Maltby Cemetery, a private pioneer burial ground north of Woodinville, Washington, is said to hide 13 steps down to a sealed crypt. Turn around at the bottom and you see your own spirit descending into Hell. Nobody has been able to find the steps since the 1990s.
Maltby Cemetery sits on a terraced hillside north of Woodinville, Washington, and somewhere in it are supposed to be 13 steps. Walk down them and turn around at the bottom, the story goes, and you watch your own spirit descend into Hell while the friend you left at the top sees nothing at all. The steps end at a crypt sealed behind seven locks. Some who go down come back unable to speak. In the telling that travels furthest, some don't come back. "Sometimes they stay missing."
Teenagers have been daring each other down those steps since the 1970s. The rumor peaked in the 1990s, got adapted for Sam Raimi's horror anthology in 2020, and has one stubborn problem. Nobody can find the steps.
Visitors say they were filled with concrete years ago. A man who saw them in 1992 described a staircase that simply ended at a dirt wall for "no apparent reason." When a Ghostly Activities team walked the grounds on September 1, 2018, with infrared and thermal cameras, the staircase had already been gone more than five years, and they found no mausoleum anywhere on the property. No county or cemetery record documents a crypt there at all.
Mike Sears of Sultan first heard the story around 1996, as a junior at Lynnwood High School. "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." He drove out about five years later, around 2 a.m. "There was howling going on," he said, "and you could hear howling in the distance." Then something flew out of the trees. "No, forget this. I'm going back to the car." He never found the steps either. He points out that the legend runs a decade older than the internet, and nobody knows where it started.
What is documented is quieter. The burial ground's real name is Paradise Lake Cemetery, after the small lake Welsh settlers named Paradise. They built a Congregational church on the hillside in 1890. Six years later it burned, and local historian Elsie Mann wrote that the site "was continued as a cemetery, since a small child had been buried there." A 2003 transcription counted 24 legible headstones across the three terraces.
The people reported there aren't on any staircase. They're women and children in ragged clothing from the 1890s through the 1930s, walking the rows and then not being there. Whispers. Lights among the stones. Two teenagers in the mid-1990s said they came upon a group dressed in black standing silently around an open casket, staring at them, until a black dog ran them off. In 1997 a visitor stopped at 2 a.m. to read a young child's headstone and passed it again ten minutes later on the way out. There was a fresh red rose on it.
Everyone came looking for a hole in the hill. The grave that made this place a cemetery was a child's.
