👻 A.G.H.O.S.T.: A Delightfully Spooky History of Seattle–Tacoma’s Most Haunted Hobby Long before EMF meters were buzzing and investigators were stumbling around dark basements whispering, “Did you hear that?”, Ross Allison was just a guy who loved ghosts and wished Seattle had a real paranormal investigation team. One night, while Ross was rambling about hauntings (as Ross does), his friend Mark finally told him, “If you want a ghost group so badly… just start one.” And Ross

By June Nixon Being the client coordinator can be a lot—and I mean a LOT in capital letters, possibly with dramatic thunder behind it. The most important part of the job is listening. Really listening. No judging, no eye rolling, no jumping to conclusions. Just listening to people who are scared, confused, grieving, curious, or sometimes just very committed to the idea that their lamp has an attitude. Over the years, I have met truly amazing people through this work, and some

By June Nixon My next step was finding a paranormal group to join, because apparently after seeing one shadow person rush at me, my brain said, “Wonderful. Let’s make this a hobby.” I won’t drag you through every group I joined, visited, or quietly backed away from while maintaining polite eye contact, but after a while I realized the paranormal world has its share of wonderfully colorful people—and a few folks who had clearly been left in the spiritual microwave a little too

That led me to take a couple of classes with a woman named Shannon, which somehow turned into investigating the old Comet Lodge Cemetery—now technically considered a park with gravestones, which feels like a very casual way to describe “former two-square-mile city of the dead.” Most of the bodies had supposedly been moved to other cemeteries—wink, wink—which is exactly the kind of sentence that makes paranormal investigators put on sensible shoes and start charging batteries.

By June Nixon Around 2005, I was watching one of those ghost-hunting shows and thought, “Ugh. This is all fake.” The dramatic music, the gasps, the night vision, the person whispering, “Did you hear that?” after someone clearly bumped into a chair—it all felt like paranormal theater with bad lighting. I decided I was going to get into ghost hunting myself and prove it was all a bunch of hogwash. Which is a very scientific term, obviously. By then, I had lost my puppy, grandfa

By June Nixon My whole life, I have been fascinated by the paranormal. Ghost stories, Halloween, old Universal monster movies—I love all of it. I was always drawn to the spooky side of things. I was never exactly goth, but someone once described me as a “colorful perky goth,” which honestly sounds like what would happen if Wednesday Addams discovered glitter and customer service. When I was fourteen and a freshman in high school, my English teacher asked us to write a short s

The Beginning You’re probably wondering how a sweet, shy Midwestern girl ended up mixed up in the paranormal and traveling around the world. Welllll, like most perfectly normal life stories, mine starts with childhood trauma and a beagle puppy. I know—nothing says “fun beginning” quite like that. But here we are, so buckle up. We’re going all the way back to when I was five years old, which was roughly 100’s of hairstyles, millions of bad decisions, and one very tender little