Mystery Spots Can't (or Won't) Explain Themselves

A 150 feet circular area in the Redwoods of Santa Cruz, California has people feeling just as confused as those in Ansted. The anomalous land was discovered in 1939 by land surveyors. It didn’t take long for humans to flip this area into a profit, opening it to the public in 1940 and calling it the Mystery Spot.

Up a steep hill a house threatens to roll down toward you. When you gets inside, the house feels upright, though it isn’t after you’ve made sure it’s still leaning dangerously over outside by looking at it from the outside once more. Two toursits stand opposite each other on a wooden plank. The taller of the two is suddenly several inches shorter. When they switch places, the taller one is once again the tallest, but not he towers over the other

The Mystery Spot’s website doesn’t explain what’s going on here because it can’t. What it does say is this: “The Some speculate that cones of metal were secretly brought here and buried in our earth as guidance systems for their spacecraft. Some think that it is in fact the spacecraft itself buried deep within the ground. Other theories include carbon dioxide permeating from the earth, a hole in the ozone layer, a magma vortex, the highest dielectric biocosmic radiation known anywhere in the world, and radiesthesia. Whatever the cause is, it remains a mystery.

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In 1973 a man builds a psychedelically colored tin structure over a basement in Ansted, West Virginia. On the structure’s roof he puts a large gorilla statue and on the side of the building is half of an old VW bug colliding neatly with the side. He puts up the signs last. They say, “See the Unbelievable Mystery Hole.”

No, the name might not be inviting, but it is intriguing. Along with the bright dome structure, giant gorilla statue, and half of a VW bug, it’s absolutely mesmerizing.

The commodities are enough to get people to pull off the road to gaze at them in wonder, but it’s the basement that eventually has tourists voluntarily coming to this place.

Below ground-level water rolls uphill and a chair hangs on a wall by nothing more than thin air. To test this, the owner encourages tourists to sit in it. In the confused and excited crowd one always raises his or her hand to try and prove that nothing can defy physics. However, he or she would climb up in to the chair, put all his or her weight on it, and it wouldn’t even slide one inch down toward the floor. Although people have barely taken more than a few steps around the basement, they suddenly feel like they’re going to fall over, that the world is bending before them. Yet nothing has moved in this basement––not even the heavy object shooting straight out into the air from the wall instead straight down toward the floor.

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The Oregon Vortex (or the House of Mystery) in Gold Hill is considered the first “mystery spot.” Before it was established in 1930, farmers and surveyors avoided the area because their horses would refuse to pass through it. The Native Americans called the area forbidden ground because the only animals who would traverse the area were snakes and lizards.

Inside the house built in the middle of the phenomenon, a broom stands upright and people grow three inches shorter or become a giant depending on which corner they stand in. Those who stand in the middle feel a force pushing against them in every direction. While the Mystery Spot in California presents the idea of aliens causing the unnatural occurrences, those who visit the Vortex think it may have something to do with magnetic fields.

Why won’t birds fly over these areas, or why do the trees grow inward toward the center as if some invisible force is guiding them?

Answers may never be found for these imbalanced spots. They have become easy tourist-traps rather than spending time finding answers. Countless articles and blogs online pine to explain what may be going on in these places, but always conclude by saying no one can really explain what’s going on here.

Albert Einstein visited the Mystery Spot to study the phenomenon. John Lister who first established the Oregon Vortex spent 40 years studying the area, as well as corresponding about it with Einstein. Yet the great German scientist was just as stumped as everyone else, and after four decades of research Lister burned his notes. What did he find in his research that would lead him to destroying everything? Or was it the lack of answers that caused him to do it?

College professors, physicists, and tourists continue to visit these places to discover, learn, and experience them. There will always be those who walk away disappointed, still skeptical, but there area also those who are proven wrong. While experts pass them off as optical illusions, the owners and many tourists disagree. Something is off in these places, something magnetic or supernatural.

It doesn’t always take a tragedy to turn a place into something haunted, strange, or unnatural. Nature itself can be responsible. Or perhaps it’s something beyond nature. Perhaps the answers are much more complicated than anyone can surmise.

We only truly know one thing about these places: no one can really explain what’s going on here.