The Hiding Man of Griffith Park

I FIRST HEAR ABOUT THE HIDING MAN back in mid-March, when I accompany a ranger for the city’s Recreation and Parks Department on a ride-along in his pickup in Griffith Park. It’s a three-hour tour that takes us from the ranger station on Crystal Springs Drive to a trail near the 101 (tourist with a twisted ankle), and then up to the radio tower above the Hollywood Sign (great view, secret bunker). On our way back to headquarters, I begin to make inquiries about strange or scary things the ranger has heard about, or stumbled across, in the park…things like dead bodies, ghosts, and weird religious rituals that involve chickens. Though the ranger is amused by my questions, he declines to get into specifics about things like suicides or animal sacrifices. He is, however, more than willing to tell me about something he is not amused by, namely, the story of a creepy-looking local denizen named The Hiding Man who, it is said, lives in the pipes and tunnels underneath the park.

The Hiding Man, of course, is not real. He’s the creation of a local artist who, in 2012 or 2013, began placing intricately-imagined paper posters in and around the park and adjacent neighborhoods that told the story of a man who looks like a burn victim with great cheekbones, or Frankenstein as interpreted by Pablo Picasso in his Cubist phase. The artist, who insists on remaining anonymous but agreed to a series of interviews, created The Hiding Man mythology not because he was looking to scare hikers or dog walkers but because he wanted to tell the story of a man (similar to himself, perhaps) who so loved the park that he’d committed himself to defending it from all manner of people who act like “trash”: Litterers, loudmouths, and those who spray-paint rocks and boulders, for starters.

The paper posters (the artist estimates he put up 1,000 to 3,000 a year across L.A. over the course of a decade) didn’t seem to bother park officials too much: They’d get pulled down after a week or so. About a decade after the posters started circulating, however, in 2024, municipal-type metal signs began to appear in the park, affixed to poles alongside signage approved by the City of Los Angeles, like those denoting speed limits or parking restrictions or the presence of rattlesnakes in the underbrush. Unlike the paper posters, these signs, which said things like: “NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR YOUR TAKE,” and “TRY QUIET INTROSPECTION” would get taken down almost immediately — sometimes within hours — which frustrated the artist, because they cost him not just time, but money. (About $70 a sign, in some cases.) 

“I had lots of plans for them in the park, and it was a massive disappointment to be unable to do any of it,” he says. “One [metal sign] in the park didn’t even make it six hours.”

The origin story of The Hiding Man goes a little like this: At some point (past, present or future), a man was set upon by five cops who dug a hole in the ground near Griffith Park and, according to the artist’s mythology, buried him alive. This crime was witnessed by a character known as The Hiding Man, who allegedly lives in, around, and underneath the park and the L.A. River, where he now exists as a sort of  Eastside Boo Radley: A boogeyman who scares people but is actually a benevolent figure, despite his weird, rubbery face and rumored penchant for “stealing” girlfriends.

We know about The Hiding Man thanks to another invention of the artist, a persona he calls the Narrator, whose fascination with the mysterious, rubber-faced character is what informs the posters the artist puts up in and around the park. The Narrator has a very unique, absurdist voice: He misspells things on the regular, doesn’t always know how to use grammar and adopts a tone of urgent, moral panic that comes across as alarmist and often hysterical. (To find inspiration for the voice, the artist scrolled through YouTube comments.) 

“A HIDEN MAN DO WATCH YOU,” reads one poster. “HE HAS ROPES AN BAG.” 

DO NO ACT LIKE A TRASH OR YOU WILL BE TAKE TO A NEW LIFE IN PIPE,” reads another.

And another: “WARNING BE GOOD TO OTHER OR A HIDING MAN WILL POP ON YOU TAKE TO NEW LIFE IN PIPE.” (Taking someone to a “new life in pipe,” is one of the artist’s favorite lines in his entire body of work, he says, and it gets quoted back to him all the time.)

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You can find the artist’s work all over the Eastside: In Silver Lake (where a sign says DO NOT ACT LIKE A TRASH NO LOUD NO SPIT NO TOUCHING NO FIRE NO LITTER NO DRUG A HIDING MAN WILL GRAB YOU), in Los Feliz (where one sign reads HE DO SEE YOU HE TAKE PICTURES A HIDING MAN WILL GRAB ON YOU SOON YOU WILL BE GOT), in Atwater (where a sign warns NO DRUGS OR BMS). There are (were?) a few in Highland Park and a couple in Burbank and Toluca Lake, too. Homages to his work have also started to appear: Behind the bar at the hot new Los Feliz cocktail bar Vandell hangs a painting of Griffith Park which features a tiny Hiding Man.

But the park is perhaps the most special of all the places in which the artist’s work has appeared. As is the case with the Narrator, the artist’s motivations are that he loves Griffith Park and the stories contained within it. He also wants to protect the park, not so much from The Hiding Man, of whom he is definitely not afraid, but from some of the park-goers themselves. After all, people don’t always treat Griffith Park well. They litter, and they cover rocks in graffiti, and they do sexual stuff and play loud music in spaces that are meant for QUIET INTROSPECTION. Indeed, part of what people love about The Hiding Man project is that it’s a critique of entitlement, societal collapse and urban decay.   

