If Hollywood has always sold itself as sunshine and reinvention, Scott Michaels has made a career out of documenting the shadows—the places where glamour curdled into scandal, where a final address replaced a marquee name, and where the city’s relentless appetite for myth often obscured what actually happened. Part historian, part storyteller, part showman with a librarian’s instinct for details, Michaels is best known as the founder and guiding voice of Dearly Departed Tours, the long-running Los Angeles excursion that treats “tragic history” not as cheap shock, but as a strange, revealing map of how fame and mortality intersect in this town.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
Michaels' fascination with death was seeded elsewhere. Raised in Detroit, he claims his childhood exposure to frequent accidents and reminders of mortality informed him at a young age; he has credited this as an influence for why he learned to read a city by what it loses. This mentality later traveled with him overseas in the late 1990s. While living in London for several years, Michaels immersed himself in a city with a media industry less fascinated with celebrity—and more transparent about its consequences. Observing celebrity culture up close in London, especially while in a relationship with soon-to-be-talk show host Graham Norton, gave Michaels a glimpse into how celebrity is manufactured, facilitated, and often dismantled behind closed doors. It sharpened his skepticism of myth and reinforced a belief that the most revealing stories often live just beyond the spotlight.
In that sense, his later Los Angeles work feels less like a lurid detour and more like a continuation: an attempt to pin down the truth inside the rumors, to locate the human reality beneath the headline.
His professional path into what later came to be called “dark-side tourism” started with the now-legendary Grave Line Tours, an earlier Hollywood death tour that ran in the 1980s.
Michaels has recalled seeing a feature on the concept and pursuing it with almost comic determination until he was hired—an apprenticeship that taught him the mechanics of guiding, the rhythm of a route, and the delicate balance between humor and respect when the subject is tragedy.
Then, long before podcasts and true-crime streaming shows turned death into mainstream entertainment, Michaels quietly logged onto the internet and started assembling one of its first digital memorial archives. In 1997, he created Findadeath.com, an austere, research-heavy website dedicated to documenting the deaths of public figures. Far from lurid exploitation, Michaels treated each story not as tabloid sensation but as history, giving eyewitness accounts of actors’ final moments the same weight as their filmographies.
The site began as a low-key labor of love, text-heavy and nowhere near flashy enough to go viral. But Michaels had an instinct that Hollywood’s mythology couldn’t be fully understood without considering how—and where—it ends. Slowly but surely, Findadeath.com became a cult destination.
Out of that experience—and out of his own growing archive of stories and locations—he launched Dearly Departed Tours, a.k.a. The Tragical History Tour in 2004, framing it as a “light-hearted look at the dark side of Hollywood,” rooted in research, local geography, and an insider’s understanding of how quickly Los Angeles erases its own past.
Scott and future chat show host Graham Norton during their relationship (Photo Credit: Daily Mail / 2017)
What distinguished Dearly Departed from the start was Michaels’ insistence on place. He wasn’t simply telling stories about famous deaths; he was taking people to the actual corners, driveways, and vanished lots where the stories happened, then setting those events against the broader churn of Los Angeles development. Over the years he has spoken pointedly about the way demolition and “progress” constantly remove key sites from the tour’s map, turning his work into an unintended form of preservation. If the city keeps tearing down its past, then at least someone should remember where it stood.
Later tours became theme-specific, including those focused on Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow and the Manson-era tragedies. These events have been heavily recycled by pop culture and are often at risk of losing their connections to reality. Michaels has navigated the mythology with sensitivity: recognizing what people think they know but grounding the stories in street addresses, timelines and tangible proof whenever he can. It is an approach that has earned him a reputation not just as a raconteur, but as a meticulous chronicler of Hollywood geography.
That impulse toward tangible evidence reached its most literal form with the Dearly Departed Tours & Artifact Museum, a companion space that brought objects into the conversation.
The museum first opened in 2012 on Sunset Boulevard and five years later moved across from Hollywood Forever Cemetery, becoming a macabre cabinet of curiosities for Los Angeles’ tragedy collectors and history obsessives. Press coverage lingered on its most arresting centerpiece: the wrecked 1966 Buick Electra in which Jayne Mansfield was killed, an artifact so visually overwhelming that it forced visitors to reckon with death as physics rather than legend. Other reports described additional items connected to celebrity deaths and notorious events—objects that, in Michaels’ telling, were never meant to be trophies so much as prompts, unsettling proof that “Hollywood history” is often written in aftermath.
