Southern California has been the cradle to many odd cults, credos, utopias and dystopias. Among the most mysterious are the ruins of a Rustic Canyon enclave once known as Murphy Ranch.
The mansions of Hollywood elite -- Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Cosby, Steven Spielberg -- sit in splendor atop the ridges of the canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains. But far below, on its secluded and woodsy floor, stand the eerily burned-out and graffiti-scarred remains of concrete and steel structures, underground tunnels and stairways leading from the top of the canyon to the bottom.
Wrapped in canyon lore, the remnants are believed by one local historian to be those of a small, short-lived colony of Nazis. Although no one can say with certainty who lived there or what they did, Randy Young, a former commercial photographer turned book publisher, said his research indicates that it could have been home to up to 40 local Nazis from about 1933 to 1945.
"It's extremely difficult to connect all the dots; too many have been erased," said Young, who has studied local history. He learned about the ranch while growing up in Rustic Canyon. His mother, Betty Lou Young, included the Nazi theory in her 1975 book on the history of the canyon.
Young continued his mother's research into the enclave, relying heavily on decades of oral histories, architectural plans, documents and letters to come to his conclusion that it was a Nazi colony. The strongest links, he said, come from the oral histories of canyon residents who told him that armed guards patrolled the canyon dressed in the uniform worn by Silver Shirts, a paramilitary group modeled after Hitler's brownshirts.
Also, Young interviewed the now-deceased John Vincent, a UCLA music professor who negotiated the sale of the property in 1948 and told him it had been a commune for Nazi sympathizers.
Yet most details about the colony's origins are untraceable, and parts of the story have taken on characteristics of a legend.
Currently the floor of upper Rustic Canyon is a popular hiking parkland owned by the city of Los Angeles. Backing up against Topanga State Park, over the years it has been home to a Boy Scout camp and an artists' colony.
Behind the locked and rusted wrought-iron entrance gates and flagstone wall stand the traces of a small community that had the capacity to grow its own food, generate its own electricity and dam its own water to cut itself off from the rest of California.
