Isolated Canyons’ Allure Can Pose Risks

Back in 1875, a beekeeper named Frank Carpenter built an adobe hut in a leafy glade tucked into a canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains. The canyon was called Black Star for the deep vein of lustrous coal discovered there.

Today, a solitary beekeeper still carefully places white wooden hives along Black Star Canyon’s twisting ravines and jagged crests. It could be a walk back into the 19th century but for the smashed windshield glass and the satanic symbols and gang graffiti scrawled at the canyon’s mouth.

On July 3, two teenage couples left the Block in Orange, a hip hangout mall, and drove into the dark canyon many miles to the east. They took a walk, searching for an old house they’d heard was haunted, they later said. Orange County historian Jim Sleeper says they might have been looking for the old beekeeper’s place.

“Any old adobe has always got a resident ghost and buried treasure,” Sleeper said. “The [one] built by Frank Carpenter is not far from the gate there.”

They never made it to the ruined fireplace and abandoned well on the probable site of Carpenter’s home. Instead, the 16- and 17-year-old boys from Mission Viejo were viciously beaten with a rock and metal rod, and the 13- and 15-year-old girls from Tustin were raped. Two men and three boys believed to be members of a loosely affiliated tagging crew--Los Traviosos Krew--have been arrested.

Two of the suspects confessed in jailhouse interviews to drinking and drug-taking while hanging out in the remote canyon area before the brutal attacks. It is the sort of crime and tragedy that over the years has contributed to dark stories about such remote spots.

From fictional tales such as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to “The Blair Witch Project,” kids have always been drawn to mysterious places full of lore about haunted houses and ghosts.

In Southern California, those atmospheric locales are often canyons. Many Southland natives grew up playing in steep neighborhood gullies and arroyos, exploring the abandoned Houdini House in Laurel Canyon, or searching for glimpses of Big Foot in the Antelope Valley’s Big Rock Canyon.

For teenagers, canyons also are places to go to party or for romance--”To watch the stars and kiss and make out,” Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Dennis DeMaio said.

DeMaio thinks the Black Star Canyon attack was an isolated case of “everyone being in the wrong place at the same time--including the bad guys.”

In a region where the bulldozer is king, the canyons sometimes offer wisps of the past. The ghost of a Spanish woman in a blue shawl is said to have been seen floating along Plum Canyon in Saugus. Tahquitz Canyon in Palm Springs takes its name from a malicious spirit that Native Americans and others believe inhabits the mountain.

Modern canyon dwellers sometimes are people living on the fringe in more ways than one: poets, hermits, circus animal trainers and, occasionally, serial killers.

“The best and the worst [people] are in the canyons, none of the in-betweeners,” said Dave Belna, owner for 26 years of the Whispering Pines ranch between Santiago and Black Star canyons.

T. Jefferson Parker, author of nine best-selling murder mysteries and a former longtime resident of Laguna Canyon, said of canyons: “The mudslides are worse, the people who come and go occasionally are worse. There’s an out-of-the-way edge feeling when you live in a canyon. You’re literally on the edge.”

Fellow author and retired Los Angeles Times arts editor and film writer Charles Champlin, who reviewed murder mysteries for the paper for six years, said just driving through Malibu Canyon instills a sense of foreboding in him.

“Even though they are usually as tame as a row of sunflowers, I think canyons speak to that latent fear of the unknown,” he said. “The narrower they are, the darker they are, the scarier they are. [Director Alfred] Hitchcock always made use of the fact that we are a little bit suspicious of nature.”

Hitchcock would have appreciated Black Star.

A narrow, twisting ravine, it unfolds in a series of switchbacks for eight miles before finally opening into a lovely mountain valley near the divide between Orange and Riverside counties. It can be traversed only by a one-lane, mostly dirt road with dizzying drop-offs into the unknown.

“If you go off the road in Black Star, you’d starve to death before you hit bottom,” says historian Sleeper.

If there is a canyon with a dark side in the sleepy, somewhat scruffy canyons at the rural edge of Orange County, it is this one.

It has only a handful of old cabins and compounds and one small ranch called Hidden Valley. There are no campgrounds or amenities for day-trippers. Gates block entry.

“Black Star Canyon Road--This Is Not Maintained--Orange County Is Not Responsible for Any Loss or Injury Suffered,” read signs pockmarked with shotgun pellets that are posted at regular intervals, like real-life versions of the Wicked Witch of the West’s “Turn Back” signs in “The Wizard of Oz.”

