At the southern end of Death Valley the ground drops below sea level and the heat in summer passes 50 degrees Celsius. Salt flats crack into white polygons. To the west the Panamint Range rises bare and folded, riddled with old mine shafts from a century of prospectors who came looking for silver, borax and gold. The Timbisha Shoshone have lived in this valley for generations, and the Southern Paiute along its eastern margins. For as long as outsiders have been writing about it, the place has attracted stories of what lies underneath.
The best known of them has a name. Shin-Au-Av, usually translated as the Land of Spirits or Ghost Land, is said to be an underground realm beneath the valley, entered through passages in the rock. In the twentieth century the name became attached to something else, a lost city of tunnels, mummies and giants that prospectors swore they had stumbled into and could never find again. And in the twenty-first, it acquired inhabitants that no early version mentions, a race of serpent people.
A Paiute guide named Tom Wilson searched for the hidden city until he died in 1968. He believed his grandfather had been inside it. Nobody has found it since. The trail to Shin-Au-Av runs through three very different kinds of story, and each has to be followed on its own terms.
The Land of Spirits
The story is usually told like this. A Paiute chief lost the wife he loved and could not accept that she was gone. Still in his living body, he set out to follow her, down through tunnels into the earth, past dangers and spirits, until he came to a chasm crossed by a narrow bridge of rock. On the far side a young woman, the daughter of the ruler of that place, met him. Beyond lay the Land of Spirits, where the dead danced. For days he watched the dancers until he saw his wife among them. The daughter gave him one instruction. Take her and run, and whatever happens, neither of you may look back.
He took her hand and ran for the bridge. Just before they reached it, he glanced back. His wife was gone. He returned alone to his people and spent the rest of his life telling them what he had seen.
The name Shin-au-av belongs to Paiute tradition itself. In the early 1870s the explorer and ethnographer John Wesley Powell recorded Southern Paiute and Ute stories in which the Shin-au-av brothers, powerful beings of the mythic age, debate the affairs of the people and shape the land. The underworld journey, in the form it circulates today, has passed through many retellings, in collections of Southwest legend, in travel books about Death Valley and now across countless websites, and its earliest printed version is hard to pin down. In none of those versions is the ruler of the Land of Spirits a serpent, and nobody in the story builds a city. It is a story about grief, about the boundary between the living and the dead, and about the one rule that cannot be broken.
Orpheus in the Great Basin
Anyone who grew up with Greek myth will recognise the shape of it at once. Orpheus, whose singing could move stones, went down into the underworld to bring back his wife Eurydice, charmed Hades and Persephone into releasing her, and lost her for ever when he turned to look back as they neared the light. Japan tells it too. In the eighth-century Kojiki, the god Izanagi follows his dead wife Izanami into Yomi, the land of the dead, breaks her command not to look at her, sees her decaying body, and flees. The rule is different, the ending the same.
The resemblance between the Paiute story and the Greek one is not a modern discovery. In 1935 the anthropologist Anna Gayton published a study of what she called the Orpheus myth in North America, and in 1957 the Swedish scholar Åke Hultkrantz devoted a whole book, The North American Indian Orpheus Tradition, to the many versions recorded across the continent, particularly in the West. A man follows a dead wife or child into the spirit world, is given a condition for bringing them back, and fails it, again and again, from California to the Plains.
How so many peoples arrived at the same story is still argued over, and it remains one of the more haunting questions in the study of myth. Some scholars favour very ancient transmission, a tale carried across the Bering land bridge and down through the Americas over thousands of years. Hultkrantz leaned toward experience, the trance journeys of shamans who went to retrieve the souls of the sick, and the dreams of the bereaved, which in every culture bring the dead back almost within reach. Either answer is extraordinary in its own way. Neither requires that the underworld be a place with tunnels and residents that a prospector could fall into.
The Prospectors’ Tunnels
That kind of underworld arrived with the miners. In the 1920s a prospector known only as White claimed that while working an abandoned mine at Wingate Pass, in the southwest corner of Death Valley, the floor gave way beneath him. He dropped into a tunnel that led to rooms filled with hundreds of mummified human figures in leather clothing, surrounded by gold bars, lit by what he described as a pale greenish-yellow light of unknown origin. He said he went back twice, once with his wife and once with his partner, Fred Thomason.
