Hidden tunnels, alien-erected walls, and a child raised by razorbacks inhabit the East Bay’s urban legends. What do you believe?
A NETWORK OF SECRET TUNNELS connects deep under the streets of Pleasanton. Aliens erected mysterious stone walls in Berkeley’s Tilden Regional Park. And in World War II, United States military inter-rogators questioned high-ranking German officials at Byron Hot Springs.
At least, that’s what a friend of a friend says.
Most people call them urban legends—but folklorists prefer the term modern legends. Every city has its own, tales that natives tell about local oddities that might not necessarily be true but make for such good stories that they can’t resist retelling.
“Once you hear a legend, it’s irresistible to spread,” says Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of sociology at UC Irvine who wrote his thesis on the mechanics behind the spread of modern legends. “It’s such a funny story you have to tell it to someone else. It’s like sneezing.”
Enduring mystery: Some think the ancient Chinese, space aliens, or Ohlone Indians built sprawling walls like these remnants in Ed Levin Park (top) and Tilden Park (middle). The truth remains speculation. Sibley attraction: The origin of this labyrinth (Bottom), built by a Montclair sculptor, is known. Photos by (top to nottom) Tom Mangan, Ed Osborn, AJ Alfieri-Crispin.
East Bay residents are no different; they love to spin yarns about the strange, unique things about living here, and anything that can’t be readily explained, any gap in their understanding, can become the basis for a legend—as long as they can fill the gap with a good story. Legends provide a way for locals to relate to their own history and understand why things are the way they are.
“People enjoy the mysterious,” says Olav Phillips, writer of the Martinez News-Gazette’s “Martinez After Midnight” column, which explores East Bay unexplained phenomenon. “If it has a clear-cut explanation, I think it’s less attractive in a lot of ways. It’s important because, as Bay Area residents, we are very curious about our history. As a group, we have invested a lot of time and money into preserving it and exploring it. So there is an inborn interest here to understand our history and the history of the area.”
UC Berkeley anthropology professor Charles Briggs, chairman of the UC Berkeley folklore program, and Alan Dundes, distinguished professor of folklore, explained that, in repeating legends, storytellers engage in “techniques of verisimilitude,” adding details that make the legend seem more credible to the audience.
“Legends incorporate the most important things in the social landscape,” says Briggs. “In Berkeley, two of the most striking things here are the university and the homeless people on Telegraph Avenue. So you hear interesting legends that combine them—that a certain homeless person used to be a Cal professor, that they actually won a Nobel Prize in physics or chemistry before they lost everything. It’s not unlike someone on the edge of town in the Middle Ages—they’re unknown, an unusual figure that most people leave alone.”
People don’t always wholly believe the legends that they repeat, but it’s important that they sound plausible enough to say that they could possibly happen. The common caveat that the legend happened to “a friend of a friend” is one way that tellers often try to make a story sound more authentic. Another common method is tying the legend to local history or geography.
“When there are gaps in the history, people will fill those gaps with what sounds sexiest and most dramatic,” says Ken MacLennan, curator at the Museum on Main in Pleasanton. Every month, museum visitors ask MacLennan about a rumor regarding underground tunnels supposedly dug by Chinese immigrants in the 1860s. The usual story relayed by visitors is that a city curfew forced all Chinese residents to stay indoors after sunset, and that Chinese immigrants used the tunnels to visit neighbors after hours. But visitors who claim to have discovered the tunnels’ entrance have often stumbled across something much more mundane—like the drainage ditches in Lions Wayside Park.
“The time that they were supposedly dug does coincide with the height of the Yellow Peril scare, but there aren’t any records from before Pleasanton was incorporated in 1894,” says MacLennan. “So it’s not clear if there really was a curfew. It’s also hard to dig tunnels in this area, because Pleasanton has a high water table, and there are no reports of tunnels discovered in any digging project. It’s almost plausible, but becomes less plausible the more you learn about the history.”
A similar rumor in Emeryville, that an extensive system of underground tunnels spiderwebs out from the Oaks Card Club on the corner of Park and San Pablo, might have started from a kernel of truth. According to some accounts, the tunnels were first dug by bootleggers in the 1920s to shuttle shipments of illegal hooch out of sight of law enforcement. Oaks Card Club owner John Tibbetts confirmed that, in fact, there once was a mysterious tunnel beneath the club floor, but that it had been boarded up since the 1960s, and neither he nor anyone else was entirely sure of its provenance.
“This building was built in the 1890s and, as far as I know, it might have been there back then,” says Tibbetts. His family has owned the card club since the 1930s, and he recalls his father first telling him about the tunnel when he was a boy. “There was a ladder that went down to a big concrete tunnel that led off in a westerly direction, but it’s been boarded up for as long as I know. It’s just one tunnel, but urban legends tend to grow.”
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SOMETIMES A LEGEND STARTS because of a mistake. For years, residents at Byron Springs in Contra Costa whispered that nearby Camp Tracy had housed high-ranking German and Japanese officials for interrogation during World War II. While the area was leased by the military for use as an interrogation camp, in reality, most of the almost 5,000 German, Italian, and Japanese POWs who passed through the facility were low-ranking soldiers.
