ASH: Yesterday we went to a lava tube cave just a little ways outside of Flagstaff. We were all interested in this because of the volcanic nature of this part of Arizona, and because the Hopi Indians who live here have some very important myths about the Underworld. The Hopi are a matriarchal society, so many of their beliefs have a strong female symbolism to them. The myth of creation talks about human beings being born out of the Earth, from a cave. This symbolism represents the process of birth where the cave represents the birth canal. So a lot of caves and caverns have special meaning to the Hopi as we discovered when we were at the Grand Canyon [For related information, see Jeremy Riposte's Bogus Journey | The Egyptian City at the Bottom of the Canyon | The Crash in the Grand Canyon | Tales from the Edge.]

The lava cave we went to is in a secluded part of the Coconino National Forest. We drove in through muddy and slippery roads, which was really kind of fun but the Camels were completely up for the challenge!! The cave was discovered in 1915 by a bunch of lumberjacks and was used for local recreation by these men and people from Flagstaff for many years. Because is much colder inside the cave all the time, sometimes the people used to harvest ice from it to make ice cream, or is was a cool place to visit on a hot summer day. The entrance today is now well-marked but I imagine a long time ago it was kind of hard to see and you could walk right by it and never even see it.

If you decide to go to the lava cave, I would recommend you carry water, really good flashlights with extra batteries, some food, warm clothes, hiking boots and protective head wear. It's really like roughing it once you go inside. You have to climb over lots of sharp rocks in complete darkness (if you don't have good lighting that is!) and many of the rocks have ice encrusted to them. I thought it was very cool, but some of the other members of the team were kind of freaked out by it. Mist. Meredian and Echo didn't make it all the way because they were either too exhausted or in Echo's case, too scaredy. That girl is totally timid! We got to toughen her up, man!

Dad, Rune and I went all the way to the end of the lava tube and back. It took us about three hours total. It was amazing to be inside as some the passage went from crawling on your knees size to as big as a giant warehouse size. In those big rooms you could call out and hear your echo bounce all the way down the cavern and into the darkness. It was really quite amazing being so surrounded by Mother Earth on every side of you and thinking about how, millions of years ago, this whole tube was just filled with molten lava! I can see why the Native Americans thought of these places like being born out of the earth. Not to get too graphic or anything, but it was really like walking into the guts of the world. Rune seemed to be particularly moved by the trip. She said that it really felt like a "power place," where you could feel the creative power of the earth really strongly. She said it reminded her of when we were in the redwood forest in northern California [See Into the Wilderness for related information.]

When we reached the end of the tube, we found remnants of candles and some strange occult symbols written on the walls, so the tube is obviously used by people performing some religious activities. It could be Wicca or some other pagan religion, or it could be Satanism. We couldn't really tell. Whoever used the place was no longer there and it was hard to tell how long the symbols and wax drippings had been there. It was still kind of creepy seeing it though. What [was] really weird is that on a couple of occasions we thought that we heard other people in the tube, even though we never passed anyone on the trail. Someone could have easily hidden in the shadows and we would have never even see them, but why would anyone do that? Dad said we were hearing our echoes. I don't know if that's true or not. I think the lava cave was one of my favorite outings in northern Arizona so far. If you are in the area, you should totally go and see it! Just be careful!

This was more or less our last outing in this part of the state. We are going to start heading south now so we avoid any snow and because we are going to spend the holidays with our webmasters in Tucson, which is where my dad grew up too.

MERIDIAN: The Vulture Mine is probably one of the best preserved ghost towns in Arizona, is easily accessible and certainly should be visited by anyone who’s interested in the state’s frontier past. According to myth, in 1862 the mine’s founder – prosector Henry Wickenburg – was out hunting when he shot a vulture. Where the bird dropped to the ground, Henry discovered some spectacular quartz formations infused with gold and established his claim. Although this story seems unlikely, Wickenberg’s instincts about the quartz formations were spot on and the mine became one of the most profitable gold producers in Arizona. Wickenburg ultimately decided that he was not interested in the mining business and sold a controlling share of the operation to Benjamin Phelps in 1866. During the first few years of Phelp’s supervision, it is estimated that the Vulture officially produced $2.5 million in gold, with almost as much being snuck out by the miners and their corrupt foremen. Stealing the gold-rich ore was such a persistent problem, that there was actually a “hanging tree” on site for those who were caught. The tree can still be seen today.

The mine changed hands again in 1878, being sold to a man named James Seymour who quickly identified another gold-rich vein and further increased the operation’s profits. Aside from the mining operation, Vulture became an important rest-stop in an otherwise unbroken stretch of desert. By the 1890s, the site featured houses, dormitories, an assayer’s office, a general store, a post office and a school. The mine continued to produce gold, albeit it at a diminished level, well into the twentieth century. At its height, the town was home to 5,000 people.

Now, the caretakers at the Vulture Mine site are anxious to tell visitors that the mine met its end as the result of a great tragedy. According to the grizzled and well-armed attendant who took our admission fee, the mine ceased production after a freak cave-in which forever trapped several men and burros in a large subterranean chamber. This, he told us, was the basis for the mine’s haunting legends. Okay, that made sense. But, the problem for the team is that we couldn’t independently confirm that such a disaster ever happened. We were able to find one website about the Vulture City Pioneer Cemetery that had this research note:

In 1923, some "Personal Miners" (as they were referred to, paid the Mine Company to extract ore) were working in one of the large underground chambers. The Vulture Mine, a hard rock mine, had no need of support timbers. The mining company found it necessary to leave about forty percent of the ore in place as supporting columns. One large chamber had ore columns that were very rich in gold. The Personal Miners were chipping away at these columns when they suddenly gave way. One hundred feet of rock over their heads collapsed on them. The cave in killed seven miners and twelve burros. There was no hope of rescue.

Unfortunately, there was no precise date or source for this information cited. Our research of local newspapers from 1923 found no mention of this disaster. That’s not to say that papers of the day didn’t cover mine disasters, especially in an area where mines were common and very important to the local economy. The Bulletin, which was published in Casa Grande about one hundred miles from Vulture Mine, contained stories about a mine collapse in Dawson, New Mexico; and a mine explosion in Trinidad, Colorado. But not a word about the Vulture Mine. Wouldn’t such a collapse, particularly with so many victims in one of the richest strikes in Arizona history, have been worthy of front page coverage?

