There are places that invite you to look closer. Washington quietly asks you to look a little longer.

Transcript

Tonight, on the Midnight Drive, we begin our journey through the evergreen state.

That’s right!
We’re in Washington!
We’ll wander through forests where generations have searched for something they’ve never
quite managed to prove.

We’ll descend beneath one of America’s great cities into the streets that time has forgotten.

And we’ll visit abandoned mill towns where history refuses to stay quiet, cemeteries
where folklore has outlived the places that inspired it, in one of the darkest chapters
in American medical history, where belief itself became something terrifying.

Some of these stories are almost certainly legends, some are rooted firmly in history.

Most exist somewhere in between.

But that’s the thing about Washington.

The farther you travel into its forests, its mountains, its coastlines, or even beneath
its streets, the harder it becomes to separate what happened from what people believed happened.

Have you ever noticed that some places seem impossible?
Not necessarily because they’re imaginary, but because they refuse to fit into a single
picture.

Washington is one of those places.

If I asked you to imagine it right now, what comes to mind?
Maybe towering evergreen forests, snow-covered volcanoes rising above the clouds.

For me, it’s the Space Needle, standing over Seattle’s skyline, ferries gliding across
Pudget Sound, or perhaps rain, lots and lots of rain.

For many people, Washington exists as a collection of postcards.

Towering pines, fog drifting between mountain peaks, coffee shops tucked away beneath gray
skies.

But postcards have a habit of leaving things out.

Washington isn’t just beautiful.

It’s surprisingly difficult to define.

Within a single day, you can leave one of the most technologically advanced cities in
the world.

Pass alpine mountain passes, drive through dense temperate forests, stand on rugged Pacific
beaches, and finish the evening looking across rolling farmland that feels more like the
American Midwest than the Pacific Northwest.

It’s a state of dramatic transitions.

And maybe that’s why it’s become home to so many stories.

Those transitions are where our imaginations tend to wake up.

There’s something about crossing a threshold that changes the way we pay attention.

Leaving the city for the forest, stepping from sunlight into shadows, walking from a
busy street into a place that has become strangely quiet.

You might notice that your senses open.

They sharpen.

You notice sounds you would normally completely ignore.

A branch snapping.

The wind shifting through cedar trees.

The distant rush of water.

Now suddenly, suddenly you’re aware.

You’re aware that you aren’t the only thing in the landscape.

Whether something is actually there or not.

Washington has always inspired that feeling.

Long before highways crossed the cascades.

Before Seattle became synonymous with technology.

Before fairies stitched together communities along Pudget Sound.

This was a landscape that demanded respect.

The forests are older than memory.

The rivers all carved their own paths.

The mountains reminded everyone who passed beneath them that people were visitors here.

Not architects.

And that perspective matters a lot.

Because when nature feels bigger than you, it’s surprisingly easy to believe there are
still things you haven’t discovered.

And perhaps, perhaps that’s one of the reasons that Washington has become so closely associated
with mystery.

Not because mysteries are more common here, but because this landscape, it allows them
to breathe.

Think about the places where our greatest legends tend to live.

They aren’t usually found in parking lots, are they?
Or shopping malls.

They’re found in places where visibility disappears after a few hundred feet.

Where every trail bends out of sight.

Where the forest swallows all of the sound.

Where distance becomes difficult to judge.

Washington has no shortage of places like that.

In fact, despite the millions of people who call this state home, much of it still feels
wonderfully and sometimes uncomfortably wild.

That’s a rare thing in the modern world.

Think about it.

Most of us spend our lives surrounded by certainty.

Streetlights, cell phone towers, maps that tell us exactly where we are.

Washington though, gently reminds us that certainty has its limits.

Walk far enough into an old growth forest and your phone will lose signal.

The road disappears behind you and the trees only grow taller.

The world becomes quieter.

And for just a moment you experience something our ancestors understood far better than we
do now.

The feeling of not being entirely sure what’s beyond the next bend.

That uncertainty isn’t necessarily frightening, it shouldn’t be.

In fact, it might be one of the last places where wonder still lives.

Because wonder begins where certainty ends.

And if there’s one thing Washington has always offered, it’s room and space to wonder.

And tonight that’s exactly what we’ll do.