Another reason the artist’s work appeals to fans is its resistance to authority. (“I wanted to pitch this as a documentary!” exclaimed one fan on Reddit a few years ago.) After all, some folks have ambitious ideas for the park’s future that don’t always align with preserving it as an urban oasis for quiet introspection. (Or living things.) There’s been talk of building a tram to the Observatory, and maybe also the Hollywood Sign, and this would have an environmental impact on the animals and plants that live in the park. One sign from 2020, titled “FUCK YOU TRAM,” features a drawing of The Hiding Man breaking apart the cables of a Griffith Park gondola, like Godzilla. “IF DESTROY GRIFFITH PARK TO MAKE TRAM PROMISE …A ANIMAL WILL GOTS CRAZY… NEW ACCIDENTS (DESERVE)…MOST OWL WILL LEAVING…MORE STUPID TYPE IN PARK…SOME WILL THROW ROCK TO IT,” it read. That sign got taken down as well.

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The artist won’t tell me his age — he doesn’t want to date himself or the story of The Hiding Man, explaining that doing so “creates judgments and ideas that I try really hard to avoid.” But he does tell me that grew up in Burbank and took regular trips with his mom to Hollywood Boulevard to, as he put it, “see the weird,” including handwritten rants that people stapled to telephone poles. As for Griffith, the artist had long regarded the 4,310-acre park with an element of suspicion. During his childhood, the word on the street was that Griffith was full of criminals — gangs, muggers, murderers, Satanists. (It wasn’t.) Plus, Griffith was something that was sort of in the way of everything else: What the artist calls a “weird interruption” sandwiched between different parts of Los Angeles that made it difficult when you wanted to go from, say, Burbank to Los Feliz. 

But the artist’s relationship to the park began to change as he got older. Around 2012 or 2013, after getting laid off from a job at Disney, the artist decided to start hiking in the park at night to reward himself for spending the day sending out dozens of resumes. He usually entered the park on the northeast side, near the Riverside Drive Bridge, not that far from where he lived in Toluca Lake, and he would make his way along routes like the Bill Eckert Trail and some that he made up on the spot, like the time he scaled the front face of Bee Rock. (This takes about 30 minutes, he informs me.)

Soon, the artist became “hyper-fixated” on Griffith and a mythology began to form in his mind as he traversed the many trails — there are 53 miles of them in the park — and stumbled across crumbling infrastructure (remnants of old buildings, the former Zoo), and things like buried trash cans painted in enamel. He also started digging through the L.A. Times archives, spending hours researching stories about the park and learning about things like a devastating 1933 wildfire that killed a few dozen men near Mineral Wells.  

Being alone up on the trails late at night in the dark was not actually that scary, the artist says; the solitude was the point. The vibe was sort of the opposite of scary, in fact; the park had a “borderline magic” aura. “When I’m up there with the smells, I will literally hug a tree or put my hands onto the dirt and just kind of sit there with my thoughts,” the artist says. “It’s very hard to explain, but it’s really profound late at night when I’m totally alone up there with just moonlight and whatever ambient L.A. lights bouncing off of Glendale or whatever.”

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The first time I talk to the artist, we’re on the phone for three hours. The second time we talk, we’re on the phone for 75 minutes. The third time we talk: Half an hour. The artist is voluble, as am I, and there’s so much to learn: How he fell in love with the park (noted above), when he puts up his signs (usually at night), his thoughts on contemporary masculinity (toxic), and hiking at night (no headlamp). I tell him my Griffith Park origin story, how I first came to know it soon after I moved to Silver Lake from New York, where I’d lived for 29 years. The pandemic had just begun, I explain, and I had fallen into a deep depression, and I wasn’t sure how to get out of it, and the park was often the only respite I could get from my psychic agony.

I tell the artist about my favorite and least favorite parts of the park — the northeast side, near the carousel and the Old Zoo, really spooks me, I tell him. (It’s his favorite area, he responds.) We also discuss the way in which his art rejects (and often mocks) a certain type of what the Narrator calls “macho” — white, aggressive, loud — that one sometimes encounters in the park. The Narrator calls these guys “chuds” — “real dick-head types” with “low-mind volumes”— and there are a number of posters in which they assume a starring role.

“Is that based on a real person?” I ask. I’m looking at one poster that depicts a Unabomber-type guy in a hooded sweatshirt with his tongue hanging out. “WARNING GRIFFITH PARK — DO YOU SEEN THIS TYPE?” reads the poster. (“Maybe twekker,” it adds. “Probally white.”) I tell the artist that there’s a guy I see all the time on Vista del Valle who wears sunglasses and a hoodie over his head even in 90-degree weather and gives off a creepy vibe. “He’s a kind of composite of things that I find trashy or offensive or antisocial,” the artist says. “So he’s made up of all these little grievances, these things that I just find silly, plus just some simple visual cues like, oh, he’s unshaven and his tongue’s out.”

