Hicks Road

A narrow, unlit 10-mile road climbing from the Almaden Valley into the Santa Cruz Mountains, home to one of the Bay Area's most persistent urban legends: a colony of hostile albinos living at the road's far end. The story goes back at least 50 years and has been documented in the USC Folklore Archives. The most plausible origin is a reclusive Swedish community near Uvas Canyon in the early 1900s.

Every South Bay teenager since the 1970s has been told some version of the Hicks Road story, and the version depends on who's telling it. The basic shape is always the same. There's a colony of albinos living at the far end of Hicks Road, in trailers or on an old ranch or in a compound deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Jose. They're not friendly. If you drive too far up the road at night, they come out. They chase you. In some versions they throw rocks at your car. In the harder versions they're part of a satanic cult, and people who go in don't come back.

Hicks Road is real. It's a narrow, twisting 10-mile stretch that climbs out of the Almaden Valley into the mountains toward the Mount Umunhum area, past the entrance to Almaden Quicksilver County Park and eventually up near Uvas Canyon. It's exactly the kind of road the story needs. No streetlights. Cell reception drops fast. Steep drop-offs on one side and dense oak-bay forest on the other. Even in daylight you feel like you're driving into something rather than through it.

The "Blood Albinos" version is the classic. According to the legend they have eyes so dark red they look black at night, and they're sometimes described as shrieking or growling rather than talking. The USC Digital Folklore Archives has collected multiple variants of this from Bay Area students over the years, which is genuinely useful, because it puts a date stamp on the folklore. Students in the 1970s already knew it. Students in the 2010s still knew it. Parents pass it to kids. Older siblings scare younger ones with it. The story has been continuously generational for at least 50 years.

Where it came from is the more interesting question. The most credible theory, noted in pieces by Searchlight San Jose and Weird Darkness, traces the story back to a small, reclusive community of fair-skinned Swedish settlers who lived near the entrance to Uvas Canyon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They kept to themselves, spoke little English, and were deeply unfriendly to outsiders who wandered onto their land. Stories about "the white people up on Hicks" became "the albinos up on Hicks," and the story slowly drifted toward its current shape. Another origin theory points to a single 1960s or 1970s encounter in which someone described seeing an unusually pale man on the road and the story calcified from there.

There's also the genuinely weird stuff that doesn't fit the colony story. People have reported a black-cloaked figure walking the road's center at night. Others describe strange lights in the trees, a woman in white near the creek crossings, and cars that stall for no mechanical reason on a specific stretch near the county park entrance. Much of this is the kind of thing that any dark, twisting rural road accumulates over 50 years, but locals will tell you Hicks has more of it than other roads in the area.

The road has also been a genuine crime location, which is part of why the legend has staying power. There have been real incidents over the years — shootings, body dumps, and, in 1998, the discovery of a young woman's body off a pullout near the road. Those are documented, and they're what people quietly reference when they're telling you the story and want you to believe it.

The thing nobody mentions in the ghost tellings, but that lands the hardest when you drive it, is how quickly the mountains eat the sound of your engine. Five minutes up Hicks Road from the valley and you can't hear the freeway anymore. Ten minutes up and your headlights are the only light in the world. Whether or not there's an albino colony out here, whether or not a black-cloaked figure walks the center line, the road itself will do most of the work if you visit it after midnight.

One warning. The upper stretches near Almaden Quicksilver are county park territory, and the area has been locked down more aggressively in recent years because of trespassers looking for the colony. If you go, stay on the road, stay in the car, and don't be the idiot who sets off a 2 am search-and-rescue because you wanted to find an urban legend.