Article by Napa native 66martinez
The story I was told goes like this… During the 1950s (or 60s, depending on how the story has changed), Napa county was a small agricultural and ranching community, which holds true until today. The wine industry takes up the valley, and the hills outside the valley are full of small ranches.
The brighter something is, the darker shadow it casts.
It all starts with a farmer (the name was lost, and I have been unable to verify) who used to live up in the hills around Partrick road. At the time, he had a small ranch where he was raising cows, but I also heard the story told where this happened to his chickens.
One night, the farmer was sleeping when he heard these weird screams in the middle of the night. When he looked outside, he saw these strange red floating lights dancing around the edges of his property. The farmer was a typical Napa native, and instead of calling the police, he grabbed his gun and went outside. He yelled at the darkness, asking who was out there, and fired warning shots into the air. Since it was the middle of the night, he decided not to investigate until the sun came out in the morning.
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Upon the sun coming up, the farmer started his probe into what happened. The first thing he decided to do was count his cattle and make sure none were missing. When he checked his herd, the farmer noticed that a few of his cows were missing, and the cattle were highly skittish.
Would you investigate in the darkness?
The farmer began looking for the missing cows and decided to go to where he saw the lights. He went out to the edge of his property, where he saw the red floating lights and was immediately sick. The sight he found was gruesome. The farmer found a group of identical rings of blood, the number of which corresponded for each one of his missing cows. Within the blood rings were three identical piles: a pile of guts, a pile of bones sitting on a pile of neatly folded up cow skin.
The farmer was furious and disgusted, so he called his buddy, one of the local sheriffs. When the sheriff got out there and saw the scene, he almost threw up. Since this was back in the 50s, there was not much crime outside of the big cities. It was the biggest crime he’d ever encountered for the Napa sheriff, so he decided to investigate. After thorough scrutinization, the sheriff decided that this must have been some sort of Satanic cult. He and the farmer agreed to stake out the farm and hopefully try and catch the cult members in the act since there was little evidence left at the scene.
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Now, it is essential to remember that Napa is a rural community in the 50s moreso than it is now. The sheriff and the farmer working together was not something that would have drawn scrutiny from the community. The plan for the stakeouts involved both men waiting with loaded guns for the trespassers to enter the land, try to steal the farmer’s animals, and arrest them. The story goes that the two men staked out for a month together before the sheriff decided that he could not waste any more time babysitting the farmer’s land.
About a week after the sheriff abandoned the stakeout, he decided to check in on the farmer since he had not heard from him. The sheriff drove up to the farmer’s property and was not immediately greeted by the farmer, which he thought was odd. So he went to the farmer’s door and knocked, but no one answered, and the sheriff noticed that the farmer’s truck was not in the driveway. The sheriff was alarmed by this and decided to look for him, where they formerly chose to stake out together. (In some stories, the farmer had a wife who was missing too.)
He had to find his friend.
When he got to the stakeout site, the sheriff found the farmer’s truck abandoned. Upon inspection, he found a broken driver-side window and immediately drew his gun. The sheriff knew something was wrong and called for backup. He continued to look for his friend while waiting for backup. A few hundred yards from the farmer’s car, the sheriff found an eerily similar sight.
What he found was a ring of blood, a pile of guts, a pile of bones all sitting on a neatly folded pair of clothes and human skin. When the sheriff saw this, he knew that it was his friend, the farmer.
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The Napa sheriff’s office did their investigation, but they couldn’t find enough evidence of who the perpetrators were. The inquiry found no tire tracks or footprints other than the farmers. They didn’t find any motivation or enemies that the farmer might have had, and they also couldn’t find any other reports of cults operating in the area. The sheriff, who was friends with the farmer, was disturbed and sad, but eventually, his office just wrote it off as a cold case unsolved homicide. (Unable to find records of this.)
Throughout the years, the sheriff’s office turned up more reports of people seeing these red lights and hearing those awful blood-curdling screams around Partrick Road, especially by the cemetery at the end. Some of these reports included teenagers parked on the road having their car attacked. Others involved people going to the graveyard at night and seeing these strange red lights. The sheriff who worked on the farmer’s case documented these accounts, but he had not been able to put a face to these attacks. The survivors, however, had dubbed these things “rebobs,” and people were warned against going down Partrick Road at night or the rebobs will get you. The name for the monsters caught on and became a legend among locals.