Tom Wilson, a Paiute trapper and guide, heard the story and recognised it. His grandfather, he said, had found an underground city of fair-skinned people with horses and strange food. Most of Wilson’s own people doubted the tale. Wilson did not. When White finally led him and a group of archaeologists to the place, they found no cavern, only a curious tunnel cut into solid rock that ended in a blank wall.
In 1932 the writer Bourke Lee added another version in his book Death Valley Men. Two miners, Jack and Bill, claimed to have found a tunnel running some twenty miles into the Panamint Mountains, with mummies and gold at the end of it. A friend, they said, stole the artifacts they brought out, and they could never relocate the entrance. The last anyone heard, they were preparing to climb the east face of the Panamints to look for it from the other side.
Mummies, Giants and the Summer of 1947
The story reached its peak in August 1947. Howard E. Hill of Los Angeles told the city’s Transportation Club about a discovery made by a retired Cincinnati physician, Dr. F. Bruce Russell, who had moved west for his health. In 1931, Hill said, Russell had been sinking a mine shaft near Death Valley when he broke through into a cave. Over the following years Russell and a colleague, Dr. Daniel S. Bovee, said they had traced at least 32 tunnels across some 180 square miles of Death Valley and southern Nevada. Inside they reported three mummified giants eight to nine feet tall, dressed in garments like dyed sheepskin, along with artifacts that resembled Egyptian and Native American designs, hieroglyphs cut into granite, and a ritual hall holding the remains of dinosaurs, elephants and tigers. On 5 August 1947 the San Diego Union ran the story under a headline promising mummies, giants and underground caverns.
It was a remarkable summer to tell it. In late June a pilot named Kenneth Arnold had reported nine shining objects over Washington State and the phrase “flying saucer” entered the language. In early July the Roswell Army Air Field announced it had recovered a “flying disc,” and retracted the claim the next day. Americans were primed for the sky, and the ground, to give up secrets.
Scientists at the Los Angeles County Museum pointed out the most obvious problem. Dinosaurs died out tens of millions of years before any tiger or elephant walked the Earth, and their remains could not have been gathered in the same hall by the same people. No archaeologist was ever taken to the site. Russell formed a company, Amazing Explorations, Inc., to raise money for an expedition, and then could not find the entrance again. His abandoned car was later found in the desert with a burst radiator and his suitcase still inside. Bovee faded from the record too.
Later retellings have added a great deal to the 1947 story, among them gas lighting, faintly radioactive spheres that glowed in the dark, and machines likened to microwave ovens, the first of which went on sale that same year. Each addition makes the city more vivid. None comes with an object, a photograph or a location.
The Navy’s Desert
The modern version of the legend has a final chapter. The discoveries, it says, were followed by the military seizing the land, which explains why nobody has been able to go back.
The dates run the other way. The Naval Ordnance Test Station that became China Lake was established in November 1943, nearly four years before Hill’s talk, to test rockets for the war in the Pacific. It grew into one of the Navy’s largest land holdings, more than a million acres of the Mojave, and Wingate Pass, the site of White’s story, lies inside its ranges, closed to the public. Death Valley itself is a different matter. It became a national monument in 1933 and a national park in 1994, and its canyons, mines and the Panamint Range are open to the million or so visitors who come each year. The city’s supposed doorway sits behind a fence that was built before anyone claimed to have found it.
Where the Serpents Came From
If the Paiute story has no serpents, and the prospectors described mummies and giants rather than reptiles, the serpent people must have come from somewhere else. They came from the twentieth century.
In August 1929 the pulp magazine Weird Tales published Robert E. Howard’s story “The Shadow Kingdom,” in which an ancient race of serpent men, able to take on human faces, secretly rule from the shadows of a forgotten age. The image spread through pulp fiction and occult writing for decades and reached its widest audience in 1999, when David Icke published The Biggest Secret and placed shape-shifting reptilians behind the world’s governments, a framework examined in our file on the reptilian hypothesis. Along the way it absorbed other American underground legends, among them the Hopi-attributed “lizard people” whose city a mining engineer tried to dig up beneath Los Angeles in 1934.
