Authors share tales of 'Weird Washington'

KENNEWICK — Jefferson Davis and Al Eufrasio are a couple of normal guys who just happen to spend their time pursuing paranormal weirdness.

Consider: A corpse that bursts into flames while reposing in a steel casket, radioactive tumbleweeds rumored to inhabit the Hanford nuclear reservation and a long-forgotten graveyard where baby graves outnumber the old folks.

As co-authors of the book Weird Washington, Davis and Eufrasio are in the Tri-Cities for a few days to share their tales and reveal some unpublished secrets and legends during presentations sponsored by the Mid-Columbia Libraries.

The free programs, which started Wednesday with gatherings at the libraries in West Richland, Benton City and Prosser, continue today with a session at noon at the Othello Library and at 7 p.m. at the Kennewick library on Union Street.

The book, which hit bookstores in 2007, is one in a series being published about weird and wild legends from all 50 states. Washington residents Davis and Eufrasio also wrote Weird Oregon, due to be released in early May.

Weird Washington is a traveler's guide to the quirky, uncanny, unbelievable and downright bizarre places hidden across the state, said Davis, of Vancouver.

"We had lots of sources," said Eufrasio, of Auburn, who admitted they retraced some of the better known tales but always dug deeper for stories behind the stories.

The internet was a valuable source for ideas, but the best tales always came by "word of mouth," he said.

Davis is the experienced writer, having self-published eight other works about the paranormal -- generally ghosts and hauntings. But Weird Washington is a first book for Eufrasio, a graphics artist.

The two men divided up the state, each following roads that had strange endings.

For example, Davis went to Soap Lake and found a town that seemed to be in a time warp.

"It had just been painted, all ready for the tourist season, but everything had a 1950s look and a For Sale sign on it," he said.

Eufrasio found his way to Long Beach, where he noticed that objects of art were defined by weirdness.

There was the chainsaw sculpture of the Ugly Mermai, a buxom babe with a goofy grin that was so uncomely that citizens banned it from downtown to a less-conspicuous resting place.

Or how about the 5-foot-tall razor clam that spits a stream of water without warning at passers-by?

Long Beach also boasts as street art a 14 1/2-foot tall frying pan -- which begs the question, why?

"It's a P.T. Barnum kind of town," said Davis, who has a master's degree in archeology from the University of Sheffield in England.

But the two connoisseurs of quirky found something that actually felt weird when a Tri-Citian agreed to take them to the babies cemetery on a bleak hill overlooking Kiona, south of Benton City.

There, in a field of parents' nightmares, a small fenced plot contains the last remains of numerous children -- an ominous sign of a time when being born was no guarantee of long life and growing up was taking a chance at survival.

The authors also have been to the Maltby Cemetery east of Woodinville, where a visitor can stumble across "13 steps to Hell" and a gravestone that appears to have a pentagram on its face.

"I don't like to go to cemeteries at night," said Davis. "Bad things can happen there, like drug deals and vandals and people you wouldn't want to meet."

Florence Ferguson would agree, had she been able to claw her way out of Wallula Cemetery.

Florence and her sisters, Mary and Mandy, all succumbed to disease, but Florence merely fell into a deep coma.

Friends buried the three sisters in the same grave in the original Wallula townsite cemetery not realizing Florence was alive.

When the town and cemetery had to be relocated in the 1950s for the building of McNary Dam, workers uncovered the bizarre evidence -- the body of Florence, twisted and clutching her own hair, apparently in a frenzied state after realizing her premature burial.

And then there's the story about buried gold somewhere in one of the Wallula townsites. Seems that train robbers snatched several pounds of Idaho gold rush treasure and hastened to catch a riverboat to Portland with their loot.

Alas, a posse caught them before they could catch the boat. But the bad guys had enough time to bury the bullion before the posse dropped ropes around their necks and hanged them from a Wallula tree.

Perhaps the oddest weird thing in the authors' traipsing across the Evergreen State was investigation of the bizarre spontaneous combustion of Betty Setlow of Hoquiam in 1973. Legend has it that after she died and after the final viewing at the funeral service, Betty went out in a blaze of glory.

According to investigators, a fire burned nearly all of her remains, leaving just her feet as proof that Betty once walked the Earth.

One can't help but wonder if the embalmer used lighter fluid.

Tonight's presentation at the Kennewick library will feature tall tales, urban legends and some untold secrets that didn't make it into print, Eufrasio said.

-- John Trumbo: 509-582-1529; jtrumbo@tricityherald.com