By Darrell Kirk
Sounder contributor
When autumn fog rolls across the horseshoe-shaped waters of Orcas Island in Washington’s San Juan Islands, locals know the spirits are stirring. This mystical island, 85 miles north of Seattle, has earned a spine-tingling reputation captured in both nonfiction paranormal investigations and fictional thrillers spanning from Spanish exploration to far-future science fiction.
Real Hauntings at Rosario Village
According to Margaret Read MacDonald’s “Ghost Stories from the Pacific Northwest” (August House, 1995), Alice Rheem took residence at what is now Rosario Village in 1938 and became notorious for riding her motor scooter around the island after drinking, sometimes wearing only her red nightgown. She was known for bringing handsome young soldiers to the mansion when her husband was away.
Rheem died in the mansion, but she hasn’t left. Dennis William Hauck’s “Haunted Places: The National Directory” (Penguin Books, 2002) reports that in 1987, three traveling entertainers were kept awake all night by sounds from the neighboring room. The desk clerk confirmed the room was empty — the key had never left its hook. Before midnight, they saw the light under the door flash on and off three times, then heard the bed creaking. The hotel staff suspect Rheem still reenacts her wild nights.
A second ghost and island mystics
David Richardson’s “Magic Islands: A Treasure-Trove of San Juan Islands Lore” (Orcas Pub. Co., 1995) also documents another haunting near the ferry landing at Sweeney Bay, where a hotel “now on the National Registry of historic buildings” once harbored smugglers and bootleggers and witnessed “at least one Wild-West style shootout.” The ghost of “the lady who ran the inn all through that colorful era is claimed to haunt the place even yet.”
Real-life mysticism also permeates the island. Von Braschler’s memoir “Confessions of a Reluctant Ghost Hunter” (Destiny Books, 2014) introduces readers to Louis Gittner, who built the Outlook Inn in Eastsound. Gittner was “a gifted psychic who went into deep trances much like those of Edgar Cayce.” His mother served as secretary to Cayce, who “had foretold great things for her son, all of which came to pass.” Braschler notes that “many diners waved or smiled appreciatively to him as he passed through the dining room,” calling Gittner “the psychic of Orcas Island.”
Joe Reigel’s “Unusual Orcas Island: Ghost Stories and Other Legends from the Gem of the San Juans” adds to the documentation with 234 pages covering everything from a turn-of-the-century Sasquatch encounter near Mountain Lake to the sea serpent “Caddy,” pirate treasure legends on Turtleback Mountain, and the mysterious lights at Ghost Rock. Reigel even explores claims of “a portal to a hidden world in Mount Constitution, and an Atlantean energy vortex in East Sound.”
Ancient mysteries and modern shamans
Rainer Rey’s thriller “The Find” (Turner, 2015) weaves historical horror into the island’s present. The novel reveals that Spanish explorers ventured to Orcas Island two centuries ago, where an officer befriended a local chieftain with “eyes that spoke of a keen intellect,” near “a black sand beach on the north side of Orcas Island.” When modern road workers unearthed “a small iron-framed strongbox of Spanish origin” in the heart of town — reported in The Sounder weekly newspaper — it triggered an international investigation connected to “two lovers were punished,” with one dying with the strongbox on Orcas Island. Rey, who dedicated his book to “Orcas Island, its people, its wildlife, and its magic, which inspired this tale,” features a young shaman from Orcas Island High School who later attended Stanford, then returned as a hermit “possessed by forces no one else could understand.”
Fictional evil beneath the island
The island’s eerie atmosphere has inspired multiple thriller writers. Michael Slade’s “Burnt Bones” (Signet, 2000) uses Orcas’s actual geography for a kidnapping mystery set in the San Juan Islands, where “there are 457 islands, rocks and reefs visible at high tide” with “375 miles of rugged shoreline, the most of any county in the United States” — making it “a kidnappers’ paradise.”
Slade’s supernatural sequel “Death’s Door” (Onyx, 2002) takes a darker turn, featuring evil caves beneath Orcas Island housing a “dank labyrinth of caves and tunnels that burrow deep below Orcas Island,” where malevolent forces “rained terror” on Seattle during deadly October events. Count Drizel “died in the caves on Orcas Island” after his attack, with Luther Baum spending months “closing the caves forever.”
Science fiction on Orcas Island
Even far-future science fiction finds Orcas Island irresistible. Julian May’s acclaimed novel “Magnificat” (Knopf, 1996) — the final book in her Galactic Milieu Trilogy — features the island in the year 2078. Despite submarine tubeways, skimferry service, and integration into Seattle Metro, the island remains recognizable as “a winter storm with near-hurricane-force winds pounded Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.” In May’s novel, scientist Marc Remillard lives in “the handsome house on Orcas Island,” where his son Denis Hagen is christened at “historic Emmanuel Church in Eastsound village on Orcas Island.” Beneath that house, Cyndia Muldowney had “reinstalled them in a clandestine gestatorium built by Shigeru Morita beneath the house on Orcas Island,” where “dedicated Rebel biotechnicians, personally supervised by Cyndia, tended the paramount babies for over seven months.” As one character reveals, Remillard “kept over a hundred that had assayed as operant paramount. I spirited them away myself, to a secret gestatorium Shig Morita and Peter Dalembert built beneath the Orcas Island house. I helped nurture those babies to term, Rogi. Mental Man became a reality.”
Visit this Halloween if you dare?
From Mount Constitution’s peak to black sand beaches, from Camp Orkila to the Orcas Island Medical Center, from Rosario Village to the Outlook Inn, from Ghost Rock to Turtleback Mountain, every location seems touched by the otherworldly. Whether you believe in passionate ghosts, ancient curses, evil caves, shamanic possession, secret laboratories, Sasquatch encounters, sea serpents, Atlantean energy vortexes or portals to hidden worlds, Orcas Island’s combination of natural beauty, isolation and documented paranormal activity — spanning nine published books across multiple genres — makes it the perfect Halloween destination.
