Beneath a freeway overpass in Pasadena, California, there is a hundred-year-old flood-control dam, a tunnel mouth with the word HELL painted above it, and a rock shaped like the face of the devil. Locals call it Devil's Gate, and the stories that cling to it are some of the strangest in the state.

In this episode, we climb down into the Arroyo Seco to pull the legend apart from the record. At the center of it is Jack Parsons: the brilliant, self-taught chemist who helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and modern American rocketry, and who recited Aleister Crowley's Hymn to Pan over his rocket tests while running the West Coast's leading Thelemic lodge out of a Pasadena mansion. 

We get into the Babalon Working, the 1946 occult ritual Parsons performed alongside future Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

We dig into the Tongva cemetery unearthed in 1938 to build a reservoir, the children said to have vanished at the dam, and the freeway-building serial killer Mack Ray Edwards, whose shadow still falls across the unsolved disappearance of eight-year-old Tommy Bowman.

Portal to hell, haunted dam, occult conspiracy, and an unsolved cold case — we lay the folklore and the documented history side by side and let you decide what is really buried at Devil's Gate.

Got a story of your own? Something unexplained? Something that still keeps you up at night?

Send it to [email protected] or message me directly at patreon.com/talesfromthedark. Your story could be next.

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