Not to prove every legend, not to dismiss every mystery, but to explore the remarkable
relationship between a landscape and the stories people tell about it.

Because before we meet the monsters, before we descend beneath Seattle’s streets, before
we visit forgotten towns and unsettling places, we first need to understand the stage on which
all of those stories were built.

And Washington may just be one of the greatest storytellers in America.

There may not be another American legend quite like Bigfoot.

We’re jumping straight into it, aren’t we?
Think about our other monsters for a moment.

Vampires have castles, ghosts haunt old houses, sea monsters belong in deep water, aliens
descend from the stars.

Bigfoot simply walks through the woods.

He doesn’t conquer, he doesn’t invade, he isn’t trying to end the world.

If you believe the stories, Bigfoot mostly wants one thing.

And that’s to be left alone.

Maybe that’s one reason why people have become so fascinated by the legend.

Up next, we’re going to talk more Bigfoot.

We’re back on the Midnight Drive and we are talking about Bigfoot.

Believe it or not, this isn’t even the Bigfoot episode, but we got to talk about it because
we’re doing an overview on our trip to Washington.

Now let’s think about it.

There’s a lot of people who are absolutely taken by the legend of Bigfoot.

Because unlike so many monsters throughout history, Bigfoot isn’t really the villain.

He’s the neighbor that you’ve never met.

For decades, people have reported enormous footprints pressed into soft earth, strange
calls echoing through valleys, rocks tossed from unseen hillsides, the sharp crack of
wood striking wood somewhere beyond the trees.

Some hikers describe the overwhelming sensation that something is watching them.

Hikers insist they caught a glimpse of a massive figure disappearing behind a cedar
before they could focus their eyes.

Most of those encounters only last for seconds.

A sound, a shadow, a movement, and then absolutely nothing.

Hikers have examined these claims for generations, and the overwhelming consensus has remained
remarkably consistent.

There is none.

There is no convincing evidence that a large undiscovered primate lives in the forests
of North America.

Hair samples have repeatedly turned out to belong to known animals.

Have often been traced back to elaborate hoaxes.

Some of the most famous tracks were eventually linked to oversized wooden feet carved decades
ago as practical jokes by loggers hoping to scare one another while working in remote
forests.

History is full of stories like that.

People laughing around campfires, friends trying to outdo one another, communities slowly
adding new details until the joke becomes folklore.

That happens far more often than we realize, and yet the legend never disappears.

That’s the fascinating part, because most hoaxes eventually die.

Bigfoot did not.

In fact, he became more popular.

Movies, television, documentaries, festivals, museums, entire podcasts devoted to Bigfoot
sightings.

Thousands of people spend weekends hiking into Washington’s forests hoping, just hoping,
to be the one who finally sees something that no one else can prove.

Why?
Why this creature?
Of all of the legends we could have created, why did this one survive?
And it makes me wonder, I wonder if the answer has less to do with Bigfoot and more to do
with forests.

Dense forests have a peculiar effect on us.

You can only see so far.

The farther you look, the more your imagination begins filling in the blanks.

A fallen log becomes the outline of an animal.

Two branches crossing become shoulders.

A stump becomes someone standing perfectly still.

We’ve talked about this a lot on the show.

Our brains are remarkably good at recognizing patterns.

In fact, they’re almost too good at it.

We sometimes refer to this tendency as pattern recognition.

Our habit of finding meaningful shapes in familiar forms where none actually exist.

It’s the same reason why people see faces in clouds, or animals in rock formations,
or expressions on the front of a car.

Your brain evolved to recognize another human being before it recognized anything else.

If something in the forest might, just might, be a person, your mind would rather guess
wrong than ignore it.

From an evolutionary standpoint, that’s a pretty useful survival strategy.

Even standing in a forest 10,000 years ago, you hear movement.

Was it another person, a predator, or simply the wind?
The cost of assuming nothing was there could be enormous.

The cost of mistakenly believing something was there was usually much smaller.

So our brains became cautious storytellers.

They connect dots, they build explanations.

Sometimes before we even realize they’re doing it.

Now, place that wonderfully imaginative brain inside one of the largest temperate rainforests
on earth.

Towering cedars, moss hanging from every branch, mist weaving through the trunks, light filtering
through layers of evergreen needles until everything seems softer around the edges.

