by Bob Curran
The idea of such ancient evil growths is not confined to any borders, however. Some of these appear in legends that come from the Spanish West of the continent and are associated with some of the early Spanish explorations along the coast of California.
From the 1600s onward, Spain took an intense interest in the Western Coast of America. Initially, the Spanish had concerned themselves with areas slightly further south in Mexico and Peru, but gradually, as they grew more confident of their power along these coasts, they began to sail along what is now the Western American coastline, although many of them did not land there. Those who did heard wonderful stories from local natives of mines further inland where pure gold was extracted, and of cities, the streets of which were lined with precious stones. They also heard horror stories of strange tree-gods who lived deep in the jungles—trees that could move of their own volition and that could eat men or draw their energies from them until they were dead. However, it was the idea of fabulously rich gold mines and jewelled cities that intrigued the Spaniards and drew them to the western coast of the continent. They dismissed the stories of the demon tree-creatures as legends—God would protect them against such unholy things if they had to venture into the interior! However, the coastal area with its hilly grasslands and deep, wooded canyons and valleys had few natural ports that would attract colonists or provide a base for an expedition further inland. Therefore, such expeditions tended to be limited until roughly the beginning of the 18th century. Even so, tales of strange forces that dwelt in the interior had percolated down from the 16th, and these included some accounts of certain vampiric growths.
During the expedition to the California coast, led by the conquistador Sebastian Vizcaino in 1602, one of his commanders split off from the main expedition and ventured inland. Legend says that somewhere in the Californian interior, they encountered a group of Native Americans who worshipped a monstrous vine-wrapped tree, tucked away in a cave-like cleft in the rock. This was said to be an ancient god that had existed in the region since before the coming of man, and which required sacrifice every so often. The thing drank the blood of those who were offered to it by wrapping their bodies in its rope-like vines through which it drank, in the same way that a spider might wrap its victim. Once it had it had a grasp on the unfortunate, it drew blood and energy from his or her body, leaving it a wasted husk. The Spaniards were taken to the cavern-like home of the thing where it was said that human bones, bleaching in the sun, were stacked as high as a man’s waist. It is even said that several of the men fell foul of this awful thing and that they had been drained of both their blood and vitality. What became of this “god” is unknown, but although subsequent English expeditions heard stories of it, none actually saw it. The creature now seemed only to exist in legend, although the memory of it was still extant. However, there was no longer any mention of (or evidence of) continued worship. And similar legends persist, stretching down from early Spanish times until almost the present day. In these earliest times, the stories of pagan vegetative “gods” were spread by the coming to California by Catholic Christianity and the arrival of Spanish monks.
The real period of the Spanish missions in California, however, lay between 1769 and 1823, and were designed to spread the Christian (Catholic) faith among the Native American tribes. The missions were a mixture of religious and military outposts, and were actually the first real attempt to colonize the Pacific Coast on behalf of a European power. The fathers who arrived brought with them a formidable faith, but they also brought their own superstitions and an absolute abhorrence of “pagan evil.”
There had already been a chain of Jesuit missions along the Californian coast stretching down as far as New Spain (Baja, California, and Mexico), but in January 1767, the Spanish king Charles III, expelled them and handed total authority to the Viceroy of New Spain, Jose de Galvez. De Galvez moved swiftly to install the Franciscans as the main missionaries in the region. They were led by Fray Junipero Serra, who arrived from Mexico to take charge of the missions on March 12th, 1768. The padres who traveled with him either closed or consolidated most of the existing former Jesuit missions and established the mission of San Fernando Rey de Espana de Velicata and the nearby Visita de Presentacion in 1769. Fray Junipero and Governor Gaspar de la Portola arrived from Mexico City to found the missions at San Diego and the presidio (a Spanish fortified base) at Monterey respectively, with Fray Junipero taking effective control of the missions. He immediately issued orders for the Christianization of the local Indian tribes, and during this period, the Spanish fathers heard many horrific stories of pagan rituals and gods in the interior of the country. Some of these were undoubtedly exaggerated and were told to shock and alarm the fathers, but some were said to have an element of truth and have made their way down to the present day in the form of Californian legends.
One of the stories that Fray Junipero heard was that of a great blood-drinking, man-eating flower, which sometimes spread itself like a carpet across the valley floors, concealed among the greases in order to trap the unwary traveler. Attached to the center of this flower were long, and rope-like vines that could restrain the victim if he or she attempted to escape. The vines themselves may have had the power to leech blood from the prisoner as they drew him or her back toward the hungry center of the great flower. Such deadly and vampiric growths lay in the shadows of rocky overhangs or under trees or in the deep woodlands. They were flowers of the dark, lurking in the shadows and waiting for blood. Perhaps such stories contained echoes of the old god plants worshipped by the Native Americans. Perhaps they were something else. Maybe somewhere out there in the Californian hinterland there really was something that perhaps had the attributes of, say, a huge Venus Flytrap, and could consume both animals and men with a deadly ease. The Indians claimed to have lost horses and cattle to the plant and showed Fray Junipero pieces of desiccated skin, which they claimed were from animals that the plant-thing had devoured. They even offered to show him a remote valley in which one of these plants was said to have thrived, but the holy man refused to go. Did he believe the Indians’ stories, or did he know something that perhaps many of us don’t? If the plants existed back in the mid-1700s, they do not seem to exist any more.
