He named the tower Hawk Tower because he said that a hawk came every day while he was building it and landed on the stones. This was not the only mystic occurrence during his tenure in Carmel. Una, an admirer of William Butler Yeats (who also owned a tower, in Ireland), was as much of a believer in spiritualism as Yeats. Yeats and his wife practiced automatic writing, during which she went into a trance and believed that her hand was guided by spirits. It seems that Una, and Jeffers, though he was a trained scientist, shared an enthusiasm for probing the spirit world. One of the surprises of the main house is a skull (what Jeffers liked to call a “human brain vault”) the couple kept in a hidden alcove under the stairs, presumably for séances.
Jeffers believed in the notion that he was part of some life flow that transcended his own mortality. And, as his poetry became inseparable from the stone and ocean, so too did his fate and his home and his poetry get intertwined. They built the house on a spot where Indians had lived. But the connection did not end there. When they later dug the foundation for the fireplace in the kitchen, they found that the Indians had had their fire pit in the exact same spot. Those coast Indians, who spoke of a fabulous city called Esalen, which no settlers ever found, had disappeared from the land long ago. But they remained alive to Jeffers and to others, who felt the presence of the Indians in the hills of Big Sur.
