Six Freaky Halloween Vacations

Know what’s scary? No, not how long we have to wait for Thanksgiving to actually happen (so long!). What’s scary are these haunted, spooky, and creep-tastic Northwest destinations. 

Forks

What’s creepier, the idea of vampires living on the Olympic Peninsula to stay out of the sunlight, or that a tiny fishing town was easily overrun by Twilight fans? Forks is almost back to normal, but there are still remnants of the phenomenon to be found (though celebration is largely limited to a September festival).

Port Gamble

So haunted! The tiny company town of Port Gamble on the Kitsap Peninsula is the site of regular ghost tours and an annual ghost conference in November. They claim they have the “most haunted” house in the state. But if there’s a hellmouth below this burg, it doesn’t keep it from being awfully charming.

Lake Quinault Lodge

Beverly is the resident ghost. The Olympic National Park is the backdrop, and Franklin D. Roosevelt is the president who formed the national park as soon as he arrived at Lake Quinault Lodge and took a gander at the damp wonderland.

Infamous horror author Stephen King may have thoroughly New England roots, but many of his movies were filmed out here. A few of the eerie spots with the Stephen King stamp of scariness:

Thornewood Castle

Site of the Stephen King miniseries Rose Red, in which the big scary protagonist was a house. (Not a house haunted by ghosts, but the house itself.) Thornewood Castle is actually a hotel just south of Tacoma with four-poster beds and Olmsted-designed gardens—romantic and creepy all at the same time.

Burnaby Village Museum

The recreated Burnaby Village, an open-air museum just outside Vancouver, BC, was used in the Stephen King movie IT (the 1990 one). Including this scene, which is TERRIFYING. Hiding under the desk now. 

Timberline Lodge

Exteriors for The Shining were filmed at the Mount Hood hotel back in 1980. Weird that director Stanley Kubrick didn’t want to film in the hotel that actually inspired the book, the Stanley Hotel in Colorado. Too close to home?

Can’t get away? Seattle is plenty haunted itself, you know: Former Seattle Met staffers have taken a ghost-hunting trip with the city’s ghost-hunting chapter and unearthed a (serial) killer ghost story about undertaker E.R. Butterworth. We even found a haunted house in Georgetown.