Looming over the landscape of Siskiyou County, California is the imposing and majestic figure of Mount Shasta. Towering alone over 14,000 feet above its surroundings, it is a solitary, formidable presence that has since time unremembered been seen as a hallowed place by Native Americans, who believe it to be the home of various gods and spirits, and feature it in many of their creation myths. The mountain has also long been saturated with tales of all manner of mysterious phenomena, including lost cities populated by refugees from a lost continent, Bigfoot, ghosts, lizard people, portals to other dimensions and vortices, and it has long been a UFO hotspot. Among the many mysteries this towering behemoth holds are the many people who have come here to never return, and the mountain seems to be in a sense a hungry place with a habit of making people vanish off the face of the earth.
By far one of the most famous tales of a vanishing at Mount Shasta revolves around a retired mining engineer by the name of J.C. Brown in the 1930s. At the time, there was much talk among occultists and Theosophists that the mountain was the home of an ancient race of enlightened, white-robed spiritual beings called the Lemurians, who were said to have escaped their sinking continent of Lemuria millions of years ago to take refuge at first at Atlantis, and then when that sank too in a lost city within the bowels of Mount Shasta. It was a popular notion for various New Agers at the time, and although it was dismissed out of hand by the scientific community and general public, there were many accounts of people encountering these enigmatic entities and even visiting their hidden city. It was against this backdrop of strangeness that one day in 1934 Brown pushed the lost city and the Lemurians onto headlines and into the public consciousness.
Hellbound and Down 