'Dark Watchers' of the Santa Lucia Mountains

[Necron 99]

Full article: HERE

If you want to see a Dark Watcher, you should wait until the late afternoon.

As the sun begins its descent behind the waves, look to the sharp ridges of the Santa Lucia Range, the mountains that rise up from the shores of Monterey and down the Central California coast. If you are lucky, you might see figures silhouetted against them. Some say the watchers are 10 feet tall, made taller or wider by hats or capes. They may turn to look at you. But they always move away quickly and disappear.

For centuries, tales of the Dark Watchers have swirled in the misty Santa Lucia Mountains. Most stories begin with the local native tribes, which allegedly spoke of the shadowy figures in their oral traditions. When the Spanish arrived in the 1700s, they began calling the apparitions los Vigilantes Oscuros (literally “the dark watchers”). And as Anglo American settlers began staking claims in the region, they too felt the sensation of being watched from the hills.

Accounts vary, although everyone agrees the beings are more shadowy than human and more observant than aggressive.

They took their most solid form in the first half of the 20th century, when two legendary writers memorialized them.

In 1937, Robinson Jeffers, poet of life along the Central Coast, drew inspiration from the watchers for his collection “Such Counsels You Gave To Me and Other Poems.”

“He thought it might be one of the watchers, who are often seen in this length of coast-range, forms that look human to human eyes, but certainly are not human. They come from behind ridges to watch,” Jeffers wrote. “... He was not surprised when the figure turning toward him in the quiet twilight showed his own face. Then it melted and merged into the shadows beyond it.”

The next year, John Steinbeck, who grew up in Salinas, spoke of them in his short story “Flight.” In the tale, a teenage Mexican American boy kills a man and is forced to flee into the Santa Lucias. As his mother bids him farewell, she urges him to say his prayers, take care of his horse and “when thou comest to the high mountains, if thou seest any of the dark watching men, go not near to them nor try to speak to them.”

Steinbeck’s mother Olive Hamilton brought fruit or sometimes flowers. Steinbeck’s son Thomas said his grandmother, a school teacher, was no fabulist, but she believed firmly in the Dark Watchers. She told her children and grandchildren she left fruit or nuts in Mule Deer Canyon on her way to school in Big Sur. On the way back, there would be flowers in their place.

The stories stuck with Steinbeck, clearly, and were echoed by Big Sur personalities like Doc Ricketts and Billy Post.

"The old timers of Big Sur swear by it," painter Benjamin Brode, who co-authored a book on the watchers with Thomas Steinbeck, told the Monterey County Weekly in 2017.