There are places in this world where seeing is deceiving, where logic’s left hanging, and sure-footed senses are not always on the level.
This does not merely refer to the sensation one feels when observing Bay Area real estate prices. Rather, we’re talking about gravity hills. Sometimes called mystery roads or magnetic hills, such spots exist around the globe and right here at home — eerie locales where cars seem to roll up a downslope on a stretch of country lane, or water appears to flow uphill, flying in the face of gravity, causing double takes and a reflexive “What the …?”
These sites often are accompanied by urban legends — wild theories of magnetic vortices, alien navigational devices embedded underground or even ghost stories that frequently involve crashed busloads of schoolchildren. Scientists, though, say these so-called anomalies actually are just plain-old optical illusions, with a convergence of landscape cues conspiring to fool the senses.
Whether phantasm or phantom, the feeling at these places often is fantastic. So get ready to explore far-flung Bay Area spots where gravity gets some serious pushback. If Sir Isaac Newton were alive, this would probably kill him.
Optic oddities
Let’s start with a classic. If you’ve been in the Bay Area any stretch of time, you’ve likely felt the pull of the famed and quirky Santa Cruz Mystery Spot, an enigma wrapped in a riddle and packaged in a 45-minute tour.
As the story goes, builders back in 1939 surveyed a small patch of woodland north of town, logged unusual readings on their instruments, then felt dizzy and off-balance. Naturally, they turned it into a tourist attraction. They designed an off-kilter cabin with tilted walls, angled floors and ceilings and dubbed it a “gravitational anomaly.”
Now, nearly eight decades and a zillion bumper stickers later, the topsy-turvy cabin is more popular than ever. Visitors book tickets weeks in advance or wait in line for hours — all to watch a billiard ball roll up a down-sloped shelf and gawk slack-jawed as companions seem to change height when standing at different points on the property.
“I personally don’t believe it’s just optical illusion,” says Rachel Miller, tour guide supervisor at the Mystery Spot. “There are so many different aspects where we haven’t been able to pinpoint reasons for what’s happening. Like, when you’re in the cabin, not only are the walls at different angles, but you can feel like you’re being pulled by some kind of force as well.”
Guides posit various theories: metal cones buried as guidance systems for alien spacecraft, carbon dioxide seeping from the ground, a magma vortex or “dielectric biocosmic radiation,” whatever that may be.
“Or it could be that somewhere above us is a hole in the ozone layer that bends light and causes illusions, like a straw in a glass of water,” Miller says. Maybe you can blame big hair of the ’80s for that, too.
To be sure, the Santa Cruz site involves showmanship and magnified mystery. But what about outlying aberrations and unexplained propulsion on the random rural road?
Take the so-called uphill stream in Golden Gate Park. It runs alongside a footpath on John F. Kennedy Drive near Lloyd Lake in San Francisco. If you head toward the ocean on JFK, just beyond the Park Presidio overpass, pause by a tall pine tree, and look to your right. You’ll see a gentle green stream trickling along steadily, and tricking the eye.
It really does look like the water is flowing uphill! It can’t be, you say, and you use the “level tool” app on your smartphone, placing it on the bank of the stream, then on the nearby path. Reason, and your phone, say these sections of ground both lean downhill — the path more so than the stream, making the stream appear to go up — but, well, wow.
Pushmi-pullyu
Even more astonishing are the spots that involve a gravitational sensation for motorists, when you stop at what you think is the bottom of a hill, put your car in neutral and — as if by magic or spooky spectral boost — the car seems to roll back up.
There’s said to be such a site on Empire Mine Road in Antioch, famed for its traditional tale of schoolchildren killed when their bus skidded off the rain-slicked lane, their spirits forever remaining to help stranded drivers get back on their way. Even more of a tragedy: That stretch of Empire Mine has been closed for some time (perhaps to give the ghost kids a rest?), so you can’t try this one by car. But there’s nothing to stop you from an experiment with a ball or a skateboard.