It’s beautiful.

It’s peaceful.

And every once in a while, it’s just uncertain enough to make you pause.

That’s fertile ground for folklore.

But Washington contributes something else to the story, respect.

Long before Bigfoot became a television celebrity, many indigenous communities throughout the
Pacific Northwest carried traditions about large wild beings that lived beyond the edges
of ordinary human life.

These stories weren’t necessarily identical to modern versions of Bigfoot.

Some described giants.

Others described powerful forest beings.

Some served as cautionary tales.

Others reflected a relationship between people and wilderness that emphasized humility rather
than conquest.

And that’s worth remembering.

Modern Bigfoot culture didn’t appear out of nowhere.

It grew from many different roots.

European tales of wild men, logger stories, campfire exaggerations, practical jokes, newspaper
headlines, Hollywood, television, every generation adds another layer.

Eventually the legend became larger than any one particular story.

Today Bigfoot isn’t just folklore.

He’s become something closer to a cultural symbol.

Washington even has counties that have passed symbolic resolutions declaring Sasquatch protected.

There are festivals, gift shops, museums, roadside statues.

You’ll find Bigfoot on coffee mugs, bumper stickers, brewery logos, hiking shirts and
postcards.

It’s almost impossible to separate the creature from the Pacific Northwest itself.

That’s a remarkable transformation.

Imagine telling someone a hundred years ago that one of America’s most famous cultural
icons would be a creature that almost certainly doesn’t exist.

Yet here we are.

And maybe that’s because Bigfoot represents something people quietly hope is still true.

Not that an enormous ape is hiding in the woods, but that the woods still have secrets.

Modern life has mapped almost everything.

What do you make of this?
I’d love to hear your comments wherever you might be listening.

You’re listening to The Midnight Drive.

So maybe out in the deep woods of Washington, maybe there is a Bigfoot.

But you want to know what?
There’s also something strangely unsettling about discovering that a city has another
city beneath it.

It’s not abandoned the way we usually imagine abandoned places, and it’s not forgotten.

It’s just literally covered over.

If you’ve ever walked through Seattle’s Pioneer Square, you’ve probably admired the brick
buildings, the cafes, the busy sidewalks, and the steady rhythm of people moving from
one destination to another.

Everything feels exactly as a modern city should, but beneath your feet, another Seattle
still exists.

Its sidewalks are still there.

Old storefronts still line narrow passageways.

Doorways that once welcomed customers now open into empty corridors.

Windows that once looked out onto busy streets now stare into darkness.

It almost feels impossible, doesn’t it?
How does an entire neighborhood simply vanish?
Believe it or not, the answer is not paranormal.

In fact, it’s remarkably practical.

In 1889, a fire broke out in a carpentry shop.

Like many cities in the American West at the time, Seattle was built largely from wood.

What began as an accident quickly became one of the most devastating fires in the city’s
history.

By the time the flames were extinguished, much of downtown Seattle had been destroyed.

Most cities would simply rebuild.

Seattle did something much stranger.

It rebuilt.

Higher.

You see, Seattle had another problem besides fire.

The city flooded frequently.

At high tide, sewage systems backed up.

Streets became muddy.

Travel became miserable.

Engineers eventually reached a bold conclusion.

Instead of lowering the water, they would raise the city.

Retaining walls were built alongside existing streets.

Earth was brought in.

Roads climbed upward one story.

New sidewalks were constructed above the old ones.

Businesses temporarily operated with ladders connecting one level to another while construction
continued around them.

Imagine visiting your favorite coffee shop.

And climbing a wooden ladder just to reach the front door.

For a while, that was perfectly normal.

Eventually the transition was complete.

The original ground floors became basements.

Entire sidewalks disappeared beneath new streets.

And the city simply kept moving.

One level higher.

And the old Seattle remained below.

It’s a fascinating image, isn’t it?
Not because it’s mysterious, but because it’s relatable.

Whenever we experience something painful, something embarrassing, or something we’d
rather not think about, our instinct often isn’t to erase it.

It’s to build over it.

We renovate.

We repaint.

We move on.

But beneath the new foundation, the older version is often still there.

Cities aren’t so different from people.

