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More Washington spooky tales: 13 Steps at Maltby Cemetery, Prop Man of Orcas Island

Oct 30, 2024, 1:17 PM | Updated: 1:22 pm

Image: A map of Orcas Island...

Have you bumped into the Prop Man of Orcas Island at Moran State Park? (Image courtesy of USGS Archives)

(Image courtesy of USGS Archives)

Halloween is tomorrow and we’ve been collecting your Washington spooky stories and tales, not about your own personal haunted house, but about public places around Puget Sound where myths and legends have emerged over the decades about creepy goings-on and other miscellaneous things that go bump in the Puget Sound night.

Last week, we put out the call to hear from listeners about neighborhood myths and community legends in the KIRO Newsradio listening area. We said we were interested in stories that pre-date the internet, but that somehow were shared and spread through word of mouth or what cultural anthropologists might call “oral tradition.”

And the KIRO Newsradio listeners came through.

The story that started it all came from Ryan Kingsbury, who told us his story in person, which then inspired this story collection effort.

The Haunted Hand of Fort Casey

Kingsbury grew up in the Canyon Park area of Bothell. Back in the late 1980s, he took a school trip to Fort Casey State Park on Whidbey Island. As part of the curriculum, the teachers told Kingsbury and the other kids many stories.

One, in particular, stood out. It’s stayed with Kingsbury for more than three decades.

“In one of the buildings there, there’s a hole in the ground where they’ve patched it with cement,” Kingsbury told KIRO Newsradio. “And the story was that a man got stuck in there when they were pouring the concrete, and (they) didn’t discover it till later.”

“He (had) put his hand up for help,” Kingsbury continued, but the concrete cured and hardened before the man was found. “And then they cut (his 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,” Kingsbury said, and there was no evidence of a body encased in the concrete. But to this day, I’ve always thought there’s a dead guy under there.”

Listeners were inspired by Kingsbury’s tale and by other spooky stories about Fire Trail Road that were shared last week, and more examples began arriving via email. KIRO Newsradio reached out to the authors of some of the creepiest tales.

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Image:Legend, but not fact, has it that a man is encased in concrete in the floor of the SWITCHBOARD building at what's now Fort Casey Historic State Park on Whidbey Island.

Legend, but not fact, has it that a man is encased in concrete in the floor of the SWITCHBOARD building at what’s now Fort Casey Historic State Park on Whidbey Island. (Image courtesy of USGS Archives)

The Prop Man of Orcas Island

Nate Ratto is a carpenter who lives in Kirkland. Back in the 1980s, Nate was a sixth-grader at Robert Frost Elementary. For the year-end “Outdoor Ed” trip, all the sixth graders at Robert Frost went to Camp Moran at Moran State Park on Orcas Island for a two-night trip.

On the first day of camp, Nate says they got situated, did outdoor activities, and had meals. Then, that evening, they had a big campfire, and the teachers started telling stories.

“And the one that stuck out to me was the one about local pilot that crashed in the fog,” Ratto explained. “Somehow, in the accident, he ended up with the propeller stuck in his head, and so he roamed the island in the fog with this propeller sticking out of his head.”

Nate feels like this particular story was told mostly for his benefit; it was intended as a cautionary tale to scare him enough so that he would behave himself.

“And so we were scared to leave our cabins at night,” Ratto continued. “So yeah, we pretty much just stayed. We didn’t want to encounter the ‘Prop Man,’ as they called him.”

Our final local micro-myth comes from Mike Sears of Sultan.

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The 13 Steps of Maltby Cemetery

Back in 1996, Mike was a junior at Lynnwood High School. Around Halloween, Mike heard one of his friends talking about a spooky place east of Lynnwood just off Highway 522.

“They’re sitting there talking about the Maltby Cemetery. And I was like, What are you talking about?” Sears told KIRO Newsradio. “And they said that there’s these 13 steps, and these 13 steps, whoever tried to walk down, by the time they got halfway down, they would just die, supposedly.”

“That was the story,” Sears said.

Mike Sears was skeptical, and told his friends he would go that very night to check it out for himself.

As it turned out, he didn’t actually go, because he came down with a cold that evening. The cold was so bad, Mike actually missed school the next day. He says that when he didn’t show up for school that morning, his friends assumed he had gone to Maltby Cemetery and walked the 13 steps and was now dead.

They were happy to see him, Mike says, when he showed up for school the day after that. And that was the end of Mike’s entanglement with Maltby Cemetery.

But the story stayed lodged in the back of his mind. Fast forward about five years, and it all came back.

“One night, we were just bored, and we’re like, ‘Oh, wait, I remember the Maltby Cemetery, let’s go,” Sears recalled. “And so we drove out there, and you’re not allowed to go back there” – it’s private property, Mike says – “it was kind of sketch anyways, but so we pull over to the side of the road, and the friends of mine start walking up into the woods, heading towards the cemetery. And I got about halfway, and I said, ‘No, forget this. I’m going back to the car.'”

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Mike left his friends and went back to the car they’d driven to the Maltby Cemetery.  And no, says Mike, Shaggy and Scooby weren’t there, and it wasn’t the Mystery Machine he went back to – it was his friend’s 1986 Toyota Corolla.

Mike says it was pretty scary sitting just there by himself waiting for his friends.

“There was howling going on, this is like two o’clock in the morning, and you could hear howling in the distance,” Sears told KIRO Newsradio. “And I mean, it was probably a dog, obviously, but it was loud, echo-y howling that was happening.”

“And then I saw something fly from the trees,” Sears continued. “Now, it could have been a bat, it could have been an owl. I don’t know what it was, but I just saw it. And I was like, ‘Okay, we gotta go.’”

“My friends finally came back, and I was like, ‘Okay, guys, did you hear the howling?’ They’re like, ‘Yes,’” Mike explained. “I was like, ‘Okay, I saw something fly from the tree.’ And then, as we were pulling out, we saw something else fly from the tree.”

Unlike “The Haunted Hand of Fort Casey” or the “The Prop Man of Orcas Island,” the story of “The 13 Steps of Maltby Cemetery” has actually become “a thing” on the internet – though Mike heard the story before a decade before Reddit was founded.

Mike says he’s looked but never found anything resembling 13 steps at Maltby Cemetery, and it’s unclear how far back that story actually goes, or how it first originated in those long-ago pre-Internet days.

If any of these stories might be inspiring you to go in search of the supernatural, please remember what Al the Guitarist, veteran observer of the paranormal on Fire Trail Road, told us last week.

“Don’t do it,” Al said. “Don’t go. Don’t go see the ghost. I mean it.”

Maybe, instead of heading out into the spooky darkness and tempting fate, why not devote your energy to digging into the recesses of your memory and then sharing any or your community or neighborhood haunted stories with KIRO Newsradio?

With Halloween still to come – as well as our ongoing efforts to pretend to be cultural anthropologists – we’d love to share your story on the radio, too. Send your best live and local spooky stuff to fbanel@kiroradio.com, if you dare!

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

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More Washington spooky tales: 13 Steps at Maltby Cemetery, Prop Man of Orcas Island