Unwinding the secret behind California’s famous “Mystery Spot”
All laws of science fail inside this 17-degree-angle ‘tilted wooden hut’, one of North America’s most notable and oldest vortexes. Defying gravity, the ‘Mystery Spot’ is located in the dense redwood forest outside Santa Cruz, California. The name ‘Mystery Spot’ itself depicts suspense and anticipation.
Here, tilt creates visual illusions so all unbelievable things seem to appear real like, balls roll uphill, water flows in reverse direction, people can even walk on walls and can bend onwards at different angles without falling.
My tour guide of this place through a narrow, steep five five-minute uphill walk took me to the gravity hill where this mysterious wooden hut is sited. I felt somewhat dizzy and off-balance as I entered the circular area of effect with a diameter of around 150 feet (46 meters). Geographers are amazed to see that in this radius no compass gives absolute correct results. They are still discovering the actual cause of creating a vortex in a specific diameter. Related to this there are many speculations like any spacecraft buried deep beneath the redwood forest or some metal cones were secretly brought here and entombed in the hills. 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.
Also building such a ‘crazy house’ on a slope and the slant of the hut cause misperceptions of the height along with the orientation of the object here. In this context, I felt so amazed to see that the person standing next to me was looking shorter and the next moment he was taller than me as the floor was also tilted. Standing on the ground level, people judge their heights using the slant of the roof rather than the true horizon. To make the mystery house look even more convincing, distorted objects are purposely placed all over it to enhance the perception of normalcy, or make people think they are standing on perfectly level ground. But they are not. Geographers have theories to explain the illusion. Some geographers and psychologists say that the house is slanted at a 17 to 20-degree angle from the ground and hence the perceiver’s body too is tilted, the distorting impact on vision is greatly magnified up to two or three times. Another point they feel is that distorted orientation causes other senses to fall back while one’s visual senses become heightened.
In the end, seeing a series of strange things inside this crazy house has made me completely puzzled and many unanswered questions are still crossing my mind. I still want to know if the place is actually suspicious or if things are fabricated here through manual intelligence. But with fun and amusement, I left the place with a “Mystery Spot” bumper sticker that can be seen far and wide on cars’ rear windows all over America and in India as well.
