A Navajo Grandmother FINALLY Speaks on What Crosses the Canyon at Night 

A Navajo Grandmother FINALLY Speaks on What Crosses the Canyon at Night 

She is 91 years old. Her hands shake when she pours coffee. She has lived in the same stone house on the western edge of the Navajo Nation for 70 years, and for most of that time, she has refused to speak about what her father saw the night he came down from the mesa with white hair.

 When the researcher from Northern Arizona University finally sat across from her last spring, she did not look at the camera. She looked at the canyon behind him, at the shadow the sun was starting to throw across the sandstone, and she said only one sentence before she asked for the recorder to be turned off. She said, “The ones who cross at night are not what your people think they are, and they have been crossing for longer than any of us have been counted.

” Before we dive in, press subscribe and let us know where in the world you are watching from. Her name is Ella Yazzie. She was born in 1934 in a hogan 7 miles from the rim of a canyon that most maps do not name, and the ones that do name it use the word the Bureau of Indian Affairs assigned in the 1950s, which is a word her family does not use.

Her people call the canyon by a phrase that translates roughly as the place where the ground remembers, and the reason they call it that is the subject of stories that were, until recently, told only in the winter months, only inside, and only to family. Ella broke that rule this year. She said she broke it because she is going to die soon, and because the last three young men who tried to walk the old trail across the canyon floor at night come back, and because their mothers came to her house one at a time and asked her, quietly, if

the stories were real. She told them the stories were real. Then she told them she would speak. The canyon is not deep by Arizona standards. It is roughly 400 ft from rim to floor at its widest point. The floor is dry for most of the year, cracked red clay with tufts of rabbit brush. There are three petroglyph panels along the north wall that Ella’s grandfather told her were carved as warnings, not as art.

The Bureau of Land Management has cataloged two of them. The third is on tribal land and has never been photographed. Ella says the third one is the important one. The story her father brought back from the mesa in 1941 begins with a horse. His name was Frank Yazzie and he was 32 years old and he had gone up to the mesa to look for a bay mare that had wandered off during a thunderstorm two nights before.

 He took a canteen and a rifle and his 12-year-old son and they made camp on the mesa top just before sundown. The son, whose name was Harold, gave an account of what happened to a Franciscan priest at St. Michael’s Mission in 1958 and that account is preserved in the mission archive. The priest, whose name was Father Damien Kowalski, believed it.

He wrote in the margin of Harold Yazzie’s file in Latin a phrase that translates to “These things are older than the church and the church is not equipped.” Harold said that he woke in the middle of the night because his father had stopped breathing. Not stopped breathing as in died, stopped breathing as in was holding his breath deliberately the way a man holds his breath when he is trying not to be heard. Harold was 12.

 He understood what that meant and he held his own breath and he did not move and he opened his eyes only enough to see. He said that on the far side of their small fire, which had burned down to coals, there was a shape crossing the mesa top from north to south. He said the shape was tall. He said it was walking on two legs but that the legs did not bend the way a man’s legs bend and that the arms were long enough that the hands nearly touched the ground when they hung straight down.

 He said that the head was in the wrong place. That was his phrase. In the wrong place. Father Kowalski asked him twice in different sessions what he meant by that, and Harold could not or would not clarify. He said only that a head is supposed to be on top, and this one was not on top, and he could not describe where it was instead without becoming distressed.

The priest let it go. The shape crossed their camp in silence. It did not look at them. It walked past the fire close enough that Harold could have reached out and touched its leg. It continued south and descended into the canyon. Harold and his father did not move until the sky turned gray.

 When they finally sat up, Harold’s father’s hair had gone white, not gray, white. There is a photograph in the family’s possession taken by a trader named Ben Kravitz at the trading post 2 weeks later that shows Frank Yazzie with a full head of white hair at the age of 32. He never went back up on that mesa, and he never spoke about what he had seen, not to anyone, until 3 months before he died, when he told Ella, who was his youngest daughter, in a conversation that lasted about 6 minutes.

 She has repeated only one part of it. He told her that the thing that crossed their camp was not alone. He told her that it had crossed on its way to meet others of its kind, and that they gathered in the canyon on certain nights, and that the Diné had known about them for as long as they had lived in the Four Corners region, and that before the Diné arrived, the ancestral Pueblans had known about them, too, which is why the petroglyphs are there.

He told her the third panel is not a warning to human beings. It is an agreement. It was carved by human hands, but at the direction of something else, and it establishes terms. The terms, as Ella understands them from her father and from her grandmother before him, are these: Human beings do not cross the canyon at night.

 If human beings cross the canyon at night, they do so knowing they may not come back, and their families do not search for them, and their names are not spoken for one full turning of the seasons, and the canyon is left alone for that year. In return, the things that gather in the canyon do not come up onto the rim. They do not enter the houses.

