Looks like Charlie has one foot on a banana peel

[H20 Toie]

RIH

 

[Willie B]

...One of my first observances of anything Manson was probably early ‘68...
...The Spahn Ranch was located in the Santa Susana Pass between the Simi and San Fernando Valleys...I was out on a Sunday drive and was driving through Santa Susana Pass and off to the right of the two lane road was a funky old movie ranch inundated with hipsters and bikers...there was a live band playing and just a ton of people...There were no signs indicating that it was a roadhouse or a bar open to the public so I just kept going...
...As I had never seen anything like this the visuals stayed with me...I was pretty straight arrow at the time and I didnt quite have a take on what was going on there???...
...Little did I know what the future held...
...(The Spahn ranch later burned to the ground and it’s location now appears to be a baseball field owned by some school)...

 

[wzuber]

...My first observance of anything Manson was probably early ‘68...
...The Spahn Ranch was located in the Santa Susana Pass between

and........

 

[Willie B]

and........

... it’s possible that this was before my pass by of The Spahn Ranch or could have been shortly after... But some friends and I were out exploring on a Saturday and one guy knew of an abandoned house up in Santa Susana Pass...A couple of carloads of us went out looking for it..:We found it and since all the doors were open we went in and checked it out...There were mattresses everywhere and old clothes spread everywhere...
...Was this one of the Manson crash pads,..I really don’t know but it was just across the canyon from the Spahn Ranch???... could very well have been...

 

[WhatExit?]

And there's Barker Ranch in Death Valley...

In 1968, Charles Manson learned about Barker Ranch from Catherine Gillies, the granddaughter of Arlene Barker. Starting in November 1968, Manson and others began staying at the ranch.

The Inyo County sheriff department, California Highway Patrol, and National Park Service law enforcement captured the group in raids on October 10 and October 12, 1969. Manson was caught hiding under the bathroom vanity.[citation needed] At the time of his arrest they were unaware of the magnitude of their find. They wanted to prosecute the persons responsible for vandalism within Death Valley National Monument further north, unaware that they had a mass murder suspect and his followers.

In early 1970, members of the Manson Family were filmed by Robert Hendrickson at Barker Ranch, sorting through, and taking evidence left behind by detectives, for the making of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Manson."

In 1971, Arlene Barker ceased to file reports with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on the family's mining activity. The land (and improvements) then reverted to government control. In 1976, the ranch became part of the California Desert Conservation Area. In 1994, it was incorporated into Death Valley National Park.

Due to a fire in May 2009, most of the main structure has been destroyed with only the concrete and rock portion of the cabin still standing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barker_Ranch#Manson_at_Barker_Ranch

 

[nowski]

RIH

Burn in Hell!!! Fixed it for you...

 

[Willie B]

...In the early to mid-70s some friends of mine from La Tuna Cyn...would go on their yearly Death Valley Ride which was a very long horseback ride complete with chuckwagon etc...well part of the ride went through the Barker Ranch and they gave me the lowdown on the status of the ranch which was still complete..,it hadn’t burned yet...they said it was a little creepy..,they saw the vanity where Charlie was hiding..,and at the time the family bus was still there(not sure if it is there now???)...The ride was put on by The San Fernando Valley Rangers of which many members are law-enforcement...

 

[WhatExit?]

Yup. I've been going to Death Valley for years and we went to Barker Rance before it burned. I've got to look and see what pics I have...

 

[Willie B]

...Back to Santa Susana Pass...There are train tracks that run from the San Fernando Valley to Simi Valley that wind through the pass and actually go through some tunnels...well the Manson family used to hang out some in the tunnels...I was with a friend one Friday night and he asked me if I wanted to go up and hang out in the tunnels because he heard there were some really cool people up there???..,we got to I think it was a park and a dirt road up to the tunnels and I got a funny feeling and said I don’t think I want to do this...who knows maybe I missed a golden opportunity to hang out with the family in numbers???...

 

[dryhoze1]

 

[Willie B]

...Yes Charlie got intermingled with Neil Young for a short period amongst other musicians...

 

[Willie B]

...More Santa Susana Pass...I have a dear lady friend that I’ve known since high school she lived in Chatsworth and had been over to visit her sister-in-law In Simi...well on the way home somewhere in the pass her car quit...three people pulled up in a red Volkswagen bus...asked her if she needed help and she said yeah I could use a ride home...well they gave her a ride home and she thought these hippies were so nice she invited them in for coffee...A few minutes into this her husband came into the room and did not like the hippie vibe and politely suggested they leave...well the three people in the Volkswagen bus were Charles Manson Tex Watson and Susan Atkins...
...I don’t know what time frame was but my friend and her husband were watching TV one night ..:the night that the Manson family had been charged with the murders and they suddenly realized that 3 of those arrested were the people who had been in their home...

