For decades, stories have surrounded Maltby Cemetery and its infamous 13 Steps to Hell. According to local legend, anyone who descended the hidden staircase and reached the thirteenth step would witness Hell itself.

Transcript

There are places we visit, and then there are places that we return to.

Not because we have to, but because something about them continues calling us back.

Perhaps it’s a favorite overlook, a quiet trail through the woods, a small town where
time seems to move a little more slowly, or perhaps it’s a cemetery.

Not because we’re fascinated by death, but because cemeteries have always been places
where memories live.

We read names, we notice dates, we wonder who those people were, what made them laugh,
what dreams they carried, and who still remembers them.

Tonight, on the Midnight Drive, we’re visiting one of Washington’s most storied cemeteries,
a place surrounded by tales of ghostly figures, unexplained lights, and whispers in the darkness.

It’s why the living have always felt the need to remember.

Morning arrives differently in a cemetery.

Not because the sun rises any slower, but because everything else seems to.

The world feels quieter here, the air is cool, dew clings to blades of grass, bird songs
echo through the towering evergreens, carrying across rows of weathered headstones that have
greeted countless mornings before this one.

As you walk through the gates of Maltby Cemetery, the first thing you notice is not fear.

It’s the stillness.

The kind of stillness that asks nothing from you except that you slow down.

There’s no rushing here, there’s no traffic, there’s no ringing phones, just winding paths,
old trees, and names carved carefully into the stone.

Some are easy to read, others have softened beneath decades of rain, moss, and Washington
winters.

A few lean ever so slightly as though time itself has been gently resting against them.

You begin reading names almost without thinking.

A husband and a wife.

An infant who lived only a few months.

A family whose generations now rest beneath the same towering cedar tree.

Born, lived, loved, gone.

Each stone offers only a handful of facts, a name, two dates, sometimes a short inscription.

Beloved mother, faithful husband, forever in our hearts.

Yet somehow, those few words invite an entire lifetime of questions.

Have you ever run into this?
Seeing a name on a headstone, somebody you don’t know, somebody you have zero history
with their family, if you let your imagination run just a little while, you start asking
yourself questions like, who were they?
What made them laugh?
What kind of work filled their days?
Who stood here on the afternoon that this stone was first placed?
History often remembers the extraordinary.

Presidents, inventors, explorers.

But cemeteries remind us that history is mostly made of ordinary people.

Teachers, farmers, mechanics, children, neighbors.

Lives that may never appear in textbooks.

I think this is one of my favorite thought exercises, actually.

Because going into a cemetery and seeing all of the headstones and seeing the unknown names
and seeing the dates of when people were born and when they died.

If you really let your imagination wander, then you’re forced into the state of Sonder
to really try to picture and imagine who these people were.

Every single headstone in a cemetery represents a person who lived a rich life.

They had their loves, they had their losses, they had things they were interested in.

They had things that infuriated them.

Some of them had spouses, some of them had children, some of them had grandchildren and
great-grandchildren.

But it really forces you to put into this perspective of yourself not necessarily being
the main character in that moment.

The thought exercise of Sonder, I love it.

Now back to the cemetery, many of these lives may never appear in textbooks.

Yet they shaped families, communities, and futures in ways that no history book could
ever fully capture.

Maltby Cemetery has quietly watched those lives come and go for well over a century.

Established in the late 19th century as the surrounding community took root, it became
the resting place for generations of local families.

Early settlers, loggers, farmers, veterans, and children all found their final home here.

Their stories woven into the history of a town that grew alongside Washington’s forests.

Unlike famous national cemeteries, there are no grand monuments here.

No endless rows stretching beyond the horizon.

Its scale feels very personal, very intimate, almost like paging through a family photo
album that somehow belongs to an entire community.

You begin noticing familiar last names repeated across decades, parents beside children, brothers
beside sisters, entire branches of family trees brought together again beneath the same
quiet hillside.

There’s something profoundly relatable to that, isn’t there?
Nearly every culture throughout history has created places like this.

Places where memory is given a physical home.

We could remember people in countless ways.

Photographs, letters, stories passed around dinner tables.

But time and time again, we’ve chosen to mark the earth itself.

To say, someone mattered here.

Perhaps that’s why cemeteries have always inspired such powerful emotions.

They’re among the few places where time itself becomes visible.

Same before a headstone from 1903, the past suddenly feels surprisingly close.

Not because the years disappear, but because another human being stood exactly where you
are standing now.

Someone looked at the same sky, walked beneath the same trees, listened to birds singing
on a spring morning, much like this one.

The distance between then and now becomes harder to measure.

Maybe that’s why places like Maltby Cemetery have gathered so many stories over the years.

Visitors have spoken of seeing a woman dressed in white moving silently through the headstones
before disappearing into the morning mist.

