Winding from Almaden to Los Gatos, Hicks Road is a local point of interest for the brave and adventurous.

A pen points to Hicks Road in Los Gatos from an 1870s map of Santa Clara County.

The road that makes some wonder

Stories paint haunting pictures of old Hicks Road

By: Dina Baslan

Posted: 3/6/08

Five months ago Shawn Qureshi, a freshman marketing major, made his way down a windy road in South San Jose, searching for the man he'd heard about in stories: the overprotective father.

Qureshi said the story goes that one night, the father allowed his daughter to go out with some guy friends, but she never came home. He went after the boys and shot them, assuming they had killed her, and he now stands in his front yard every night, preying on passersby.

"I'm going to punch him in the face," Qureshi remembered telling his friends.

He stepped out of the car, his friends switched off the lights, and Qureshi started walking. There he was - a 5-foot-tall, 2-foot-wide figure in the darkness.

Hicks Road is the narrow path running up the slopes of Mount Umunhum that connects Almaden and Los Gatos. Among longtime San Jose residents like Qureshi, it has a curious attraction to urban legends.

The road is named after England-born Thomas Pasco Brown Hicks, who moved to a village, known as Guadalupe in 1867, in Santa Clara Valley.

It was a mining town of 400 residents, according to a 1974 San Jose news report, and most of the land was owned by Quicksilver Mining Co.

In 1868, the county approved construction of a public road into the area and named it after Hicks, who paid the cost of surveying the land.

Jason Whitcomb, a sophomore kinesiology major, said he has heard all kinds of stories about old Hicks Road.

"I've heard about an albino community, about trailer parks and abandoned houses," Whitcomb, 19, said. "There's a giant rock with a door painted on it: devil's door."

He has his reasons for believing in them, he said. His friend once touched devil's door and found out the next day that his mother had cancer, he said.

Another one of Whitcomb's friends, he said, once fell off of a giant rope swing they had found while wandering around the reservoir formerly named River of Our Lady of Guadalupe and injured himself.

Whitcomb said he has also encountered one of the road's residents while looking for help with his friend's flat tire.

"He thought he was messing around," Whitcomb said. "He opened the door with a shotgun and told him to get off his property."

Qureshi also talked about a psychic ward that sits on the top of the hill - an old deserted building with broken windows and doors. Ghosts of patients who once lived there are said to be hovering around, haunting people who get near the building, he said.

"I won't walk down there again," said Jesse Villasenor, a San Jose resident who works as a club promoter, recalling his midnight visit to Hicks Road a year ago.

Villasenor, 24, said he and his friends heard a rumbling noise as they were walking toward an old building.

"It was a sound of a door closing," Villasenor said. "As if warning us, 'get away.'"

He said the building was once a Christian school and that he recalls hearing stories of a teacher who shot one of her students there.

The noise, he said, was followed by the appearance of a figure that ran toward the school at "faster than human speed."

Growing up with tales of Hicks Road has inspired creativity for one man, Julian Flores, a San Jose resident and movie director.

"When you drive up there at night," he said, "you feel like something's not right. The whole environment gets to you mentally. And it inspired me to do a horror movie."

Actor Shane Hennessey, playing the character of Mike in the movie, said he used to hear his older brother talking about the road with his friends and telling ghost stories. He was thrilled when the road became his first movie set, he said.

"Just because it's so mysterious," Hennessey said. "You don't know what to expect."

Artist Jacob Mantia also found an opportunity to retell a Hicks Road story with a new twist.

"There is an old abandoned military radar base at the top of Mount Umanhum," he wrote in his blog, "Monsters and Kittens." "(An) albino was killed, and the toxic waste that was left at the base turned him into a zombie. He forever walks Hicks Road at night looking for fresh victims."

His painting "Beware of Hicks Road Zombie" is a rendition of that scene made out of coffee mixed with watercolors on a cold-press illustration board.

The figure Qureshi saw in the darkness five months ago turned out to be a brick gatepost, with a lamp anchored on top of it that resembled a head.

"I made myself look like an idiot," he said. "I flipped him off, knocked on the light globe, and shouted back at my friends, 'You guys are assholes.'"

Qureshi said he was disappointed. He had gone to the road that night with an expectation only to expose an urban legend.

For Morgan Chivers, a senior global media major, these stories of ghosts, albinos and zombies are just another memory of high school novelties.

"Ghosts aren't the only people who can drive beat-up Jeeps," Chivers, 24, said. "Humans can drive those, too, and try to scare people - we've all seen "Scooby Doo." Some people are hoping and expecting and trying to see things, so tiny little bits blow up in their mind and let their imagination roll."