The Secret History of Santa Cruz, Vol 4

Yes, it's more of these things and they're all TRUE.

The remnants of the last known coven of Mail Witches, seen here blessing the site of the current Santa Cruz post office just before construction commenced in 1910. In the subsequent 113 years no personal letter mailed at the premises has ever gone missing, except in cases when it was better for it not to arrive.

The lighthouse on Barclay Point was one of the first along the Santa Cruz County coast. Nicknamed “The Darkhouse” by residents, it was associated with an unusual number of shipwrecks for many years and already falling into disrepair by this photo of 1912. After its subsequent demolition, no further maritime accidents occurred.

The early years of Santa Cruz featured rumors of little people who lived in the mountains, after being stranded there after some kind of calamity during a very long journey. Kezlak however always claimed that the preserved curiosities in his Museum of Outlandishness were fakes constructed for his own amusement, and it is doubtless a co-incidence that Lockheed eventually established a seldom-spoken-of facility in those same mountains.

Though notably worse in recent years, forest fires are not a new phenomenon in the Santa Cruz area, and “The Great Burn” of 1896 claimed many hundreds of acres. Its cause is unknown, but when on the first evening a resident attempted to return to his house to save a goat, he captured the above image.

The doorway on Cowell Beach has been there since before records began. It is said that anyone passing through it never returns, and over the years a great many unsuccessful attempts were made to destroy it. It persists to this day, now safely hidden in the basement of The Ideal Grill, a restaurant built to conceal it.

A resident of a nearby mountain town called Felton, “Blessed Mary” discovered she could fly at an early age, though to her disappointment the ability remained limited to simply going up, and then coming down again. Eventually tiring of the experience, she conducted one last flight — captured in this photograph of 1908 — before retiring to become a celebrated painter of chickens.

This postcard of 1906 is captioned “Catch of the Day”. It’s likely this was an ironic reference for the amusement of locals, however, as immediately after the photograph was taken, the sea creature — evidently nowhere near as deceased as the three gentlemen bystanders had assumed — suddenly turned and ate them whole.

Previous volumes can be found here, here, and here.