Spahn Ranch: The Counterculture's Last Chapter

The Santa Susana Pass marks the rugged northwest edge of the San Fernando Valley, where old movie ranches once stood among the rock outcroppings. For most of the twentieth century the area attracted a specific California type: people who wanted proximity to Los Angeles without belonging to it. Artists, musicians, people testing new arrangements for living. In the late nineteen sixties, that included Charles Manson.

Spahn Ranch was a fifty-five-acre former Western film location, the kind of place where B-movie cowboys had ridden across painted backdrops for two decades. By nineteen sixty-eight, the productions had stopped and the ranch was owned by a man named George Spahn, who was eighty years old and nearly blind. Manson and his followers had been drifting through Southern California since the summer of sixty-seven. Spahn allowed them to occupy the ranch in exchange for labor and companionship.

What Manson enforced inside the ranch was an information blackout. No clocks. No calendars. No newspapers. The outside world was not permitted to enter as a coherent narrative. The Family ran on Manson's version of events, which included a coming race war he called Helter Skelter and a prophecy in which they would emerge from the chaos as its inheritors. They waited.

The summer of nineteen sixty-nine arrived. In August, members of the group carried out the Tate and LaBianca murders. The counterculture, which had been telling itself a story about communal living and the transformation of American consciousness, found that story was not the only one being lived in the hills above Los Angeles.

Spahn Ranch burned in a brush fire in September nineteen seventy. No structure remains. The site is inside a state historic park. The land does not advertise what happened there.