The Dark Watchers

Spanish-era lore; Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck both wrote of them

The Dark Watchers belong to the Santa Lucia Mountains, the range that climbs straight out of the sea along the Big Sur coast of California. They are tall, sometimes giant, featureless dark silhouettes, often with a brimmed hat or a walking stick, standing motionless on the ridgelines and watching travellers below, most often around dusk and dawn. No one has seen one up close. Walk toward one, the legend says, and it is gone.

The early Spanish settlers, and the Mexican ranchers and vaqueros who came after, are said to have seen them first and called them Los Vigilantes Oscuros. They are sometimes credited to the Chumash, who lived along the central and southern coast, but nothing like them turns up in Chumash mythology. They reached print in the 1930s. In Robinson Jeffers's poem Such Counsels You Gave to Me, published in 1937, a man sees one of the watchers that haunt this stretch of the coast range, forms that look human but are not, and when it turns toward him in the twilight it wears his own face before melting into the shadows. In John Steinbeck's story Flight, in The Long Valley of 1938, young Pepé glimpses a black figure on a ridge while running for his life into the mountains, and looks away, because the watchers were best ignored by anyone who stayed on the trail and minded his own business.

Steinbeck had the story close to home. His mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, swore she had seen the watchers and said she had traded them fruit, flowers and walnuts. Her grandson Thomas Steinbeck said he saw them as a boy, and in 2014 he and the painter Benjamin Brode published In Search of the Dark Watchers, a book of history, local interviews, among them the Big Sur resident Billy Post, and 26 oil paintings from Brode's own search of the coast. In the mid-1960s, newspapers reported, a former Monterey Peninsula high school principal hiking in the Santa Lucias saw a dark figure standing on a rock, surveying the country; when he called to his companions it vanished.

The explanations are earthbound. Psychologists point to exhaustion, isolation and the brain's habit of finding figures in shadows. Wind can generate infrasound, which leaves some people uneasy. And the Brocken spectre, a walker's own shadow thrown huge onto a bank of cloud or fog when the sun is low behind them, is a plausible explanation for the legend.