Halfway up a particularly steep, wooded area, the ramshackle compounds of “Black Star” Bill and a second mountain man named Art cling to rocky plateaus.

Hikers and mountain bikers have long complained that there are canyon dwellers who brandish shotguns to warn them back down the road, saying it is private, said U.S. Forest Service Capt. Gordon Martin and others. Martin, stationed at the fire station office in nearby Silverado Canyon, says he has received as many as three complaints a month.

He tells recreational users that the land off the road is a public-private checkerboard.

According to local lore, Bill won his parcel in a poker game, with the transfer written on the back of a cocktail napkin. Not surprisingly perhaps, his claim didn’t hold up in court, and he was evicted about a year ago. Or so the story goes.

On a recent sunny weekday afternoon, both compounds appeared abandoned from the road, fenced off and posted liberally with “No Trespassing” signs. A peacock flapped its wings atop a crumbling house foundation. Black Star Bill and his neighbor Art were nowhere to be seen.

“Some of these old crotchety fellows do tend to be hermits,” Sleeper said. “They get a little possessive up there, and they are spooky because they don’t like intruders.”

For folks who live in them, the darkness that blankets the canyons at night is comfort and solace, a refuge from city lights. But for teenagers and other more urban folk who venture into them at night, the sensation is different.

“It’s the roller-coaster ride effect: ‘Ooh, that was scary. Let’s do it again,’ ” said Sherry Meddick, a former Greenpeace activist who lives in Silverado Canyon.

“The Puritans were scared of the darkness; they were forbidden to go into the dark forest,” she said. “These kids who grow up bathed in city lights are terrified of the dark. They think it’s spooky. But they still want to come.”

Canyons are, for the most part, far safer than an average city neighborhood, police say. But “head for the hills” has long applied to criminals looking to hide, from horse thieves to mobsters and serial killers.

Some of Los Angeles’ most notorious crimes have occurred in built-up, heavily populated canyons. Charles Manson’s followers went into Sharon Tate’s Benedict Canyon home in 1969 and murdered the pregnant actress and four of her friends.

Eddie Nash, called “the one who got away” by Los Angeles police, has been arrested and acquitted more than once in connection with the grisly 1981 murders of four people in a Laurel Canyon drug den.

Mobster Mickey Cohen’s attorney, Sam Rummel, was killed by a blast from a sawed-off shotgun outside his Laurel Canyon home in 1950.

In more recent times, youth gangs and would-be devil worshipers have left their mark on Black Star, San Diego County’s Harbison Canyon and elsewhere. Charred fire rings, pentacles and the familiar curlicues of rivals’ graffiti mar trees and rocks.

In fact, fresh graffiti--the tagging crew’s “LTK” on the metal gate at Black Star Canyon Road found more than a week after the recent rapes and beatings--led police to arrest the five members of the Anaheim area gang.

When crimes do occur in remote canyons, they can seem particularly horrific. From murdered cab drivers to young girls found bound and tied, there is a terrible poignancy to faded newspaper stories that tell of bodies dumped along isolated roads and in deep crevasses.

There is also unintentional human tragedy. When William Mulholland’s famous St. Francis Dam broke on March 12, 1928, it sent 12 billion gallons of water down San Francisquito Canyon north of Saugus, killing at least 450 people.

“I envy the dead,” the 80-year-old Mulholland said tearfully at the time. A study years later found the collapse probably had been caused by an underground remnant of an ancient landslide giving way.

Nature does “slap you down” in the canyons, as author Champlin put it. Mudslides, fire, rattlesnakes and black widow spiders all threaten. The hot Santa Ana winds seem to be born in places like Black Star.

“The canyons for whatever reason seem to be more exposed to nature’s fury,” novelist Parker said.

He said he began his fourth book, “Summer of Fear,” in a Laguna Canyon home set on stilts “as frail as mosquito legs.”

“On a bad night here in the canyon, the wind can hit so hard it feels like my house is coming down,” he wrote. “When the wind is strong, it can change course a hundred times a minute, trapped as it is by the canyon walls. With too much gale in too little space, the air doubles back, howls in fierce frustration, then whips around for another bellowing pass. Order breaks down.”

Parker has set many other scenes in canyons.

“When it came time to write something . . . spooky and upsetting and out of the suburban tract, I called on the canyon world that I lived in,” he said. “You can spin it spooky, spin it folksy, or spin it homey, but there’s always a kind of raw underbelly to life in canyons . . . And Black Star proves it.”

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Times staff writer Cecilia Rasmussen contributed to this story.