The time frame also doesn’t work here. According to the Arizona Geological Survey, the Vulture Mine ceased production in 1942. If the collapse which killed the seven miners happened in 1923, rendering the site unusable, why did it continue to produce gold and silver for another two decades? In fact, in the book Arizona Ghost Towns and Mining Camps by Philip Varney, I found this explanation of the mine’s closing:

“In fact, it wasn’t until 1942, when President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 208 banned the mining of non-strategic material during World War II that production ceased.” [p. 26]

Could the Outcast Earth team members have been victims of the haunted landmark’s most valuable assets – the tall tale? Welcome to my “aha moment!” The grizzled old attendant with the big handgun on his hip was bullshitting us! Although I found myself irritated by this realization, I also have to admit that I liked the tall tale much more than the mundane truth. And even though there probably are not ghosts of crushed miners wandering the desert hills around the Vulture Mine, it’s still an amazing site particularly due to its accessibility and state of preservation.

Before touring, we were asked to sign a liability waiver (the place is one hundred years old and not maintained after all), given a crudely-drawn laminated map and sent on our way. We were the only people there and were allowed to wander at will through the various buildings. The loop through the major part of the town is only a mile long, but there’s so much to see that we ended up staying for over three hours. Some of the buildings are partially collapsed, others are virtually intact. The two-story assayers office was of particular interest to us, and we even tempted fate by climbing the sagging stairs to the now mostly caved-in second floor and sent Ash on a subterranean expedition into the massive floor safe on the ground level. Almost all of the buildings have period furnishings and – as the man with the gun warned us – plenty of rattlesnakes. We didn’t see any of the latter, however. I wasn’t sure as I wandered through this amazing place if all the artifacts inside were original materials left behind by the residents after 1942, or “atmosphere” added by the current owners. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. All of the dust-covered and rusting clutter added immeasurably to our experience.

Somewhat to the southwest of the assayer’s office is the mine and a collection of other buildings including a massive machine shop and powerhouse. The mine shaft is now covered with chain-link panels to keep anyone from going inside, but even with those in place I still felt a touch of vertigo looking down into its dark maw. Working in such a remote place so deep in the ground certainly took a special kind of man.

On the far side of the small visitors center and gift shop [are] the remains of Vulture City itself. This is where most of the residential areas, including the church and school are located. I found it almost as interesting as the mine itself, particularly when the desert wind kicked up and caused the old schoolyard swings to creak and squeak. It was a chilling effect... one that Polaris thankfully videotaped [See this footage in the video below: Gold's Last Glimmer]. The desert is beginning to reclaim this part of Vulture. Palo verde and mesquite trees are starting to consume the disturbingly steep children’s slide and the nearby outhouses. Wooden structures and adobe walls are collapsing and their remnants almost indistinguishable among the dark greens and browns of the desert floor. But all of this gave me more of a sense of place and time than almost any other ghost town I have ever visited.

If you happen to find yourself in the Wickenburg area of Arizona, I suggest you make the detour to see the Vulture mine. Listen to the crazy stories the caretakers tell you and enjoy them even if you take them with a grain of salt. Trust me, Vulture Mine is a place you should really let your imagination run wild!

Return to top of page

MIST: Approximately half way between Tucson and Phoenix are some roadside curiosities that harken back to an era when motor travel was both new and exciting. At the base of Picacho Peak, a strange-looking volcanic formation rising out of the flat desert floor, is a small collection of buildings, now abandoned or partially destroyed. The first, now little more than a pile of charred lumber, is all that remains for the Picacho Peak Trading Post, an old-time curio shop that was complete with totem poles and a ridiculous and racially-insensitive statue of a Native American brave giving the “how” sign to approaching vehicles. To the south of this is the still largely intact remains of a Nickerson Farms restaurant, one of those classic roadside eateries like Howard Johnson’s or Stuckeys. As part of my research for this blog entry, I interviewed Polaris about his recollections of these roadside attractions since he had lived in Tucson up until 1985.

“I can recall stopping at these buildings only once or twice in the time our family lived in Arizona,” he told me. “We traveled I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix regularly, but these were tourists attractions and since we weren’t tourists, I guess they didn’t attract us. I remember that the trading post was filled with that awful pseudo-Native American crap merchandise that I just loath. Plenty of feather headdresses, rubber tomahawks, gaudy pottery that was actually made in Taiwan... that sort of junk. You’d start seeing signs for the trading post about ten miles either north or south of it along the highway. They were alway big, ugly signs advertising cactus gardens and rock candy and there was a new sign about every mile right up until you reached Picacho Peak. The [trading post] building was a low-profile all-wood building with with bright yellow and red signs on it. I remember there was a giant statue of an Indian standing outside wearing a feather headdress. You could see him from the interstate below. Even as a kid I can remember thinking that the place must have been like fly-paper for suckers.”

The trading post was destroyed under rather mysterious circumstances on the night of Saturday, November 16, 2002. According to neighbor who lived nearby and tried to contain the blaze with his garden hose, the inferno was proceeded by a flash of bright light. The neighbor assumed that it had been a lightning strike that set the wooden structure ablaze, but the skies had been clear that night. We could not find any contemporary newspaper articles that explained the fire, although some did note that no foul play was suspected.

And what about the Nickerson Farm’s restaurant?

“Never ate there,” Polaris stated. “But like the giant Indian, you could see that red roof miles away. It was in a great location. There was nothing else around like it for forty miles in any direction. I’m sure they made a bundle in their heyday.”

The Nickerson Farms restaurant at Picacho opened on December 22, 1969, and was first store of the franchise in Arizona. It was famous for its fried chicken and fresh honey. There were reportedly bee hives on the hillside behind the restaurant – a common feature for this restaurant chain. The restaurant also had a gift shop that must have rivaled the nearby Trading Post in tackiness. In a newspaper article from 1975, Jeffery Yaskin, the manager bragged that the store was “one of the company’s busier” locations.

“‘The gift shop’s specialty is imported items,’ Yaskin said, ‘such as glassware and crystal from Italy and Argentina, as well as copper ware from Portugal.’”

Polaris laughed when I read this to him. “I’m sure much of the stuff in these roadside attractions are imported,” he said. “America doesn’t have a monopoly on producing dreck.”

I wasn’t able to find out exactly when or why the Nickerson Farms was shut down, as none of the newspapers I consulted had anything about it. The last reference I could find was from the February 16, 1988, edition of the Casa Grande Dispatch that reported a possible breakin at “Nickerson Farms at Picacho Peak which is currently being remodeled.” Since there were no references to the restaurant as being open after this, I assume that the company closed it for remodeling and then just never open it again. Curiously, however, I found sources that stated that the franchise went out of business in 1980, so I can’t really explain the date discrepancy. Did the Picacho Peak location sit for eight years awaiting a remodeling that never came? That seems weird. I asked Polaris about it, and he thought that the restaurant was still open when he moved to Hawai’i in 1985.