They do not take children from their beds. They cross where they have always crossed, and they meet where they have always met, and they leave before the sun comes up. This has been the arrangement for a thousand years, and probably longer, and it has held with only a handful of exceptions, most of which happened during periods when outsiders came onto the land and did not know the rules.

 The most recent violation before this year was in 1973. Two brothers from Gallup, neither of them Diné, decided to hike the old trail across the canyon floor as a shortcut to a hunting camp on the far rim. They started at dusk. The younger brother’s flashlight was found four days later about halfway across the canyon floor, still switched on but with dead batteries.

 The rifle was found about 30 yards further west, the stock cracked, all six rounds discharged, no shell casings recovered. The whiskey bottle was found unopened, standing upright on a flat rock, positioned as if someone had set it there carefully. The brothers were never found. Ella Yazzie will tell you, if you ask her, that of the 31 unsolved disappearances in Apache County since 1950, at least 19 were people who crossed the canyon at night, and the sheriff’s department knows this, which is why they do not encourage hikers to use the old trail after sundown. I want to tell you about what Ella said happens if you are on the rim at night and you look down. She said that most nights nothing happens. The canyon is dark and quiet, and you can hear the wind and sometimes coyotes, and that is all. But she said that on certain nights, which are not predictable and which do not correspond to the phases of the moon or to any calendar her family has been able to figure out, you can see lights on the canyon floor.

 She said the lights are not fires. Fires flicker and move and cast smoke. These lights do not flicker. They do not move. They appear in a rough circle and they hold their positions. And they are the wrong color. Her father described the color as the color of a bruise about 3 days old. Her grandmother described it as the color inside a dog’s mouth.

 Ella described it as the color of skin under water. She said that if you see the lights, you should go back into the house and you should not look out the window again until morning and you should not tell anyone what you saw for at least 3 days. And if you have a dog, you should bring the dog inside because the dogs know and the dogs will try to warn you.

 And if you do not listen to the dogs, the dogs will sometimes go down into the canyon by themselves and the dogs do not come back either. Ella lost two dogs that way. The first was in 1968. The second was in 2004. Both times she saw the lights. Both times the dog stood at the door and would not stop crying. Both times she opened the door because she could not stand the sound and the dog went out into the dark and did not come home.

She said she does not blame herself for the first dog. She was young, she said, and she thought the old stories were exaggerated. She blames herself for the second dog. She said she should have known better. The three young men who disappeared this year were 19, 21, and 22. Two of them were cousins.

 All three were enrolled members of the Navajo Nation. They had heard the stories and according to their families, they had decided to walk the old trail across the canyon floor at night on a dare. They left at 10:00 in the evening on a Wednesday in April and they did not come back. The search parties found one thing on Friday which was a pile of clothing folded neatly on the trail about a third of the way across the canyon floor.

 It belonged to the youngest of the three. It was folded the way a mother folds laundry, socks tucked inside the shoes, shoes on top of the folded jeans, jeans on top of the folded shirt. There was no body. There was no blood. There were no footprints leading away from the pile in any direction, which the tracker who examined the site said should have been impossible, because the red clay in that part of the canyon takes footprints the way wet cement does.

The other two young men have not been found. The clothing was returned to the youngest one’s mother, who did not want it, and who asked her aunt, who is Ella’s second cousin, to burn it. The aunt burned it and told Ella that while it was burning, the smoke did not go up. The smoke went sideways, along the ground, west toward the canyon.

 Ella agreed to talk to the researcher because the mothers came to her and because she said that some things need to be said out loud before the people who remember them are gone. She did not agree to talk on camera. She would only allow her real name to be used after her death, which is why this account can be told at all.

 Ella Yazzie passed away in her sleep 6 weeks ago, 2 weeks after the interview. The researcher asked her near the end of their conversation what she thought the things in the canyon were. Ella said she did not know exactly. She said her grandmother had used a word for them that Ella would not repeat because to say the word is to invite attention.

 The closest English translation, she said, meant something like the ones who were here before the ground was solid. Her grandmother believed they were not from another place. She believed they were from this place, from before it was the way it is now, from a time when the rocks were still soft and the rules were different. Her grandmother believed they had gone underneath into the layers of the canyon that the geologists call Permian and Triassic and Jurassic and that they came up on certain nights to walk on the surface again because the surface had

once been theirs. The researcher asked Ella if she believed her grandmother. Ella said she did not have to. She had seen the lights three times in her life and she had lost two dogs and she had a photograph of her father with white hair at 32 and she had a memory of her mother screaming in 1952 because something had walked past their window in the middle of the night and had left prints in the dust that were not shaped like feet.

Belief was not the point. The point was that the arrangement was old and the arrangement was working and it required that human beings stay off the canyon floor at night. There is a geologist named Sarah Whitcomb who works out of the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff and who has spent the last 11 years studying the strata of that particular canyon and who has published two papers in peer-reviewed journals about anomalous readings her instruments have picked up in a specific section of the canyon floor.