Another gravity road is said to be on Lake Herman Road, in a remote area between Vallejo and Benicia. Just off Columbus Parkway, it’s at the bottom of the first hill where the road merges into single lanes. This site has been linked to the ghost of a victim of the infamous Zodiac Killer.
Yet another is on Patterson Pass Road in Livermore, either at mile marker 1.57 or 7.52, depending on the story you read. (Word is, marker 1.57 has been stolen, making it even trickier to find.) This, too, incorporates another version of the school-bus tale — the bus got stuck, kids got out to push, the bus rolled back … you get the grisly picture.
A definitely doable gravity-hill experience is on Lichau Road, in the rolling countryside above Penngrove in Sonoma County. Take Roberts Road to Lichau, winding around past a couple of vineyards, across a rumble of cattle guards and up through oaks and golden brush. Pass Cannon Road, then reach a crest marked by an iron arch reading “Gracias Santiago.” Proceed down the hill to what seems to be a dip between two upward slopes, put your car in neutral, take your foot off the brake (watch for oncoming cars, of course), and let anti-gravity do the work. It really feels freaky. You’d swear you’re coasting back up the hill!
Susan Panttaja, now a perfectly logical geology instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College, used to go to the spot back in her high school days. “My friends and I would all drive up to Lichau Road in a Datsun 2000 Roadster. When we got there, we’d play Dan Fogelberg tapes,” Panttaja told Bohemian.com a few years ago, and recently recalled the experience for this magazine once again.
The science-minded friends also performed various experiments — rolling balls and other round items — to test the so-called gravitational forces that seemed to make the Datsun roll uphill. And rather than citing a crashed school bus as the source, Panttaja and her pals knew it was “an accident of topography.”
“The lines of the hills — and the fact that you have been driving uphill — give you the impression, once the grade becomes gentler, that you are now on a downhill grade,” she says.
Buzz killers
Indeed, leave it to scientists to drag us back down to earth.
“These are all optical illusions,” says Paul Doherty, senior scientist at San Francisco’s Exploratorium. “Your eyes and brain use clues from the landscape to determine your perception of the slope of a hill. But your eyes and brain can be misled.”
He explains that all of these places — from the stream in Golden Gate Park to the so-called gravitational effect on Lichau Road — have no distant reference points. The true horizon is shielded, whether by trees or nearby hills. In the case of the Santa Cruz cabin, the sensations occur inside a tilted building with no visible true horizon.
As to the outdoor sites, researchers exploring this phenomenon have made scale models of gravity hills, Doherty says.
“The model will have a miniature road that has three different sections to it, all at different slopes — a steep downhill slope, then a less downhill slope, and then another steep downhill slope.
“To people looking at it — even just at the model — the center section appears uphill, when it is indeed downhill, because you’re comparing it to what’s around it.”
In fact, the Exploratorium plays this trick on visitors on a daily basis. In the Vision section, find the Ames Room, originally designed by ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames to demonstrate this optical phenomenon. The room is built with distorted walls and flooring so that marbles appear to roll uphill, and a person walking into it seems to grow into a giant at one end, then shrinks down to the size of a child at the other.
But it’s all a ruse on the retina.
“There are a hundred million sensors on your retina,” Doherty says. “So the first thing your retina does is throw away 99 percent of that information, then sends the remaining 1 percent to your brain to make up the rest of the story. Basically, what you see is what you think you see.”
This visual bluff often happens to mountain climbers and skiers standing at the bottom of a slope — it always looks steeper than it really is. To counteract this perceptual error, one method is to bend over and look at the slope through your legs, which changes your normal reference points enough so you can begin to discern the reality.
“We call it mooning the slope,” Doherty jokes. “You could try at the Mystery Spot. Then you could be part of the attraction.”
Contact Angela Hill at ahill@bayareanewsgroup.com. Follow her at Twitter.com/giveemhill.
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