Long before it became known as the home of the Manson Family, the Spahn Movie Ranch was actively used as a shooting location for big screen films.
The big budget classic Duel in the Sun filmed there and became a huge hit at the box office.
Movie and TV westerns, however, quickly became a thing of the past. Audiences were no longer into the kind of films that required a western setting. Soon the Ranch was hosting low budget Z-Movies like The Creeping Terror, a laughably bad film featuring a renegade alien that looked like a carpet.
The ranch would sink further by the late 1960's, becoming the home of the Manson Family cult. The same ranch that had been seen by millions on the silver screen would become synonymous with real life terror and mayhem.
