In 2017, a woman was killed when a cliff collapsed beneath her. Climate change and sea-level rise are eating away at its signature shoreline. While much of California is vulnerable to drought, Santa Cruz, highly dependent on its own rainfall and waterways, is even more susceptible another major dry spell could produce damaging water shortages. Other deals with the devil haunt Santa Cruz, which struggles just to keep what it has. If Santa Cruzans see weed as a spark for economic opportunity, they are making a Faustian bargain. It’s telling that, even as other Santa Cruz structures show their age, the shiniest building in town is the KindPeoples Recreational Cannabis Dispensary, on Ocean Street, near the creepy-looking county government building. Santa Cruz County is consumed with cannabis-more than 20 manufacturers, two distributors, seven cultivators, and even Melissa Etheridge’s new company, Etheridge Farms. And there’s a good chance the other people driving are so high they’re effectively zombies. Finding a parking space downtown is a fight (and if you find one, you might get ticketed anyway-the meters only take change). This may be where Santa Cruz is scariest.
#WEATHER SANTA CRUZ BEACH BOARDWALK CA SERIAL#
(One was killing, he said, to appease God’s taste for blood as a way of preventing an earthquake, while the other, the Coed Killer, targeted students).Įven the road into Santa Cruz is fraught: California State Route 17 has so many dangerous sharp turns, blind spots, and narrow shoulders that it’s called “Blood Alley” or “Killer 17.” The mountains separating Santa Cruz from the Bay Area are a leading site of Bigfoot sightings, and they are full of the vacation homes of Silicon Valley technologists who are busy plotting God knows what.īut, as any horror filmmaker will tell you, the scariest threats come not from the rare serial killer or tech overlord but rather from the routines of daily living, which can seem so difficult as to produce feelings of powerlessness. Santa Cruz residents still talk about the two different serial killers who, between them, killed more than 20 people in the 1970s. In the darkness, trouble thrived, including the cultists of early-20th century Holy City, whose leader practiced bigamy while preaching celibacy, repeatedly ran for governor, and was arrested for writing supportive letters to Hitler. Santa Cruz’s mission is remembered for the murder of Father Andres Quintana, who was strangled to death-and then castrated-shortly after he nearly beat to death two indigenous people whose coerced labor he depended upon.Īll the tall trees on those hills cast a lot of shade. While Santa Cruz’s shoreline geography makes its mountains tumble violently down to a sea, local history correspondingly sends shivers up your spine. She is not the first to feel that way about the place.
“Being here feels like there’s this black cloud over me,” says the film’s protagonist, a wealthy Bay Area woman (played by Lupita Nyong’o) who summers in Santa Cruz.
Perhaps that’s what made Santa Cruz, a pretty place somehow beset by demons, such an effective setting for Jordan Peele’s Us, the year’s most popular horror film.
Santa Cruz is not our most dangerous or damaged place, but it comes very close to embodying the greatest fears of Californians, which are all about our powerlessness: that our coastal beauty is collapsing underneath us, that we’ve lost control over our future, and that our state’s wealth no longer guarantees anything, not even a roof over our heads. But there is simply no place in our state scarier than this coastal county of 275,000 tortured souls. Is Santa Cruz the scariest place in California?įor sure, this state’s 21st-century reality is frightening: from the persecution of immigrants to the droughts and wildfires made worse by climate change.
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