The Mystery Spot’s yellow sticker is taking over the world and nobody is quite sure why

Ben Hamilton had just finished an electrician service call in Celina, Texas, when a flash of bright yellow caught his eye. The familiar blocky letters plastered on the Honda Civic’s rear bumper read “MYSTERY SPOT,” and underneath in smaller print “SANTA CRUZ, CALIF. – U.S.A.”

It took him a moment to remember that he was in Texas, not Santa Cruz, where he lived for the first nine years of his life, nor greater Northern California, where he lived for years — and where bumper stickers for the mystifying, seemingly gravity-defying tourist spot are seemingly ubiquitous. He snapped a photo to show his wife and ended up posting it to Facebook. 

His post is one of many lending evidence to the idea that these homegrown bumper stickers might just be a worldwide phenomenon.

So, just how far does the reach of the Mystery Spot sticker go?

Posts and comments about the Mystery Spot bumper stickers on social media indicate they’ve been spotted in Oregon, North Dakota, Hawaii and Georgia; British Columbia, Canada; East Sussex in the United Kingdom; Germany; Hyderabad and Delhi in India; Beijing, China; New Zealand; and Quito, Ecuador. 

The Mystery Spot’s manager, Rachel Miller, said India is the No. 1 place where customers tell her the stickers have been spotted, followed by the U.K. and Russia. And from the online store, Miller said the stickers are often shipped to Mexico, Iowa and a bunch to Michigan on account of a similarly billed supernatural attraction there. 

Around 80% of the Mystery Spot’s marketing budget goes toward those stickers, with the other part being explanatory brochures. Based on customer surveys, roughly 20% of visitors found out about the attraction off Branciforte Drive in Happy Valley because of the stickers.  

Miller estimates that 25,000 stickers are handed out free each year to visitors, leaving plenty of opportunity for the yellow and black emblem to circulate worldwide. And the Mystery Spot’s customer base is only growing larger. 

Employee sightings

Reuben Campbell, who has worked at the Mystery Spot for five years and lived in Santa Cruz for 16, saw the sticker in his hometown of Bath, England. He can’t remember the first time he saw the stickers since he was just 4 years old when he got here. 

But that day in Bath, Campbell said he looked up at one of the old-timey British street posts holding a lantern and saw the Mystery Spot represented alongside a group of other stickers. 

“I was there enjoying a foreign city,” he said. “And you know, they had clearly come and enjoyed our city, which is cool.”

Up in Portland, Oregon, for a college tour in April, Nora Brylowski pulled into a parking lot at Reed College and caught a glimpse of the sticker on a car with Washington license plates. She compared their global reach to that of the “Nice here, but have you been in Baden-Württemberg?” stickers referring to a province in southwestern Germany. That sticker started out as a tourism marketing campaign and ended up as more of a meme than anything. 

“It’s sort of like a local point of pride,” she said, adding that both she and her parents have Mystery Spot stickers on their cars. 

Brylowski used to live in Michigan, where she would see the Mystery Spot Santa Cruz stickers around town. She also went to what she deems the “fake” and “cash grab” Mystery Spot in Michigan when she was too young to remember.

Similarly, while Conall MacFhionnlaoich was in Illinois for the past year, he saw the “banana slug” yellow surface in his area every so often. 

That’s why he and his brother, who also worked at the Mystery Spot, weren’t too shocked when they saw one on a walk just 3 minutes from their house in Dublin, Ireland. When his brother first recognized the sticker on the parked car with Irish license plates, he said something to the effect of “We can’t escape it!”

He was a little more surprised to see it on a different trip to the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, where the sticker was plastered on a construction truck moving hurricane debris. 

In MacFhionnlaoich’s 11 summers working at the Mystery Spot, he’s given tours to plenty of visitors from India, Japan and China who are typically brought there by relatives living in the Bay Area, but he also remembers a few more obscure ones from Madagascar, Mauritius and South Georgia Island.

“Because of how widespread they are, it’s one of those things of you see it all the time, but you don’t really know what it is,” he said of the stickers. “So, that draws people in, and then you get it for free. So it’s like you’re kind of joining a club, almost.”

History of the sticker

George Prather, the founder of the Mystery Spot, first discovered the site in 1939 before opening it to the public in 1942. And as far as Miller knows, that’s when the bumper stickers were designed and created. Prather ran the place with his son, Bruce, and the pair have been credited for the emblematic design, particularly the yellow.  

“That’s the only logo we’ve ever had,” Miller said.

When asked how she would describe the sticker’s specific color, Miller said she likes to think of it as a “true sunshine yellow.”