Others describe hearing children laughing when no one else is nearby.

While some report unexplained lights weaving gently between the trees after sunset.

But before we ask whether these stories are true, perhaps we should ask a different question.

Why have cemeteries inspired stories like these for generations, in nearly every culture,
on nearly every continent, long before anyone had ever heard the name Maltby?
After the break, we’ll explore why the places we build to remember the dead have also become
places where the living continue searching for meaning.

You’re listening to the Midnight Drive.

Have you ever asked yourself, why do we tell ghost stories?
It’s actually quite remarkable to think about it.

No matter where you travel in the world, ghost stories always seem to find cemeteries.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re walking through a centuries-old churchyard in England,
an ancient burial ground in Japan, or a quiet hillside cemetery here in Washington State.

Eventually, someone will tell you about the figure that they saw among the graves.

Or a voice they couldn’t explain, or the footsteps behind them.

The feeling that someone was quietly watching.

Different cultures tell different stories.

But somehow, the places where we remember the dead almost always become places where
we imagine they might still be near.

Why?
Perhaps because cemeteries ask us questions that we rarely allow ourselves to consider
anywhere else.

Every headstone reminds us that every life, no matter how extraordinary or underwhelming,
has an ending.

Hey, and surprise, that’s not a very comfortable thought, is it?
So our minds naturally begin searching for something beyond it.

Not necessarily proof, just possibility.

Stories have helped us explore the questions that we cannot answer.

Stories fill in the gaps of uncertainty.

Long before science explained lightning, people imagined gods.

Before astronomy mapped the heavens, we imagined constellations as heroes and monsters.

Before medicine understood diseases, we searched for meaning in spirits and curses.

Ghost stories belong to that same tradition.

Not because people were foolish, but because people have always been curious.

And perhaps nowhere does curiosity become more personal than in a cemetery.

Let’s think about it for a moment.

Imagine standing beside a headstone that simply reads, Emma, 1887, 1910.

That’s all.

That’s all the information you get immediately, immediately.

Your imagination probably has already started filling in the gaps.

Who was Emma?
Emma sounds like a first name, but is Emma a first name or a last name?
Did she love music?
Did she dream of traveling?
Did she fall in love?
Was she funny?
Was she somber?
Did she paint pictures?
Did she sew garments?
Did she know that she would be remembered more than a hundred years later by someone
that she could never have imagined?
We’ve talked about this a lot on this show, but our brains do not like unfinished stories.

Sometimes we are described as natural storytellers because of that.

We connect scattered pieces into meaningful narratives almost automatically.

It’s one of the reasons why people are so creative.

It’s also one of the reasons that legends survive.

And how legends evolve.

And how lore begins.

When information is incomplete, imagination quietly steps in.

And perhaps that’s why visitors sometimes describe feeling as though someone is walking
beside them, among the graves.

Our attention sharpens.

Every sound becomes noticeable.

The rustle of cedar branches, a bird taking flight, the distant snap of a twig.

In everyday life, our brains filter most of that away.

Here they don’t.

The environment itself encourages awareness.

Silence becomes louder.

Small movements become more meaningful.

Time itself seems to slow down.

And in the heightened awareness that you’re experiencing, ordinary things can suddenly
feel extraordinary.

That doesn’t mean that people are imagining things.

It means that context matters.

The same creaking sound that would go unnoticed in a grocery store can feel profoundly mysterious
in a cemetery at dusk.

Expectation changes perception.

I’ll say it as many times as I need to on this show.

Expectation changes perception.

anticipate seeing often shapes what we actually notice.

When we enter a place already carrying stories of ghostly figures or mysterious lights, our
minds naturally pay closer attention to every unusual detail.

It’s not deception, it’s only one of many ways that our brains help us to interpret
an uncertain world.

It grounds us.

Even if it’s on artificial pretenses, our brains ground us.

And perhaps that’s why so many of Maltby’s legends feel familiar.

Visitors speak of a woman dressed in white, a figure that appears briefly before fading
into the trees.

Women’s laughter drifting through empty pathways.

Soft lights moving between headstones after sunset.

None of those stories are unique to Washington.

Versions of it exist all around the world.

And maybe that’s exactly what makes them so fascinating.

They’re less about a single cemetery and more about being a human.

Because beneath every ghost story, there’s usually another story waiting to be found.

A story about grief, about hope, about unfinished conversations, about wondering whether love
can somehow outlast loss.

Perhaps we tell stories of spirits because we struggle with the idea that the people
who shaped our lives could simply vanish.

Those stories become one way of saying maybe they’re still with us.

Whether we mean literally or emotionally is a deeply personal conversation.

But maybe we’ve been asking the wrong questions all along.

Instead of asking whether cemeteries are haunted, perhaps we should ask why remembrance itself
is so powerful.

