They say no rain falls in the middle of the circle.

If you drive around Roche Harbor, a pleasant resort town on the north side of San Juan Island, and turn right on a road past the airport, you’ll find a patch of woods. Wander through the trees up the hill, well past a tiny, overgrown cemetery, and you’ll come upon something odd: a limestone table and six chairs perched on a stepped platform, surrounded by columns joined at the top by something like a crown. There is nothing else around aside from the trees, the birds, and perhaps some buzzing insects. The whole thing looks like a temple in a grove, or like something from a dream.

In fact, it is a mausoleum, one belonging to a man who was once the most powerful in the San Juan Islands. The ashes of his family—a wife, three sons, and one daughter—are buried there alongside him. But there’s someone else there too, someone whose name does not appear anywhere at the site. Someone whose legends still linger on the island, even as some wish those stories could be put to rest for good.

Born in 1856 in Sugar Grove, Indiana, John Stafford McMillin moved to Tacoma in 1882. A former lawyer, he incorporated the Tacoma Lime Company in 1883. Around the same time, he took a scouting trip searching for lime in the San Juan Islands. Likely he had heard about the deposits on San Juan Island itself, where British troops had operated a kiln during the Pig War days of the 1860s.

The potential of Roche Harbor must have become apparent pretty quickly. “For here was a ledge of the purest limestone, a quarter of a mile wide and three quarters of a mile long,” writes David Richardson in his book Magic Islands. According to Richardson, there was so much limestone that “the supply was considered inexhaustible."

Per Richardson, the deposits were also located on a hill above the harbor, which meant that gravity itself could be harnessed as a natural resource. The lime was blasted out of vertical quarries before being loaded onto cars that descended at a grade to the kilns below. Once burned, the lime fell via chutes to barreling rooms. The barrels were then trucked to a warehouse on the docks of the harbor, whose deep, protected waters made it suitable for even the largest ocean-going vessels. Those ships would take the lime as far away as Hawaii, where it was spread as fertilizer on sugarcane fields.

But the primary use for lime was in mortar, which would help build the cities of the then-booming Northwest, especially after major fires in Seattle, Spokane, and Ellensburg in 1889 encouraged a turn away from wood and toward the much-less-flammable brick. It wasn’t long before Roche Harbor had the largest lime works on the West Coast, and John S. McMillin was a wealthy man.

Accounts of McMillin often paint him as a domineering figure in the robber baron mold. He ran Roche Harbor as a company town: Every building in the 4,000 acres was owned by the Roche Harbor Lime & Cement Company, no outside businesses were allowed, and workers (over 800 of them by the 1910s) were initially paid in scrip that could only be redeemed at the company store. Later, workers could be paid in cash, but according to Richardson: “Employees and their families were ‘encouraged’—a stronger word might be even more correct—to trade only at the company store, live in company-owned rental cottages, relax in the company’s saloon, pray in the company’s church, and be buried in the company cemetery.” Historians also say McMillin was guilty of robber-baron-style business practices that included price fixing. He was also a fiercely committed Republican who was prominent in the state central committee, and there are stories of him firing workers who didn’t vote the same way he did.

Yet there was another side to McMillin. He wrote poetic odes to the mountains and his wife, loved boating, and made amateur films. He gave back to the community, throwing parties on Christmas and the Fourth of July. He was deeply devoted to his family, to his Sigma Chi fraternity, and to his Masonic lodges. And it’s those last three things that most influenced that striking mausoleum in the middle of the woods.

At the entrance to the site, a metal archway flanked by stone pillars spells out the words “Afterglow Vista.” Once, the family had a house nearby called Afterglow Manor. The “glow” here is the sunset, and it’s a reference to a favorite family pastime—sitting around the dinner table watching the sun paint the sky crimson and gold.

The symbolism-per-square-inch at Afterglow Vista, designed by McMillin in the 1930s, is like something out of a Dan Brown novel. One set of stairs represents the steps within the Masonic order, while another stands for the “spiritual life of man,” according to a sign at the site. The winding path represents the fact that “the future cannot be seen.” The stairs come in sets of three, five, and seven—the three stages of life, the five orders of architecture and five senses, and the seven liberal arts and sciences. The 30-foot columns are the same size as the ones in King Solomon’s temple (supposedly).

