Shenandoah Valley Outcropping Haunts

   Barely five miles wide and eight miles long – not two miles northeast of Plymouth – lies Shenandoah Valley. An area rich in agriculture and history. Currently, a wine lovers haven with over forty wineries boasting world class wines from the unique Appalachia that harbors some of the best soil in all the world.

   Shenandoah Valley’s rich terrain is picturesque. It’s rolling foothills are green after winter’s rain and glisten golden in the summer sun. Granite outcroppings dot the landscape. Worn into some of those gray-green boulders are mortar holes left by the area’s original inhabitants – the Miwok.

   Once upon a time, the Shenandoah Valley was inhabited by a large population of Central Sierra Miwok. Evidence abounds of their rich life. For decades, settlers have been foraging the rich earth for the artistic beads and other artifacts. As late as the 1970s people were packing them out by the bucketful, along with loose rock pestle and mortars. 

    One such outcropping sits in the crux of the hill on Steiner Road. The boulders are arranged in a protective circle, some flattened granite tabletops, with worn mortar holes, paint a picture of what once one. The earth is black and early in the 1970s charred animal bones, arrowheads and beads rested layers deep. 

   The circle is calm, welcoming, safe. The stress of the world physically drains from the body of those fortunate enough to rest within its arms – for those who respect the earth and leave the remnants of the former inhabitants alone.

   This is not the only location in the valley with beads, arrowheads, and other artifacts of the Miwok, but it is the only one where the spirits of the area’s first inhabitants welcome those who respect the land. But what about those who take the beads or desecrate the land. 

   There are stories – one is of a little girl, a frequent bead gatherer in the early 1970s, who after one particularly long day of gathering beads met with a formidable calamity. The girl was “beading” with friends and cousins. They dug through the rich black dirt – claiming coffee cans full of beads. After the day, they went to the relative’s house where they were staying, showered and returned home to Sacramento. Later that night, the girl reported feeling a cold chill, seconds before a candle whipped off a porch and burned a portion of the girl’s body to the bone. Heavily scarred, the girl will never forget her Shenandoah Valley adventures.

   Another young lady met an even more tragic fate. Victoria was a frequent visitor to the sacred outcropping. She hunted beads with her friends and even some family members. The summer before her first year in college, Victoria and her friend Hannah took Hannah’s Ouiji board to the outcropping. Victoria’s parents forbid Ouiji boards in their house, but Hannah had access and the girls were intrigued with the afterlife.

   Both felt the presence of something beyond this earth when they visited the outcropping and wanted to test their luck with the board. They took it to the circle of rocks.

   A few days after they worked the board, Victoria told her younger sister, Nola, that they were able to contact a boy named Lopatee. Matter-of-factly, Victoria told her little sister that Lopatee told her that she would not live to see eighteen.

   A shiver ran up Nola’s spine. “Stop,” Nola told her sister. “Those things are stupid. They’re fake.”

  “No, they aren’t. You’ll see,” Victoria said.

   Nola didn’t think much of it until after Christmas that year. Her sister had come home from college, relatives were visiting, so the girls shared a room for the first time since they were very young.

   “Tell me you love me,” Victoria blurted to Nola one night before bed.

   “Why?” Nola asked. The awkward tween just wanted to go to sleep.

   “Because I won’t be around forever and then you’ll be sorry,” Victoria said.

   Nola loved her sister dearly; however, she rolled over and went to sleep. Victoria returned to school the next day. Nola never saw her again. 

   Further misfortune befell the family until they eventually moved.

   Was Lopatee a spirit who took revenge on those who disturbed a spot sacred to his people? Was it all a coincidence? 

    Decades later Nola returned to the outcropping. It was spring and the day was warm; however, when she entered the circle of the granite an icy chill replaced the air as the sun ducked under a cloud. She looked up at the sky. A cloud floated by in the form of a cat or maybe it was a mountain lion

   Nola left the rocks – never to return again.