According to some online sources, the interior of the building is still largely intact with all the kitchen equipment and fixtures still in place. We weren’t able to confirm this, however, as all the windows and doors were covered with thick plywood and there was no way to peek inside.

If the restaurant was abandoned by design, then it certainly explains why it’s in such good condition. There’s nothing paranormal about the site, but if you are a devotee of forgotten and abandoned places, then it might be worth the five minute detour to see Nickerson Farms and the remains of the trading post as you travel this otherwise lonely and ugly stretch of Interstate 10.

RUNE: The team set out on a concerted mission to discover some ghost towns around the Tucson area in Pima County. But finding this obscure historical places is often a lot harder than one might expect, even with good maps, GPS and plenty of historical information. I’m reminded that this is also part of the fun, but today it just turned out to be aggravating.

Our goal was to find four former mining camps – Twin Buttes, Mineral Hill (Azurite), Olive and Continental – all located to the south of Tucson along the Interstate 19 corridor. This entire area around the present-day towns of Sahuarita and Green Valley is littered with mines dating back to the 19th century. Today, the scars from generations of mining operations are a blight on the landscape. Huge piles of discarded earth, looking like step pyramids, rise over the landscape. Nothing larger than small desert scrub seems to grow on these ugly mounds. From their flat tops roll great plumes of chalky, white dust that blows across the desert floor and makes the entire area seem surreal, almost post-apocalyptic. Hidden somewhere in all this are the remains of these four towns, most of which were abandoned almost one hundred years ago. It became apparent almost immediately that we had our work cut out for us.

Our first stops were in search of Mineral Hill and Olive, which were located close to each other along Mission Road, west of I-19. The settlement at Mineral Hill, which was more properly known as Azurite, was the smaller and less-developed of the two. At its height in 1899, it is said to have been home for about one-hundred and twenty-five miners. There were a number of wood-frame buildings, a company store and a smelter for the nearby copper mine. But by the following year the mine had closed and Azurite was abandoned. The settlement was resurrected briefly in the 1920s when copper mining resumed following the First World War. During this interval, another store and a post office were built on the site. Olive slightly predates Mineral Hill and was a camp for silver miners from an era before copper became a mainstay of the Arizona economy. The camp was named after Olive Stephenson Brown, the wife of the mine’s owner. Mrs. Brown appointed herself the patron of the camp. A kind-hearted and generous woman, she organized free chicken dinners every Sunday for the miners.

The Arizona Republican had a brief description of the town’s demise in its May 24, 1906, edition:

...During the good prices of silver, Olive district was home of the mining chloriders. Many claims were worked with profit, more than $1,200,000 being taken out of the Olive camp mines and shipped to reduction works. With the depreciation of silver the silver mines closed down and remained unworked until within the last two years, when one or two of the groups were again worked at a good profit because of the high grade of ore taken therefrom...

After the mine sold in the late 1880s, Olive Stephenson Brown and her husband moved to Tucson where they continued to play an important role in the city’s early development. A collection of her reminiscences about this pioneer age is available through the Arizona State library.

To find both camps, we followed Mission Road south toward Green Valley. This particular stretch of the road has a very lonely feel to it. In fact, I don’t know if we saw more than one or two other cars during the entire journey. We were not able to find the location for Mineral Hill at all and had only marginally better success with Olive. Nestled between the stark artificial mountains created by the mining companies, and across the street from a rural fire department, we did find a padlocked gate which according to our information should have led to the Olive ruins. Naturally, we didn’t trespass nor could we see the ruins from road as they were clearly lost among the washes and desert vegetation below us. Undeterred, we got back in the Camels and proceeded south toward the Twin Buttes site.

The information we had on Twin Buttes was sparse to begin with, but we did know that most of the settlement was buried by the tailings piles years ago. Twin Buttes maintained a post office up until 1930, so it must have been a community of some size. We found articles in the Arizona Independent Republic that noted that the Twin Buttes mine was still in operation in the early 1940s, so it’s possible that the camp was also active in some respect at this time. We were not able to find a lot of concrete information about the camp, but my archival research did turn up this curious poem penned by a man named William F. Kirk describing the exploits of an outlaw named Jack Harwood. The poem mentions Twin Buttes and gives some indication of the “wild west” environment in which the camp existed:

“Jack Harwood was a bad one, tall, strangely fast and game,
He never drew his gun too quick and never pulled up lame.
The fighting men of Tucson knew his record all too well,
And when his horse loped into town a deathlike silence fell.
Once, in the town of Tombstone, not many years ago,
He shot two faro dealers and four Greasers in a row,
And once at Twin Buttes mining camp, when things were breaking wrong,
Three gun men bit the sawdust, never more to hear the gong...”

Some online resources indicated that you can still find concrete foundations and other Twin Buttes artifacts hidden on the desert floor, but our team was not successful in finding any of this. Again, disappointed but undeterred, we pressed on...

Our final site was called Continental. This camp was said to be located on the east side of I-19 along the banks of the Santa Cruz River. We were not optimistic about finding any of Continental either, especially since our GPS system indicated that its remains lay smack in the middle of a modern housing development. Whatever Continental had been during the first half of the twentieth century, it seems to have been erased by current streets and track homes. What was interesting, however, is how many places in the surrounding area still bear the camp’s name. There were roads, shopping centers, stores and more. Out of curiosity, we pulled into a strip mall called Continental Shopping Plaza and ate lunch at a McDonalds. I love doing these little “on the spot polls,” so I approached different people in the restaurant and the parking lot and asked them if they knew about the town of Continental. I didn’t find a single person who had even heard of the old camp or knew that so many sites around them were named after it. This made me feel a little sentimental. These camps have been permanently erased from the earth’s surface, but their legacy carries through their names. What’s sad is that no body seems to know that.

POLARIS: This is to be the last blog entry for the Outcast Earth team for 2009. How fitting, for such a bizarre year, that I have the honor of writing about a place called "The Thing: Mystery of the Desert."

SPOILER ALERT! Now, before you read this blog any further, rest assured that I am going to ruin any surprises for you. I will be revealing what “the mystery of the desert” is, and perhaps more importantly, what it is not. You will also have the opportunity to click a link below to actually see a close up photo of "The Thing." Continue at your own peril!