Visitors to the site quickly notice that one of the columns surrounding the limestone circle is deliberately broken. It does not represent a wayward son, as some claim, but rather “the broken column of life—that man dies before his work is completed.” In front of the broken column is a slight space at the table. While the “missing chair” is also sometimes said to refer to a wayward son, Richardson says the arrangement of the chairs mimics how the family would sit at the table in life, so no one would have their back to the view of the sunset. The ashes of the family rest in the bases of the chairs, which are carved with each family member’s political and masonic affiliations. (Except for Louella, who is remembered simply as “Wife of John S. McMillin.”) John was buried there first, in 1936, and the rest of the family followed.

But not everyone buried at Afterglow Vista is a McMillin.

Adah Beeny’s name, occupation, and reputation have been butchered for decades. She was not a Bean or a Beanning or a bookkeeper or a secretary, as various accounts will have you believe. Instead, she was a domestic helper, someone who took care of the children and Louella McMillin’s mother. Her work helped the McMillin household, well, work. Born in England, she immigrated to the US in her 20s and likely met the McMillins during their Tacoma days before moving with them to the island, where she spent the rest of her life. She became almost like a member of the family, and the 1950 census has her “relationship to head of household” John McMillin as “friend.” She died at her cottage on the island at age 86 on January 5, 1955 of a heart episode and was cremated in Bellingham.

By the following year, her ashes were in a mason jar on the mantle of the office of John McMillin’s son Paul. Neil Tarte, who took over the management of the Roche Harbor Resort not long after Adah’s death, says he was told to bring her ashes up to the mausoleum, where they were added to the chair containing the ashes of the McMillin’s infant son John.

“Ever since that day we put her ashes into the copper urn in the family crypt, she’s refused to leave us alone at the resort,” Tarte told the Seattle Weekly in 1987. “Lights go on and off. Doors open and close. The blender turns itself on. The usual ghostly pranks.”

In fact, local ghost stories and at least one popular paranormal podcast describe the Afterglow Vista as haunted. It’s said that on a full moon, people see the McMillin family around the table, chatting and laughing as they did in life. Visitors on rainy days have reported that no rain falls on them while they stand inside the columns. Those who sit in the chairs feel a creeping unease or describe the sensation of spectral hands pushing them off their seats. In the forest, at night, people see blue lights dancing above the chairs.

Nearby, the Roche Harbor Resort has its own share of legends. At the Hotel de Haro, which claims to be the oldest continuously run lodging in the state, a store room door seems to open of its own accord, appliances turn off and on, glass shelves in the gift shop shatter, and people hear fabric rustling or sense a weird presence. In the McMillin’s Dining Room Restaurant, candles reignite themselves after being extinguished, and furniture has been found rearranged for no reason. But it isn’t the McMillins doing that, the legends say. It’s Adah.

Why would Adah haunt the resort? Is there some reason she might be unsettled?

According to local journalist and Roche Harbor author Richard Walker, some have described Adah as John McMillin’s mistress. Others say she was the mistress of his son Paul, and ended her life in the 1920s, pregnant and swinging from a chandelier. In fact, a picture of Adah at 85 shows she made it well into old age.

These tales, Walker says, are “absolutely false.” And not only that, they hurt.

Walker says that Paul’s daughter Mary McMillin told him that the stories often made their way back to family members who visited the resort in later years, generally without announcing that they were McMillins. “She was aware of the stories that were told over the years, stories that came up, the ghost stories,” he says. “They're unfortunate because people's feelings get hurt, [and] they can besmirch the reputations of people who aren’t here to defend themselves.”

If they’re not true, why have these legends persisted? Maybe because they feel like they could be true, because they play to our worst suspicions about how men in positions of great power—extracting vast amounts of natural resources, running company towns—behave. Gossip among the workers and townsfolk, however unwarranted, may have even been a way to take back some power from the most important family in town. As a servant, Adah may have lived much of her life in the shadows, which perhaps made it easier to make up stories about her.

As for the ghost stories, we all like to think there’s a chance we might live on. Such tales provide a tantalizing hint that such hopes might not be in vain. After all, even the lime deposits that were once considered “inexhaustible” proved themselves finite around the same time Adah did.

Today, the lime works at Roche Harbor are long gone and the town has been transformed into a picturesque boating destination. The Afterglow Vista feels almost like a relic of another era. But if you come upon it some afternoon in the woods, remember the man who built it—and remember the real Adah Beeny.