CalEXPLORnia

High on a Santa Lucia ridgeline, etched against the twilight sky, something is watching.

Somewhere along the pitch-black backroads outside Ojai, local lore warns that a badly burned figure waits in the shadows near a bridge.

Drive into the pitch-black corridor of Proctor Valley after dark, and local lore warns that you won’t be driving alone.

On the night of November 8, 1958, Charlie Wetzel was driving near the dark contours of the Santa Ana River when something suddenly jumped into the road ahead of his car.

By the 1960s, Aliso Canyon’s old Billiwhack Dairy had everything a California urban legend could ask for: decaying concrete silos, dark subterranean spaces, and a technology company tied to some of America’s most secretive Cold War spy-plane programs oper…

The Bay Area has a distinct style of folklore compared to the rest of California.

Within the larger world of California urban legends, Southern California has its own strange flavor: Hollywood tragedy, coastal hauntings, canyon-road rumors, monsters, cursed landmarks, and weird L.A. lore that still gets repeated because the stories feel

Northern California doesn’t just tell urban legends, it grows them right out of the damp forest floor.

Across California, tribal nations and Native organizations run museums and cultural centers where communities tell their own stories, protect languages, preserve traditions, and connect ancestral history with modern life.

During the California Gold Rush, Chinese Camp became one of the most important Chinese communities in the Southern Mines.

The Gold Rush left behind more than stories.

California has no shortage of strange stories labeled as “mysteries.”

California history has never needed much help becoming strange.

Zzyzx sounds like a typo.

California has plenty of real laws that sound bizarre when stripped of context.

Sacramento may not be a waterfall capital on par with Yosemite or the Redwood Coast, but one of the best parts of the region is how quickly the landscape changes once you leave the valley floor.

Monk’s Rock sits beside an old road near Strawberry, a weathered granite boulder that might seem unremarkable at first glance.

Among California’s many lost treasure stories, the Lost Gold of Duncan Canyon endures because the mystery never depended on buried loot or an outlaw stash.

The roof is gone, the rooms are open to the sky and the dark stone walls are gradually becoming part of the forest.

A small bronze plaque mounted on a coastal boulder, marks one of the most quietly moving landmarks on the Monterey Peninsula.