• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Magnetic / Gravity / Mystery Hills (Where Things 'Roll Uphill')

View attachment 8462 There's a really good railway "Electric Brae" at Law in South Lanarkshire. The West Coast Main Line diverges at Law Junction with the straight ahead route heading for Motherwell and the line to the right going to Wishaw and Holytown Jn. This photo I took a couple of years ago shows it reasonably well; the Holytown line on the right looks like it is climbing significantly but in fact the gradient on both lines is falling, it's just the main line drops away at a much steeper rate. Off the top of my head I think the fall on the Holytown line is around 1 in 800ish. It's a pretty convincing optical illusion and is even better in real life but sadly only train drivers and railway engineers (like me) riding up the front get to experience it.

Oh my FLIP, why haven't I seen this before? Brilliant!
 
I have heard of this but not experienced it for my self, was always under the impression that it was a optical illusion.
 
Escet (our own former CERN physicist) was talking about this phenomenon over a curry and beers recently. We had a lot to talk about! but we may have agreed to visit some gravity hot-spots. I'll report back!

It's an illusion though innit. Out on the bikes, I often think we're level or going downhill when Techy says we're actually fighting the gradient*, or vice versa. Maybe some people are worse at judging gradients than others?

*Though he's sometimes convinced we're climbing/descending along a canal path. Canals have to be level or the water would fall out.
 
I have heard of this but not experienced it for my self, was always under the impression that it was a optical illusion.

It is an optical illusion.

I've been to the Electric Brae and viewed the phenomenon myself. I have several photos of the area, but for some reason, I can't get my Windows 8.1 lappy to open the .jpeg files on the DVD-R.

The illusion is caused by the road dropping off out of sight down a steep slope, with rising hills in the background. This leads the eye to suppose that it's running uphill, whereas the opposite is the case.

maximus otter
 
Dangerous, for sure. Fun? Yep.

I was with some fiends and other animals in Scotland late last year and we had seen the Electric Brae mentioned in FT so we took a look.

It took 3 goes, but when we started rolling backwards we were really freaked out by it. Bearing in mind the scene: 3 Cars each with 4x 30 somethings in it, all rolling backwards - UPHILL.

Very cool, I recomend it to anyone.

Our best guess was the way the level horizon of the sea works with the surrounding landscape.
I went there to try it years ago and nothing happened. I put my disappointment down to wrong atmospherics on the day.
 
This is so poorly described that I'm not sure what is meant, but is this spot in the Redwoods the same phenomenon?

'Mystery Spot'
Warning: Contains Jonathan King.


From 2:50, but you may as well watch from the start.

More Forteana (The Winchester House) at 8:36
 
Today Techy and I visited an ancient cairn called the Bridestones. As we drew near I was forging ahead and at the top of a hill I stopped pedalling and prepared to coast down the dip.

However, instead the bike ground to a halt and I nearly fell off. It felt heavy as lead, as if I was going uphill and not down. I resumed pedalling and all was well.

Baffling.
 
This is so poorly described that I'm not sure what is meant, but is this spot in the Redwoods the same phenomenon?

'Mystery Spot'
Warning: Contains Jonathan King.


From 2:50, but you may as well watch from the start.

More Forteana (The Winchester House) at 8:36
How did this doofus get a show? That's the real mystery.

The "Mystery Spot" is in Santa Cruz. It's a well-established tourist trap. From my SpookyGeology post:

You’ll have to pay to visit most crooked shack “mystery spots”. A famous one is in Santa Cruz, California. The tour guides say the “gravity house” is the product of a circular anomaly about 150 feet (46m) in diameter where gravity misbehaves. Here is a ridiculous attempt at an explanation from their website:

Some speculate that cones of metal were secretly brought here and buried in our earth as guidance systems for their spacecraft. Some think that it is in fact the spacecraft itself buried deep within the ground. Other theories include carbon dioxide permeating from the earth, a hole in the ozone layer, a magma vortex, the highest dielectric biocosmic radiation known anywhere in the world, and radiesthesia. Whatever the cause is, it remains a mystery.
The Mystery Spot (Santa Cruz)
*SPOILERS* No, it's no mystery. That's a whole lotta bullshit in one paragraph.
The Santa Cruz Mystery Spot was listed as a California Historical Landmark (#1055) on August 22, 2014. It was not listed because of its natural wonder, though. It was notable as the first (1941) and most significant “tilt-box” or “gravity house” roadside attraction in California. It was certainly not the last. These types of tourist spots became popular in the mid-twentieth century.

Originally, tilt-houses were the product of the Great Depression era, when people needed cheap entertainment. Local tales notwithstanding, they have little to do with any physical anomaly. They are cleverly engineered structures designed to distort the architecture – where normal visual references are hidden, and distorted objects are added to enhance the effect. People stand at weird angles and experience a sensory illusion that can induce vertigo, nausea, or it may be entirely enjoyable and fun. Visitors are primed to be astounded and confused but discouraged from lingering too long in the structure to do any measurements. The exaggerated story of a physical anomaly that “baffles” scientists add to the atmosphere. The illusion effect is so powerful that people buy a nonsensical incorrect explanation.

So, nothing strange here except this TV host.
 
How did this doofus get a show? That's the real mystery.

The "Mystery Spot" is in Santa Cruz. It's a well-established tourist trap. From my SpookyGeology post:

You’ll have to pay to visit most crooked shack “mystery spots”. A famous one is in Santa Cruz, California. The tour guides say the “gravity house” is the product of a circular anomaly about 150 feet (46m) in diameter where gravity misbehaves. Here is a ridiculous attempt at an explanation from their website:


*SPOILERS* No, it's no mystery. That's a whole lotta bullshit in one paragraph.
The Santa Cruz Mystery Spot was listed as a California Historical Landmark (#1055) on August 22, 2014. It was not listed because of its natural wonder, though. It was notable as the first (1941) and most significant “tilt-box” or “gravity house” roadside attraction in California. It was certainly not the last. These types of tourist spots became popular in the mid-twentieth century.