Top: Scott Michaels with yours-truly in front of the Jayne Mansfield Death Car. Middle: Scott with Quentin Tarantino. Bottom: Scott with Zak Bagans.
Michaels' reputation—and particularly his knowledge of the Manson era geography of Los Angeles—found its way into Hollywood as well. Quentin Tarantino recruited him as a consultant while preparing to make Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Michaels received a "special thanks" credit in the final film, rare mainstream recognition for a historian whose primary expertise lies on city streets instead of movie soundstages. Michaels has also consulted on popular television and paranormal shows such as Zak Bagans Ghost Adventures, including the episode on the Cecil Hotel, another location where lore often overshadows facts.
If Michaels has a single signature beyond his research, it may be the community he helped name and cultivate: the self-described “Death Hags,” devotees of celebrity-death history who treat gravesites, final apartments, and lost landmarks as a peculiar kind of cultural record. The term appears both in coverage of his work and in the self-identity of his audience, suggesting that his tours didn’t merely serve an existing fandom—they organized it.
Like many location-based businesses, Dearly Departed was hammered by the pandemic era. By 2021, the company’s operations were described in local business coverage as discontinued, with Michaels emphasizing that the online side of the project had become crucial.
Leaving Hollywood was painful, he has said, but it allowed him to continue “touring” digitally, shifting the enterprise from buses and museum walls to a steady stream of videos, commentary, and remote explorations. As of early 2026, his YouTube presence, Dearly Departed Tours with Scott Michaels, remains a major platform for that work, with a large subscriber base reflecting a sustained appetite for his blend of history, artifact-talk, and on-location storytelling. Still, Michaels has made clear that he hopes one day to reopen his museum, a prospect his followers anticipate with unmistakable enthusiasm.
What do critics and fans make of him? In the press, Michaels is often framed as a guide who treats lurid material with an unexpectedly careful hand—respectful and lighthearted without denying why people are drawn to the dark corners. His reputation has been reinforced by the way Los Angeles media outlets have repeatedly folded Dearly Departed into “Best of L.A.” conversations and listed it among the city’s singular experiences: part tourism, part folklore seminar, part unofficial archive. Among fans, the response is visible in the long trail of reviews and repeat viewership. The appeal isn’t simply the shock of celebrity death; it’s the sense that Michaels is mapping an alternative Los Angeles—the one that existed before redevelopment, before the last house was torn down, before the story was sanitized.
As for the most personal parts of his life, what is publicly known is that he shares his life with his husband and creative partner Troy Musgrave, who has appeared alongside him in media projects and online work connected to Dearly Departed. Together they have navigated the evolution of the enterprise from physical tours to digital storytelling, a partnership that mirrors the project itself: collaborative, research-driven and anchored, even when the place is only accessible through memory and video.
In Hollywood, where reinvention is a civic creed, such containment may be appropriate. Scott Michaels isn’t peddling his own mythology nearly as much as he is collecting the conclusions of others, insisting—against wrecking balls, narratives and oblivion—that these places still have relevance.
Scott and his husband, Troy Musgrave (Photo Credit: The LA Beat / Erica Lancaster)
If Hollywood is a dream factory, he has guided us these many years to the backlot of that factory where the dream fades, gesturing towards the precise location where it fell apart and reminded us, gently, that history isn’t a genre. It’s a place.
Editor's Note: Readers who want to dive deeper into Scott Michaels’ work and storytelling can explore his adventures, research, and on-location history firsthand on his YouTube channel, Dearly Departed Tours with Scott Michaels, where Hollywood’s dark side comes vividly to life.
Profiles & Remembrances is an ongoing series at The Hollywoodland Revue devoted to writers, historians, archivists, collectors, and cultural stewards whose work has helped preserve and interpret Hollywood’s past. These profiles are independently researched and written to document contributions, context, and legacy—ensuring that the people who keep Hollywood’s history alive are not forgotten.
Please consider leaving a comment, rating the post, and sharing it with fellow fans of Hollywood history and true-crime lore.
Add comment
Comments
What a great article! I've been "following" Scott for years, and his valuable body of work is simply incredible. He is my favorite historian. He's also just a really nice guy.
What a lovely article!
Beautiful article and well said. <3