After the break, we’ll leave the legends behind for a little while and explore why
human beings have spent literally thousands of years building places devoted to remembering
those who came before us.

And why those places continue to shape the living every bit as much as they honor the
dead.

You’re listening to The Midnight Drive.

Now imagine trying to explain a cemetery to someone who had never seen one before.

Kind of a weird thing to think about, isn’t it?
You might start by describing the stones, the flowers, the pathways, the carefully tended
grass.

But eventually, you’d have to explain something much more difficult.

Why we build them in the first place.

People have lived for hundreds of thousands of years.

For nearly all of that time, we’ve buried our dead with intention.

Sometimes beneath great pyramids, sometimes beneath simple wooden crosses, sometimes beneath
stones so modest that only a name remains.

The details change from culture to culture.

The reasons rarely do.

We remember.

Anthropologists have long noted that one of the things separating humans from nearly every
other species is the way we preserve memory across generations.

We don’t simply experience life.

We create traditions.

We tell stories.

And we build places that allow those stories to outlive us.

A cemetery is one of those places.

It’s a promise, a quiet agreement between generations.

It says, you mattered.

You won’t simply disappear.

That promise isn’t really for the person beneath the stone.

It’s for everybody else who’s still living.

Think about the last time you visited the grave of someone you loved.

Perhaps you spoke out loud.

Perhaps you stood silently.

Perhaps you smiled in a memory that surfaced unexpectedly.

Nothing about that moment changed the past.

But it may have changed you.

Places have a remarkable ability to anchor memory.

A familiar front porch.

A favorite fishing spot.

The kitchen where holidays were always celebrated.

They all return years later.

And memories seem to arrive almost uninvited.

Scientists sometimes call this place-dependent memory.

The idea that physical locations become deeply connected to our experiences.

Making it easier to recall our emotions, our conversations, and moments when we return
to those same spaces.

Perhaps.

That’s why cemeteries continue to matter.

Even in a world where photographs, videos, and entire family histories can fit inside
a phone.

Technology stores information.

Places hold experience.

Everything before a headstone is not the same as scrolling through an album.

One is observed, the other is felt.

Maybe that’s why people leave flowers, small stones, flags, letters tucked beneath bouquets.

Their gestures that don’t accomplish anything measurable.

Yet they accomplish something deeply personal.

They say, I was here.

I remembered.

In a way, every visit becomes another chapter in someone else’s story.

Memory isn’t something we keep alone.

It’s something that we share.

That’s one reason why family cemeteries feel so different.

Looking through them, you begin seeing entire lives connected across generations.

Grandparents beside grandchildren, spouses reunited after decades apart, names repeated
again and again, each one carrying pieces of the family forward.

It’s easy to think of a cemetery as a place where stories end, but perhaps it’s the
exact opposite.

Every stone becomes the beginning of another story.

A grandchild asking, who is she?
A parent telling stories they’ve carried for years.

A photograph passed around the dinner table.

A laugh remembered.

A lesson repeated.

As long as someone asks the question, the story continues.

Maybe that’s why old cemeteries rarely feel empty.

It’s not because they’re occupied by ghosts, but because they’re full of conversations.

Not spoken ones, but remembered ones.

You begin realizing something beautiful.

The people buried here shaped a community that they will never see.

They planted trees whose shade they would never sit beneath.

They built roads for travelers that they would never meet.

They raised children who raised children of their own.

Their influence continued long after their lives ended.

We often think about the legacy of famous people, celebrities, presidents, scientists,
but legacy is much more ordinary than that.

Every kindness changes someone.

I’m going to say that again because it’s really, really important.

Every kindness changes someone.

Every friendship leaves a mark.

Every parent shapes a child.

Every teacher shapes a classroom.

Every neighbor quietly changes the neighborhood.

Most of us will never have statues built in our honor.

But almost all of us will leave traces and memories and traditions and people.

Perhaps that’s what cemeteries have been trying to teach us all along.

Not to fear death, but to notice life.

To recognize that even the quietest lives ripple outward in ways we’ll never fully
see.

And maybe that’s why walking through a space like Maltby Cemetery doesn’t leave us feeling
hopeless.

As a matter of fact, it leaves us feeling connected.

Connected to families that we’ll never meet.

To generations that we’ll never know.

To the simple truth that every name carved into stone once belonged to someone whose
world was every bit as rich and complicated as our own.

Full circle back to Sonder.

I love it.

After the break, we will take one final walk through Washington together and discover that
perhaps the greatest stories this state has to offer were never about Bigfoot, ghosts,
or forgotten legends at all.

But about the remarkable relationship between people, places, and the memories that they
leave behind.

You my friend are listening to The Midnight Drive.

As our drive through Washington comes to an end, I keep thinking about the story that
first brought so many people here to Maltby Cemetery in the first place.

For decades, people have whispered about the 13 steps to hell.

