WeirdPNW is a reader-submission archive of haunted places, roadside oddities, and local legend in the Pacific Northwest — in the same family as long-running outlets like Weird NJ. Whatcom County is the first drawer because that is where the research started. The rest of the map is supposed to fill in.
Browse by region. Read what we have already written down. Send a story or a photograph. Nothing from the public goes live until a person reads it.
How we treat a story
Researched means we found it in local reporting, history writing, or long-running tour lore and rewrote it in our own words. User-submitted means someone sent it in. Neither stamp means “this happened.” It means “this is the tale attached to this place.”
Unsolved crime
Some files name real dead people and open cases. We will not publish accusations against the living, and we may refuse a submission that reads like a score-settling. True-crime folklore is not a verdict.
Native stories
Coast Salish and other Native nations of this coast are not a costume rack for Halloween copy. Native is a story type, same as a haunted building or a cemetery — living place-tales nations have already put in public, not a separate site. We do not scrape sacred narrative out of ethnography. If a legend is offered by someone with standing to tell it, it waits in the queue, and it will be handled slower and with more no’s available. The Spanish-conquistador-in-Fairhaven tale is the kind of thing we are not seeding: folklore glued onto real Indigenous history without care.
Comments and accounts
You can leave a mark at the bottom of a story without an account. Comments wait in a queue. Register if you want a name that sticks, or subscribe for a short note when new stories go up. We do not sell the list.
Tours
If you want a walk instead of a webpage: Gore and Lore Tours (Bellinghistory / the Good Time Girls) and Bellingham Ghost Tours operate in town. We are not them. We may link out. We do not take their tickets.
Contact
Use the submission forms. For anything else, the site admin email is the one on the WordPress account.