the untamed years

Before the Summer of Love turned Esalen into a counterculture pilgrimage site, the Institute was already hosting an eclectic parade of visionaries, renegades, and artists.

Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg were there at times, bringing with them an air of exile, erotic experiment, and literary provocation.

Joan Baez lived on the property, offering intimate midnight concerts to whoever was near enough to hear.

And the young Hunter S. Thompson — just 20, armed with several weapons and tracer bullets, serving as the property’s most improbable security guard. He idolized Henry Miller and Dennis Murphy, Michael’s brother, who had written a bestselling novel.

One legendary night, a group of visiting Venice Beach bodybuilders decided that Hunter’s homophobic remarks had crossed the line. He soon found himself dangling over the cliff — an early lesson in the local definition of peacekeeping.

Some moments on the property have defied explanation. On the night Alan Watts died, for example, Michael was meditating in his upstairs room in the Murphy House, and was suddenly struck by pain and confusion. At the same time, in his home in Mill Valley, George Leonard had similar unaccountable feelings of distress.

In Esalen lore, such synchronicities are often reported. When Michael’s grandfather purchased the land in 1910, he didn’t know he was acquiring territory sacred to Indigenous people who believed spirits inhabited the place. Today, some people still have experiences that lead them to think such spirits remain active here.

Through the decades, the institute has become a crossroads where the physical world meets the mystical, and artistic risk lives alongside spiritual experiment.