Now, the legend goes like this.

It says that somewhere within Maltby Cemetery, there’s a hidden staircase that once descended
into the earth.

If someone walked all 13 steps, they would see hell.

Some versions say the staircase disappeared years ago.

Others insist that it was sealed.

And still others claim that it never existed at all.

Unlike so many legends, especially local legends, the details change depending on who’s
telling the story.

But perhaps that’s exactly the point.

Every old cemetery seems to gather one story that grows larger than the place itself.

A phantom in white, or a mysterious light, or a forgotten grave.

In this case, a staircase leading somewhere that no one should ever go.

The legends are different.

But the reason why we tell them is remarkably similar.

They are our way of giving voice to the questions that cemeteries quietly ask every single one
of us.

What remains after we’re gone?
Can a place remember us?
Do the people we love ever truly disappear?
When this week began, I thought we were setting out to explore mysteries together.

At the beginning of the week, we stood beneath towering evergreens and wondered why places
inspire stories at all.

The forest didn’t give us any answers.

They simply reminded us that wonder begins where certainty ends.

And then we followed the legend of Bigfoot.

Not to prove whether something enormous still walks beneath the trees, rather to understand
why human beings continue searching for mystery in a world that often feels completely mapped.

Perhaps Bigfoot’s greatest footprint was never left in mud.

Perhaps it was left in our imagination.

Then we visited Starvation Heights, a place where hope became tangled with certainty.

Where desperate people searched for healing and discovered instead why humility matters
just as much as hope.

Reminded us that good intentions alone are never enough.

Curiosity must always walk beside evidence.

Then we wandered the quiet streets of Port Gamble, a town that seemed to have stepped
gently out of another century.

There we discovered that perhaps ghosts aren’t simply stories about the dead.

Perhaps they’re stories about memory.

About places refusing to let go of the lives that shaped them.

And tonight, here among the quiet stones of Maltby Cemetery, we’ve been reminded that
memory doesn’t belong only to spaces or places.

It belongs to us.

Every name carved into stone, every weathered photograph, every story passed from one generation
to another, is another way of saying, you mattered.

Maybe that’s what all of these places have been trying to teach us.

Forests, towns, old buildings, cemeteries.

They’re never just collections of trees or streets or stones.

They’re containers holding the lives that unfolded there.

Even laughter, heartbreak, hope, loss.

Ordinary Tuesday afternoons that felt completely ordinary at the time, until years later when
they became cherished memories.

It’s easy to think that history is made of extraordinary people, but after spending this
week exploring Washington, I’m not so sure.

Because history feels much quieter than any of that.

It’s subtle.

It happens every time someone plants a tree they’ll never sit beneath.

It happens every time someone builds a home where future generations will laugh together.

Or teaches a child or comforts a friend, falls in love, keeps a promise.

Those moments rarely make headlines, yet somehow they become the foundation upon which
entire communities are built.

And it’s those small moments that make life worth living.

And maybe that’s why the legend of the 13 steps has endured for so many years.

Not because generations keep finding a staircase, but because generations kept finding themselves
asking the exact same questions about memory, about loss, about what if anything waits beyond
the horizon we all eventually will reach.

Maybe that’s why places matter so much.

Because places remember what people often forget.

A weathered porch remembers every conversation held there.

A forest remembers every trail walked beneath its branches.

A harbor remembers every ship that came in.

A cemetery remembers every life that was loved.

And if we’re paying attention, those places quietly remind us to remember as well.

There’s something comforting about it.

We spend so much of our lives worrying about being forgotten.

About whether what we do truly matters.

Yet every place we visited this week suggests the same truth.

Our lives ripple outward in ways we’ll probably never see.

A kindness offered today becomes someone else’s strength tomorrow.

A story told around the dinner table survives long after the voices that first shared it
have fallen silent.

A community built with care continues welcoming strangers decades after its builders are gone.

Perhaps immortality doesn’t always look the way that we imagine.

Perhaps it isn’t about living forever.

Perhaps it’s about leaving the world just a little kinder, a little wiser, a little more beautiful than we found it.

As our drive comes to an end, the road once again disappears beneath Washington’s towering
evergreens.

The same forests that welcomed us at the beginning of this journey.

Only now they feel familiar.

Not because we’ve solved every mystery, but because we’ve learned to appreciate them.

Wonder doesn’t require answers, and mystery doesn’t demand certainty.

Memory doesn’t need perfection.

Sometimes it’s enough simply to notice.

To slow down.

To listen.

To remember.

I want to thank you so much for joining me this week as we’ve wandered through the forests,
towns, and quiet places that make Washington State so unforgettable.

So until our next drive, wherever the road may lead, keep wondering, keep asking questions,
keep remembering, and I’ll meet you further down the road, right here, on the Midnight Drive.