Fray Junipero also heard tales of another type of plant like creature from the Native Americans—a creature which also had vampiric qualities. This growth existed in the dark of a large cave high up in the mountains and was apparently like a giant mushroom of a great fungus ball, lurking in the shadows, waiting for victims. Again, it was considered by the local Native Americans to be some sort of pagan god. Such a creature, said the Native American legends, was a being that had been left over from the very foundation of the world, and had existed in the cathedral-like cavern since before the memory of man. It may very well have been the last of its kind, for at one time what is now the Eastern American seaboard was covered by them, and they grew in large forests there. This one, however, kept to the shadows. No Native American dared approach it, for, like the giant open flowers under their rocky overhangs, it had large tendrils, and thick whips, with which it could capture its prey and draw it in. The creature, Fray Junipero was told, fed in this fashion, absorbing its prey and digesting it at will, drawing the blood from it first. However, like many vampiric entities, such a creature feared the light, for the skies had been slightly different when it thrived on earth in the primal time. Therefore, it could be driven back by Native Americans bearing flaming torches, although few had tried. As with the giant Venus Flytrap-like blossom, the Natives offered to take Fray Junipero up into the mountains and show him the cave of the creature. Once again, the holy man refused. The reason that he gave was that he would not dignify such a pagan thing with his presence by going to see it. Although the Native Americans told Fray Junipero the location of the cavern in the mountains, it has since been lost. Even the name of the mountain range where the cavern was located has been forgotten, although there are some who say that the cavern lay somewh
ere in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Monterey. There are also tales that rock falls in these mountains blocked off a number of caves and caverns and that may include the one to which the Native Americans offered to take Junipero. The thing may still wait down there in the dark beneath tons of fallen rock.
In fact, tales of something living in a mountain cave, obscured by a rock fall, continued long after the Spanish fathers and conquistadores were long gone from California. There were other legends—namely that there were gold and silver mines located somewhere in the hills and mountains of southern California. These were said to be the workings of Native Americans and of the Spanish and there were rich lodes of precious metals that had been mined in places such as the Santa Susanna Mountains. These rumors were prevalent enough to have mining companies scour the area into the early 1900s, more than 50 years after the great California Gold Rush. As late as the 1890s, company agents and mining experts were showing up in places such as Stockton and Sacramento, intent on looking for claims (and lost mines) in the hills. Spurious maps began to circulate in a number of mining towns showing the locations of such whispered lodes—places such as a fabulous mine in the Pico Blanco Mountain country around Little Sur where in former times both Native Americans and Spanish settlers had led their burros up into the hills along winding trails to return with the animals laden down with precious metals.
But if tales of vanished mines were prevalent, so were stories of strange and lightless places, far underground where perhaps old things survived from some former time. In the late 1800s, a story was told in Stockton concerning two half–Native American prospectors, Henry Chee and Jacob Cahee, who had been hunting for gold in the Cascade Range of Northern California. They had accidentally stumbled into a vast cave system and, trying to find their way out again, they had encountered, on the shores of a vast subterranean lake, something they initially thought was a huge monster, rising out of the water. However, upon closer inspection, it turned out to be the dragon prow of a large Viking ship (perhaps a war-ship), which had become lodged in the rock. The men wished to investigate further, but the air in the caves was bad and they were already starting to feel unwell. They managed to find their way back into Stockton where the news of their strange and eerie find quickly spread. How had a Viking ship got there? Its existence, if it were to be proved, would be one of the archaeological finds of the century, and would shed new light on the early days of America. However, neither prospector had kept any record as to where the cave might have been, and subsequent searches of the area of its possible location proved completely fruitless. The tale was simply dismissed as another tall story from the Cascades, but was it? Maybe somewhere far below the mountain lies a strange interior world in which lies a wrecked Viking ship from centuries ago. Such cave systems do exist, some of which have been used by pirates such as Hippolyte de Bouchard, who attacked and burned the Alta Californian capital of Monterey in November 1818. During his piracy, Bouchard was continually harassed by both American and Spanish warships and had several hideouts along the coast, some of which were large caves that stretched far back into the landscape. Some of these were used as storehouses for weaponry and supplies. In an account allegedly given by one of Bouchard’s men, the pirate had used a massive cave system near a set of low hills close to the coast to store weapons and cannons for a proposed attack on the fortress at El Castillo and the isolated inland missions of San Juan Bautista and San Antonio. While looking for a way overland to attack El Castillo, Bouchard and his men came on the entrance to a great cavern that seemed to stretch back into the hills through a series of connecting tunnels, which linked a massive cave system. And, it seemed to stretch downward toward the very core of the Earth. The pirates decided to use the upper part of the cavern as a storehouse while they searched for the overland route. However, even the great Bouchard was frightened to venture any further down into the darkness of the lower levels, for there seemed to be movement down there in the shadows. There were sounds, such as the rustlings of dead leaves and the buccaneers were convinced that something down there was aware of them and meant them no good. Many of the tunnels were choked with weed and rock and the pirates did not wish to clear them. Using the stored weaponry, Bouchard captured the fortress by using a stratagem. However, the eerie sensations of the great coastal cavern remained with the pirates for many years afterward. The notion of an intelligence coupled with the leafy rustling sound down there in the dark was enough to send distinct shivers along the spines of even the most hardened of seafarers.