 

[WhatExit?]

Heisenberg met Charlie...

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainmen...counter-with-charles-manson-in-his-youth.html

 

[Willie B]

...Back to the Spahn Ranch...I was at the world finals or winter nationals at Pomona roughly 19 or 20 years ago and ran into one of the hard running frontmotored top fuel guys from the mid ‘’60’s and we all started telling stories...after I told a couple of my stories...he told me that he used to go to the Spahn Ranch and buy guns from Charlie...Sounded like he did this on a regular basis...I even asked him if he thought he might’ve been buying stolen guns???...he didn’t answer me???...

 

[Willie B]

...Not sure of the month or year of this one but the location was Old Topanga Cyn Rd in Topanga Canyon...
...Just down the road from the scene of the Manson induced Gary Hinman murder,...a dear lady friend of mine was a roommate of a chick that in the ‘70’s was the highest paid female rock artist... I think it best to leave her name out of this...
...Anyway there was a girl next door to them who knew Manson... and had told him she wanted a baby...Well good ol Charlie went out and stole her a baby???...My friend hearing a baby crying and knowing that the neighbor had no kids went next-door to investigate... turns out this infant was quite ill...
...My friend immediately took the infant to the emergency hospital...
...When admissions realized that my friend was not the mother of this child they would not treat the child...
...Being pretty freaked out my friend took the baby up to her mothers house in Rancho Palos Verdes.., her mother called the police...and the kid was taken by my friend and her mother to another emergency room where they met up with LAPD detectives...all turned out well for the infant...health restored and I’m assuming the child was returned to where it belonged...
...Other than being interviewed at the hospital by the detectives the LAPD never really followed up any further with my friend and my friend never saw her young neighbor girl again???...
..,Pretty bizarre...
...My friend became one of the founders of a quite famous restaurant bar in Calabasas and her roommate the singer went on to major fame and fortune...

 

[HB2Havasu]

I hope there's a special place in hell for this asshat. I remember being a small child and seeing these murders reported on the news. It had all of SoCal on edge for weeks until they caught these low life monsters. RIH

 

[wzuber]

...Not sure of the month or year of this one but the location was Old Topanga Cyn Rd in Topanga Canyon...
...Just down the road from the scene of the Manson induced Gary Hinman murder,...a dear lady friend of mine was a roommate of a chick that in the ‘70’s was the highest paid female rock artist... I think it best to leave her name out of this...
...Anyway there was a girl next door to them who knew Manson... and had told him she wanted a baby...Well good ol Charlie went out and stole her a baby???...My friend hearing a baby crying and knowing that the neighbor had no kids went next-door to investigate... turns out this infant was quite ill...
...My friend immediately took the infant to the emergency hospital...
...When admissions realized that my friend was not the mother of this child they would not treat the child...
...Being pretty freaked out my friend took the baby up to her mothers house in Rancho Palos Verdes.., her mother called the police...and the kid was taken by my friend and her mother to another emergency room where they met up with LAPD detectives...all turned out well for the infant...health restored and I’m assuming the child was returned to where it belonged...
...Other than being interviewed at the hospital by the detectives the LAPD never really followed up any further with my friend and my friend never saw her young neighbor girl again???...
..,Pretty bizarre...
...My friend became one of the founders of a quite famous restaurant bar in Calabasas and her roommate the singer went on to major fame and fortune...

Kuul stories, thanks for sharing.

 

[Willie B]

...This Time it was Lake Malibu up off of Mulholland Hwy...Had some friends that I had gone to high school with...that became quite good at making leather goods...they would travel with the renisance fair all over the country...they made leather shirts pants dresses skirts purses,...you name ithey could make it..:
...The girl part of the duo who had been my junior high school sweetheart was home and someone had told Charlie where the leather people lived..,
...So these couple of guys knock on her door...One was Charlie no clue as to the other guy...
...she opened the door a bit saw Charlie whose look immediately threw up a red flag..:Normally she would invite customers in but not these guys.
...They wanted something like a half a hide...so she slid it out the door and took their money..
...When the Manson family was arrested she became terrified because she had heard that there were a bunch more of them and she was afraid that might come back Rob or even kill her...
... not sure if Charlie scarred her off but she did bail out of the Malibu hills and became a very successful cattle rancher in New Mexico...

