Searching For Jack Parsons' Ghost (Part 1)
The Arroyo Seco
It was a hot day in Los Angeles. Fourth day of a heatwave in fact. 108 degrees in The Valley. To make matters worse, the car’s air conditioner was busted and leaking fluid beneath the passenger side dashboard. It was a sweaty seething drive up the 110 freeway. The car felt like a toaster oven with the Soup Nazi ladling boiled clam chowder down our backsides.
Yeah, it was hot enough for a Seinfeld reference, so there you have it.
We didn’t care. We had a job to do, well, in the bowels of hell. Specifically, a lonesome grotto on the outskirts of Pasadena affectionately named Devil’s Gate Dam.
What in the good Lord’s name would we want to do something like that, you might wonder. It had to do with the history of the place. A dark history of course. Loose talk of a portal located at the Devil’s Gate Dam have been circulating on the internet for years now. It all comes back to a mad rocket scientist named Jack Parsons, the creepy founder of Scientology L.Ron Hubbard and, as is often the case in such dreary matters, the occultist Aleister Crowley.
Sophie and I had packed the car with film equipment and state of the art paranormal gadgets in hopes of nailing some cold hard evidence that there was indeed something nefarious going on at the dam. Heat be damned. The trick though, was finding it. From our maps, we could see that it was located in an area called the Arroyo Seco.
The Arroyo Seco, which means "dry stream" in Spanish, is a 24.9-mile-long seasonal river in Los Angeles County, California. It was explored by Gaspar de Portolà, who named it after noticing that it had less water than other canyons he had seen.
During his exploration, he met the Chief Hahamog-na of the Tongva Indians. The rapids of the Arroyo Seco are positioned in such a way that they make a beating, laughing sound, which is attributed to a wager between the river and the coyote spirit in Tongva-Gabrieliño traditional narratives.
The watershed begins in the Angeles National Forest near Mount Wilson in the San Gabriel Mountains, and flows through the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Highland Park, Hermon, Montecito Heights, and Cypress Park. It ends north of Dodger Stadium in Downtown Los Angeles, at the confluence with the Los Angeles River near Elysian Park.
The first flood control dam in Los Angeles County was built by the Los Angeles County Flood Control District at Devil's Gate gorge in 1920. The dam was named after a rock outcropping that resembles the face of a devil, which is located at the narrowest spot on the Arroyo Seco river.
It was in the Arroyo Seco near the base of Devil’s Gate Dam that Jack Parsons tested the first liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets. Parsons was the enfant terrible of rocketry as it were. He in fact invented the first rocket engine utilizing a composite, castable rocket propellant. That’s right, the one and the same solid jet fuel that, without which, we wouldn’t have gone into space, reached the moon, flew the Space Shuttle, etc. BTW, for his troubles, Parsons has a crater on the moon named after him - Parsons’ Moon Crater.
Parsons was a co-founder of Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) which brought you such greatest hits as the Mars Rover and the near-earth orbit satellites. Every Halloween, it turns out, the folks at JPL have a little re-enactment of the founding of JPL, kind of like the the story of the Three Wise Men around Christmas time, only this features Parsons at the Devil’s Gate Dam.
Parsons was no slouch, to be sure, but he had certain life style choices that put him at odds with the normally staid and conservative scientific community. You could describe Parsons as an uber progressive and, in the 1920s, that’s saying quite a lot. He was hyper sexual and his tastes leaned towards both men and women.
What draws us here today though has to do more with Parsons’ leaning towards the occult, and specifically, his occult practices in and around the the Devil’s Gate Dam area.
In 1941, Parsons joined the Agape Lodge, the Californian branch of the Thelemite Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) which he ran out of his mansion in Pasadena, a few miles south of Devil’s Gate Dam. Parsons was in constant contact, via mail, with head of the O.T.O. Aleister Crowley, who was living in London. With Crowley’s bidding, Parsons took over as head of Agape Lodge in 1942, replacing Wilfred Talbot Smith.
The reputation of the O.T.O. as well as rumors of Parsons own chaotic personal conduct led to his ouster from JPL and Aerojet in 1944. This however, appeared not to phase him much, as he had bigger ambitions to pursue. To whit, the invocation of the Thelemic goddess Babalon to appear on earth. To accomplish this goal, Parsons hooked up with science fiction writer and soon to be founder of Scientology - L. Ron Hubbard.
They conducted this “Babylon Working” in 1946. And what were the results? Some claim it was a resounding success, that the Operation did indeed rip a whole in the time-space continuum ushering in said Whore of Babylon Herself, as well as a multi-varied host of other inter-dimensional beings. Researchers sight 1947, the year following this Babylon Working, to be the advent of the great UFO migration into our world, which continues to this day.
These and other strange anomalies in the Arroyo Seco led us to suspect that the Devils’s Gate Dam was a vortex site of no small significance and probably haunted AF. Our personal investigations into the area led to some disturbing discoveries. Check out a clip from our film here:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
