The disturbing story of the California highway that ‘defies gravity’ the place vehicles seem to roll UPHILL
It looks like a normal road at first glance but a stretch of highway in the Los Angeles area is the site of an eerie phenomenon where cars appear to defy gravity.
The mountainside road in Altadena, just north of Pasadena, is known as Gravity Hill. It has been the center of several urban legends that attempt to explain why vehicles on the highway, which looks like it slopes downward, roll uphill.
Tok Thompson, a professor of anthropology and folklore researcher at the University of Southern California, told the Daily Mail about some of the spooky stories.
The most popular folklore involves a school bus full of children who allegedly died on the road. Their ghosts are said to haunt the hill, pushing cars up to prevent drivers from suffering the same fate they did.
While another myth is that a high school girl took her parents’ car out for a joyride with friends, but it spun out of control, rolling down and crashing before killing everyone inside. Locals believe the spirit of the girl and her pals haunt the road.
‘There is no one set story,’ Thompson said. ‘All these stories overlap. There’s no one correct version.
‘What we do find is they tend to bleed into each other very often.’
He said the school bus legend has a couple of versions. One is that the driver was tired and wanted to get home quickly, so he was driving too fast and swerved at a bend, causing the bus to tip over and slam against trees on the side of the road, killing all the children.
This image of the road illustrates the optical illusion. It is hard to tell in which direction it slopes, but the area from the red car to the fire hydrant is in fact uphill
Folklorist Tok Thompson shared some of the stories that have been handed down through generations of locals
Another is that after the bus stalled on the road and the driver asked the students to help him push it, but the bus rolled backwards and ran them over.
Some say that if you sprinkle baby powder on the back of your car before letting it roll uphill, small handprints will appear.
There is no documented school bus crash at the site. Thompson said of the stories: ‘Maybe they’re true. I’m not gonna say ghosts aren’t real. Science has never disproved ghosts.
‘One of the things about being a folklorist is we usually sort of suspend our judgment of the stories.’
However, skeptical observers tend to go for a more rational explanation – the road is simply a naturally-occurring optical illusion caused by a lack of a visible horizon.
When seeing the phenomenon in action, it is hard to wrap one’s head around the illusion, even if the observer knows about it. The road and cars on it clearly appear to be angled downwards.
But it is a case of misleading angles and perspective which highlight the limitations of our perception as humans.
The illusion occurs because viewers have a skewed perspective on the road. The area where cars roll ‘backwards’ is on the crest of a hill where the road incline becomes less steep just before it actually begins to slope down.
This stretch of road in Altadena possesses a strange phenomena that has sparked various spooky stories
There are gravity hills all over America. Pleasant View Road in Fairview Township in Pennsylvania (pictured) also has one
For observers, the difference in inclines makes it look like cars have already passed the top of the hill, and the lack of a horizon or distant reference points completes the illusion.
Altadena’s Gravity Hill is far from the only one in the world. In California alone, there are at least eight gravity hills.
‘If I’m talking to my folklore class – I’ve got about 100 students in the lecture or something – most of them will have heard of a gravity hill, maybe where they come from,’ Thompson said.
A gravity hill holds the same kind of appeal as a haunted house, Thompson said, drawing both skeptics and believers hoping to see the phenomenon for themselves and prove or disprove its various explanations.
YouTube and TikTok are full of videos of people driving on gravity hills to see what happens for themselves. Some even sprinkle baby powder on their vehicle but are hit with disappointment when no handprints appear.
Thompson said the great thing about these stories is that they foster community identity. To truly become a local, one must learn the local folklore.
‘If you move to a new area, you’re supposed to pick up on all these legends of whatever the local monster might be, or the local gravity hill, or the local haunted house,’ he said. ‘So it’s also sort of where people establish their identity as a local.’