Partrick Road can be both beautiful and unsettling.
And, this is where the story gets interesting. The sheriff who found the farmer’s body retired, but he still wanted to bring his friend’s killer to justice. He never got the chance, but when the sheriff was very old, a whistleblower from the federal government told him to speak with a mental patient at the Napa state hospital (unsure if this was in the 80s, 90s, or 2000s). The whistleblower said that the patient had a crazy story, which may provide answers to the sheriff and possibly give him some closure.
The old retired sheriff interviewed this guy who was an ex-big game hunter, permanently institutionalized at the Hospital. He said that many years earlier, the US government hired him to help clean up Angel Island (a location near the legend). He said that he lead a team of soldiers because of his experience tracking and killing dangerous wild game. The briefing stated that sometime in the 50s, the US government conducted genetic experiments on Angel Island at an underground base hidden on the island. (I found this fascinating since operation paperclip scientists were present in the bay area, and San Francisco was a hotbed of illegal CIA experiments around that time, i.e., MK ULTRA).
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Genetic experiments took place for some time—the end goal to create a covert weapon. The Feds viewed genetic manipulation as a way to get around the nuclear treaties at the time. The scientists combined raptor DNA with Monkeys to breed the ultimate predator. The idea was to drop one or two of these things over a town in Russia, and they would be able to wipe out a city or military base covertly without detonating nukes or declaring war.
The briefings said that these genetic experiments had razor-sharp talons on their hands, wing-like bats and three eyes, two normal monkey eyes, and one infrared eye in their forehead to allow them to see in the dark. They smaller than humans, but this is conflicting (I have heard that they were human-sized as well). The general consensus is that they can fly and only move around at night since their red-eye gets hurt in the daylight.
Genetically engineered weapons of the government?
The rebobs are intelligent and problem-solving by design. As the story goes, they got smart enough to wonder why they had to take orders and live in cages. Supposedly, these creatures got out of the science base after killing all of the scientists who created them and started to kill people on the Angel Island base. The army was having difficulty containing these things, and the fear was they would escape to the mainland. The government knew they needed help, so they called in this big game hunter to find a way to capture and kill these things so they could reopen the base and not have them escape to the mainland.
The hunter devised a plan based on his experience hunting dangerous game. He used the geography of Angel Island, which has a hill on it, giving him a 360-degree view of the whole island. He placed his men at strategic positions around the island in groups of three. Essentially he planned to use one guy as bait and the others to kill the genetic experiments. The bait guy was to hold a torch and stand there throughout the night. The hunter was supposed to stay on the mountain with a radio and other men in his group. He was going to be viewing his men throughout the night and give them guidance over the radio.
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The night the plan was to be executed, the hunter set up his men and climbed to the top of Angel Island. He waited in the dark and saw his men light their torches. As the night progressed, his men began to get attacked. At first, the torch lights started to go out. Then he saw the red dancing lights. All of a sudden, screams echoed in a cacophony from the darkness, and gunshots followed. He tried to render aid, but when he would send men out to assist, all he would get was a report over the radio of a ring of blood, a pile of guts, a pile of bones, and a pile of human skin all nice and folded up. As the night progressed, he slowly lost contact with all of his men.
The story goes they all died, and the hunter got so scared that he ran down the hill, jumped in the bay, and swam to the mainland. The entire time he ran, otherworldy noise reverberated around him in the night. Upon reaching civilization, law enforcement didn’t take long to pick him up because of his apparent madness and insane story that allegedly transpired that night. The government then institutionalized him, and no one took him seriously until he told his story to the sheriff.
It was all swept under the rug just like MK-Ultra and the UFO phenomenon…
The part of the story that was never made clear was how these creatures got to Napa. One of the stories that I heard was that they jumped a ferry to get onto the mainland. Another version has them following the hunter as he swam away. What isn’t clear is why they chose Napa and specifically Partrick Road. I was told that it was because, in the 50s and 60s, Napa was rural with a lot of food in the shape of farm animals. But Petaluma and Santa Rosa have the same ranches, so how come these creatures are a “Napa only” phenomenon?
To learn more about the Napa Rebobs click here
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