She has recorded on multiple occasions a low-frequency vibration at approximately 11 hertz that has no obvious geological source and that does not correspond to any tectonic activity in the region. She has recorded temperature differentials of up to 15 degrees Fahrenheit between two points less than 4 feet apart.

 She has recorded on one occasion what her seismograph registered as a footfall, singular, of an object she has estimated at approximately 800 pounds at a time when there was no one on the canyon floor and no one on the rim within 2 miles. She has not published that last finding. She has said that she does not intend to spend more time on that canyon after her current grant runs out. I asked Dr.

Whitcomb through email whether she was familiar with the stories told by the Diné families who live along the rim. She said she was. I asked her whether she would walk the old trail across the canyon floor at night. She did not respond for 8 days. When she did, she wrote only, “No.” and thanked me for my time.

 The third petroglyph panel is located in a section of the north wall that requires climbing gear to reach. Ella described it from memory because she had seen it once when she was 9 years old and her grandfather had held her by the shoulders and made her look at it for a long time so that she would remember.

 The carvings are not like the other panels which show human figures and animals and handprints and spirals. The third panel shows shapes that do not correspond to anything in the natural world arranged in a formal composition. In the center is a rectangle which her grandfather told her represented a door. On either side of the door there are figures.

The figures on one side are recognizably human. The figures on the other side are not. Between them, carved deeply into the rock, is a line her grandfather said represented the terms of the agreement. As long as that line remains unbroken, the agreement holds. If anyone ever damages the panel, the things in the canyon will not stay in the canyon anymore.

 Ella said her grandfather made her promise at the age of 9 that she would never tell an outsider where the third panel was located. She kept that promise. She was telling the story now at the end of her life only because she believed that if the young people forgot, the panel would eventually be damaged either by accident or by someone who thinks the old rules do not apply to them.

 And if it were damaged, the consequences would not be limited to the canyon. The researcher asked her finally if she had ever seen one of the things directly. Not from a distance. Not as lights on the canyon floor. Directly. Ella said yes. She said it was in 1961. She was 27 years old and she was walking home from her sister’s house at dusk.

Later than she should have been out. And she took a shortcut along the rim and she came around a bend in the trail and there was one of them standing on the rim looking down into the canyon with its back to her. She said she stopped walking. She said it did not turn around. She said she stood there for what she estimated was about 2 minutes and it did not move and she did not move and then she began to walk backwards very slowly the way you walk backwards away from a rattlesnake and she walked backwards for about 100 yards until she was around the

bend and out of sight. And then she turned and she ran. She said that when she got home her mother took one look at her and knew and put her to bed and sat with her all night. In the morning her mother said, “You saw one.” And Ella said, “Yes.” And her mother said, “Did it see you?” And Ella said she did not think so.

 And her mother said, “Good. We will not speak of this again.” They did not speak of it again for 63 years until Ella spoke of it to the researcher 3 weeks before she died. The researcher asked her what it looked like. Ella described it in translation from the Navajo which she preferred to speak in for this part of the interview.

She said it was tall, taller than a man and thin and the color of it was wrong and it was wearing something that was not clothing but was not skin either and its arms were long and its head, she said, and then she paused and then she said, “Its head was in the wrong place.” Which is the same phrase her 12-year-old brother had used 70 years earlier, and which Ella did not elaborate on when he asked her to. Ella died 6 weeks ago.

 She was buried on tribal land in a private ceremony. The mothers of the three young men attended. Ella had been clear in the weeks before her death that she wanted the burial done the old way without any elements of the church, which she had participated in for most of her life, but which she said at the end was not adequate for what she had seen and what she had known.

The old trail across the canyon floor is now closed. The tribal council voted in June to close it indefinitely. The signs at both trailheads say the closure is for reasons of cultural preservation and public safety, which is true and which is not the entire truth. The families along the rim have been asked, quietly, to make sure anyone visiting understands that the canyon is not to be entered at night under any circumstances.

 The younger dogs sometimes still cry at the door on certain nights. The families do not open the door anymore. Ella’s last words to the researcher were that she was tired, that she wanted him to leave the recorder off from that point forward, and that she had one thing left to say and would say it to the wall, not to him. He turned the recorder off.

 He does not know what she said to the wall. She spoke for perhaps 30 seconds quietly in Navajo, and when she was finished, she closed her eyes and he let himself out. She was found by her granddaughter the following Tuesday, having died sometime in the night in her sleep in the same house where she had lived for 70 years, 400 yards from the rim of a canyon that most maps do not name and that the ones who cross at night have crossed for longer than any of us have been counted.

The old trail is closed. The panel is unbroken. The lights, according to the families along the rim, still appear on certain nights without pattern, without warning, and hold their positions, and are the wrong color, and go away before the sun comes up. The dogs cry. The doors stay shut. The arrangement holds.

For now. And for as long as the panel stays in the rock, and the rules stay in the memory of the people, and the door in the center of the composition stays closed.