Having already made our short side-trip to visit the old Nickerson Farms and trading post at Picacho Peak north of Tucson, the team went southeast to see an even more famous roadside attraction. “The Thing” is a venerable tourist trap that demands (yes – DEMANDS!) your attention through the numerous bright yellow billboards that line the highways of southern Arizona and can be seen as far away as El Paso, Texas. “What is it?” the billboards ask in twenty-foot letters. Truthfully, I cannot recall a time in this part of the state when the billboards were not there; and as a child I begged my parents to take me to see The Thing. Being academics and unable to understand my abiding interest in oddities even at that age, both ardently refused. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I finally made the seventy mile roadtrip with friends to satisfy my curiosity.

The attraction sits on Interstate 10 at the crest of a hill near Dragoon, Arizona. This is about half way between Benson and Willcox. It is a curious place to find a throw-back to the era of roadside oddities. As you travel east from Tucson, you pass through the spectacularly beautiful Texas Canyon, an alien-like landscape of rounded rock formations and desert scrub. Nearby, and only five miles from The Thing itself, is the world-famous Amerind Museum of Native American Archaeology, Art, History and Culture. The proximity between such a prestigious museum and a bizarre amusement is an oddity in itself, but that is sometimes the nature of the American southwest.

From a distance, The Thing appears to be just another truckstop. There is a gas station there, along with a large Dairy Queen and an extensive gift shop selling, well, the same stuff those types of gift shops always sell. (See Mist’s blog on the Picacho Peak Trading Post for examples.) The Thing, which is part of a larger collection of curiosities, sits behind these newer structures. You enter this hidden complex through a door in the gift shop that is modeled to look like a cave entrance. At the time I visited The Thing in high school, I believe it was only seventy-five cents to get in. It’s gone up some since, but it’s still dirt cheap to take the self-guided tour.

You exit the gift shop into a small courtyard and follow large yellow footprints painted on the sidewalk through a series of metal sheds crammed with farm machinery, old cars, antiques and questionable artwork. Everything is covered in thick layers of dust and plentiful cobwebs, which naturally lends to the mystique of the place. Some of the “displays” are highly questionable, like the Mercedes Benz (apparently a 1950s model) that is labeled “Hitler’s staff car.” Just as weird are the framed images that were obviously torn out of contemporary magazines and are mounted in lit display cases nearby. Some are labeled in strangely simple ways – for example, “France.” You walk passed them and wonder why someone even went to the trouble since there is nothing particularly remarkable about the images, but that too is the nature of roadside oddities.

The final metal shed contains The Thing itself. It shares the space with a menagerie of animals created from pieces of painted driftwood. The first time I visited, an obese, friendly and partially-blind cat lay on the concrete sarcophagus that held the “mystery of the desert.” The cat too was a fitting addition to the place. Beneath his swishing tail was a five-foot “mummy” that appeared to be handmade from papier-maché and wood. One of those conical straw hats, often known as Coolies or rice paddy hats, lay the on the mummy’s belly. I found that to be the strangest thing about it, as I had always heard rumors that The Thing was supposed to be the mummy of a “Native American princess.” I don’t think any of the tribes in southern Arizona had princesses, and I was pretty sure that none of them wore Coolies. I was amused. My seventy-five cents was well spent.

You can rest assured that The Thing is not a mummy. It is a mystery of the desert, however, and that certainly makes it worth seeing. Back in 2002, KJZZ Radio, the Phoenix-based National Public Radio affiliate, did an investigative piece on The Thing that shed some light on the artifact’s origins. According the reporter Rene Gutel, the “mummy” was the handiwork of a Phoenix local named Homer Tate. Tate had worked many jobs during his life, but in the 1940s he became interested in creating “gaffs,” or fake creatures and other props often used in roadside attractions, carnivals and less-reputable museums. Tate owned his own curiosity shop in Phoenix and may have become acquainted with Thomas Binkley Prince, another Phoenician and the man who established The Thing in 1965. It’s unknown if Prince commissioned the ‘mummy’ from Tate or simply purchased it from his shop. Regardless, Tate’s creation has been housed on the side of the road outside of Benson for forty-plus years and attracts hundreds of visitors every week.

READY TO SEE "THE THING?" Click here to see a close up image of the Mystery of the Desert.

RUNE: Arizona is filled with stories about lost gold mines and buried treasure. Here's another one. Are you ready?

In the early years of the twentieth century, two brothers found employment at the famous Vulture Mine near Wickenburg. But the brothers were not interested in the hard life of the miner. They were interested in the comparatively easy, albeit high-risk life of the bandit. The brothers easily gained the trust of the mine foreman, which allowed them access to the underground safe where all the mine's gold awaited transportation to other destinations. The brothers were able to abscond with several bars of high grade gold and fled on horseback across the open desert. They headed south passed Tucson until they eventually ended up in the small ranching community of Arivaca. Their older sister, Dona Teresa Celaya, was a well-known business woman in the town, running several establishments of questionable repute. Teresa had her brothers bury the gold in the yard behind the sprawling adobe building that functioned as both her tavern and her home. The brothers then vanished, supposedly going into hiding until the heat was off. What happened to the brothers and their stolen treasure is unknown, but many claim that those gold bars are still hidden in the ground behind that adobe house.

Is it true?

There were parts of the story we were able to confirm. For example, there was a prominent woman named Dona Teresa Celaya who lived in Arivaca during the early part of the twentieth century and did own the adobe ruin behind which the gold was rumored to have been buried. An online article from the Arivaca newspaper provided this brief sketch of Celaya and the buildings along Arivaca Road:

“For many Arivacans, the center of town life has been La Gitana Cantina. Besides a dance hall and saloon, at various times the building has been used for a church, a courtroom, a store, a hay barn, and a restaurant. There had been at least one saloon in Arivaca since the 1870s. Sometimes there was enough business for two or more. The little building that now houses La Gitana has been a cantina since at least the 1940s, but its origins are lost in time. It appears in a 1914 photo, but the date it was constructed has not yet been determined. Doña Teresa Celaya ran a saloon and pool hall next door (in what is now the ruin) from at least the turn of the century, and probably well before that time, so the south side of Main Street has always had a bar. Doña Teresa came to Arivaca in the mid 1880s from Altar, Sonora. Frank Krupp remembered her as “Lady Bountiful and the friend in need of rich and poor alike throughout the area. . . In addition, the Senora ran the cantina, and in that capacity was her own bouncer, and an effective one.” [Connection Newspaper, Arivaca, Arizona]

Celaya was a quite a town fixture. She had multiple properties around the town and her fingers in several businesses, from prostitution to gambling. Apparently she died in the town in 1937 at the age of 102. She’s buried in the local cemetery in a plot she shares with her youngest daughter.

