Dark WatchersThe true origins of the Dark Watchers, said to go all the way back to Chumash Indian stories. Skeptoid Podcast
#522 They stand motionless in long black cloaks. Surveying the crags and peaks of California's Santa Lucia Moutains, the Dark Watchers look out to sea, often in broad brimmed hats, often with a staff or walking stick, but always still and silent and featureless. Travelers are said to spot the watchers on some rocky prominence, but by the second glance they have always vanished. Tales of the Dark Watchers appear in many books, and are still reported on the Internet. Here are a few samples found in one online forum:
Named in 1602 by a Spanish cartographer, the Sierra de Santa Lucia is a coastal mountain range in central California, stretching from Monterey at the north all the way south to San Luis Obispo. The famous Hearst Castle is perched among its southern peaks. North of Ragged Point, the Santa Lucias are the coast, forming a wall of wave-dashed cliffs 100 kilometers long — known as Big Sur — to which the Pacific Coast Highway clings, in some places precariously. You've seen photos and video of the Bixby Bridge's graceful arch a hundred times. California Condors soar above the Santa Lucias. Sea otters and elephant seals fill the turbulent waters at their base, and great coastal redwoods choke their northern hollows. It's a land of great beauty and solitude, a part of the nation's most populous state that you can get to in only a few hours, yet find yourself centuries removed. A brief description of the Dark Watchers can be found in virtually any popular book on California's famous ghost stories — a description so brief and so common that one suspects these authors might be doing little more than copying from one another — and they always give the same three sources. First is a mention in John Steinbeck's short story Flight. Second is Robinson Jeffers' poem Such Counsels You Gave to Me, and third is a rather non-specific assertion that stories of the Dark Watchers go all the way back to the Chumash native American tribe, which has lived along California's central coast and among the Channel Islands for some 13,000 years. The most detailed and authoritative account of Chumash beliefs is probably the 1974 1200-page doctoral dissertation by Thomas Blackburn, subsequently published as December's Child: A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives. Blackburn's principal source was the massive archive, including 111 Chumash oral narratives, collected by American linguist and ethnologist John Peabody Harrington between 1912 and 1928. Harrington's body of unpublished research, most of it on California natives, takes up over 200 meters of shelf space at the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives. Blackburn's Ph.D was well earned, because he went through it all, and compiled virtually all we know of the Chumash beliefs. So the question is: Did the Chumash indeed tell stories of the Dark Watchers? Well, I can't say for certain, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my study of Blackburn's work was probably more detailed than whatever work was done by the ghost story authors who casually toss out the same sentence, copied and pasted from book to book and website to website, that "stories of the Dark Watchers go all the way back to the Chumash Indians". I didn't find anything like that. The closest thing was a creature called a nunašīš. Chumash believed the Earth, as we know it, is the Middle World, an island surrounded by ocean; and the sun and other celestial bodies occupy the Upper World; and below is a Lower World. Among the denizens of the Lower World are the nunašīš, monstrous and misshapen animals, who come up to the Middle World at night and spread illness, bad luck, and other negative things. They can be shaped like men, but they're neither dark nor cloaked nor known for standing sentinel-like on prominences and then vanishing. The Chumash also believed in shape-shifting animals and humans, basically the same "skinwalker" belief widely held by many Native American cultures. But so far as whether the Dark Watchers can be linked with any Chumash tradition, I'm going to call that an invention of 20th century ghost story authors. When John Steinbeck published his book of short stories The Long Valley in 1938, he was just beginning to eke out a career as an author, and lived near Monterey at the northern terminus of the Santa Lucias. Flight is the title of the story that most famously mentions the Dark Watchers. Steinbeck's story is that of a teenage boy, Pepé, who kills a man during a moment of thoughtless drunkenness. Knowing it means his end at the hands of the law, his mother advises him to flee, and has only scant moments to give a few words of advice:
Sure enough, as Pepé made his escape ascending into the fog-cloaked mountains on horseback, he soon had his first encounter:
Mind his own business he did, but as the posse drew nearer he had another close call:
The Dark Watchers play a minor role — receiving only these three brief mentions — in an otherwise dramatic tale, which ends as must the plight of every anti-hero, with Pepé's death. They are not aggressors in the story so much as they are part of the scenery; they are the scary owl's eyes that frighten Snow White as she runs lost through the dark woods. That Steinbeck included the Dark Watchers as specific, named characters instead of figments of Pepé's frightened imagination suggests that Steinbeck considered them noteworthy enough. That the Dark Watchers must have had some notoriety, at least locally, is bolstered by the fact that the only other well-known mention of them in early print was written at almost exactly the same time. The poet Robinson Jeffers also lived and wrote in Big Sur, and in 1937 he published the poem Such Counsels You Gave to Me in a volume of the same title:
Though Jeffers' Dark Watcher turned out to be — in this case — merely a reflection of the boy's own self-image, the boy did know them to be actual entities. Jeffers and Steinbeck wrote in the same region at the same time and drew upon the same local traditions, so some Dark Watchers lore clearly predated both their stories. But what was it? If it appeared in print, it seems to have been lost to history. I found no earlier mention of the stoic observers in any archive of published material prior to 1937. Most likely, whatever drives people to think they saw something in the fog today was chilling travelers a hundred years before. We need neither a supernatural entity nor an exact diagnosis of some perceptual phenomenon to know that our minds and eyes play tricks on us all the time, especially in spooky environments where we're on edge and every sense is on alert. And, as authors so often do, when you can't find an original reference, make one up. It was perhaps inevitable that writers of glib ghost story books would claim the Dark Watchers go all the way back to Chumash folklore; what better way to lend credibility to an urban legend than to tie it to an ancient culture? At once, it becomes freighted with mystique, and with a provenance burnished with antiquity. So the next time you find yourself hiking in the Santa Lucia Mountains in the fading twilight, with the ocean winds pushing puffs of gray clouds among the crags, take care not to engage with any silent, inky-black figures you might see. Their credentials might be a little bit... shady.
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