Weird Crescenta Valley

My newest book on the weirder aspects of our local history is now available, called “Weird Crescenta Valley: Historical and Natural Oddities.” I tend toward the darker sides of history anyway so a selection of weird stories is right on the mark. The chapters are as follows.

Weird Supernatural – My favorite! Up first is a selection of a few of the local haunted places and stories attached to them. Ralphs supermarket, which I wrote about recently, is here. It’s built over the site of a sanitarium for mental illness and apparently some of the patients never left! There are numerous stories of hauntings in the supermarket aisles. The section of the book on abandoned Rockhaven Sanitarium boasts many ghost stories; what could be more likely for a haunting than an abandoned sanitarium? The chapter is rounded out with more ghost tales and some local UFO sightings, all conveniently from the 1950s when people didn’t have cameras on them 24/7. And brought to you by the Angeles Sasquatch Association, a selection of Bigfoot encounters in the mountains above us.

Weird Photos – A cavalcade of shots I find unusual and the stories behind them: a rock star leading a live camel across a local bowling alley, a giant head statue in a local park, workers installing freeway lane markers from go-carts and a live horse being lifted hundreds of feet in the air by a helicopter.

Weird People – This includes the story of a professional rainmaker who made it rain here in 1902. (It seems we could use his services again.) Nat King Cole’s hit “Nature Boy” was written by a real nature boy who lived in Big Tujunga Canyon and the last truly “wild Apache” grew up near there as well. How about the sleaziest filmmaker in Hollywood history that lived and produced movies right here in La Crescenta? We can “thank” him for such classics as “Freaks” and “Reefer Madness.”

Weird Places – We learn the backstory on the crazy rock and junk walls of Dunsmore Park, which I call “the Watts Towers of La Crescenta.” Aztec Park is a lost community of homes in the mountains, now only foundations, with little clues to its origins. The entire story on a lost mine in the Verdugo Mountains is told and how massive concrete remnants still exist. And who knew Montrose once had an automobile factory?

Weird Events – A national atomic bomb drill in 1955 was largely ignored in the Crescenta Valley but some chilling scenarios were envisioned. Another article proposes that the California wine industry was born in Glendale via our own Don Jose Verdugo. Montrose produced some Indianapolis 500 racecars in the 1930s. Richard Nixon once visited Montrose and a full-size train was wrecked in Big Tujunga Canyon for a John Wayne movie.

Weird Nature – This chapter is surprising in that it illuminates a lot of stuff I never knew and I doubt you knew either … such as where the heck all those noisy parrots came from. It’s not from the “fire in a pet store” story we’ve all heard. Or how about the “squirrel wars” or, even better, the “spider wars?” We learn about the native bees that are all around us. Our regular honeybees are not native.

“Weird Crescenta Valley” shows us that “weird” is all around us. As normal and mundane as our valley seems there is an undercurrent of weirdness just below the surface. This book is hot off the press and is perfect as a Christmas gift for your weird friends and relatives. It’s available in local bookstores Once Upon A Time bookstore in Montrose and Flintridge Books in La Cañada. You can also buy it from the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley via its website CVHistory.org under the “Shop” tab.

But to avoid embarrassment before you give it to someone as a gift skim through the book. Make sure you aren’t included in the pages of “Weird Crescenta Valley!”