Maltby Cemetery

One of Washington's oldest cemeteries, built in 1901, now on private property and closed to the public.

Paradise Lake Cemetery -- known locally as Maltby Cemetery -- sits on a three-terraced hillside off Paradise Lake Road in the rural outskirts of Maltby, Washington, about thirty miles north of Seattle. The land was donated by Henry Davis, an Episcopal minister and pioneer farmer who settled in Paradise Valley alongside Welsh immigrants, coal miner James Morgan Lloyd, and other homesteaders in the late 1880s. The oldest headstone belongs to Maggie Robertson, an infant who lived just three months between May and August of 1886. A Congregational church built nearby in 1890 burned six years later, and after a small child was buried on the grounds, the site transitioned into a community cemetery for the pioneer families -- the Davises, Lloyds, and Doolittles -- who carved a life from the dense timber of the Pacific Northwest. At least one Civil War veteran, John Davis of Company A, 2nd Maryland Infantry, rests among the approximately two dozen documented burials. The Paradise Lake Cemetery Association maintained the grounds from its incorporation in 1964 until its dissolution in 2000, after which the Lloyd family sold the surrounding land to create the Paradise Valley Conservation Area. The cemetery itself remains on private property, accessible only to descendants of the interred families.

The legend of the 13 Steps to Hell is what transformed this quiet pioneer graveyard into one of the most notorious haunted locations in Washington state. According to the story, thirteen steps descended from the cemetery's surface into a hillside crypt belonging to a wealthy family rumored to have practiced satanism and the occult arts. The crypt was said to be sealed behind seven locks requiring seven separate keys. Anyone who walked down the thirteen steps and turned around would supposedly see a vision of their own spirit descending into Hell. In more extreme tellings, people dropped dead at the bottom of the stairs, unable to cope with what they had witnessed. Some accounts claimed that visitors who reached the sixth step would experience nausea, progressive deafening of all sound, and the sensation of invisible hands pushing against their backs. A variation of the legend held that standing on the seventh step at midnight and looking upward would reveal the ghostly figure of a woman -- identified in some versions as a grieving mother searching for her lost child, and in others as a witch who had been buried alive.

The rumors appear to have circulated since the 1970s, gaining peak popularity through the 1990s when Maltby Cemetery became a rite-of-passage destination for teenagers across the greater Seattle area. Mike Sears of Sultan first heard the story around 1996 as a junior at Lynnwood High School and visited roughly five years later with friends. At approximately 2 AM, they heard loud, echoing howling and watched something fly from the trees overhead, but found no evidence of anything resembling thirteen steps. Other visitors from the same era reported more unsettling encounters. Two teenagers in the mid-1990s described stumbling upon a group of people dressed entirely in black, standing in silence around an open casket -- despite no burials having been recorded since 1985. An aggressive black dog appeared beside the mourners, and the group stared wordlessly at the teens until they fled. Another account describes a visitor discovering a fresh red rose placed before a child's grave during a 2 AM visit, though the flower had not been there minutes earlier when they first passed the same headstone.

Beyond the 13 Steps legend, visitors have reported apparitions of women and children in tattered, outdated clothing wandering between the graves, sometimes vanishing mid-step. Eerie lights have been seen dancing among the tombstones, and whispered voices emerge from the tree line surrounding the terraced hillside. Some visitors have documented vehicle malfunctions near the cemetery entrance and an overwhelming sensation of being watched or followed while leaving. The steps themselves no longer exist -- they were reportedly filled with cement or destroyed in the early 2000s, likely by property owners attempting to curtail the steady stream of trespassing teenagers. Whether the steps ever led to an actual crypt, or were simply a set of utilitarian stairs on the terraced hillside that accumulated supernatural folklore over decades, remains an open question.

The legend reached its widest audience when Sam Raimi's horror anthology series 50 States of Fright adapted the story as "13 Steps to Hell," which premiered on Quibi on September 28, 2020. Directed by Lee Cronin (who later helmed Evil Dead Rise) and written by Sarah Conradt, the two-part episode starred Rory Culkin and Lulu Wilson as siblings who discover the staircase while playing in an abandoned cemetery. The conservation area surrounding the cemetery opened to the public on April 22, 2009, but the cemetery itself remains closed -- a quiet pioneer burial ground whose greatest haunting may be the legend it never asked for.