Eerie California

Finalist, Travel Books Category, IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award. From the book: “Deep beneath the heart of Los Angeles’ financial district, hundreds of feet below the huge edifices that house banks, corporate offices, and government agencies, lies another city remembered only in obscure Indian legends, an underground world built by a strange race that vanished five thousand years ago. “At least that’s what mining engineer W. Warren Shufelt claimed in the January 29, 1934 Los Angeles Times. According to reporter Jean Bosquet, Shufelt was ready to dig up downtown L.A. in search of this ancient civilization. “Shufelt had first heard of the city in a Hopi legend about “the Lizard People.” They were a fabled lost race who had built 13 great underground cities on the Pacific Coast after a huge holocaust swept the Southwest back around 3,000 BC…. “A Hopi chief told Shufelt that the vanished race’s capital city was located under present-day downtown Los Angeles. After surveying the area, Shufelt showed up on the Banning property at North Hill Street and sank a 350-foot shaft straight down, digging for what he said was a ‘treasure room’ directly underneath. Shufelt said he had located gold in the catacombs below with the aid of his ‘radio x-ray’…. “He said that the subterranean city was shaped like a giant lizard, with the tail tapering out beneath the Central Library, and the head in the vicinity of Chavez Ravine (now Dodger Stadium). The ‘key room,’ the chamber that contained the map of the city and the directory to the gold tablets, lay several hundred feet under the present site of Times-Mirror Square….”