From buried grottos to mysterious orbs, could this Santa Cruz Mountains property be the next Fatima or Lourdes?

BOULDER CREEK – Brut Farris moved into a cottage among the towering redwoods overlooking the Boulder Creek deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains about 15 years ago because it was scenic — not sacred.

It didn’t hurt that there was plenty of space for him and his friends to shoot their bows and park their Harleys.

So when he stumbled upon a toppled-over statue of the Virgin Mary in a stone enclosure while helping extend the driveway to the edge of a hillside, he didn’t think much  about chucking it into a sinkhole with other debris.

He had no idea back then that the property’s previous owner, the late Cora Evans who died here in 1957, was a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church. He hadn’t heard the stories that she was considered a mystic and fell into deep trances and wrote thousands of pages about walks with God. He didn’t know that she tended a meandering garden path down the hillside where she prayed before religious statues tucked into homemade rock grottos.

“I was unhip to that,” said Farris, 57, who wishes he had the statue back. “I’m mad at myself for letting it go.”

This week, two cousins will travel to the Vatican to make the case for Evans’ sainthood, a prospect that could one day turn this unlikely spot in the Santa Cruz Mountains into a holy destination, like Lourdes and Fatima.

“Our Lord did say that that will become a shrine later on in the future,” said Michael Huston, 75, one of the cousins whose grandmother was best friends with Evans. “We don’t know if that’s going to be 100 years from now or what.”

If it’s anytime soon, believers might find, along with the Harleys and ATVs in the driveway, a place of curiosities and contradictions, the secular and the sacred, amid damage from this winter’s storms that even insurance companies would consider “Acts of God.”

The cousins say they hope to one day purchase the property, but for now, they are concentrating on their trip next week to the Vatican – 6,200 miles away – where they will meet with the Congregation of Saints who will further investigate Evans’ cause. For more than two decades, Huston and his cousin, Mike McDevitt, have been pursuing the case for sainthood, publishing books of Evans’ writings, assembling histories and testimonials about her life and holding retreats in her name. Evans has already cleared the first hurdle for sainthood: She is considered a “Servant of God.” The next step would be the Vatican declaring her  “Venerable,” meaning she is “heroic in virtue.”

Only 11 Americans have ever been canonized as saints. There are more than 100 other would-be saints from the United States — many who died more than a century or two ago — who have never advanced beyond Servant of God.

But the Diocese of Monterey, which encompasses Evans’ home and sanctioned the cousin’s efforts, and the Rev. Gary Thomas, the former Sacred Heart pastor from Saratoga who advised the cousins along the sainthood journey, believe she is a strong candidate.

Evans was born into a Mormon family in Utah in 1904 but became disillusioned with the church after she married. After listening to an inspirational radio program, she converted to Catholicism. She had three children, including a son who died at 11 months old. The family moved to Los Angeles first, where she connected with Jesuit priests and began to have mystic visions of the life of Jesus. Believers would go to her house and witness her in a trance-like state of “ecstasy,” Thomas said in an interview. She levitated from her bed, he said, and experienced stigmata, the bleeding from her palms like Christ did from the cross. Huston says his parents witnessed it.

Evans is considered a “mystic” because she had spiritual visions that were not considered hallucinations.

“When she would come back to herself, she would share what she had seen — having to do with Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Thomas said.

Unlike priests and nuns known for starting schools or serving the poor, Evans is a candidate for sainthood, Thomas said, because of her spiritual gifts that allowed her to “see” the life of Jesus unfold in a much more detailed way than even the Bible.

She also might be an appealing, relatable saint, Huston said, because unlike many female saints who were nuns, Evans was a 20th-century wife and mother who suffered the loss of a child.

But first, the Vatican congregation must review 11,000 pages of documents compiled by Huston and McDevitt and others, neatly packed in 11 white boxes, wrapped in red ribbon and secured with the wax seal of the Monterey Diocese.

On April 20, the cousins and a small group of supporters, including McDevitt’s wife, Pam, will witness the moment when the Congregation of Saints “breaks the seals” and commits to investigating Evans’ life.

If all goes well, perhaps in as few as five years, Evans may join more than 80 others in the Venerable category worldwide. But then comes the trickiest part for sainthood – proving two miracles after her death. Her supporters would have to show the Vatican that prayers made directly to Evans led to both miracles, such as healing someone suffering from a medically incurable disease.

Turning Evans’ former Boulder Creek home and property into a shrine, however, might require another miracle.

After her death, her property a half mile from Johnnie’s Super Market in downtown Boulder Creek was purchased, then split in two. Her three-bedroom house sits on one lot and looks ready to fall down the hillside into the rain-swollen creek. During this winter’s storms, a tree smashed through the back deck, and large branches pierced the roof.  A blue tarp covers most of it now. The garage doors won’t open and the house slopes so far toward the hillside that a marble could roll from the front door to the back.

The owner, William Kersten, built a 6-foot fence around his property after thieves stole his tools, and today an entrance is nearly impossible to find. In the 15 years he’s owned the home, the retired building maintenance supervisor never once heard the name Cora Evans, much less the idea of turning the property into a shrine.

“Well, the place needs a full-on makeover, that’s for sure,” Kersten said.

The second lot includes a red, one-room cottage where Farris lives and where Evans apparently put up guests. A new home was built next to it sometime later, where Farris’s landlord and other biker friends live.

For a while, a woman rented an apartment underneath it and swore the place was haunted, said Jim Cicero, who lives upstairs.

And instead of gardens and a sanctuary to the Blessed Mother Mary down by the creek, Farris has set up a mannequin for target shooting with his bow and arrow.

Sometimes, when Cicero has taken photos of the property near the creek, the prints are filled with bubble-like orbs.

“We don’t see them when we take the pictures, but later on, we see all these orbs on our pictures,” said Cicero, who grew up in the Lutheran Church. “It probably has something to do with the water, but other people think that it’s some supernatural kind of thing.”

Already, nearly two dozen strangers have shown up over the years asking about Cora Evans, and Farris often obliges with a quick tour on his side of the property.

He still feels bad about burying the shrine to the Virgin Mary. But it’s not the only one discovered on the property. Another free-standing concrete grotto, without a statue inside, somehow ended up leaning against the newer house where Cicero lives. When Cicero’s Aunt Marian visited and learned about Evans, she asked if she could have it — and put her own statue of the Virgin Mary inside. So Cicero heaved it into the back of his truck and drove it to Livermore, where his son then drove it to her backyard in Boise, Idaho.

“My daughter gave me this statue 12 years ago, it fits perfect in there like it was meant to be,” said Marian Bailey, who took up reading extensively about Cora Evans. “I feel strongly that she should be considered a saint and what she saw and experienced was real.”

Just last week, below the debris pile and obscured by brush, Kersten found yet another grotto — empty but still upright — and dug out nearly three feet of dark humus that had settled inside.

The statue that wound up in the sinkhole might have been broken or cracked at the time, Farris said, a condition that might lend him a little grace for tossing it. Still, he tries to look on the bright side of his own bungle.

“It’s almost a blessing” that he buried the shrine when he did, he said. “Now at least it’s still here – because Jimmy’s aunt would have got two of ‘em.”

It will “take a minute,” he said, but now that he understands the extra significance of the statue that he hurled into a sinkhole 15 years ago, he plans to resurrect it.

Someday, pilgrims may want to see it.

“I’ll unbury it nice,” Farris said, “and put it back the best that I can.”