Los Angeles' Last Stand—An Original Urban Legend

A Chapter by Steven Cash

Totally original.

Very few people will tell you the story of Los Angeles’ Last Stand. That’s because very few know the story. 1952 in the middle of the Sci-Fi craze that swept America, where everyone was thinking about aliens and radioactive lizards, there was a man who called himself Ambrose Pennington.

The very first record of Ambrose Pennington is a disorderly conduct arrest made by an LAPD policeman, Officer Jay Wilkins, who found Ambrose walking the streets and claiming he was ‘The Judge of the World’. The officer tried to shut him up, but he kept rambling and was subsequently arrested and fined the sum of $250.

Now, this is where the story goes awry. Three days later on the exact same spot, Ambrose reappeared. This time the officer was a little more strict, and threatened a much stiffer line of charges.

Ambrose simply looked the man in the eye and said, “Touch me, and I will haunt you. I am the judge.”

Needless to say, the officer arrested Ambrose and he received nearly two years in jail, for threatening an officer and resisting arrest. In court Ambrose said only one thing before the gavel came down.

He said, “Let the games begin.”

That night, Officer Wilkins experiences a terrible nightmare. The details were never recounted, but according to Wilkins he sustained a gash in his dream and when he woke he noticed the same gash.

This went on for a span of three weeks, until finally Officer Wilkins shot himself with his service weapon. His distraught wife said he began to go mad, speaking of ‘the Judge’ and waking up to more and more painful scars.

The night of the suicide, Mayor Fletcher Bowron visited Ambrose. Ambrose reportedly sat on his cot with a smile plastered on his face. The guard reported he had been smiling, and periodically laughing, since 7:00pm.

Unbeknownst to the guard, that was the exact time Officer Wilkins killed himself.

Mayor Fletcher Bowron tried to talk to Ambrose, but the man kept his gaze dead ahead. Finally, exasperated the Mayor asked, “What do you want from me?”

Ambrose then looked the Mayor dead in the eyes and said, “A fair wager.”

The Mayor sat beside him. “What is the wager?”

“Get me out of jail, and I never touch another one of your policemen or anybody in this city. I move along. If I stay in jail, I pronounce a curse on a very prominent family, and lets just say it won’t be pretty.”

The Mayor stood up and said, “Curse away,” then left.

With that, only the guard was left to hear the curse be uttered by Ambrose. He wrote it down and gave it to the Mayor later, who dismissed it as foolishness.

But when you read the curse you will see it is far from such. It read:

A native son, Catholic raised, a champion in trying days

Shall lead a people from oppression, aided by a King

Sharing times so private with a model, Satan guided

In this country so divided, he shall be a light unbridled

Til from a warehouse he shall be cut off by a foreign son

So shall the King he aided, and his brother, likely fated

Foolishness?

prev chapter