Shhhhhhhh! Did you hear that? Maybe it was your imagination? Or perhaps the wind? Or maybe just a wild animal. Or could it be something else more nefarious going bump in the night?
There’s no shortage of tall tales of ghosts, goblins, and ghouls, leaving us on edge and with quite the fright, especially during everyone’s favorite spooky holiday, Halloween. The Tri-Cities are no exception to the rule, so to get you into the spooky spirit, here are some of the region’s most famous haunted locations and scary places!
St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church
317 7th Street, Prosser
The paranormal activity at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Prosser has attracted the attention of many ghost enthusiasts over the years, including TV’s very own Ghost Hunters. The church was featured in season 3, episode 16, “Houses of the Holy” in 2007.
Witnesses have reported an unexplained boy’s apparition on the property, smells of burning wood, and size six footprints that seem to come from nowhere often appear on the wood floor. Visitors have also reported hearing what sounds like children playing throughout the house during the daylight hours, seemingly running up and down the upstairs hallway.
Phi Delta Theta House
715 Estrella Street, Walla Walla
It’s said that Whitman College’s very own Phi Delta Theta House has been haunted for many years by a ghost known as the “Blue Man.” Legend goes Blue Man was a former resident of the house and is known for making appearances in the bedroom on the 2nd floor. Thankfully for the students who call this haunted house home during their college years, the Blue Man is generally regarded as a friendly ghost, as his encounters are known to be non-threatening.
Gravity Hill
1012044 N Crosby Road, Prosser
On a lonely stretch of road just north of Prosser is an eerie little spot where a strange phenomenon causes gravity to seemingly “work backward” that has been blamed on the paranormal. Gravity Hill sits at the “base” of a slight incline where it has been demonstrated time and time again that if you shift your car into neutral, you will, as if by magic, begin rolling uphill.
Reasons for the occurrence vary from the paranormal spectrum to aliens or perhaps even ghosts. In truth, the phenomenon is merely an optical illusion, known as a “magnetic hill,” “anti-gravity hill,” or simply “gravity hill,” as it’s known to locals.
Mystery spots like this are located all over the world. What may seem like an uphill slope is, in fact, a segment of a broader downhill descent. Our brains perceive this phenomenon in such a manner due to how these slopes are positioned, combined with limited or no visibility of the horizon line. This creates the illusion that objects defy gravity — a natural trick that has fascinated and bewildered observers at these mysterious locations for centuries.
Baby Graves
Horse Haven Hills Cemetery
A winding gravel road leads to Horse Heaven Hills Cemetery, beyond which is an old white picket fence where a series of “baby graves” are nestled. It’s here at the Baby Graves that the tiny, buried corpses of infants aged two years and younger lay, having belonged to the region’s original settlers and prairie pioneers dating back to the early 1800s. Many of these children were thought to have died far too young from the flu, and it seems that some of them may have stuck around.
People visiting the graves often report hearing babies crying and calling out for their mothers. The scattered baby toys left behind by visitors paying their respects further enhance the eeriness of the situation. Visitors to the cemetery also report a looming shadow figure that seems to stalk them as they make their way through the graveyard, many speculating the presence to be a parent to one or some of the children or perhaps even a guardian sent to keep watch over their gravesites as it’s often been a favorite spot for vandalism in the past.
With haunted places like this in the Tri-Cities, it’s enough to make one not want to go out at night, especially on Halloween!
