MYNORTHWEST HISTORY

All Over The Map: Searching for ghostly local myths at Fire Trail Road and Fort Casey

Oct 25, 2024, 9:35 AM | Updated: 10:30 am

A 1911 map is annotated to show the general location of Fire Trail Road, a notoriously spooky and d...

A 1911 map is annotated to show the general location of Fire Trail Road, a notoriously spooky and dangerous place, according to old newspaper clippings and at least one local man. (USGS Archives)

(USGS Archives)

On this week’s edition of All Over The Map, we go in search of “The Ghost of Fire Trail Road” and “The Severed Hand of Fort Casey,” and ask for your help to uncover more spooky stories from Northwest streets and neighborhoods.

All Over The Map is about “place based stories” from around the Northwest, and we love to highlight little-known events that have happened anywhere from wide spots in the road to well-known public places.

Several times in a decade of doing these kinds of stories for KIRO Newsradio, we have gotten help from listeners to bring attention to things lots of people knew about, but which hadn’t really been formally documented. Some of the best examples are places like Marijuana ; the “Whidbey Island Man”; derogatory nicknames for communities; and unwritten names for local buildings. KIRO Newsradio listeners and MyNorthwest readers shared some really cool and distinctive stuff that we were able to write about and discuss on the radio.

For Halloween 2024, we want to do the same with ghost stories or stories about unexplained happenings – call it modern Puget Sound mythology – on a neighbor or community level.

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For example, we looked into Fire Trail Road in Snohomish County. This thoroughfare’s official name is 140 Street NE, and it goes mostly east-west between I-5 and Marine Drive in an area north of Marysville, south of Smokey Point.

The internet is rife with vague stories about unexplained happenings along Fire Trail Road. A cursory search in online newspaper archives and reveals all kinds of stories about car wrecks over the decades, especially before parts of the road were straightened and paved. One Everett Herald article from 1990 reported that, based on statistics, Fire Trail Road is believed to be 11 times more dangerous than the average Snohomish County road.

Digging a little deeper, KIRO Newsradio reached out to a man named Al, who asked that we not use his last name. He asked to be called “Al the Guitarist for the band La Need Machine.”

Al says that back in the 1970s when he was attending Everett High School, he heard stories of spooky happenings on Fire Trail Road from older students. So, he went to check it out one night with his friends – about eight of them, all packed into a 1970 Chevy Station Wagon with fake wood sides.

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Al says they witnessed two ghostly happenings late at night at Fire Trail Road. One was a bright orb that appeared over the road, not unlike a UFO or UAP. He says the second phenomenon is a ghost that appears in the backseat of the car. However, in Al’s case, because the station wagon was packed full of his friends, the ghost appeared outside the back window.

And what did it look like?

“Bright light, very bright light,” Al said. “You couldn’t see anything else, it blinded you it was so bright.”

“And then, of course, when that happened,” he continued, “the only thing you would do is just turn the ignition on and pull out of there as fast as you could to try to get away.”

“One time, it chased us,” Al said. “It stayed with us for a little while till we got, I don’t know, 50 yards or something away.”

Al says – and the web confirms – that sources of whatever is happening at Fire Trail Road may trace back to Indigenous populations (Fire Trail Road runs along the northern boundary of the Tulalip Indian Reservation), or to more recent deadly traffic accidents (a surprising number of which are documented in newspaper archives). The idea, says Al, is that the ghost is warning drivers of potential danger.

The Fire Trail Road ghost is, as already noted, all over the internet. Hopes are that there are similar neighborhood or small town stories like this – call them “micro-myths” or “micro-legends” – that may or may not have been shared as widely yet.

One such example that KIRO Newsradio is investigating is a story shared by a man named Ryan Kingsbury who attended Canyon Park Junior High in the 1980s, and who once went on a school field trip to Fort Casey Historical State Park on Whidbey Island.

“We did a weekend getaway for our school to Camp Casey,” Kingsbury told KIRO Newsradio. “And one of the stories (the teachers told us is that) in one of the buildings there, there’s a hole in the ground where they’ve patched it with cement, and the story was that a man got stuck in there when they were pouring the concrete, and didn’t discover it till later.”

“He put his hand up for help,” but the concrete dried rock-solid before the man could be rescued, Kingsbury explained. “Then they cut (the hand) off, and then they just filled it in the hole there with extra concrete. So we all, of course, went to go look at the hole that had been filled in already.”

“But to this day,” Kingsbury said of the concrete slab, with a patch, in one of the smaller buildings at Fort Casey, “I’ve always thought there’s a dead guy under there.”

Kingsbury says his brother, who is a year younger, also took part in a separate school trip to Fort Casey a year later and heard the same ghoulish story.

KIRO Newsradio checked with Washington State Parks on Thursday. An official there said they had never heard this story before, but they are checking with other staff at Fort Casey State Park.

As for Al the Guitarist for the band La Need Machine, he says that despite or even because of the unexplained phenomena, he went out to Fire Trail Road with his friends multiple times 45 or so years ago during his high school days. He claims they would go there and discuss things like literature and chess.

Nowadays, as a much older and much wiser man, he warns against anyone trying to visit for any reason.

“I would say to all the kids out there that are thinking about going out on the Fire Trail Road to go out there and see the ghost, don’t do it,” Al warned. “Don’t go. Don’t go see the ghost.”

“I mean it,” he said.

If you have ghost stories you’ve heard about your street, your neighborhood, your town or someplace around Washington that you’ve visited, please send an email to fbanel@kiroradio.com. This might seem like something a radio station or website might do to stir up the audience in advance of Halloween, but really, it’s about cultural anthropology and collecting the stories we tell ourselves and each other that help us transmit our values and experiences to our neighbors and to the next generation here in the great Pacific Northwest.

Depending on what kind of response we get, we might share stories on-air and online next week.

Like Al said, we mean it.

You can hear Feliks every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien, read more from him here, and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please

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All Over The Map: Searching for ghostly local myths at Fire Trail Road and Fort Casey