Unfortunately, we could not find any information supporting the story that Teresa had brothers, let alone ones she harbored after they stole from the Vulture Mine. In her day and age, this would have been a hanging offense and Teresa would have been putting herself at tremendous risk in assisting her brothers. Still, she was a woman who seemed to operate outside the law as needed, so perhaps hiding bars of gold would have been just another questionable activity.

Certainly the Vulture Mine, one of the most profitable mines in Arizona, was an easy target for “highgrading,” a contemporary term for when miners looted gold-rich ore. “From it over $16,000,000 in gold has already been taken and the mine has long been known as one from which a great deal of pilfering has been done,” reported a 1904 news article from the Arizona Republican. “A story is told of a Mexican who worked at the mine for one day, receiving $5 for his services and stealing $65. A German, who for several months held the position of foreman in the crushing department, is reported to have stolen over $200,000 and then returned to Germany and built himself a castle.”

If the story about Teresa’s brothers is true, it is probably unlikely that they stole gold bars which would have been very heavy and harder to conceal. It’s perhaps more conceivable that the brothers highgraded gold-rich ore, which miners often did by shoving it into their boots. It may have been the ore that was hidden in the yard behind the adobe ruins... if it happened at all.

POLARIS: Imagine the scene if you can... You are poking around in a rather rural area of the Sonoran Desert near the remains of an old lime kiln.  The landscape seems inhospitable.  There's a river nearby, but it only runs sporadically.  The vegetation is sparse, low-lying and yields very little that any human being could use for food or any kind of sustenance. The soil is either sandy or armored with a kind of dense native clay called "caliche" which is almost impossible to penetrate.  During the summer months, temperatures are blistering hot.  During the winter, the over-night lows can sink to freezing. And then there's the rattlesnakes, scorpions, centipedes and numerous other venomous animals that creep through the brush. As you wander around the old kiln, you happen to notice a strange metal object jutting out from a dirt embankment about five feet below the surface.  Intrigued, you excavate the object slowly and carefully.  There shouldn't be anything metal buried so deep in the desert soil.  Not here, not in this extremely remote place.  What you unearth is a roughhewn cross, fashioned from lead, weighing about sixty-five pounds and inscribed with strange lettering.  Latin.  Could it be some relic from when the Spaniards settled this area nearly four hundred years earlier?  Maybe this artifact was even carried by the famous Father Eusebio Kino, the missionary who established the San Xavier Mission approximately twenty-five miles to the south?

The truth behind this roadside oddity, however, would prove to be much stranger and more controversial than any relic that might have been dropped by Father Kino.

If your mind is still in "imagination mode," then consider the possibility that that strange cross covered in Latin was not dropped by a Spaniard, but by a Roman.  A Roman Jew to be precise.  (I know, if they were Jews then why was a Christian cross discovered?  I'll get to that... be patient.)

In 1924, something close to this scene allegedly played out in a desert field between Silverbell Road and the Santa Cruz River outside of Tucson, Arizona.  In September of that year, a man named Charles E. Manier (and later with Thomas W. Bent who owned the property) claimed to have unearthed several "Roman Jewish" artifacts from a previously unknown (and equally hard to imagine) settlement called Calalus. The clues to this settlement's existence, which was apparently established by a hopelessly lost band of Jewish refugees, were found on subsequent artifacts dug up from the same area. Many of these artifacts were inscribed with crudely written Latin, Hebrew and childish pictograms. Others were purely utilitarian, including spearpoints and swords. The hypothesis was that a boatload of Roman Jews (perhaps escaping persecution) somehow found themselves on the west side of the Atlantic Ocean, stranded on the shore of an unfamiliar continent.  Unable to return home, the Jews set out on an arduous march across North America and ultimately decided that the sun-baked lands of the Sonoran Desert were the ideal area to build a new colony.  Despite the fact that the "Roman Jews" would have encountered many Native Americans in much more hospitable environments along the way, living on the banks of the Santa Cruz River would not have been impossible had they actually made it this far.  There were, after all, people with established settlements here long before the Conquistadors arrived, namely the Hohokam and later the Tohono O'odham Indians.

Needless to say, Manier and Bent's discovery started a firestorm and quickly embroiled the national media, the University of Arizona, and archaeologists from around the world. The New York Times reported the discovery in its December 13, 1925, edition:

"After investigation by a number of scientists, first announcement was made here today of the excavation near Tucson of cast lead swords, crosses and other objects bearing Latin and Hebrew inscriptions which, taken at their face value, are held to mean that Roman Jews crossed the Atlantic in the Dark Ages, penetrated to Arizona and founded a kingdom which lasted from about 700 A.D. to 900 A.D..."

Subsequent inscriptions on the found objects seemed to indicate that the "Roman Jews" were ruled by four successive kings: Theodorus, Jacobus, Israel the First and Israel the Second.  Somehow, the Jewish settlement ran afoul of the Toltec Indians, a Meso-American tribe that lived in central Mexico but is not known to have had any kind of presence in Arizona. Were the swords and spearpoints an indication of some war against the Toltecs, as unlikely as that seems? And who exactly were the people of Calalus?  Were they all Roman Jews?  Were they Christians? Did they start to inter-breed with the local people? As more artifacts were discovered, the mystery seemed to deepen:

"The combination of Christian cross, Moslem crescent, Hebraic seven-branched candlestick and Freemasonry emblems has imposed a heavy tax on the credulity of investigators," reported the New York Times article, "but their appearance of having been covered and embedded in stone by natural processes has puzzled skilled archaeologists. Some have arrived at the opinion that, whatever their origin, the objects lay for centuries in the earth where they were found."

A total of thirty-two crosses and miscellaneous other objects were found in the area between 1924 and 1930. Some of the stranger relics included a sword etched with a drawing of a dinosaur – a creature that would have been unknown to medieval peoples – and a fan-shaped baton that included a map of the settlement. By the end of it, Calalus was beginning to look like a melting-pot of races and religions. But strangely, other than the metal artifacts, there seemed to be no other trace of the settlement.  No foundations were ever found.  Or a shard of pottery.  Or a burial site.  It seemed that Calalus, if it existed, produced a variety of iron objects and then vanished.  A hoax was almost screaming to be discovered.

Scholars pointed to some very obvious problems with the relics themselves. As the Yuma Morning Sun reported at the time, the Latin inscriptions were “formed by stringing together disconnected sentences which are exactly word for word, to be found in the ‘Glossary of Foreign Words and Phrases’ of the Standard dictionary.’” The images on the relics were also a hodgepodge of disconnected symbols from various ages and cultures. And then, of course, there was that dinosaur.

So if the relics – and Calalus itself – were hoaxes, who perpetrated the scheme? Those who champion the authenticity of Calalus even to this day are quick to point out that the relics were found five to six feet below the desert surface, beneath that almost impenetrable layer of caliche. How could someone possibly plant the artifacts without disturbing the earth above?

