Anton Szandor LaVey The Purple Room
Anton LaVey in the Purple Room of the Black House, San Francisco. Surrounded by books and the macabre curiosities that made 6114 California Street legendary, LaVey stands beside the glass cabinet containing the human skeleton known as “Reuben.” The Purple Room served as the Black House’s reception parlour and library, where generations of journalists, artists, occultists and curious visitors waited to meet the founder of the Church of Satan. With its purple walls, concealed passages, unusual furnishings and carefully assembled collection of the macabre, the room embodied LaVey’s distinctive mixture of scholarship, theatre, humour and cultivated menace.
- photographer unknown
- photo restoration by Elias Thorne