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Anyone who’s been in the park has seen a few chuds, but it’s unclear whether anyone has claimed to see The Hiding Man himself. As for the artist, in late March he made one of his first public appearances when he headlined an L.A. Breakfast Club event near the park. He appeared at the invitation of Sabrina Parke, the club’s vice president, who first encountered The Hiding Man in 2023 on a poster in Toluca Lake while out on a walk with her husband. Parke says she “truly did not know what to make of it,” but soon realized that there was a backstory, that The Hiding Man was in fact an established character, and that the posters were pieces of a larger puzzle, “like you were coming in in the middle of a movie.” 

Pasadena residents and The Hiding Man collectors Andrew Bakhit and his wife Tessa Tweet tell me that they came across the artist’s work on the L.A. River bike path where Bakhit would go to exercise and get fresh air during Covid lockdown. “I would come across these posters that were very strange at first, but the more I read them, the funnier they were,” Bakhit says. “And I slowly started getting the humor in it and then saw enough to start seeing the same language in each one, seeing recurring characters in each one and just became more interested in it and being like, ‘Oh, wow, this is actually really amazing.’”

Now, a few years later, Bakhit and Tweet have become friends with the artist and own a bunch of his work, including pieces of vintage clothing with incredible illustrations painted on them and The Hiding Man baseball cards (manufactured by Topps). One of the pieces in the couple’s collection is an original work, commissioned by Tweet, who, in 2022 asked the artist to create something for Bakhit’s 30th birthday. The result was an original illustration that drew — literally and figuratively — from Bakhit’s actual life and incorporated him into the landscape of the Pasadena environs and, by extension, the larger story of The Hiding Man himself.

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The turnout at the Breakfast Club event was substantial — some 170 people, says Parke — and after the 35-minute talk, the artist met with fans and, with his partner Kate, sold merch like apparel and baseball cards and other items. Not everyone was amused or intrigued: A woman from Friends of Griffith Park asked, glibly, if the artist had ever “considered putting your stuff in a gallery.” Another asked: “If you love the park so much, why are you trying to scare people?” Also, a ranger from Rec and Parks showed up to the event and stood silently, at the back of the room, which unnerved some people. The artist later heard that the ranger asked a photographer to share pictures from the event with him.

As of now, the artist has about 3,400 followers on Instagram, which is the primary platform through which he interacts with fans. (He reads, but does not comment on, the Reddit threads in which people discuss his work.) And though he wants to grow his audience, he isn’t necessarily ready to go totally public with his identity, in part because of his concerns about getting too much attention from Rec and Parks or other authorities: The artist’s work violates an L.A. city code that prohibits the posting of “hand-bills” and “signs” in public places and on objects. (Officials for the department responded to repeated requests for comment by saying that "art displays are coordinated through the Department of Cultural Affairs" and that it is unclear "whether this particular artist completed the appropriate approval process for the display of their artwork.")

Gerry Hans, President of Friends of Griffith Park, says that though there's a "rich history of 'prank art'" in Griffith Park, his concern is not whether [The Hiding Man] is art or not, but that it is "a symbol of the 'anything goes' in Griffith Park attitude, which is inconsistent and disrespectful to the park’s urban wilderness identity, adopted and supported by the City."

The artist splits his time between Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, where he and Kate share a home with a cat named Topps; when he’s in L.A., he sees friends and family, puts up posters and displays and sells his beautifully-painted vintage apparel at a stand at the Rose Bowl. (These one-of-a-kind illustrated garments, he says, are more important to him than even The Hiding Man posters project.) In October, the artist is going to Tokyo for an art pop-up with a boutique clothing store and in November he’s having an art show at the Echo Park gallery Malvoyante — his first. He’s also working on a new, bigger edition of his heretofore self-published book, A OTHERING OF EVERYTHING and looking for representation for his work.

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“He is an author,” says the artist David Buckingham, who sometimes goes on “runs” with the artist into neighborhoods on the Eastside to put up art. (Buckingham’s rainbow-colored “KOOK” signs are visible on wooden utility poles all over the city.)

“He’s using the streets of Los Angeles as the pages in his book. What is the book about? I’m still not quite sure yet. It’s just so all over the place and so different and so unexpected that you just don’t know where it’s coming from next.” 

When I begin to tell Buckingham that it’s my understanding that, though the voice on the posters is that of the Narrator, the voice on the metal “municipal” signs is the artist’s own, Buckingham interrupts me. 

“You know what this makes me realize? I don’t think I want to fully understand it,” he says. “I just don’t know that I need to understand it all. I just have to experience it. It’s like listening to Frank Zappa. You’re not sure what it is. But it’s like, ‘I’m still here. As a matter of fact, I just turned it up a little bit.’”