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Vehicles drive by a Zzyzx Road exit sign off of Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Barstow, Calif. Zzyzx, formerly Soda Springs, is a community in San Bernardino County within the boundaries of the Mojave National Preserve.
Monday, Jan. 30, 2023 | 2 a.m.
A crucifix-shaped swimming pool crumbles in the desert sun. Alongside it, five decrepit concrete baths once filled with the promise of cleansing sins. Warm mineral water, tapped from what was said to be a holy underground river, drew desperate salvation searchers to this remote California wasteland. Today, part of the pool sinks into the banks of the ancient lakebed upon which this strange settlement was built.
This place was once the 12,000-acre dream of notorious huckster and “super squatter” Curtis Springer. Springer claimed to be a doctor, a minister, a professor and a miner — but turned out to be none of those. Eventually, his wrongs caught up with him, forcing him to leave his tiny stolen empire in these desolate reaches of California.
This strange history, the two horror movies shot here and the place’s bizarre name first drew me to the Zzyzx Road turnoff on I-15, around an hour east of Barstow, Calif. But notorious fraudster and creepy swimming pool aside, I discovered that the site at the end of the 4-mile track is a natural phenomenon unique unto itself. A true oasis in the desert.
Around 3 miles in, the road turns to loose gravel as it bends around a rocky outcrop. Lined with palm trees, the unpaved track finally approaches the fabled cluster of buildings at its terminus.
I made my way down there on a clear winter day. Without a soul in sight, the place felt a world away from the interstate highway that ferries thousands between Los Angeles and Las Vegas every day.
The most striking sight at Zzyzx is Lake Tuendae, a body of water the size of a football field. Beyond, through the palm trees, the vast, ancient, crusty white lakebed reaches to the Devils Playground mountains.
“It’s a special place,” Terry McGlynn tells me. “There are scorpions at night, foxes, coyotes, rabbits and big-horned sheep wandering around. It’s absolutely stunning.”
McGlynn is the director at the California State University Desert Studies Center, which has occupied the storied settlement of Zzyzx, once named Soda Springs, for nearly 50 years. There, students and research scientists stay for weeks on end at the edge of Soda Dry Lake — a bright-white lakebed that was once Lake Mojave. Evidence shows that Indigenous people began populating the lakeshore around 10,000 years ago.
“It’s the terminal basin for the Mojave River, which runs west to east from the San Bernardino Mountains,” DSC operations manager and herpetologist (lizard expert) Jason Wallace tells me. “Which is kinda backwards for most river systems.”
While dry on the surface, the Mojave River is still active underground, Wallace says. “It’s always a little moist, not too far under the lakebed.”
Visiting students’ work here today includes drilling into the rocks to discover ancient climates, tracking sheep, conducting a reptile census and analyzing the hydrology of the ancient natural springs that have drawn people there for thousands of years.
“Geologists come from all over the world,” McGlynn says. “It offers a really unique window into the history of time.”
Despite the often repeated myth that the site is an abandoned ghost town, Zzyzx is an active field station, affiliated with California State University Fullerton, with around 60 beds for visiting students and research scientists.
“For some students from LA, this is the first place they see the uninterrupted night sky. It’s spectacular,” McGlynn says. “A lot of people haven’t seen the Milky Way before.”
The beautiful centerpiece to Zzyzx, Lake Tuendae, provides a home for mud hens, dragonflies and various migratory birds getting a drink on their long flight over the desert. It’s also one of only three places where the protected and endangered Mohave tui chub fish can be found.
“You never see them. They sit on the bottom of the lake,” McGlynn says. “Once every few years, a group of people monitor them to make sure they’re there and OK.”
But something about the rectangular pond, flanked with evenly spaced palm trees, seems uncanny. It’s almost too perfect. That’s because the pristine lake in the desert is, in fact, a human-made pond. And that human is seemingly inescapable in any story about this place.
“There are no photos that show this,” McGlynn says. “But presumably, the lake was dug out by Springer.”
Born in 1896 in Alabama, Curtis Springer first made a name for himself as a lecturer and later as a radio evangelist and fervent promotor of health foods.
As a self-described doctor, Springer took curious students’ cash to attend his lectures and learn his secrets to a healthy, God-fearing life. In 1930, at a YMCA in Scranton, Pa., Springer taught a course he claimed was associated with the “Extension Department of the National Academy,” a wholly made-up university. Other courses included “How to Banish Disease and Know the Joy of Living” and “Picking a Husband for Keeps.”
One repeated grift of Springer’s — may it be while teaching courses, offering samples of his miracle foods or later inviting visitors to bathe in his desert pool — was to ask for zero cash upfront but bait-and-switch attendees during the proceedings to get their money. Many of his lectures would pause halfway through so Springer could collect “donations” and also offer private sessions later that day for $25 a pop.
A 1935 report, “Curtis Howe Springer: A Quack and His Nostrums,” published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, alleged that Springer lied his way through numerous East Coast and Midwestern cities in the early 1930s, duping people out of cash for courses before leaving town and adorning himself with various fictional titles along the way.
