Arizona Paranormal Week: Route 66 Weirdness





Historic Route 66 that crosses the nation is a popular drive, but the route through Arizona State is perhaps the most amazing bang-for-your buck bizarre trek possible!



If you want to go the location of such things as UFOs, ghosts, skinwalkers, Bigfoot, ancient native culture, amazing geological features and abandoned buildings, this route is going to put you over the top with joy. 

Let's look at some of what it offers (BTW, I plan to take this same trek with my best friend this year and will definitely share the findings)


GEOLOGY




Petrified Forest Covering 230 square miles, these eroded badlands contain massive amounts of petrified wood approximately 225 million years old! There are fantastic rock shops in the area that I highly suggest you peruse. 




Meteor Crater was created by impact about 50,000 years ago by a 160-foot iron nickel meteorite. This is truly an amazing sight. 




Painted Desert runs from the Grand Canyon area to the Petrified Forest. Iron and manganese create the colors within.


ANCIENT NATIVE CULTURE



Walnut Canyon is just outside of Flagstaff and contains lots of cliff dwellings from ancient Native Culture. The hikes are breathtaking around this area.

URBEX/ABANDONED



Two Guns is a town with only a few crumbling memories left behind. It became infamous for the fact the town was built over top of caverns where great Native tragedy occurred when a war happened between two tribes, trapping and killing a tribe within. The town was said to be cursed, as many things went wrong. Eventually, citizens up and left. 


Truxton, Arizona

There are plenty of abandoned homes and businesses along I-40 (Historic Route 66) as I-10 East/West became the popular back and forth for the nation. Many places shut down and moved on and left the beautiful crumbling remains behind.


Twin Arrows, AZ


GHOSTS


Hotel Monte Vista, Flagstaff, Arizona If you want to stay in a haunted location, this one has a LOT of different unusual ghosts. An infant is heard crying in the basement, a woman of the night tossed from a window supposedly watches people sleep and even bothers the men, a bank robber with a disembodied voice, a woman seen in a rocking chair, and much more!




Williams, AZ rail car at the Canyon Motel (LINK) This charming motel offers a haunted train car to rent for the night, if you dare....

CRYPTIDS AND SKINWALKERS

Northern Arizona has a lot of reports of Bigfoot but the town of Seligman (almost the midway point of I-40 - historic route 66 in AZ) became famous for the submission of a supposed Bigfoot toenail to Melba Ketchum's DNA study of Bigfoot. 

Skinwalkers, spoken of in the Navajo Culture, are witches who have the ability to shift their shape and disguise as an animal. The Windowrock area of Four Corners has many reports of skinwalkers. 

(LINK). In June 1987, the mutilated body of Sarah Saganitso was found in a rocky area behind where she worked at the Flagstaff Medical Center. George Abney, a professor at Northern Arizona University, was arrested that September and tried for her murder. Part of the woman’s left breast had been bitten off, and the prosecution offered testimony that the bite marks matched Abney’s teeth. The defense countered that circumstances surrounding Saganitso’s slaying suggested a skinwalker-witchcraft murder, including a broken stick left across her neck as well as a clump of grave grass found next to her pickup truck. Abney’s attorneys first tried to implicate Saganitso’s former boyfriend on the flimsy basis that he was a member of the Native American church, but investigation proved that the man in question was at a sweat lodge in Tuba City on the night of her murder. Nonetheless, Abney was acquitted. Did a guilty man go free, or do murdering skinwalkers sometimes prowl Arizona?

FREAKY FUN



Wigwam Village Motel in Holbrook (LINK) Stay in a tee pee shaped room! 



The town of Oatman (on the western end of Historic Rt 66 I-40) has wild burros that walk the streets. When miners shut down in the area, they left them to roam free which they still do today. 



Northeast corner of Antares Rd and Rt 66.



A must-get-selfie point in Winslow, Arizona.



Dinosaurs in Holbrook, AZ

UFOs


There is a local legend of a UFO crashing in Kingman, Arizona (far west portion of I-40 Historic Rt 66 in Arizona) in 1953.

LINK: (researcher Preston Dennett) says the UFO crashed May 21, 1953, about eight miles northeast of the Kingman Airport and that government officials sent a team of about 40 scientists to the crash site to investigate.


“The object was described as metallic, 30 feet wide and three and a half feet high, oval-shaped with portholes,” he says. “Inside were two to four, four-foot tall humanoids, deceased according to most sources, with large eyes and wearing metallic suits.”

The object was quickly scooped up and taken to either Area 51 air base in Nevada or Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Dennett says.

Arizona gets a great deal of UFO sightings for a few reasons and one is that the skies are clear the great majority of the year and in most places the view is 180 degree of uninterrupted sky. 

Pretty much, if you're out in our desert at night and don't scan the skies, you could be missing a LOT. I have seen numerous UFOs here (I only count them if they are definitely not plane/helicopter like). I've seen them in daytime and at night, various shapes and various types of light. Perhaps the most interesting ones I ever witnessed with a friend were balls of red-orange light dancing, dissolving, coming back, and playing over and over - with no apparent vehicle or sound. 



More Info
13 Bizarre Rt. 66 Attractions 



Comments

  1. I so want to do this road trip! Slowly! Maybe a week or so to take it all in!
    Thanks Sharon!

    ReplyDelete

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