Suspicion eventually landed on a boy named Timoteo Odohui, who forty years earlier had lived near the old lime kilns where the artifacts were discovered. Such kilns had operated in and around Tucson since the 1880s to produce quicklime which was used for creating mortar in many contemporary buildings. The kilns themselves were not dissimilar to ancient Roman forges and witnesses who knew Odohui reported his fascination with ancient civilizations, his artistic talent and his metal-working skills. Additionally, Odohui read and spoke Latin. At the time the relics were discovered in 1924, however, Timoteo Odohui had long since vanished and no one knows what happened to him.

To be fair, even if Odohui created the strange objects, it is not known if he actually intended a hoax. Modern investigators speculate that the relics were created decades before they were actually discovered, perhaps as early at the 1850s, and may have been left behind in Odohui’s old house after the lime kiln was shut down. If that’s the case, then it’s possible that someone else actually took the objects and planted them in the ground. Getting around that layer of caliche was also not impossible. Placing the lead artifacts in a lime mixture and then implanting them horizontally into the desert hillsides would have left the clay layer intact and simulated natural mineral encrustations that one would expect to find on lead objects that had lain in the ground for centuries. If allowed to sit for several years before being “discovered,” the result would have been quite authentic.

Among the hoax suspects we must also include Thomas W. Bent, the man who owned the land on which the Calalus artifacts were found and subsequently wrote a book championing their authenticity in 1964. The timing of the discovery was advantageous to Bent regardless of his involvement. Only two years earlier, the tomb of King Tutankhamun had been discovered in Egypt, starting off an international fascination with ancient civilizations. The romantic belief that adventurers from the Old World had made it to the New World and established colonies here was also not unknown. We will remind our visitors that the Outcast Earth team recently investigated a 1909 report of a hidden Egyptian city located at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. [For more information, see The Egyptian City at the Bottom of the Canyon and Jeremy Riposte’s Bogus Journey.] By comparison, Calalus seems downright plausible! Bent eventually received the equivalent of $150,000 for the relics when they were purchased by the University of Arizona in 1926. He went to his grave insisting that Calalus was real.

There is apparently an obscure book about the Calalus artifacts written by the intriguely-named Cyclone Covey, but we were unable to locate a copy locally. The book is available on Ebay for as much as $300 per copy, making it perhaps as valuable as the lead artifacts themselves.  

Some of the Calalus relics are currently in the possession of the Arizona Historical Society Museum in Tucson and are on public display.

MIST: The drive into Copper Creek gave our team a little taste of what it must've been like to live and work in this area during the beginning of the twentieth century. The roads were bad, often precipitous, with no way to turn around or even back up. We marveled at how people in horse-drawn wagons or primitive cars were able to navigate the way. But before we could tackle this dangerous road, we first had to find it. And this was no small trick.

The ghost town is not well known, even to those living in nearby Mammoth. We stopped at several places to ask for directions to Bluebird Road, so-named [for] the mine where Copper Creek was located, and the only route into the town from the west. The road is not on maps and the most anyone could tell us is that it was “a dirt road on the other side of the San Pedro River.” So we drove across the river and then just scouted around. Finding the road was a matter of blind luck and some guess work. There were several – I’m going to call them “trails” because none of them seemed to really qualify as “roads” – on the east side of the San Pedro. We took the one that looked the oldest and more traveled. Once we started down the deeply rutted route, we realized almost immediately that we were entering a kind of no man's land. Old refrigerators pockmarked with bullet holes, deteriorating couches and the countless “empties” of what must have been countless desert beer parties littered the embankments interspersed with household trash and other wildcat dump sites. But even these ugly reminders of humanity disappeared after the first half an hour. From that point forward, we were simply following a lonely trail into the heart of the desert without so much as a road sign or even a reliable GPS coordinate to guide us. Along the way, we encountered only one other artifice of humanity, the crumbled remains of the GF Bar Ranch. The ranch was owned by famous frontierswoman and author Eulalia Bourne who died here in 1984. After her demise, the buildings began to collapse and her home is now little more than a pile of splintered lumber overgrown with weeds and desert wildflowers.

The only other sign we would see of human occupation was when we reached the Bluebird mining area which sits adjacent to the tiny town of Copper Creek. The high red rock walls were scattered with the remains of rusted machinery and the buckled timbers that once held open the entrances of mine shafts. This was the area of Copper Creek that the public and the working man knew. This is where fifty-some buildings including the post office were built on tiers across the hillside. Echo’s sharp eyes spotted what was left of the concrete “Copper Creek” sign that used to mark the post office. The marker is now broken and heavily covered in graffiti, but it was the first confirmation we had seen that we were in the right place. But still, this was not the best part of Copper Creek and it was certainly not the part we had come to see. For that, we would have to travel on foot for almost another two hours through the hills and along the streams looking for a structure that was rumored to be as startling today as when the mine was still active. The team set out on foot and timed our progress. We were not prepared for an overnight excursion, so we had to turn around by no later than 2 p.m. in order to be out of the wilderness by nightfall. With our backpacks on and provisions in hand, we started hiking west out of the town area. We wandered for over an hour with a growing sense of despair, and then suddenly a pair of three-story stone parapets rose out of the sycamores that lined the creek. I think all of us took a collective gasp. This is what we had come to see. This was the famous Sibley Mansion.

My daughter's descriptions of such places always begin or end with a reference to a modern fantasy movie. She described this ruin as looking “like that fortress in the valley from the Lord of the Rings where Aragorn fought all the orcs.” (I assume she meant Helms Deep from the Two Towers.) And to give Echo credit, the mansion did have an almost otherworldly feel to it with its crumbling walls of multi-colored stone with trees growing out of the foundations. There was not so much as a whisper of modern civilization encroaching on this scene which was both profoundly beautiful and acutely sad. The story of how this mansion came to be in such a strange place is an example of great but fleeting wealth.

The mansion was completed in 1908, the brainchild of Roy Sibley, one of two brothers who owned the Copper Creek mining conglomerate. Sibley had built the mansion with his wife to entertain potential investors and make the mining operation appear more lucrative that it actually was. Belle Sibley would arrange impressive banquets with elaborate meals served off of fine china. Musicians would be trundled in at great expense to perform live and guests would dance the night away on the polished hardwood floors. The mansion was intended to show wealthy investors that Sibley had brought civilization to the Arizona wilderness. Every inch of it, from its beautiful masonry to its tapestries to its floor-to-ceiling mirrors, was designed to dazzle. We wandered through what was left of the collapsed and looted mansion and tried to imagine the grand parties that Belle Sibley once hosted there.

