First Wave, Old Trick

The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum honors three teenage Hawaiian princes — David Kawānanakoa, Edward Keliʻiahonui, and Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaʻole — who rode the San Lorenzo River mouth on a Sunday in July 1885, nearly three decades before Duke Kahanamoku popularized the sport anywhere else on the mainland. The princes, spending their summer away from a nearby boarding school, had local redwood milled into massive o'lo boards — a shape traditionally reserved for Hawaiian royalty, each board weighing up to 175 pounds. Two of the original boards survive in a Hawaiian museum collection today, donated decades later by one of the princes' widows.

The Mystery Spot's origin story is a promotional legend as old as the attraction itself: property surveyors supposedly grew dizzy and watched their compasses spin wildly on this exact hillside, convincing electrician George Prather he'd found a genuine gravitational anomaly worth turning into a business. What's verifiable is more mundane, and in its own way cleverer — Prather built his gravity house a few years after a similar roadside attraction became a sensation to the north, using the same trick: a small structure tilted at an angle, which throws off the brain's sense of level far more effectively than any compass ever could. The disorientation visitors feel is real. The magnetism was never anything but marketing.