What Jack Parsons Summoned at Devil’s Gate Dam

Jack Parsons co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL is the NASA-affiliated research center that built the technology behind America’s rocket program and, decades later, the Mars rovers. Parsons was one of the men who made that program possible in the first place. He was not a fringe figure. He was one of the architects of American aerospace.

But at night, he tried to open a portal to another world.

Parsons grew up wealthy and lonely, in a Pasadena mansion on a stretch of road locals called Millionaire’s Row. He struggled in school, likely with undiagnosed dyslexia, and buried himself instead in mythology, Arthurian legend, and the Arabian Nights. Rocketry became his other obsession early. As a teenager he was expelled from a military academy after his own experiments blew up the school’s toilets. He never finished college. Everything he built afterward, he built as a self-taught chemist with a head full of stories about magic and the ancient world. He worked alongside people with far more formal credentials than he ever had.

That combination, rigor without a degree, science shot through with myth, followed him into the Arroyo Seco. That’s the dry riverbed at the edge of Pasadena where he and a handful of Caltech classmates tested rocket engines starting in the 1930s. Other students called them the Suicide Squad. On Halloween in 1936, the group gathered near Devil’s Gate Dam to launch their first liquid-fuel rocket. It failed three times before an oxygen line ignited and sent flames toward the group. Parsons caught fire and survived. That test site, right beside the dam, is the same ground JPL now occupies.

Devil’s Gate Dam had been completed in 1920, California’s first flood control structure, built where the Arroyo Seco narrows into a natural gate. It takes its name from a rock formation nearby, a shape that from the right angle looks like the side profile of a devil’s face. The name was already old by the time Parsons arrived. A Pasadena newspaper account from 1947 traces it back to 1858. Long before that, the Tongva people who lived in the region were said to have regarded the site as spiritually significant. They saw it as a gateway between worlds, generations before anyone called it the Devil’s Gate at all.

By the late 1930s, Parsons had converted to Thelema, the occult philosophy of English writer Aleister Crowley. He rose to lead the local branch of Crowley’s order at Crowley’s own request. He bought a mansion on Orange Grove Boulevard, turned it into a commune he called the Parsonage, and filled it with artists, drifters, and fellow occultists. Police visited often, responding to reports of ritual activity in the garden. Parsons would meet them at the door himself and talk his way out of it, presenting himself as a respectable Caltech scientist with nothing to hide.

Here is where the legend answers the question of why Devil’s Gate specifically. According to accounts of Parsons’s occult life, Crowley himself taught that Devil’s Gate was one of seven portals to Hell scattered across the world. Parsons carried that belief into his own rituals at the site. One account of the story goes further, claiming Parsons became convinced that the ground just south of JPL held a genuine and immense spiritual power, power he intended to use. Whether or not any of that is true in the way Parsons believed it, it means the choice wasn’t incidental. If the legend is right, he picked that ground on purpose, because he thought it already had something in it.

In 1945, a young former naval officer and aspiring writer named L. Ron Hubbard entered Parsons’s circle. The two became close collaborators. Together, over roughly two years, they pursued what they called the Babalon Working, a ritual intended to summon a magical entity known as the Moonchild. It was meant to embody a force of nature into human form. To bring a Thelemic goddess into our world. No moonchild ever appeared, not in any form either man could point to. What they believed they’d opened instead is a question nobody has ever answered.

The friendship did not end well. Hubbard eventually left with both Parsons’s girlfriend and his life savings, gone in a real estate scheme that collapsed once Parsons realized what had happened. By then, JPL had already forced Parsons out, in 1944, citing his occult activities and increasingly reckless lab habits. He spent his final years drifting between explosives work and consulting jobs, watched by federal investigators amid Cold War fears about who he’d been talking to and why. In 1952, at thirty-seven, he died in a home laboratory explosion. Investigators ruled it an accident. Many of the people who knew him never quite believed that.

Roughly a decade after the Babalon Working, four children disappeared from the area around Devil’s Gate within the span of a single year during the 1950s. Two were never found. The other two were murdered by Mack Ray Edwards, a road construction worker later convicted as a serial killer. He confessed to burying their bodies beneath the asphalt of a freeway he had helped pave. Edwards’s crimes had a documented, human explanation. Nothing ties him to Parsons, to Hubbard, or to any occult claim about the dam.

And yet that decade sits at an uncomfortable distance. Too far to draw a straight line from ritual to tragedy. Not far enough for the place to have shaken off what happened there, if anything did.

Devil’s Gate doesn’t stand alone in Pasadena’s stranger geography either. It forms one point of what locals call the haunted triangle. The second point is the Colorado Street Bridge, a concrete span opened in 1913. Within a decade it had earned the nickname Suicide Bridge, after a string of deaths there in the years that followed. The third point is the site of the old Cob Estate, once a lumber baron’s mansion in the hills above Pasadena. The mansion was torn down decades ago. What’s left is a stretch of trail known mostly as the Enchanted Forest, where hikers report the kind of unease that outlasts a demolished building. Draw a line between the three points on a map, and by local account, they form a triangle that closes on the dam itself. It’s as if everything in the area points back to where Parsons stood.

I came across this story while researching for the podcast, and it’s stayed with me since. I don’t have a definitive answer for what happened at Devil’s Gate Dam, and I’m not sure anyone does. What I keep coming back to is this. A man capable of helping build America’s rocket program also believed, with total sincerity, that a specific piece of ground back home could open a door to somewhere else. He picked that ground on purpose. Something came after, even if no one can prove what caused it.

I think there’s something to all of it. Not proof. Just a suspicion that doesn’t go away.

Whether that’s enough to call Devil’s Gate a portal, or just a place where enough strange things accumulated to feel like one, I’ll leave to you.