Seattle just makes the process visible.

Today, guided tours lead visitors beneath Pioneer Square.

You’ll find brick-lined passages, old storefronts, vault lights embedded overhead that once allowed
sunlight to reach the sidewalks below.

If you look carefully, you’ll notice details that reveal these weren’t tunnels built in
secret, but that they were streets.

Places where ordinary life unfolded.

People bought groceries.

Children ran errands.

Merchants swept sidewalks, and neighbors stopped to talk.

Then history changed the elevation, and everyday life quietly slipped underground.

Now, of course, once a place becomes inaccessible, the stories begin to grow.

By the early 20th century, the underground had developed a reputation.

Some portions became storage.

Others reportedly became gambling halls.

There were rumors of speakeasy during Prohibition, illegal businesses, hidden passageways, sketchy
activity that preferred staying out of sight.

Some of those stories are pretty well documented.

Others have grown larger with every retelling.

That’s often how folklore works.

We’ve talked about that on the show.

Reality plants the seed.

Imagination waters it.

Eventually, separating one from the other becomes almost impossible.

Today, plenty of ghost stories surround the underground.

Visitors report footsteps when nobody is nearby.

Shadowy figures disappearing around corners.

Cold spots.

Unexplainable voices.

The familiar collection of experiences that seem to gather wherever history settles long
enough.

Maybe those experiences are exactly what people believe that they are.

Or maybe old architecture simply changes the way we experience a place in general.

Think about how different your senses become underground.

The air feels cooler.

Sounds echo differently.

Your footsteps arrive a fraction of a second later after bouncing off brick walls.

Every creek feels amplified.

Every distant sound seems impossible to locate.

Your brain starts working harder.

And whenever the brain works harder to interpret incomplete information, it becomes more willing
to start filling in gaps.

Again, it’s not a flaw.

That’s how perception works.

We’re constantly constructing reality from incomplete information.

Usually we don’t notice.

Underground, we do.

I also wonder if places like Seattle’s underground remind us of something we don’t often like
to admit.

History never really disappears.

It simply becomes harder to see.

Every city has layers.

The coffee shop may have replaced a bookstore.

The bookstore may have replaced a warehouse.

The warehouse may have stood where someone once built a family home.

Life keeps stacking itself one generation at a time.

And most cities hide those layers remarkably well.

Seattle accidentally preserved them.

And because we can still walk through those older streets, it’s almost impossible not
to imagine the people who once did the same.

Not ghosts, just people living their lives.

Thousands upon thousands of completely ordinary lives.

That’s something I think we sometimes overlook when we talk about haunted places.

We tend to focus on extraordinary stories.

The unexplained footsteps, the mysterious voices, the shadow at the end of the hallway.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about old places isn’t that they might contain
ghosts.

It’s that they unquestionably contain history.

Every brick was laid by someone.

Every storefront belonged to someone.

Every staircase was climbed by someone carrying groceries, or returning home after work, or
hurrying through the rain to meet someone they loved.

And those people are now gone.

Got more next, right here on the Midnight Drive.

There is something that I noticed while researching the state of Washington.

The stories don’t really agree with each other.

Bigfoot doesn’t have much in common with abandoned mill towns.

A forgotten cemetery outside Maltby seems worlds apart from Seattle’s underground streets.

And a tragic sanitarium overlooking Pudget Sound doesn’t sound anything like a creature
wandering through old growth forests.

On paper, these shouldn’t be long together, yet somehow they do.

I’ve spent enough time working on this show to notice that every state seems to have a
personality.

Some states feel adventurous, some feel haunted, some are deeply historical, others almost
seem to celebrate the strange.

Washington feels thoughtful.

It’s a place that leaves room for personal interpretation.

Maybe that’s because so much of the landscape refuses to explain itself.

Take the forests, walk through enough old-growth timber, and eventually you’ll stop trying
to measure the trees.

You’ll simply accept that they’re older than you, older than your grandparents.

Some of them were already standing when Shakespeare was still writing plays.

That’s the kind of perspective that changes you.

People like feeling important.

And old forests have a gentle way of reminding us that we’re only passing through.

The same thing happens with mountains.

Washington’s skyline isn’t defined by skyscrapers, it’s defined by volcanoes.

