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Heavily Investigated

Port Gamble does not feel like a town so much as a place where a century and a half of mill-town life pressed itself into the woodwork and never quite left. Walk Rainier Avenue after dark and the Victorian facades watch back. The Walker-Ames House anchors it all — people swear they've seen three small children staring from the upstairs windows of an empty house, felt a hand close around their leg in the basement, watched attic lights flicker with no one home. And in the Buena Vista cemetery up the hill, visitors report a dread that arrives before they can name it.

Founded September 1, 1853 by the Puget Mill Company — Pope, Talbot, and Walker, all Maine men far from home — Port Gamble ran North America's longest continuously operating sawmill for 142 years, shutting down only in 1995. The town's New England-style Victorians were built to impress and preserved to last; today it's a National Historic Landmark, essentially unchanged. The record shows a tidy company town; the legend insists that 142 years of labor, isolation, and loss left behind residents unwilling to clock out.