Greetings family, friends and neighbors! Some of you may remember seeing "Mystery Spot" bumper stickers on Bay Area cars (remember when cars had bumpers?) but I'm positive that you never saw a "Curious Canyon" sticker. Today's story is about the short lived and little known roadside attraction....Bill
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Roadside Distractions
THE SHORT STORY OF CURIOUS CANYON
Geologist, mining engineer, and physicist John Lister reportedly conducted thousands of experiments within the 165 foot radius magnetic Vortex on his property on Sardine Creek in Gold Hill, Oregon before opening his House of Mystery to the public in 1930. His convincing backstory of Native Americans refusing to enter the forbidden grounds, prospectors observing unusual activity, and his own “scientific” claims and demonstrations of balls and water running uphill, walking on walls, brooms standing on their own, and visitors changing height was unchallenged. That is until 1941 when John Prather opened The Mystery Spot as a roadside attraction in Santa Cruz, California and duplicating most of Lister’s demonstrations. It wasn’t long before other “gravity-defying” tilt
houses began appearing around the country usually conveniently located for motorists in busy tourist areas. Confusion Hill opened along the California’s Redwood Highway in 1949, and Walter Knott added Haunted Shacks to his Buena Park Farm and Calico Ghost Town. Ponderosa Ranch and Frontier Village both had their own mystery shacks. It is estimated that there may have been as many as thirty mystery houses around the country in the 1950’s, each
with it’s own imaginative explanation for the attractions unusual behavior including landslides, earthquakes, magnetized mineral deposits, buried meteorites, extraterrestrial influences and something coined “gravity vortex”.
It was only a matter of time before there was one too many mystery houses. In 1954 Earl Perrin and Melvin Biesemeier opened Curious Canyon near The Mystery Spot and copied many of the tried and true anti-gravity demonstrations. Almost immediately Curious Canyon was the focus of a lawsuit from Bruce
Prather of The Mystery Spot seeking $10,000 in damages and requesting that the defendants be restrained from operating a similar business near to their own causing confusion by potential customers and lost revenue. A judge denied the request and the Curious Canyon attorney agreed to clarify some roadside signage, however Prater decided to drop the lawsuit since the high profile
public exposure of the non-scientific optical illusion nature of mystery houses would be detrimental to his own business. The Mystery Spot, an official designated Historical Site, continues to entertain new generations of families after eight decades and is the oldest gravity-defying tilt house roadside attraction in California.
After one year of competing with The Mystery Spot and unable to make property payments, short lived beleaguered and halfhearted Curious Canyon closed in 1955 and quickly faded into obscurity.
-Bill 9/24
Circa 1955 Postcard “ INSIDE TABLE-CURIOUS CANYON, SANTA CRUZ, CALIF”
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