 

[Willie B]

...In speaking with the guy who owns the Topanga market now..:just off old Topanga Cyn Rd.::He told me that the Manson family used to live in the creek bed out behind the market...I don’t know if they were in the family bus or just really roughing it...
..:Sometime in 68 we were shooting an album cover photo with two flat bed trucks backed up to each other and the Southwind band playing on the beds of the trucks..:well that was right next-door to the market...at that time there were a bunch of hippies lliving by the creek and under the market..:It is entirely possible that if some of the Manson’s were sheltering there...they could have ended up in the photo that was used on the foldout large picture on the inside of the album???...

 

[Willie B]

...Also In Topanga... not sure of the timeframe of this either...but the band Spirit was rehearsing at the home they rented... sometime into the night their manager noticed a creepy little guy standing in the driveway..,well this guy was so creepy he made everybody very nervous...so Their manager who may have been David Briggs???...went out and asked this individual to leave..,the individual was Charlie ..;the guys in Spirit are probably lucky he didn’t seek retribution...

 

[FROGMAN524]

Just read about Dean Corrl, what a sick POS

 

[Willie B]

... OK here is where the vibe of Charlie starts getting a little too close to me and mine...The Place Malibu...a bit north of Zumba Beach-and The Trancas Market...
...As I remember it a couple of the neighborhood girls were supposed to do the house cleaning chores while the guys I lived with,...The Southwind Band,...Spirit and The Canned Heat hit the road to play The Fillmore East...
...The girls, sisters Valerie and Leeann were daughters of a doctor and lived in a gated community behind the Trancas Market...
...So while they were doing a great job of tidying up the house they told me that Ed,...one of the guys who’s name was on the lease,said it would be fine if they painted a mural on the living room wall ...they assured me it would be beautiful ...it was a rental house my name wasn’t on the lease so I said go ahead...
It was a tall wall,...vaulted ceiling...
Here is a current pic of the wall...on the left...

...The girls started the mural With a group of people standing on the lower left-hand corner of the wall they then proceeded to draw a trail to the top right-hand corner of the wall ...at the upper right-hand corner was a little guy with a beard with the words Charlie is God ...at the beginning where the people were standing it said...the family...hmm???
(To be continued)...

 

[johnnyC]

its interesting how manson touched so many people directly and indirectly in and about Los Angeles, When I was in high school about 1969 there was a girl i had been friendly with in one of my classes Prior to summer and when school started again in sept. she wasn't around the campus, I didn't give it much thought at the time but later when the book helter skelter came out and i was reading it low and behold there was her picture, the first printing her picture was in it and in the abridged version it wasn't..... now my neighbor in bullhead who was working for the studios at that time was working at spahn ranch as punishment had lunch with the family.... small world!!!!

 

[Willie B]

...So I was having a great time with those two girls and then some more girls showed up so it was a me and a couple of male regulars at the house and all theses girls... these girls cooked and cleaned for us and we had quite a time...I don’t think any of this group of girls nuded up and jumped into the indoor pool that we had but that was something that happened quite a bit just not this time...
...Well about three days into this Leanne said to me...A couple of guys are gonna come by today the are really cool you’ll really like them...
...I had to tell her a couple of guys are not coming by today don’t want any strangers around...
... about a half hour later an old red VW bus starts to come down the driveway ...we had a very long driveway reference the pic...

 

[Willie B]

...Well I see this red Volkswagen bus and I go out to the bottom of the driveway and I bad vibe these guys to the point of where they backed up out into the street ...I thought they left ...well I went back in the house but kept an eye on the driveway and lo and behold the two guys were now walking down the driveway...I told Leanne you better go tell your friends they have to leave...which they did...
...I will probably never know if the short guy of the two was Charlie...???...The possibility of it being Charlie never entered my mind until a couple of years ago when my lady friend whose car had broken down near the Spahn Ranch and Charlie Tex Watson and Susan Atkins gave her a ride home in an old red Volkswagen bus...hmmm???...same bus same people???...guess I’ll never know???...
(An over view of how our Malibu house looks today)...

(More to come)it gets weirder...

 

[dryhoze1]

Interesting stuff Willie B..

 

[Willie B]

Interesting stuff Willie B..

...Had you of been there the visuals in your mind would be ingrained forever...
...I will finish up the stories as soon as I can I think Thanksgiving wiped me out for a bit...

 

[Willie B]

...Here’s one from the night of the Tate murders...