To further accommodate guests and investors, the Sibley brothers brought in a Stutz Bearcat motorcar and even had a small locomotive hauled overland to service the area. Right across the road from the mansion was another ruin which, though not as impressive as the Sibley home, still seemed acutely out of place in the environment. This was the what remained for the old company office and mercantile. A large metal cistern and what remained of a horse corral were situated nearby and closer to the creek. Near the corral was the faint impression of an old road. This was the avenue upon which Roy Sibley was said to run his motorcar at top speed to the delight of onlookers. Today, the road, like like everything else in Copper Creek, is being reclaimed by the wilderness. In the mercantile, where rows of food and dry goods once stood, young saplings as tall as your shoulder are growing. Animals of all kinds live in the nooks and crannies of the masonry. The stones that have fallen from the walls are now almost indistinguishable on the desert floor.

Unfortunately, due to the four hours it took us to get into the site, we didn't have very much time to linger around the mansion and the outlying buildings. All too quickly our timeframe had expired and we packed ourselves back out to where we had parked The Camels. I thought how wonderful it might have been to sleep among the ruins of the Sibley mansion. We should have brought camping gear. But in the end I will just have to settle for my handful of pictures and the images that linger in my mind’s eye.

MIST: After taking a few weeks off to visit friends and family elsewhere, the team has finally reassembled in Tucson and is ready to get back to work. Did you guys miss us? Our first outing was to Tombstone, Arizona, which lies to the southeast of Tucson in Cochise County. We debated for a long time as to whether we even wanted to visit Tombstone. It’s called “the town too tough to die,” but for ghost hunters it's the town no one will let die. The fact is, Tombstone and its various haunted locales can be found in almost every atlas to haunted locations ever published. For the team, it was the question of whether our visiting the town would simply be an act of complete redundancy.  

So, as you're reading this blog entry, don't expect to find any detailed investigations about the spooks at the Birdcage Theater, for example. Instead, we have decided to approach Tombstone as part of our Roadside Oddities feature. Although we will certainly list some of the haunted sites of Tombstone here, we were much more interested in looking at the town as an unusual highway attraction.

If you enter Tombstone, you must realize that the town is not so much an interesting historical location as it is a lifestyle choice. Grown men strut along the avenues in long leather dusters, ten-gallon hats and six shooters. Frontier ladies in paisley sunbonnets and flowing skirts, that seem disastrously impractical in any century, loiter outside the ice cream parlors and step daintily around the mounds of horse manure. If Tombstone were national park, you'd think that these individuals were part of a historical recreation program. But for the residents of Tombstone, many of whom still live in the 19th century, this is a very serious business indeed. Yes, they add a lot of color and are always willing to genially pose for tourist photographs, but we ran into several for whom their grasp on reality was questionable. As someone who spent the better part of her adult life working Renaissance and Shakespeare festivals, I am very familiar with this mindset. It can be both amusing and a little creepy. Still, you can have a lovely day at Tombstone as long as you don't take many of the stories or people you encounter too seriously.

Tombstone Courthouse State Park: If you want the straight skinny on Tombstone, then I would suggest you head over to the Courthouse which is now part of the Arizona State Parks system and offers a more credible view on the town’s history. In fact, this might be a good place to start so you can separate fact from fiction as you tour the town later. Sadly, due to the pathetic state of the Arizona economy, this park is due to close its doors on March 28, 2010. You better hurry if you want to see it.

The Birdcage Theater: This strange, somewhat dilapidated building is widely considered the most haunted place in Tombstone. There have been numerous formal investigations of the site, many of which have resulted in unusual experiences, photographs and recordings. The proprietors also claim that an incredible number of murders took place on the site. The basement was a brothel and private gambling parlor where many other violent acts took place. There's a rumor that beneath the basement floor are the remains of numerous aborted fetuses and the dead children from the prostitutes who worked there. As far as we know, there's never been an archaeological study of the Birdcage basement so it's unclear whether these rumors are true. What was clear was the reaction that all our members had to touring the Birdcage. Ash described the experience like "your psychic radar is just going ping-ping-ping the entire time." Certainly it is the most authentic 19th century place we visited in Tombstone, as it has many of the original furnishing including the tattered wallpaper. The building's infamous reputation was known far and wide during its heyday, so there was no problem with any of us believing that the entire building is chock full of spooks.

Nellie Cashman’s Restaurant: In a town famous for its reprobates and criminals, there were a few good people as well. Ellen “Nellie” Cashman, a devoutly religious woman and prospector, was chief among them. This Irish immigrant set up a cottage industry to feed, clothe and entertain the miners and prospectors of the area without the benefit of liquor, gambling and prostitution. She worked throughout the western United States and Canada, but is probably best know for her time in Tombstone. Despite her more wholesome approach, her restaurant and hotel (called the Russ House at the time she owned it), which still operates to this day, was not excused from hunting phenomenon. According to witnesses, there are a variety of apparitions and poltergeist phenomenon that regularly manifest themselves in the establishment.

The Buford House: The charming little home, now a bed and breakfast, was a site of a Romeo-and-Juliet-esque tragedy dating from the 1880s.  George Buford was a young man who hoped to strike it rich as a gold prospector.  Having grown up most of his life in Tombstone, he was well-known in town and had fallen in love with the girl next door.  Her name was Cleopatra, better known as "Petra.”  George hoped to acquire enough money to marry Petra and establish a home of their own.  After a prospecting trip, however, George seemed to become convinced that Petra's eye had wandered and she was no longer interested in his advances.  George slipped into a deep depression which culminated in him taking his pistol and shooting Petra before killing himself.  The young woman recovered from her injuries, but George was gone forever.  Or was he?  Ever since his suicide, owners and guest to the adobe home have claimed to see the apparition of a young man wandering the hallways or the street in front of the residence.  These sightings are often accompanied by strange knocks, footsteps and other poltergeist-like phenomenon. Our team was able to briefly walk through the home which is lovely and very cozy.  If George is still there, I'm not surprised.  It's a beautiful place and the only home he ever really knew.  The Buford House still stands and is open to guests at 113 E. Stafford Street.