Springer also launched a curiously named magazine, “Symposium Creative Psychologic,” a title the American Medical Association found “as meaningless as some of the titles Springer has annexed.” Archives reveal a second magazine, named “The Elucidator,” was also published in 1935, but a second issue never appeared.
At the peak of his radio fame, Springer’s show was syndicated by over 200 stations in the U.S. and another 100 overseas. Springer claimed he had 14 million listeners a week, which may have been not far from the truth. The show was a combination of preaching (Springer claimed to be a Methodist minister but was later revealed to be self-ordained at best), gospel singing, screeds against the sins of alcohol and testimonials from happy users of his miracle medicinal cures.
These dubious products, which would later land Springer in jail, included his famous Antediluvian Tea, a mixture of laxatives named after a biblical flood; a “Hollywood cocktail”; a $25 hemorrhoid kit; and Mo-Hair, a baldness cure that was later revealed to be a mixture of just two ingredients: mud and oil.
In his various ads, lectures and radio shows, Springer followed his name with M.D. and Ph.D. — titles the AMA’s investigation found had no merit whatsoever, as Springer never “graduated from any reputable college, medical or otherwise.” At one point in Pennsylvania, he was charged with practicing medicine without a license but skipped town while on bail, according to the report.
Maybe to escape the AMA or those seeking his tax dollars or refunds for aborted courses, in the early 1940s, Springer moved to Los Angeles.
While there, he once recalled how he stumbled upon a 25-cent pamphlet in a secondhand Hollywood bookstore about the “mineral springs of the Pacific Coast.” Inside, he saw mention of a place named “Fort Soda Mineral Springs,” in the Mojave Desert. When he was unable to locate the site on a map, Springer headed into the desert, some 200 miles from his Hollywood home, and managed to find the spring that was sourced from the underground Mojave River, on the edge of the ancient Soda Dry Lake. At the time, the site was an uninhabited wilderness with nothing on the land beyond some old baking soda mines and the remnants of Fort Soda, an early Spanish and then U.S. military camp where dozens of Native American people were killed in the 1860s.
Springer and his wife, Helen, filed a mining claim to an 8-by-5-mile swath of federal land there and proceeded to build the place for which the preacher would be forever remembered.
To build his ambitious resort, Springer headed back to Los Angeles and hired homeless men on Skid Row to come to the desert and help him tap the spring and erect the settlement. Springer himself admitted to bringing “hundreds” of men from Skid Row to help build the site and paying them in room and board.
He coined the site “Zzyzx” as a gag of sorts — so he would always have “the last word in health.” The name was formally, and controversially, recognized by the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors in 1965, resulting in the iconic green sign on I-15.
Springer’s hired help built the “hotel” — the same dorms used today by visiting students — on the town’s main esplanade he named “Boulevard of Dreams.”
The first newspaper advertisement for the resort ran in November 1945 in the Los Angeles Times, offering bus trips to Zzyzx from LA hotels and promising mud, sun, mineral baths, homemade ice cream and a “definite Christian atmosphere.” Springer had long been a staunch advocate of prohibition, and the site never served a drop of alcohol.
Zzyzx would prove to be a big success, largely due to the apparent cost. “We accept whatever amount God has made possible for you to pay,” the ad stated.
This also proved to be a falsehood; Springer charged $50 a week to the vast majority of guests, though he would grant a free stay if the visitor provided a letter from their “preacher, priest or rabbi” proving that they were indeed “penniless.”
The site mostly bused in pensioners from Southern California and could welcome up to 140 guests, all seeking to be cleansed in the desert by Springer’s godly advice, hot mineral water and health cures. And for some of those who visited the site, it seemed to work.
“I had arthritis in my hand so bad I could hardly bend it,” one unnamed 89-year-old guest said in a New York Times story headlined “Zzyzx is a booming health spa.” “Now look,” she added, before “flexing her gnarled hand with ease.”
Through the 1950s, laborers at Zzyzx continued to expand Springer’s dream in the desert. At one time, the site boasted a recording studio, a metal-working shop, a printing facility and even Springer’s own private airstrip named Zyport, which ferried the radio star back to Hollywood every week to promote his new attraction.
It was also fitted with a PA system and loudspeaker, from which Springer would bellow a twice-daily sermon while not recording his radio show on-site.
Many of the advertisements for the resort claim the cleansing water that sprung from the underground river into the cross-shaped pool and baths was naturally “warm.”
But as with all of Springer’s claims, all wasn’t as it seemed at Zzyzx.
“He used to heat it up and say it was ‘hot springs,’ ” McGlynn laughs. “He had a diesel generator to heat the water and say ‘ooh it’s hot mineral springs.’ ”
Springer’s car salesmanlike approach to drawing customers to the desert can be heard on an archival recording of his radio show.
“We have this lovely 12,000-acre estate here that belongs to God,” Springer announces. “If you want to come and stay, come and stay for a month. If at the end of that month, you have any results that you think are worthwhile, and you’re able to do so, we’d appreciate anything you have to contribute. If you don’t, you owe us nothing.”
