The Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz: Altered Reality or a Clever Gimmick?

Oh, the famous Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz, a special place full of intrigue and imagination. When you visit Santa Cruz, you will no doubt have someone ask if you are going to the Mystery Spot, and you will see signs and bumper stickers all over town. I had never been, and I figured I would not research it beforehand, so I could be surprised when I showed up and took the tour. If you want to be surprised, feel free to stop reading, but I can honestly say it will be hard to describe it in text, and you should just go experience it for yourself if you are interested. Here is all the information.

Details

• Open 10-4, but you should get tickets in advance especially for the weekends
• $8 for a ticket and $5 to park your car
• All information from 2015 and 2021
• Location: 465 Mystery Spot Rd, Santa Cruz, CA 95065

When you arrive and pick up your tickets in the store, you will see the Mystery Spot on everything in the store, from shot glasses to socks. After picking up or paying for your ticket, you will sit and wait till the start of your tour to enter the mystery area. From here, the tour starts, and you learn about this crazy “natural magic show.”

History

Here is a synopsis but you can read the full history here:

The Mystery Spot was discovered in 1939 by a group of surveyors and opened to the public in 1940. The Mystery Spot has amazed and perplexed hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world, and many return time and time again to experience these puzzling variations of gravity, perspective, and height.

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.

The Tour

The tour proceeds up the steep incline until you make it to the slanted house and begin to see how weird this area is. The guide then takes you through a series of strange examples that mess with your head and help to show off the phenomenon here.

The highlight of the trip is walking into the main house where the 17-degree angle starts to play with the brain. You can climb tables, hang from the wall, and walk up the stairs, all of these things designed to mess with your mind and to provide some fun Instagram pictures.

After the guide shows you the area, you can mess with it yourself and try the different activities she explained. It is actually a lot of fun to mess around on the different “magic spots.”

After that, you exit the house and have a few more examples of natural magic, including an explanation of how some of the trees are even growing at an angle near the house.

It is a fun tour, and I would say it is worth the 8 dollar cost to enter. They even give you a bumper sticker to take with you when the tour ends.

It’s especially a fun stop on a Pacific Coast Highway drive as it has been around for decades, and thousands of people have marveled at its mystery. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.