The Empty Grave: Although my lovely daughter has volunteered to write up a blog on the Boot Hill Cemetery [see below], I couldn't help but share this curious story about one of the most infamous crimes of southeastern Arizona's frontier days.  The tale involves a man named John Heath, an on-again-off-again criminal who, in December of 1883, owned an infamous bar and dance hall in Bisbee about twenty-three miles to the south of Tombstone. It was well known that Heath used his establishment to provide safe haven to local criminals, but what was not suspected at first was the role he played in one of the most senseless crimes of the era, commonly known as the "Bisbee Massacre."  On December 8th, five men held up the Goldwater and Castenada Store which they believed held the payroll for the lucrative Copper Queen Mine.  Enraged that the payroll shipment hadn't yet arrived, the men robbed the patrons inside the store and then began a wild shooting spree with left four people dead, including a deputy sheriff.  The outraged residents of Bisbee immediately contacted Sheriff J.L. Ward who was headquartered in Tombstone.  The sheriff formed two posses to hunt down the murderers.  One of his first stops was at Heath's dance hall where the nervous business man claimed to have heard rumors about the heist and proceeded to lead Ward's posse on a wild goose chase through the desert hills.  Naturally, this ruse only succeeded in making the authorities even more suspicious of Heath.  

After several weeks, all of the suspects were captured and Heath eventually confessed that he was the mastermind behind the armed robbery.  He insisted, however, that murder had never been part of the plan and that he was not responsible for the actions of the other men.  His jury apparently agreed with him, as they only convicted him of second degree murder and he was sentenced to the Yuma Territorial Prison.  (The other five men -- Daniel "Big Dan” Dowd, Comer W. "Red” Sample, Daniel "York” Kelly, William "Billy” Delaney and James "Tex” Howard -- were sentenced to hang.) But Heath's sentence only help inflame the anger of the people of both Bisbee and Tombstone and on the morning of February 22, 1884, a group of vigilantes stormed the Tombstone jail and dragged Heath to the corner of First and Toughnut Streets. Heath was lynched from a nearby telegraph pole, resulting in the conclusion of both a heinous crime and the creation of one of the most enduring images of frontier justice ever created.  The image of Heath's bound and blindfolded body dangling by his stretched out neck can be found all over Tombstone today. But what happened to Heath's body?  If you wander through the famous Boot Hill cemetery, you will find a grave labeled:

JOHN HEATH
Taken from the county jail & LYNCHED by Bisbee Mob in TOMBSTONE. Feb. 22, 1884.

But according to one legend, Heath's grave is empty and presumably the marker was erected simply to remind visitors of the infamous crime with which he was connected.  According to contemporary records, however, Heath's body was transported to Texas and buried by his family in an unmarked grave in the tiny town of Oakland. Although we offered to come back with shovels, the caretakers of Boot Hill would not allow us to test the validity of this legend.  Where the infamous John Heath lies may still be a matter of debate for decades to come.

POLARIS: We postponed our trip to Sedona, Arizona so we could take one final look at a few Tucson area roadside oddities. I present these more out of a sense of nostalgia rather than because there is any known paranormal activity on the sites. Both our webmaster and me remember these places fondly from our youth. And we felt like we needed to acknowledge them before they vanish forever.

The first is a small abandoned waterpark located on the Interstate-10 frontage road near the Ina Road exit. The park can be easily seen from the highway as you're entering Tucson from the north. Despite some diligent hunting through newspaper archives and on the Internet, I was not able to find much background information on this park. Our webmaster and I remember it as being a combination of water slides, a mini go-kart course and a small miniature golf area. It was both our recollection that the park was open until the early 1990s but has remained abandoned ever since. I remember having a friend from high school who actually work there on the weekends, but I don't recall ever visiting the place myself. I lived on the other side of town and it was too hard to get to the park. This park has been known over the years by various names, including the Tucson Sports Park, the Pima County Sports Park, and currently the Mike Jacobs Sports Park. However, we're not sure if any of these were the original name and the lack of information about the facility doesn’t help matters much. The tower for the water slides, which I recall were made of green fiberglass, still stands as a strange and lonely sentinel next to the interstate.  The fiberglass slides were removed years ago, probably because they were collapsing from lack of maintenance. The rest of the area, which includes a clubhouse on the top of a short hill and several outlying buildings, are now inaccessible to the public. The nearby baseball diamonds and soccer fields are still very active and a popular attraction with locals, but you can't get close to the old waterpark due to high chain-link fences. If anyone has any information on this old attraction please e-mail us. As previously noted, our memories are rather faulty on this facility but would like to learn more.

The second abandoned park we are featuring is the much better-known Magic Carpet miniature golf course located in central Tucson near the intersection of Speedway Boulevard and Wilmot Road. Magic Carpet was one of those 1950s-60s era amusement parks, complete with strange little buildings, oversized cement animals and the general atmosphere to it that was both fantastic and a little creepy. It was definitely a throwback to another era as you don't see miniature golf courses being built with this level of creativity anymore. Locals might alternately describe Magic Carpet as both a favorite place and a roadside eyesore. And probably both opinions are correct.

The last time I visited Magic Carpet was a little over two years ago, during a holiday visit back to Tucson. I had the good fortune of convincing both Ash and Coyote to go with me, although they were less than enthusiastic about the weed-strewn paths and crumbling façades. The man who had owned the place since its creation was still tending shop in the main building. Ironically, he would die only a few months later and the park would be thrown into a kind of limbo while the Tucson community debated whether it was a cultural landmark or a growing safety hazard. Eventually, Magic Carpet would be sold to a local auto dealer with plans to raze all of the curious buildings and put in a parking lot. An organization was formed to salvage some of the more iconic statues from the property and, in fact, some of them have been moved to other locations. The Arizona Daily Star reported on the strange adoption program in March 2008:

For the next few months, Tucson's self-proclaimed fantasy land will double as an adoption agency for abandoned mini-golf statues.

The Valley of the Moon's staff is working to find good homes for the statues that have resided at the now-defunct Magic Carpet Golf course for more than 30 years.

The Valley of the Moon, 2544 E. Allen Road, will keep three or four of the statues that fit in with the park's theme. The others must be housed by volunteers, or must face the wrecking ball.

Early this year, Magic Carpet, at 6125 E. Speedway, was sold for $1.8 million to Tempe-based Chapman Automotive Group, owner of a nearby Mercedes dealership.

The new owner "realized how attached people are to the statues and allowed us to dispose of them," said Valley of the Moon spokesman Charles Spillar.
There are five or six months left to find homes for the unique structures, which include a lifelike T-Rex and towering monkey.

Today about fifty percent of the structures on the property have been removed and a high fence blocks any access to what remains. Magic Carpet golf is a place that I remember with a great deal of fondness, having spent many summer nights there with my high school friends.

If you want to catch a glimpse of this roadside oddity, you better hurry. Demolition is still ongoing on the property and though it appears to have been much delayed by local conservation efforts, it’s safe to say that Magic Carpet’s final days are truly numbered.