1 post tagged “gravity hill”
well, if you read below, you'd understand my skepticism when it comes to so-called mystery spots. it just so happened that last night, i was at a bookstore and i picked up weird california. the book explores oddities in california that anyone could visit. places like ghost hauntings, bizzare attractions, etc.
one of the oddities was a place called gravity hill. a mystery spot, if you will. the book gave specific directions to a little road in altadena where cars are rumored to roll backwards.. UPHILL. local folklore is that a bus full of children (5th graders, oh my!) had died in a freak crash. now, their spirits supposedly PUSH your car uphill if you happen to park there. legend has it that you'll see little handprints on your car where these spirits "pushed" your car.
so... since ray and i had nothing better to do on a friday night, we put the book down, got in the car, and headed straight to altadena. we couldn't have chosen a better night to go, actually. the moon was bright, it was almost midnight, and the roads were windy. the directions were really obscure too. the book starts off very direct with street-to-street directions. the rest of the directions got bizzare.. "after a few dips, the road veers to the right, stop at the first house". it took us a few shots, but we finally found a house at a bottom of the incline in a quiet, windy, DARK road in altadena. we checked our description from the book.. and YES.. this was most definitely, the haunted hill.
we drive to the bottom of the hill and ray puts the car in neutral and takes his foot off the pedals. we waited for about thirty seconds.. and low and behold.. the car starts going backwards uphill! i shit you not! the car was rolling uphill for about a minute, during which the car would sometimes speed up or slow down. it truly gave me the chills. i was still pretty skeptical that we were even moving, but it was obvious that we were. we heard the gravel crunching, the speedometer was changing, AND the beams of the headlights were definitely moving - true signs that the car was indeed going backwards uphill. crazy crazy. we ended up about a yard from where ray had initially stopped the car.
sadly, we didn't find any little handprints on the car, but it was truly mind boggling (by the way, there IS an explanation to this mystery, but i don't want to ruin it for you folks). there are other gravity hills throughout the world (my parents had experienced one in the philippines in a province called laguna). there's even a more prominent one in la jolla, san diego.
if you're interested in going, let me know. i'll give you the directions (or i'll take you there!).
water rolling uphill
