Informant Information:

Frank Pol is a student at the University of Southern California studying Computer Science. He is from a Venezuelan background, and is originally from Weston, FL before moving to Los Angeles, CA for college.

Story:

“My dad, so in Venezuela where my dad is from, they have a mountain called the Avila and it has a bunch of hiking and biking paths all the way down. I would take them all the time. So there’s this one that him and his family called Pase del Diablo. It’s basically just a super deep drop they would never do on their bikes, because there’s a story of people always trying to do it but they always end up dying because it’s hard to land. The whole area was protected so you weren’t supposed to be up there according to the government, but because the government doesn’t mean anything in Venezuela they still go up there.”

Q: Before your dad started biking, was this place familiar for this atmosphere?

“Yeah from the way he told me it was a story that was told to him by older friends.”

Q: Have you ever had a personal experience with this mountain?

“I just saw it from a distance. We didn’t make it to the waterfall but yeah we didn’t see the actual thing but we passed the path and he told me the story.”

Analysis:

The informant had heard of this tale from his father, and didn’t really know much about this belief other than what his father had told him. After conducting further research, I could not find the specific pass in the mountain that he mentioned, nor any mentions of a “devil’s path” on the mountain of Avila. It must only be a belief held by his father and his father’s biker friends.