The "Mystery Spot" Experience in Santa Cruz

At the Mystery Spot, every law on gravity remains haywire. It is intriguing. It is crazy. It is entertaining. It is out of this world. This 150 feet in diameter tourist spot is located in the Sta. Cruz mountains. Driving there is a bit hunted---no passerbys in sight! We were surrounded by long trees and we were the only car on the road! We were just listening to the car's GPS for directions and sometimes the signal would be disconnected. Mystery was really in the air for this trip!

The trees are slanted. I wonder why?

We were early for our tour. I saw a Broom man, he was sweeping the leaves, not minding the visitors. I approached him and asked if we can go in. "No, just wait..." was his answer. It was winter time in California and since I was brought up in the tropics, the weather was uncomfortable for me. So we just sat on the bench and later, checked their gift shop.

Finally, our time has come to walk inside the Mystery Spot. Guess who approached us? The Broom man is also the Tour Guide! LOL. To think he was indifferent to his customers earlier.

The tour guide's "attitude" turned 360 degree during the tour. He was funny, authoritative, and kinda brainwashed us to believe all the wonders of the Mystery Spot! The tour took us to different "illusions"--- a cue ball rolling on its own, changing sizes of people, being balanced in an uneven table etc. Each visitor can experience this weird phenomenon inside the Mystery Spot.

Ball going uphill or an optical illusion?

Here a ball rolls uphill and then it moves back to its original place by some undefined force of its own. It was magical to see, haha!

The man in red photo was taken during the 1950s. The Broom Man-Tour Guide was shot during our tour last December 2007. Look they are both unbalanced and slanted and I tried that too!

Anti-gravitational forces caused by UFOs or aliens? Were we brainwashed into thinking there's some magnetic force? Spaceship buried below? Carbon dioxide seeps out of Earth? These are the theories given to us. But I know there is a scientific explanation somewhere...Hehe.

My take on this: Sige na nga, magpaloko tayo sa mga Kano! (Let's ride on their crazy theories). The experience is really fun and entertaining! If you have a senior citizen with you, the steps are kinda steep (its a mountain!) and it can be tiring if you're not physically fit. Some also feels dizzy after the tour. A good hiking or rubbershoes can be helpful too. Entrance costs $6 each. Below is the owner's explanation...

"Originally, we wanted to get the level ground below here for a summer home or mountain cabin, but the gentleman we were buying it from would not sell the level ground unless we purchased a strip across the entire south end of his property, including this hillside.
Finally, we bought the entire piece, mainly to get the level ground, and as we were helping the surveyor along the north line, we noted the compass to vary a small amount on the transit and spoke to him about it at that time. He said we might get that variation along a barbed wire fence or some mineral in the ground and let it pass at that.
On thinking it over later, there was no barbed wire fence near where we were at the time, and as far as we knew, no excessive mineral in this ground; so we took our own small hand compass and went up over the north line to try and check on it. The variation there was not great enough that we could tell anything about it with the point of the hill and through the brush.
On returning, we came down the little canyon or draw above here. In so doing felt very light headed or top heavy, felt like something trying to force us right off the hill. We sat down for a while to try and overcome that feeling. While sitting there we happened to look at the compass again. There, the compass had varied enough that we needed nothing to compare it with to tell that it was not correct.
We began to check from that, and we found the more checked the more we found, until we found we had this spot of ground here. About one hundred fifty feet in diameter, that so far, we have not found any instrument absolutely correct over. A portable radio will play any place over it, but with very little variation, being the nearest correct that we have found."
- Mr. Prather Original owner

465 Mystery Spot Rd Santa Cruz, CA 95065(831) 423-8897