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder, nicknamed Little Bastard, has been called cursed for decades.

Even Alec Guinness later wrote that he’d felt an inexplicable dread looking at the car and warned Dean not to get in it—a story with a named, credible witness attached.

The crushed shell later vanished from a safety exhibit without explanation, and the legend never died.Christopher Lee kept a substantial library on demonology and warned fans about black magic with unsettling gravity.

Laurence Harvey, by contrast, is the thinnest case of all—he merely attended LaVey’s parties, and no card or letter ever surfaced.

He died in 1973, never addressing the rumors.Eleven names, eleven very different stories.

Mansfield, Davis, Anger, and Cameron left actual paperwork behind.

The rest live on rumor and retelling.

Somewhere between the glamour and the ghost stories, the line between performance and belief has never been easy to find.So which name do you think crossed that line for real—and which was simply playing a part?