Originally, tilt-houses were the product of the Great Depression era, when people needed cheap entertainment. Local tales notwithstanding, they have little to do with any physical anomaly. They are cleverly engineered structures designed to distort the architecture – where normal visual references are hidden, and distorted objects are added to enhance the effect. People stand at weird angles and experience a sensory illusion that can induce vertigo, nausea, or it may be entirely enjoyable and fun. Visitors are primed to be astounded and confused but discouraged from lingering too long in the structure to do any measurements. The exaggerated story of a physical anomaly that “baffles” scientists add to the atmosphere. The illusion effect is so powerful that people buy a nonsensical incorrect explanation.

So, nothing strange here except this TV host.

Spoilsport - I was banking on it being down to secretly buried cones of metal left by a spacecraft.
 
As promised, here are some photos from my and my wife's visit to the Mystery Spot in 2013. As an added bonus there are a handful of pictures from Santa Cruz boardwalk which was a filming location for The Lost Boys.

MDS_2237.jpg

MDS_2247.jpg
MDS_2251.jpg
MDS_2253.jpg
MDS_2257.jpg

MDS_2261.jpg
MDS_2262.jpg
MDS_2292.jpg
MDS_2293.jpg
MDS_2297.jpg
MDS_2312.jpg
 
As promised, here are some photos from my and my wife's visit to the Mystery Spot in 2013. As an added bonus there are a handful of pictures from Santa Cruz boardwalk which was a filming location for The Lost Boys.

View attachment 28804
View attachment 28805View attachment 28806View attachment 28807View attachment 28808
View attachment 28809View attachment 28810View attachment 28811View attachment 28812View attachment 28813View attachment 28814

That's quite a bonus--I love the Lost Boys.

And no Jonathan King in any of your shots, either!
 
Actually the optical illusion doesn't apply to all these places. A surveyor friend and I took a theodolite out to one of the non-mystery house versions of the mystery spots and surveyed one and it wasn't an optical illusion at all, or the theodolite would have picked it up.
 
This Science Alert article provides an overview of the 'mystery hill' phenomenon and multiple videos / animations illustrating the weirdness at actual such sites..
These Gravity-Defying Hills Are One of The Weirdest Natural Phenomena We've Seen

Scattered across the world are a number of bewildering 'mystery spots' that appear to defy gravity – places where cars seem to drift uphill, and cyclists struggle to push themselves downhill.

Also known as gravity hills, these bizarre natural phenomena can be found in places like Confusion Hill in California and Magnetic Hill in Canada, and while they've inspired rumours of witchcraft and giant magnets buried in the countryside, the actual scientific explanation will have you questioning every slope you encounter from here on out.

There are reportedly dozens of gravity hills around the world, in the US, the UK, Australia, Brazil, and Italy, and they all have one thing in common – if you drive your car to the bottom of the hill and put it in neutral, it will proceed to roll back UP the slope. ...

But if you get some surveying equipment or GPS markers to actually measure the difference between the 'top' of the slope and the 'bottom', you'll realise that everything is actually in reverse.

"The embankment is sloped in a way that gives you the effect that you are going uphill," materials physicist Brock Weiss from Pennsylvania State University told Discoveries and Breakthroughs in Science back in 2006.

"You are, indeed, going downhill, even though your brain gives you the impression that you're going uphill."

But if a hill is physically sloping one way – so much so that cars actually gain quite a bit of momentum when they start drifting 'up' – how could our eyes trick us so bad every time?

According to psychologists, it's all about the horizon – either it's obscured in areas with gravity hills, so we don't have a proper point of reference, or the horizon is there, but it obscures how the hill slopes in relation to the rest of the landscape. ...

A 2003 study looked into how the absence of a horizon can also skew our perspective on gravity hills by recreating a number of real-life 'antigravity' places in the lab to see how volunteers would react.

Researchers from the Universities of Padova and Pavia in Italy built tabletop models of several gravity hills around the world and got volunteers to peer at them through a hole that gave them the perspective of actually being there. ...

They then messed around with the horizon in the model to see how that would affect the volunteers' perspective on which way the slope ran.

They found that without a true horizon in sight, landmarks such as trees and signs actually played tricks on the volunteers' brains. ...

FULL STORY (WITH MULTIPLE VIDEOS / ANIMATIONS):
https://www.sciencealert.com/these-...-of-the-weirdest-natural-phenomena-we-ve-seen
 
Here are the bibliographic particulars and abstract of the 2003 study cited in the article ...

Bressan P, Garlaschelli L, Barracano M.
Antigravity Hills are Visual Illusions.
Psychological Science. 2003;14(5):441-449.
doi:10.1111/1467-9280.02451

Abstract
Antigravity hills, also known as spook hills or magnetic hills, are natural places where cars put into neutral are seen to move uphill on a slightly sloping road, apparently defying the law of gravity. We show that these effects, popularly attributed to gravitational anomalies, are in fact visual illusions. We re-created all the known types of antigravity spots in our laboratory using tabletop models; the number of visible stretches of road, their slant, and the height of the visible horizon were systematically varied in four experiments. We conclude that antigravity-hill effects follow from a misperception of the eye level relative to gravity, caused by the presence of either contextual inclines or a false horizon line.

SOURCE: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9280.02451#articleCitationDownloadContainer
 
Back
Top