13 Steps

The 13 steps is a scary urban legend about Maltby Cemetery in Washington. They say that these thirteen steps lead down to hell.

The 13 Steps down to hell were located in Maltby Cemetery in Washington. There used to be a staircase that began at ground level and descended down under the earth. It was said to be low-grade entrance to the tomb of a wealthy local family.

According to the legend, you had to go to the cemetery late at night and walk down these 13 steps. While descending the steps, you wouldn’t be able to hear anything. Once you had reached the bottom, if you turned around, you would be confronted by a vision of hell.

They say that the vision would drive you insane. Those who watched people performing this ritual said that they witnessed the person stop at the bottom, turn around and then collapse to their knees in horror. According to some reports, several children emerged nearly comatose from the steps, many of them never uttered another word.

The 13 steps no longer exist. As the story goes, they were bulldozed or filled in with concrete years ago. Since then, there have been severe No Tresspassing limitations on the cemetery and even rumors of kids making expeditions late at night to Maltby Cemetery, armed with shovels, hoping to unearth the 13 steps down to hell.

“My girlfriend and I wanted to see this for ourselves. You have to go down these thirteen steps and then you see a little chair. If you sit in the chair it automatically means that you have sold your soul to the devil. It sounds really creepy. I was at church with my friend and his pastor said that he went there when he was 16 years old and it was the worst experience of his entire life”.

“A group of us headed out to the cemetery in Maltby. We made sure we got there as close to midnight as possible. After about an hour of searching around in the dark, we finally found it. The 13 steps. In the moonlight, you couldn’t see the bottom. We tried using a flashlight and we still could not see the bottom. It was frightening and one of the girls was so freaked out that she couldn’t even look down into the staircase. I decided I was going to go for it, but as I walked down the first two steps, I started to feel a sick.

After the next two steps, I felt light-headed. When I got to the sixth step, I became so cold that I could barely breathe and I could hear muffled yelling and screaming. I was not going any further. I couldn’t even take the next step. When I turned to climb back up, I could feel something pushing on my back and I couldn’t see out up to my friends clearly. When I finally reached the top of the staircase, I realized the yelling and screaming was coming from my friends.

They were screaming that I had disappeared when I went down. I am six feet tall. I couldn’t have been out of sight after having only gone down halfway down. Needless to say, we were all completely freaked out and got out of there as quickly as possible. To this day, every now and then, I dream about the 13 steps that lead down to hell and I always wake up in a cold sweat”.

Note: There is also a “13 Steps” cemetery in Palo called Pleasant Ridge cemetery. There is a set of stairs leading up to the cemetery gate that has 12 steps. But at night, a 13th step is said to appear.