During our 1989 exploratory trip to Michoacan, we ventured to ancient ruins known as Tingambato. The top photograph is from a postcard. Often, I try to stand exactly where the postcard photographer stood and take the exact same shot.

Notice the child in blue and red running across the courtyard. To reproduce the postcard accurately, I asked my wife to run across the courtyard in similar fashion. She wouldn’t go for it. I asked nicely, persuasively and she would not do it. It was too hot to be running around like that. The temperature on that day was around 100 degrees.

Despite my wife not wanting to run across the courtyard, I lined up the shot and took the picture. Weeks later, back in the states, I had the film developed and looked at the picture. To my surprise, my picture shows a child running across the courtyard just like in the postcard. I don’t remember the child being there, or maybe I did and snapped the picture real quick. Not sure.

The Tingambato ruins are fascinating. They had pyramids and a ball court. Reminded me of Teotihuacan near Mexico City. The ruins of Tingambato was discovered in 1977. I started to write a book about this great find. A snippet is below these photographs.

One final note. See the mountain in the background? When we were there, I would hear the sound of a cannon firing. When I looked, I watched the projectile hit the side of the mountain causing an explosion. I don’t know if this was artillery practice or firing at rebels on the mountain. I may never know.

Below is a snippet of a book I started to write about Tingambato. The book will remain unfinished.

Tingambato is a real place and not a hallucination. It hardly showed up on the map prior to 1977 when stone ruins dating back to Mexico’s Classic Age were discovered there. Prior to that year, the State of Michoacan was a blank spot in the field of 10,000 known archaeological sites. We’re talking expansive civilizations of the Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs never reached there, or had they? It was believed that despite inhabiting areas north, south and east of Michoacan, they had left this region alone for unknown reasons. For this reason, Dr. Román Piña Chan from the National Institute of Anthropology and History, was sent to investigate.

A noted archeologist, Chan had oversight over projects in the State of Mexico and Michoacan, but when Salvador Propero approached him about possible ruins at Tingambato he was doubtful, it was unprecedented. Still, to his credit Propero persisted. Propero had an affinity for his hometown of Timgambato, though he had moved to Morelia to teach music. He told Chan about a place near Timgambato they called the Two Little Hills. It was here, hidden beneath the earth, that Propero claimed were the ruins of his Tarascan ancestors.

But Propero wasn’t pulling this stuff out of the sky, the village was flooded with rumors that at the place of the Two Little Hills, the Devil lived. They knew that an ancient people lived there prior to the arrival of the Spanish, thus the people were pagans and their ghosts haunted the area. When Propero was 12-years-old, his teacher, Professor Serapio Barjas Jazo, an amateur archeologist, studied the terrain of the Two Little Hills, and claimed the hills were an ‘old town’. But Bajas Jazo talked about it but never dug.

Propero held another memory involving his father, a musician who would walk to the surrounding villages and teach them music. They were returning from the village of San Angel one night and his father decided to cut across the Two Little Hills. Propero begged him not to cross because the Devil lived there dressed up like a fancy horseman, a charro. His father knelt down beside Propero and told him that the story was a bunch of superstitious nonsense. But, his father also said, “Salvadore, there’s something there.”

He held a memory of when he was a child walking with his father. As they approached the Two Little Hills area, little Propero begged his father not to enter. ProHe told his father that the other boy remembered his father, also a musician, He held on to his father’s words that there was something there. But his own father suspected there was something there and told young Properowith conviction he talked and finally Chan agreed to investigate.