The claim that serpent people appear underground on six continents leans on traditions that are each richer and stranger than the summary. In Hindu, Buddhist and Jain tradition the nagas are semi-divine serpent beings who dwell in Patala, a jewelled world beneath the earth, and guard its treasures. The naga king Mucalinda is said to have coiled around the meditating Buddha to shelter him from a storm, and several historical Indian dynasties took the name Naga. In Mesoamerica the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl to the Aztecs and Kukulkan to the Maya, was a god of wind, learning and the morning star. At Chichen Itza the setting sun of the equinoxes throws a serpent of light and shadow down the staircase of the great pyramid. The famous story that the Aztecs expected Quetzalcoatl to return and mistook Cortés for him is now widely seen by historians such as Camilla Townsend as a legend written after the conquest. In China the dragon kings rule from crystal palaces beneath seas and rivers and send the rain.
Britain’s contribution in the old list, a class of underground wise serpents called the adderamim, could not be traced to any Celtic source. What can be traced is the Roman writer Pliny the Elder’s account of the anguinum, a “serpent’s egg” said to be formed from the spittle of tangled snakes and prized by the Druids, and the holed “adder stones” of later British folk belief. The Hopi and Zuni emergence stories, which tell of the people climbing up through a series of earlier worlds and emerging through a sipapu, an opening in the earth, describe human ancestors coming out of the ground, not serpents living in it.
The serpent and the underworld do meet across the world, and the reason is close to the ground. Snakes live in holes and crevices, vanish into the earth and reappear. They shed their skins and seem to be reborn. They gather near water. Many peoples, separately, made them guardians of the hidden and the deep. That shared symbol is not evidence of a shared civilisation beneath our feet.
Cities Under the Earth
People have built underground cities, and two of them are among the most astonishing places on Earth. Neither needed a legend to be found, and both were found by accident.
In 1963 a man renovating his house in the town of Derinkuyu in Cappadocia, central Turkey, knocked through a wall and found a passage behind it. It led to an underground city cut into the soft volcanic rock, reaching down around 85 metres through many levels, with ventilation shafts, wells, stables, kitchens, chapels and great rolling stone doors that could seal each level from the inside. It may have sheltered as many as 20,000 people with their livestock. Its earliest levels may go back to the Phrygians of the first millennium BCE, and it was greatly expanded in Byzantine times as a refuge from raids. The Cappadocian Greeks, who knew the town as Malakopi, still used its tunnels into the twentieth century, until the population exchange of 1923 sent them to Greece.
On Malta in 1902, workers cutting cisterns for new houses broke into the Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni, a complex of chambers carved downward through the limestone over centuries, between around 4000 and 2500 BCE. It held the remains of thousands of people. One chamber, known as the Oracle Room, carries a man’s low voice through the whole complex, and acoustic studies have recorded strong resonance in it at frequencies within the range of the human voice.
Both places show what human beings could do with stone, patience and fear. Both have been excavated, mapped and opened to the public. They make the case that underground cities can exist, and they show what a real one leaves behind.
The Verdict | Debunked
The lost city beneath Death Valley rests on a prospector’s story told to a Paiute guide who could not find it, a book about miners who disappeared looking for it, and a 1947 talk relayed in a newspaper, about a site no archaeologist ever saw, holding dinosaurs and Ice Age tigers side by side. Its doorway is said to have been sealed by a naval base that already existed. Its serpent rulers came from pulp fiction and modern conspiracy, not from the Paiute. As a hidden city of mummies, giants and serpent people, Shin-Au-Av is debunked.
What Lies Beneath Shin-Au-Av
What it leaves behind belongs to a different order of mystery. A Paiute chief who followed his wife into the dark, and an Orpheus story told in nearly the same words across a continent and an ocean, by peoples who never met. The first printed source of the Death Valley version is still uncertain. So is the reason the story keeps returning, in Greece, in Japan and in the Great Basin, with its one unbreakable rule. Anyone who has lost someone will understand it without a scholar’s help.
Tom Wilson spent his life looking for the city his grandfather described, and died without finding it. The chief in the story looked back and lost what he came for. The underworld in both cases stays where the old stories always put it, just out of reach, and for those who knew Death Valley best it was always a land of spirits before it was a land of tunnels. The same mix of sacred mountain and invented inhabitants surrounds another western landmark, Mount Shasta, where the stories of a hidden people inside the mountain began in a novel.
For how this verdict sits beside the rest of the archive, see the Verdict Index.