Similar stories have come from various parts of California, one of the more famous being the tale of Alfred K. Clark (known locally as “Uncle Al”) in the 1930s. Around 1910, Clark—a veteran of the Civil War—headed West, greatly fascinated with tales of lost Spanish gold and the hidden mines of California. Backed by a local doctor, Clarence H. Pearce, he began prospecting in the Big Sur area, traveling as far as Pico Blanco. He befriended the Little Sur Indians, who told him of a fantastic realm far below the earth where terrible things dwelt. Guided by some Native Americans, Clarke was taken in confidence to the supposed entrance to this awful underground world. It had been blocked off by a major rock fall, and was all but impassable. This was where Dr. Pearce came in. Clark convinced the doctor that a vast lode of silver lay down there, and if only the rock could be cleared away, he could get at it. Pearce provided men and equipment, but after several months of back-breaking labor, nothing was found. There were more falls further down in the tunnel and these had to be cleared away. Furthermore, the workmen—mainly Native Americans—were getting jittery, claiming something was watching them as they worked. There was a disagreement between Pearce and Clark and, disillusioned, the Doctor pulled out of the enterprise. The workmen packed up and left, but Clark continued to work in the remote place, becoming something of a hermit and an eccentric. The years went by and little was heard from him—from time to time, he would turn up in various towns to buy his supplies, but he claimed to be working in the mountains, looking for the lost silver mine.
Then, in 1930, when he was more than 90 years old, “Uncle Al” suddenly showed up at the house of a friend, Al Greer, in a very dishevelled and excited state. He told Greer and his family a strange tale. He had been working in an abandoned Spanish silver mine in the Pico Blanco region when his pick had gone through a wall into a mysterious underground cavern. He had entered a huge cathedral-like place, the limits of which he couldn’t determine in the pervading darkness. Thinking that this was indeed a silver-working, he had explored further, moving slowly and carefully because he had little light. From rocky overhangs above his head hung great “icicles,” which looked “like glass.” Eerie flowers that seemed to be made out of stone sprouted from the nearby rocks and walls around him, and some of them even seemed to crumble at his touch. Scattered just beyond the brilliance of the light were a number of small shiny stones that looked as if they might be nuggets of silver. Further along in the darkness of the great cavern, he came across a bubbling stream in which a number of small fish were swimming. They were so pale that they were almost transparent, and it appeared as if they had no eyes. Away in the dark around him, Uncle Al was sure that there was someone or something else—that he was not alone in this lightless underground world with its glass stalactites and blind fish. From time to time, he was sure that something moved—a low, whispery kind of sound, like the movement of dry paper. He thought too that something long and thin, like a white rope, moved along the ground in his direction and was then withdrawn. What struck him about the place was that the dry stone floor beneath his feet and the walls of the cavern were pitted with Indian mortars and had been marked in some kind of unknown pigment with some curious designs of which he could make no sense. It was, he said, almost as if ancient Indians had been working the place into some sort of underground temple. But was this a temple where a god of some sort still lived? The further he went into the darkness, the sense of being watched grew more. Of course, he may have been led astray
by the echoes in the vast place, but he couldn’t be sure. A feeling of menace increased the deeper he ventured into this subterranean world, and Uncle Al suddenly thought the better of his adventure. He made his way back towards the entrance and, as he did so, he became aware of a slithering noise, as if heavy cords were being pulled back across the uneven ground. He made it out of that lightless world and out into the more wholesome sunlight, but the experience had shaken him greatly.
This is the chilling tale that the delirious old man told his astonished listeners, and it bolstered the idea of a strange lost world, which was something that Clark hadn’t really seen. But there may well be another explanation behind the strange tale. The area around Pico Blanco is said to boast the highest concentrations of dolomite limestone anywhere on the coast. This is a highly porous limestone that lends itself to the carvings of underground rivers. The cavern might have been created by a prehistoric flood in the area leading to a subterranean confluence of several small streams and the South Fork of the Little Sur River, which disappears underground at several locations and re-emerges a few miles each time. The albino fish that Clark described could be troglobites, blind fish that lose their pigmentation due to the amount of time that they spend in the darkness. The “stone blooms” that he also touched might have been what geologists refer to as gypsum flowers, petal-like discharges of a substance known as selenite. The “icicles” might well be stalactites and stalagmites, formations of mineralized water, which are a common feature of underground environments. And although the shiny rocks that Clark’s light picked out might not have been nuggets of silver, they might have been rocks containing flecks of silver ore—or they might have been some other mineral. The suspected movements in the dark of the place are not too easy to explain away.