“I grew up next to Byron Hot Springs, and for years, everything you’d read would say that high-ranking officers were interrogated there during World War II,” says Kathy Leighton, president of the East Contra Costa County Historical Society. Leighton spent years investigating the history of the facility, poring over declassified military documents and interviewing former camp guards, only to find that the truth, again, was somewhat less glamorous. “As near as I can tell, the legend is tracked back to an Oakland Tribune article right after the war [that] took license with the facts.”
Legends often tend to center around what Briggs termed “points of anxiety,” topics or places that make people vaguely uncomfortable; legends help to soothe those feelings by offering an explanation. They can serve as cautionary fables when they tell stories about people we recognize in ourselves. For example, Briggs recalled a persistent rumor that a small child, lost while hiking with his family in the Marin Hills, was raised by razorbacks, or wild pigs, and now roams the wilds as a semi-feral wild man.
“Everyone can imagine losing a child,” said Briggs, “so it becomes a story about being careful in strange places.”
Even a place as developed as the East Bay still has its out-of-the-way spots, and these are the places that tend to spawn legends. At their simplest, the legends provide an entertaining reminder to watch your step while you’re exploring new territory away from the bustle of the city center. Some ramshackle cement ruins along desolate Empire Mine Road in Antioch gave rise to stories that the area once housed a haunted insane asylum. (In fact, the so-callled asylum ruins were simply part of a scrapped housing project.) Nestled deep in the ancient volcanic craters of Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve in the Oakland Hills, an enigmatic labyrinth carved into the bottom of a rock quarry has been attributed to ancient witches and warlocks (although it was actually built by Montclair sculptor Helena Mazzariello in 1989). And an unexplained stone wall atop wind-whipped Monument Peak in Milpitas has been attributed to everyone from Chinese explorers who supposedly discovered America before Columbus to visitors from outer space.
When avid hiker Tom Mangan decided to brave the 2,000 foot climb behind Sandy Wool Lake at Ed Levin County Park in Milpitas, he didn’t know that he would come face to face with one of the East Bay’s most enduring mysteries. After he followed an old gravel road to the Monument Peak summit, he saw an expanse of stones, piled into a low wall, stretching off into the distance across the hilltop.
“You do have to rest up from the hike to get to the top of Monument Peak, so the stone offer a chance to pause and reflect on the mystery of how they got there,” says Mangan. “I could not help remarking on how much energy it must have taken to move all those stones. There must be thousands of tons of them, and it appears they all were lifted by hand.”
The Monument Peak wall is part of the East Bay Walls, a series of peculiar rock walls that once stretched from the Berkeley Hills to Milpitas. Tilden supervising naturalist Dave Zuckerman says that much of the old walls have been lost to development, but hikers still occasionally stumble over sections at Mission Peak Regional Preserve in Fremont, off Big Spring trail in Berkeley’s Tilden Park, or in the Hayward Hills. Some people speculate that the walls were built by the native Ohlone Indians for ceremonial purposes; others think that they were built by early settlers in California’s ranching period to mark grazing territory. But the Ohlone weren’t known for building stone structures, and the walls don’t match up with any known property lines.
“The mystery walls never attracted serious scholarship, so all we have is in the realm of people spinning ideas,” said Zuckerman. “Most of the research done is by people who’ve just been bitten by the bug to walk the land. The bottom line is we don’t know a hard and fast answer, but it’s a really fascinating question. Was it Native Americans or during the ranching period? Some people even think that Martians did it.”
Zuckerman noted that the remnants of some walls in Tilden look like retaining walls, and might have been built in conjunction with the planting of the Tilden botanical garden in the ’40s. And retired Tilden naturalist Tim Gordon, who for 20 years led regular hikes dubbed “The Gathering of the Wall Nuts” to look at the walls and speculate about their origins, noted that during World War II, the army set up barracks in abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps buildings dubbed called “Camp Wildcat Canyon” and that some of the walls might have been meaningless projects meant to keep idle soldiers busy.
Some theories are a bit wilder. The East Bay Regional Park district was founded in the 1930s, but, even earlier than that, one of the first people to imagine that the wild woods could make a beautiful park was Harold French, founder of the Contra Costa Hills Club. In a 1904 San Francisco Chronicle article, French wrote that the walls were of prehistoric origin and could be evidence that “a superior race had once settled in the east bay.”
“People have been wondering about these things for a long time,” says Zuckerman.
At first, Mangan had assumed the walls had been built by farmers to mark grazing pastures, until on way back down when he passed some hikers who were looking for “stone walls that may be pre-Ohlone.”
“I’m not sure which explanation I believe, but I’m also not sure that it matters,” says Mangan. “In fact, I kind of enjoy the fact that the story of those stones remains untold. The mystery is probably a lot more interesting than the actual explanation.
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Mike Rosen-Molina is an East Bay writer and frequent contributor to The Monthly. He has not found the secret buried gold of John Marsh.
