ALONG THE WAY

Anasazi 'Sightings' - Strange Things Happen at Ancient Indian Ruins After the Sun Goes Down

Never hang around In-dian ruins after dark. I'm embarrassed to write this. I don't believe in superstitions, don't believe in spirits, don't believe in much of anything that science or art can't explain. But I never hang around Indian ruins after dark.

The first story I heard from someone who did chilled my spine.

Back in 1988, when I was in Sedona working on my first Arizona Highways book, Scenic Sedona, someone told me that a wilderness guide nicknamed “Ropes” had a frightening ex-perience during a sleepover in a Sinagua pueblo near town. I tracked Ropes down and ar-ranged an interview. He seemed serious and lucid, and he made me promise never to use his given name.

"I'd been going to these ruins in the daylight for 15 years," Ropes said. “Once it got dark, they seemed so different. I got a real uneasy feeling - like I was intruding."

On the edge of sleep, Ropes said, he heard crying. “At first I tried to tell myself it was bats. Then I thought, well, it's jack-rabbits. Finally I realized I was hearing children. Crying, in this room."

In the daylight following a sleepless night, Ropes examined the room and found tiny fingerprints that had been pressed into the mortar some 900 years ago. Studying the winter sun angling across the sky, he concluded that the room where he'd spent the night would have been the warmest place in the pueblo. A likely nursery.

Five years later, researching another Arizona Highways book, A.D. 1250, I kept running into stories like the one Ropes told. I wanted to scoff, but in every case these were stories told by sober, rational, educated people who had stumbled into experiences that couldn't be explained by anything ever taught in college. The stories didn't belong in my book, but I made notes and dropped them into a file labeled, half-facetiously, “Anasazi - Sightings."

Photographer David Smith told me about camping below the great ruin of Keet Seel in Navajo National Monument: The moon rose. Down the canyon, a coyote howled. Then a silent shadow in human form sprinted across the lip of the sandstone alcove encasing the ruin. Smith said he did not wait for dawn to show him the way out.

Philip Stearns, a Tucson restaurant owner, years ago was sleeping at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico when a crow woke him. He peered out of his tent and saw the crow standing on A low stone wall. It was still screaming.

In the morning the wall was gone, but the crow still circled overhead. Stearns said he got the strange feeling the bird wanted him to follow. He did, and eventually it fluttered down onto an Anasazi ax. Stearns impulsively pocketed the stone implement as a souvenir, an act that was and is illegal. “It was like it was meant for me,” he explained.

It wasn't. That night, Stearns and his companions became violently ill. A few days later, back in Tucson, his skin erupted in mysterious rashes. His business inexplicably began to melt down. Finally, while taking a nap one afternoon, he spun out of bed to answer the phone. His foot struck the ax, severing his Achilles tendon.

The following week, Stearns took the ax back to where he found it.

Sometimes such unexplained experiences prove benign. Jo Baeza, a writer and teacher, once bivouacked on a Navajo mesa in northern Arizona. “About midnight,” she said, “my two dogs woke me up, and I heard yeibichai songs, sacred songs, coming from below. The dogs listened to them, too. That was the eerie part. Finally the songs faded away, and I went back to sleep. In the morning, I went down there and found a deserted ho-gan - with no tracks around it. Nobody had been there.

"I felt blessed," she told me. “I think it was spirits singing, and they had allowed me to hear."

Still skeptical, I called three archaeologists, expecting them to ridicule the stories. They did not. Two of them had similar experiences in the course of their work around prehistoric sites. Archaeologist-ethnologist Jonathan Reyman said that while these Southwestern land-scapes can be “very suggestive places, I'll accept that there are all sorts of things out there that we don't understand."

I began, tentatively, to shift on my agnostic ground. I told Reyman I could at least agree that there are aspects of Indian spirituality I could never begin to understand nor, likely, could any outsider. “That's right,” he said. “They have access to a reality that we don't."

When I mentioned this conversation to Philip Stearns, he recalled a talk he'd had with a park ranger, a white man, about his ax encounter at Chaco. “He was a very rational guy, but when I told him about the crow, he turned sheet-white.

"He said, 'You didn't follow it, did you? You just don't follow crows.

"Crows are messengers from another world.'"