From the Desert Oracle: “The Known Unknown: Tales of the Yucca Man”
Here’s the Flipboard link to the story from Desert Oracle, a local literary magazine produced in the High Desert area of California. This story was published in Flipboard. Kind of silly, but worth a read if you can laugh at this sort of stuff, or believe in this sort of stuff. A photo of this thing, apparition, ghost, imaginary friend, hallucination or creative use of Photoshop, from the 1990′s:
Excerpt:
The story you’ll hear most often goes like this: There’s a young Marine on guard duty in some far-off corner of the massive Twentynine Palms desert training base. He hears an awful sound in the dark, something like a growl. Then, the breathing, coming from one side of his lonesome little guard booth and now from the other.
It’s circling him.
He steps out into the dark, his sidearm drawn. There it stands, eight feet tall, an unbearable stench from its hairy body, the eyes glowing like red coals.
Sometimes, the Marine is knocked unconscious by the beast and found hours later by the next shift. One version occurs at the old rifle range, where the watchman — also armed with a rifle — wakes from the assault to find his weapon bent in half.
Since the 1970s, when the Mojave Desert base expanded from its World War II encampment, there have been regular reports of new recruits terrorized by both the Yucca Man and pranks inspired by the tales. But most sightings of the spectral creature come from campers and hikers at Joshua Tree National Park. Tents have been opened in the night by stinking monstrosities, and there is an occasional large footprint or blurry photograph submitted as evidence. A snapshot from the Hidden Valley campground has made the rounds for a decade now: The figure bounding over the boulders looks much like the iconic Bigfoot from the Patterson–Gimlin film of 1967.
But the Natives who lived in California long before European colonization considered these creatures to be supernatural entities, with names that often translated to “hairy devils.” They took care to avoid the gloomy spots where the devils were often seen.
The Tongva People living around the Santa Ana River called the devils’ hideout east of the river’s source in the San Bernardino Mountains the Camp of the Takwis, pronounced the same as the Tahquitz known to the Cahuilla of Agua Caliente. According to John Reed Swanton’s The Indian Tribes of North America, “Takwis” also survives as a site name at the head of the Santa Margarita River, at Temecula Creek. Throughout Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, you’ll see it spelled Tahquitz — the angry specter’s unhappy home in the region is the cursed Tahquitz Canyon.
And here’s one of my photos I took a couple of weeks ago, while I was hiking in the Tahquitz Canyon in Palm Springs, where this Yucca Man might be living. According to local legend from the Agua Caliente tribe, as told to me by a member of the tribe, Takwis (or Tahquitz) was a mean shaman, and after so many evil stunts, he was banished to the canyon, where he took up residence in a cave. When he gets pissed off, he stomps his feet and runs around the canyon walls, which is what causes earthquakes.