Paranormal Hotspot: Mount Shasta

Photo by Bill Gracey.

On a whim, you decide you want to take a vacation and go on a multi-faceted paranormal investigation.  You want to investigate bigfoot, ghosts, aliens, UFOs, lost civilizations, mysterious ancient legends, and some sort of new agey beliefs too. But you just don't have the time and resources to visit the Pacific Northwest, the Myrtles Plantation, Roswell, Rendlesham Forest, Akrotiri, Teotihuacan, and Stonehenge.  So what are you to do?  Go to Mount Shasta of course!

The area around Mt. Shasta, CA has been inhabited for thousands of years.  The peak the city is named after has long been viewed as a sacred place to Native American tribes in the area.  It was thought that the mountain was the center of creation, and the Great Spirit created it by pushing ice and snow through a hole from heaven and then using the mountain to step onto the earth.  It was also thought that the Great Spirit, known as Skell, dwelled on the mountain after creation.  It even has a story of a great flood attached to it.

New Age groups have regarded the mountain as a sacred location as well.  It's been claimed that beneath the mountain is a very ancient city called Telos, which is allegedly where people from the ancient lost continent of Lemuria (a.k.a. Mu) settled after Lemuria was destroyed.  Allegedly, they continue to live beneath the mountain in a utopian like civilization.  Sometimes it's claimed they are physical people, sometimes it's claimed they dwell on a different plane of existence, perhaps as 4th or 5th dimensional entities (4th dimensional denoting a higher awareness of spirituality/consciousness, 5th dimensional meaning a non-physical intelligent entity).  The story of Telos actually comes from a fictional novel called A Dweller on Two Planets that was written in 1800s by Frederick Spencer Oliver.  It was thought that the author must have 'channeled' the story because he was only 17 and the depth of the topics covered seem to be beyond what a 17 year old of the time would have been capable of writing.  Decades later in the 1930s, the secret society known as the Rosicrucians would popularize the belief that advanced Lemurians lived beneath Mount Shasta.

Native American legends and New Age beliefs aside, there are many reports of strange phenomena occurring at Mount Shasta.

-Bigfoot has been sighted there. Link
-Ghosts have been sighted there. Link
-UFOs have been sighted there. Link Link 2 Link 3 (Update 11/16/12: Original Link 2 no longer worked so I replaced it with a new link I found and added a third link)

In addition to claims that Mount Shasta is an entrance to the hollow earth, it's also been claimed that there is an underground military base there.  Even Batsquatch has been sighted there!  Interestingly, Batsquatch is a creature allegedly sighted around Mount St. Helens, a stratovolcano.  Mt. Shasta is a stratovolcano also.

There's a lot stories regarding paranormal phenomena on Mt. Shasta, however it's hard to find a lot of good, credible research regarding those stories.  Some of the stories are probably fictional or fabricated, some of them may be misidentifications, others may be exaggerated.  However, despite some of the stories being questionable, I think there is enough evidence to suggest that Mt. Shasta is indeed a mysterious place.  Whether it's ghosts, legends, UFOs, or cryptozoology, a paranormal researcher can probably find something of interest to study at Mt. Shasta.  It seems to be quite the 'paranormal hotspot'.