The thick “O” represents the 150-foot diameter circle that the Mystery Spot property contains, and the hole in the center of the “O” is a symbol for the cabin that lies in the middle of the spot and is said to hold the strongest forces showcased on the tours.  

And while that “O” in fact depicted the Mystery Spot, to some unsuspecting visitors it seems to suggest a record store or donut shop — and the name gives little help to those struggling to figure out what the Mystery Spot is or sells. Miller has talked to people who showed up thinking the Mystery Spot sold these things, never bothering to Google it prior.

The logo and bumper sticker were born simultaneously. Or, rather, it started as a bumper ornament. The original “wired to the grill” design saw the logo printed on 2-foot by 6-inch cardstock-like paper with hole punches, then twined onto the metal bumper of cars in the parking lot by Mystery Spot employees during the tours. 

Adhesive got involved around 1963 with the first real sticker. It got smaller, now about 1 foot by 4 inches, but retained the exact logo and color of the original. This edition stood until the mid-1990s when the internet came around, bringing about text on the bottom right corner that read: “Visit us on the world wide web at www.mysteryspot.com.”

The design got smaller once again, in 2005, measuring 8 inches long and about 3 inches tall, which remains as today’s classic bumper sticker size. Miller said she’s a fan of going bigger, but that people with increasingly expensive cars are less likely to use a larger sticker. 

In 2014, the yellow got a few shades brighter though not noticeable to the untrained eye, added “California State Historical Landmark NO. 1055” in the bottom left corner and changed the world wide web text to simply: “Visit us at www.mysteryspot.com.” 

A few months ago, management made the most significant change in the sticker’s history: printing a version with a black border. It will be short-lived, though. The Mystery Spot won’t be reordering them after people found them a bit jarring to look at and somewhat clunky. Staff also experimented with different equally bright colors to replace the iconic yellow but decided the brand recognition took precedence. Those never made it into customer hands.

Miller herself sports an exclusive pink Mystery Spot sticker on her car from those samples.

Besides that experiment and a couple early newspaper ads that ran in orange, the yellow has been a Mystery Spot mainstay.

“The yellow is just so iconic,” Miller said. “And, you know, being such an old historic business, it’s really important to us to maintain our historicalness and not change too many things.”

Not many changes are planned for the future, and the stickers will surely keep the yellow and the same big text. 

The Mystery Spot cars

Perhaps the most extreme examples of the bumper sticker craze are the four Mystery Spot-owned cars that are completely covered in the stickers: the original Kia that staff covered in 2005, the Mazda that joined it in 2015, a super old Toyota pickup truck they use for dump runs, and their newest, a red Mini Cooper that a former employee donated.

There’s a secret fifth Mystery Spot car if you count the Ford Crown Victoria that broke down on a trip to a gift shop convention in Las Vegas, was sold to a guy who was interested and which now sits on the side of the road next to his shop in Boron, California. 

Some of the newer vehicles are wrapped rather than carpeted with actual stickers. The idea came out of the need to replace old faded stickers about once a year. Miller said the employee tasked with the re-stickering counted 2,387 bumper stickers on one of the cars.

The Mystery Spot wasn’t the first to do it. 

The cars idea came from a regular customer in the 1980s who came back week after week to alleviate his chronic pain. Miller said a lot of people believe in “some sort of healing effect of the Mystery Spot.”

“We’ve had a few customers that will come weekly, take the tour, but really just to stand inside the cabin and feel that relief,” she said of the building that’s the centerpiece of the Mystery Spot tour.

He was one of those people. And after each tour, he would get a free bumper sticker — maybe a few more once the staff figured out what he was up to — until he had enough to cover his Volkswagen bus. It was also popular at the time to paint vans to look like The Mystery Machine from “Scooby-Doo.” 

“He was like, ‘I’m making my own Mystery Machine,’” Miller said. “And it was full of stickers, and he would come all the time, and it was such a hoot.”

The power of the sticker

Brylowski, who just finished her first year working at the Mystery Spot, said she sees locals both avoid the Mystery Spot because they’re sick of the stickers or love them and see it as a local point of pride.  

“I’m from Santa Cruz, look at me with my bumper sticker,” she said. “I feel like it definitely is a connection to Santa Cruz.”

She saw a post on Reddit that resonated with her that deemed the Mystery Spot stickers an “unofficial badge of someone who lives in the Bay Area.”

MacFhionnlaoich sees its strength in the simplicity of the color scheme.

“It’s very standout, you know, the black and yellow so it’s easy to see,” he said.

But it could also just be the dynamic, enjoyable medium.

“It’s such a fun piece of advertising,” Miller said. “I think more businesses should take advantage of the sticker. People love stickers. People stick it on anything.”

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