Mount Rainier doesn’t ask for your attention.

It simply exists on a clear day, it’s visible from hundreds of miles away, quietly dominating
the horizon without saying a word.

There’s something deeply humbling about landscapes like that.

Perhaps that’s why stories thrive here.

Not because Washington is somehow more mysterious than everywhere else, but because mystery
feels more believable in places that already inspire awe.

Psychologists have spent years studying awe, not excitement, not fear, but awe.

It’s a fascinating emotion because it does something unusual, it makes us feel smaller.

Normally that might sound unpleasant, but researchers have found that experiences of
awe often make people feel more connected, more curious, and even more generous.

Standing beneath enormous trees, looking across an endless coastline, watching clouds wrap
themselves around a mountain.

Moments like those quietly remind us that the world isn’t centered around us.

Maybe that’s why folklore flourishes in beautiful places.

Not because beauty creates monsters, but because beauty encourages humility, and humility leaves
room for possibility.

That’s a very different way of approaching mystery.

It’s one thing to say, I know exactly how the world works.

It’s another to stand alone in a rainforest while fog drifts between the trees and admit,
maybe there are still some things that I don’t understand.

Notice, I didn’t say, maybe Bigfoot is real.

Those aren’t the same statement.

One demands certainty, the other accepts uncertainty.

That’s the distinction to pay attention to.

Because uncertainty has become surprisingly rare.

We live in an age where almost every question has an answer waiting in our pockets.

Need directions?
Your phone knows.

Wonder what mountain you’re looking at?
Your phone knows.

Curious about the weather tomorrow?
Your phone knows.

We’ve become remarkably good at eliminating mystery.

And yet, people still travel to places like Washington hoping to experience exactly that
feeling again.

Not necessarily because they expect to find something supernatural, but because they want
to remember what it feels like to not know.

That’s one of the reasons I think Bigfoot has survived for so long.

Whether people believe in the creature almost doesn’t matter anymore.

Bigfoot has become shorthand for a much bigger idea.

That somewhere, out there, the world might still be capable of surprising us.

Tells a similar story.

Not because ghosts have been proven to walk its corridors, but because descending beneath
a modern city reminds us that history is never as far away as we imagine.

The past is not gone.

It’s simply covered by another layer.

Even the stories we’ll explore later this week seem connected by that same thread.

The abandoned streets of Port Gamble.

The legend of the 13 Steps to Hell.

The tragedy of Starvation Heights.

They’re wildly different stories.

One is folklore.

One is local legend.

One is documented history.

Yet, all of them ask remarkably similar questions.

What happens after people leave?
How do stories change over time?
When does memory become legend?
Why in the world are we so eager to believe certain stories while dismissing others?
I don’t think those are questions unique to the state of Washington.

Washington simply provides an extraordinary backdrop for asking them.

There’s another thought that stayed with me while putting this week together.

Every single one of these places still exists.

The forests are still standing.

Seattle’s underground streets are still beneath the sidewalks.

Port Gamble still overlooks the water.

Malby Cemetery is still there.

The ruins of Starvation Heights haven’t disappeared.

The locations remain remarkably ordinary.

It’s us who bring the extraordinary.

Two people can stand in exactly the same place.

One sees trees.

The other sees Bigfoot Country.

One sees old bricks.

The other sees ghosts.

One sees a staircase.

The other imagines the entrance to hell.

Neither person is lying.

We’re simply experiencing the same place through different stories.

Maybe that’s what folklore has always been.

Not an attempt to fool people, an attempt to understand places that leave us feeling
something that we can’t quite explain.

Sometimes those explanations become monsters.

Sometimes they become ghost stories.

Sometimes they become cautionary tales.

They simply become family stories told around campfires for generations.

And maybe that’s the real magic.

Not whether every legend happened exactly as is told, but that people cared enough to
keep telling it.

Because stories don’t survive by accident.

They survive because in one way or another they help us make sense of the world.

Washington has been doing that for a very long time, long before the highways crossed
the cascades, long before Seattle reached toward the sky.

People were standing beneath the same trees, looking toward the same mountains, asking
many of the same questions we still ask today.

What’s out there?
What happened here?
Who came before us?
And perhaps the biggest question of all.

What stories will we leave behind?