Maltby Cemetery

A tiny pioneer cemetery outside Seattle where a legend claims thirteen steps descend into a hillside crypt sealed with seven locks, and anyone who walks down sees a vision of their own descent into Hell. The steps were destroyed in the early 2000s, but visitors from the 1990s reported silent mourners in black standing around an open casket, phantom women in tattered clothing, and a fresh red rose that appeared on a child's grave between one visit and the next.

Two teenagers in the mid-1990s stumbled onto a group of people dressed entirely in black, standing in silence around an open casket at Maltby Cemetery. No burials had been recorded since 1985. An aggressive black dog appeared beside the mourners, and the group stared wordlessly at the teens until they fled.

The actual name is Paradise Lake Cemetery. It sits on a three-terraced hillside off Paradise Lake Road in rural Maltby, about thirty miles north of Seattle. Henry Davis, an Episcopal minister and pioneer farmer, donated the land in the late 1880s. The oldest headstone belongs to Maggie Robertson, an infant who lived three months between May and August 1886. A Congregational church built nearby in 1890 burned six years later, and the site became a community burial ground for the pioneer families of Paradise Valley: the Davises, Lloyds, and Doolittles. At least one Civil War veteran, John Davis of Company A, 2nd Maryland Infantry, rests among roughly two dozen documented burials.

Nobody would know any of this if not for the 13 Steps to Hell.

The legend goes like this: thirteen steps descended from the cemetery's surface into a hillside crypt belonging to a wealthy family rumored to have practiced satanism. The crypt was sealed behind seven locks requiring seven separate keys. Anyone who walked down the thirteen steps and turned around would see a vision of their own spirit descending into Hell. In the more extreme versions, people dropped dead at the bottom. Other accounts claimed that reaching the sixth step brought nausea, a progressive deafening of all sound, and the sensation of invisible hands pushing against your back. A variation held that standing on the seventh step at midnight and looking up would reveal the figure of a woman, identified in some versions as a grieving mother, in others as a witch buried alive.

The rumors circulated from the 1970s onward. By the 1990s, Maltby Cemetery was a rite-of-passage destination for teenagers across greater Seattle. Mike Sears of Sultan first heard the story around 1996 as a junior at Lynnwood High School and visited about five years later with friends. At roughly 2 AM, they heard loud, echoing howling and watched something fly from the trees overhead. They found no evidence of thirteen steps.

But other visitors from that era reported stranger things. One person discovered a fresh red rose placed before a child's grave during a 2 AM visit, though the flower hadn't been there minutes earlier when they'd first passed the same headstone. People report seeing ghosts of women and children in tattered, outdated clothing walking between the graves, vanishing mid-step. Lights dance among the tombstones. Whispered voices come from the tree line. Cars malfunction near the cemetery entrance.

The steps no longer exist. They were filled with cement or destroyed in the early 2000s, likely by property owners tired of trespassing teenagers. The steps may have led to an actual crypt, or they may have been utilitarian stairs on the terraced hillside that collected supernatural folklore over the span of thirty years. Nobody has satisfactorily answered that question.

The legend got its widest audience when Sam Raimi's horror anthology 50 States of Fright adapted it as "13 Steps to Hell," premiering on Quibi on September 28, 2020. Lee Cronin directed (he later made Evil Dead Rise). Rory Culkin and Lulu Wilson starred as siblings who discover the staircase while playing in an abandoned cemetery. The Paradise Valley Conservation Area surrounding the cemetery opened to the public on April 22, 2009, but the cemetery itself remains private property, accessible only to descendants of the interred families. A quiet pioneer burial ground whose most famous feature might never have existed at all.