...An longtime female friend of mine and part of our waterski bunch had rented a Benedict Canyon home with her boyfriend in the late 60s...The deal was he would be on the road a bunch as he was just starting a 5 year stint with the Rolling Stones(trumpet)...so the high rent wasn’t a big deal...We will just refer to her as Piano Peggy ...her nickname...a pretty successful studio musician(piano)...
...Well it was a hot summer night ...and she said she had her bathroom window open...she says she heard the gunshots from up the canyon...but didn’t think to much about it at the time...The next time I was in the area I took a drive up to the front gate of the Cielo Dr murder house...(not really one of my brighter ideas)...to see how far it was from there to her house...It seemed to me that it was quite a distance between the two homes...and I later heard the gun used was a 22 pistol...hmm???but it was a canyon and sound will carry...so???...maybe she really did hear the shooting???...Since she was there by herself most of the time I do know this for sure she was scared shitless for quite awhile...

 

[Willie B]

... OK here’s where I really started getting weirded out...

...The Place The Topanga Corral up in Topanga Canyon(a canyon that connects the San Fernando Valley to the Pacific Ocean)... essentially a roadhouse type place...beer bar rockn roll club..:Many of the greats of that era played there..,Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Canned Heat, Little Feat, Rolling Stones, Linda Ronstadt, Emmilou Harris, Grahm Parsons were few of the people who played..a couple of the Beatles had also been seen there...
...It was a Sunday night I think???...and I remember it being hot probably towards the end of summer and after the Tate/La Bianca murders...but before the police had it figured out...
...It was the special night because the music critic for the Los Angeles Times,...Robert Hillburn was coming out to write a review of The Southwind...so that meant the execs of Blue Thumb Record’s...The Southwinds record label ..would be there...As I remember it it was also the night that I had invited Gray Davis and his girlfriend to come out and see the band...Gray Davis went on to become California’s governor for awhile...He had given me a Volkswagen carburetor free of charge and seemed like a great guy...so I thought he might enjoy the band...
...I also remember Glen Frey later of the Eagles sitting on the edge of the stage...
...But before the Festivities started and it was still daylight I rode with the Roadies from our Malibu house up to the Corral...there was not supposed to be another band playing...
...I remember walking in the place and there was a band playing...They were playing the worst shit I have ever heard..:it was like thump thump thump kind of stuff...
...There was a little guy out in the middle of the dance floor making herkey jerky movements to the music...he never moved his feet just his hands and arms... keep in mind he was the only guy in the place except for about four people sitting at the bar drinking beer...
...Well I had to walk to the big part of one side of the room to get a fix on the best placement of each amplifier...as the place was expected to be packed...
...As I got to within about 10 feet of the guy on the dance floor...the tension got so thick I had to go back outside for an attitude adjustment...It was like he had lightning bolts coming off of him...in other words a really bad vibe...
...On my way outside I asked one of the beer servers who had just come to work ..,I said who is that and she said who do you mean and I said the guy on the dance floor ...she looked around a post and she goes oh that’s just Charlie...???...Weirded me out???...
...Well the band that had been playing which turned out to be the Manson family band...finally broke down their equiptmant and left along with the little strange dude...
...So later on as the Southwind had set up and started playing their first set the club started filling up...I remember looking across the room and noticing all the money people mixed in with all the hippies...(keep in mind we are fast approaching 50 years ago so I may have some of the actual attendees that night mixed up with other weekends???)...
... so everything was under control...and about the middle of the second set I decided to have a few beers and do some dancing...I’m not sure who I was dancing with but I remember being next to Dan Rowan the comedian’s daughter Mary who was one of us beachouse dwellers...and the drummers girlfriend...
...I looked just beyond her and there he was the little creepy guy...just my luck...he never looked up but managed to get behind me just over my left shoulder...every time I would make a turn he would make the same move and stay just over my left shoulder???...very strange???...(you know it just occurred to me right now that he may have remembered me from running him off at the beach house if in fact that was him coming down our driveway???)...
... can’t remember much else from that night could’ve been the beer???

...To be continued...there is more...
...but my brain hurts...

 

[Done-it-again]

Crazy Willie B. This was before my time. But last night I watched a special on the Manson family. That dude was freaky and what is nuts is how close he got to people, maybe it was the times as well. Good thing you kept a distance.

 

[Willie B]

Crazy Willie B. This was before my time. But last night I watched a special on the Manson family. That dude was freaky and what is nuts is how close he got to people, maybe it was the times as well. Good thing you kept a distance.

...Ol Charlie never would have gotten away with his psyco babble controlling bullshit with our bunch...Most everybody was college educated and if not very smart ...I’m pretty sure we would’ve just seen him as a novelty nutcase...but he would have been treated nicely...we never really did anything to piss people off or degrade people...
...Musically and as singer he wouldnt have held a candle to the two lead singers of Southwind...he just wouldn’t have fit in...reference this Southwind song recorded live at the Fillmore West...although a bit sloppy...with today’s technology it could have been cleaned up allot...