“The idea was that the water came from a ‘cleansing spring,’ ” McGlynn says, and while the water was technically safe, it was largely undrinkable due to the mineral content. “The water would literally cleanse you by giving you diarrhea.”
Things started to go wrong in the late 1960s, when Springer allowed those who made large donations to build houses on the land, which was still technically owned by the Bureau of Land Management. Springer’s 1944 mining claim did not allow occupation or development of the land beyond mining use, and Springer did everything there but mine.
In 1967, an LA Times writer named Charles Hillinger published several exposés painting Springer as nothing more than a fraud and a huckster, living on stolen land. Springer was described by the paper as a “pudgy, blue-eyed, ruddy-faced, thin-haired promoter.” Hillinger’s reports revealed that the IRS and Bureau of Land Management had been investigating the squatter since the early 1950s for tax evasion and building countless buildings on land he never owned.
In 1968, Springer was arrested at the resort and served 49 days of a 90-day sentence on 65 counts of false advertising and misrepresentation. One of the charges named his $25 hemorrhoid treatment as useless, and another said Springer sold simple foods such as celery and parsnip as pricey “health supplements.” Springer was also charged with falsely claiming his regimen “cured cancer.”
After his sentence, Springer returned to the resort and continued to operate his business there, despite the BLM’s serving notices that he owed $34,000 in rent. The news of his charges also shined a spotlight on the Zzyzx and brought more reporters to the remote road.
In 1969, a Chicago Tribune journalist approached Springer at the resort with some tough questions and received a frosty welcome.
“I’ve told you three times I don’t want any snooping around. You newspaper men are just like detectives. ... If you’re looking for trouble, we’ll give it to you,” Springer told the reporter, who described the heated moment somewhat poetically: “During this outburst, his ears reddened to the same color as his bulbous nose, setting off his white hair rather flatteringly in the late afternoon sun.”
Though, as was often the case in the diverging views on the mercurial figure, even that report stated that he “may be a shameless fraud, or he may be a great healer of mankind.”
After six years of court proceedings, in 1974, the Bureau of Land Management finally, forcibly evicted Springer from the town he named but never owned.
“Behind the fraudulent acts he has perpetrated stand hundreds, or thousands and possibly tens of thousands of people who have been bilked of their money and possibly their health,” a probation officer wrote, adding that the spa was “portrayed in advertising as an Eden while in comparison is directly the opposite.”
Just two years later, the site was turned into the university research center that still operates today. In a strange TV news moment, on the day of the launch of the site in 1976, as journalists gathered and cameras were rolling, Springer drove up to the site, in violation of his court order.
“The 80-year-old super squatter,” a local news anchor reported, “held court by the lake he built, boasting of the millions of free beds and free meals he had handed out at the site over the years.”
Asked by a reporter where he got the money to fund that charity, Springer curtly replied, “Well, that’s none of your business.”
At that time, the Philadelphia Inquirer estimated that Springer earned between $250,000 and $750,000 a year from donations. Another report said he netted over $1 million a year between 1963 and 1968.
“I believe this property belongs to God,” Springer told the cameras. “I’m going to keep my foot right in the door. I’ll fight until hell freezes over, and the last dog has been hung.”
It would be Springer’s last time at Zzyzx, though the preacher protested the eviction decision until his dying day.
Others also spoke out in defense of Springer and what he achieved in the desert. “He had done a lot of good. He gave retirees a place to vacation,” the owner of a hotel in nearby Baker, Calif., told reporters. “Now lots of people are left with a vacuum in their hearts.”
“We aided in the rehabilitation of 4,000 destitute men,” Springer said in his twilight years in 1982. “I’d like our children and friends to know, and not forget about the good things we did at Zzyzx.”
Curtis Springer died Aug. 19, 1985, in Las Vegas, at the age of 88.
“It’s interesting to me that there hasn’t been a biography or movie about his legacy,” McGlynn tells me. “Not many people know about him.”
Wallace, who lives on-site and has worked there since 2007, wants visitors to know that they should stay on the designated path around Tuendae Lake. “You can see everything from the Springer days from there,” he says, adding that the swimming pool has been “wrecked” by gawkers.
Maybe due to its history, or its remoteness, in recent years, the site has sometimes become a draw for those seeking life off the grid.
“We’re a magnet; we’re at the end of a weirdly named road, which piques everyone’s interest. We get vandalized. We get people poking around where they are not supposed to,” Wallace says. “People think it’s abandoned. They walk away with stuff and say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize anyone was here. I’m just taking this chainsaw.’ It’s crazy.”
Wallace said that during the pandemic, the site became a destination for some. “They didn’t know where to go. ‘I need to get out. I’ll just go to the desert,’ they’d say, and they’d get themselves in trouble.”
“People are out here in the middle of the summer with half a bottle of water, no idea where they’re going or what they’re doing,” Wallace says. “But the desert will always win.”
I ask McGlynn if Zzyzx ever feels a little spooky at night. “I don’t feel that way, but I think some visitors might. It’s incredibly still,” he says. “I find it incredibly peaceful.”