 

[Willie B]

...So after my adventure with Charlie on the dance floor at the Topanga Corrall...I don’t really know what the timeframe was but all of a sudden the headlines in the newspapers and TV news broadcasts were just loaded with...Hippie Cult Arrested In Tate/Labianca Murders...
...What I do remember is I believe I was at home one night and all of a sudden one of the road managers and one of the lead singers of the Southwind band came rolling into the house with a bunch of wood paneling and nails...It hadn’t taken us long to figure out that the hippie cult and the people in the mural painted by the neighborhood girls were one in the same...yikes...
...So we stayed up all night paneling over the mural...
... The story of the Manson family that unfolded really didn’t affect us at the time all that much as we were in the outskirts of Malibu and we didn’t have a TV to watch all the stuff about the murders
...Most of the news we got was when we went to the Trancas market and could see the headlines of the Herald Examiner and Los Angeles Times...
...It was kind of business as usual for us...the band was playing a different concert every week or playing at a different club every week we were all trying to stay upbeat...
..,And I hadn’t put it together about the little guy coming down the driveway or the little creepy guy on the dance floor...
...I don’t really remember any of us even talking about it after paneling over the mural???...

 

[Willie B]

...And then came the day when our lease was up on the Beach house...
...We planned a big ..,this is it party...and Southwind was going to play even though they had broken up months earlier after their last album didn’t sell well...
...It was winter and it was cold sometime during the party we ran out of firewood
somebody got the bright idea of ripping the paneling off-the-mural wall breaking it up into shorter lengths and throwing it in the fireplace which worked just fine...
...Well the new owners were supposed to come and take possession the next morning as I recall...I was very hungover and was in my sleeping bag on the couch by the pool and there was some chick who I had never seen in my life on the payphone...we had finally gotten smart and installed a payphone... Myself and the chick were the only two people left in the house...
...I heard the kitchen door open and heard people talking so I grabbed my sleeping bag and headed for the door that let out onto the sun deck..
...Before I got outside I heard a womans voice come from the living room saying...Oh No???...
... it’s another one of those I will never know...Was the woman saying Oh No because of empty liquor bottles everywhere or was she saying Oh No because she realized she was looking at a mural that depicted the Manson Family...and flashed on she might have just bought a house that may have been occupied by Charlie???...Dunno???...

 

[hallett21]

Crazy stories. Grew up in Malibu my whole life (lived on schueren above camp 8) but never knew Manson was hanging out in all those areas.


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[Lumpy]

Thats some heavy shit Willie...moved to Malibu in 74...I was a kid back then but heard a few stories. All the places you mentioned I remember like it was yesterday before it all changed. Crazy.

 

[Lumpy]

hallett21, grew up in the cove...you? what years?

 

[hallett21]

hallett21, grew up in the cove...you? what years?

Top of Las Flores (canyon that ends at dukes) above camp 8 (fire camp with the helicopter)


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Willie B]

Thats some heavy shit Willie...moved to Malibu in 74...I was a kid back then but heard a few stories. All the places you mentioned I remember like it was yesterday before it all changed. Crazy.

...There are at least 4 and possibly more people in these stories that your mom went to high school with...but none were part of the Manson family...had you guys moved to the cove 2 or 3 years earlier and your mom had been working at the market in town...our paths might have crossed...would your mom have hung out at our beach house I seriously doubt it...might have been a bit of a culture shock as our lifestyle kind of leaned in the hippie direction...
...then again we had a few parties that 90% of the people that came had gone to our high school...The La Tuna Cyn crowd...

 

[coolchange]

My brother was at Barker ranch wheelin a few.years ago. Spent the night and left the next day. As he was leaving a bunch of black sedan were making there way up the road. Apparently one of the followers had tried to buy some good will by giving locations of buried body's up there.
Had dinner with my bil last week end. LAPD. He gets a call for back up from State Police at Rocky Point. Shows up and it's park rangers. Two women. Down in the rocks there is a group with a fire going. They approach the group and announce themselves and some guy sticks a strobe flashlight in his face and he had to point his weapon as the guy wouldn't comply. He was probably the best guy to take the call since he knew the Iversons and spent a lot of time on the Iversons ranch. The property that's all condo's now next to Spahn. Turns out it was a.bunch of Manson followers having some ritual when Manson died.
They're still out there folks.

 

[Old Texan]

Great stories Willie......Eerie stuff to think back on and scary to realize in some small way to have been on a psychopath's radar.

Over the years' I've been in the presence of folks who exude a bad feeling/vibe like you describe CM had......To me it's a sign of evil existing within certain people. People to avoid and stay far away from, as one never knows what they are capable of doing.