This year in the spirit of Halloween, the Lynnwood Times sat down with local paranormal celebrity Jeff Davis to ask about his journey to a best-selling paranormal author, the most haunted places in Washington, and what exactly is a ghost to begin with.
Jeff Davis has authored over a dozen books and articles on archeology, history, and the paranormal, notably the best-selling books Weird Washington and Weird Oregon, and Ghosts, Critters, and Sacred Places of Washington and Oregon.
Davis has also been featured on several television shows including Coast to Coast AM, the History Channel show Haunted History: Northwest, Alaskan Killer Bigfoot, Ghost Adventures, the Dead Files, and That White People Sh*t.
Prior to leading ghost hunting tours in the Vancouver area, where he grew up, and authoring books on the strange, dark, and mysterious, Davis spent many years in the United States Army and Army Reserves, serving in Europe and Asia. Through his military career Davis held several positions ranging from infantryman; to military historian; to putting on puppet shows at orphanages.
Davis studied anthropology and archaeology in college and his master’s thesis was on the Vikings in Greenland. He worked as a field archaeologist in the Pacific Northwest prior to pursuing his writing full-time.
Separate to his writing career Davis puts on Ghost Walks through the Vancouver Barracks which, according to him, is one of the most haunted places in Washington. Tours run year-round by appointment and regularly from July through Halloween.
Davis’ recalled the first moment he formed an interest in the paranormal. As a child struggling with ADHD his parents bought him a television to keep himself entertained. One of his favorite things to watch on this television set was the horror movies his favorite station ran every Friday and Saturday – namely the original 1930’s The Mummy. Davis also attributed this movie to inspiring a life-long interest in anthropology which he said is surprisingly closely related to the paranormal as far as studying histories, ancestry, and human sub-species go.
Davis also attributes his interest to Washington’s rich paranormal culture from Bigfoot to U.F.O. sightings, to being the setting of popular supernatural stories like Twilight, Twin Peaks, and the Alan Wake video game series to name a few.
“When you grow up in a location and you have shared culture and shared interests and information it’s all natural, so you don’t really notice how unique it is until you go somewhere else,” said Davis.
As an example, Davis shared a story about when he was deployed in Kuwait and himself and several fellow soldiers were sitting around watching a documentary series on Big Foot. When the program showed a courthouse, he grew up driving passed, and he pointed that out, everyone were shocked and wanted to know if he ever witnessed Bigfoot himself.
According to Davis a couple of the most haunted places in Washington are the entire town of Port Gamble, several houses in Colfax, and a handful of the state’s old penitentiaries including Western State Hospital and Eastern State Hospital.
When asked why Washington State is the setting for so many different allegedly haunted locations when its a relatively new state, comparative to the Northeast for example, Davis speculated it may have something to do with Washingtonian’s receptiveness to paranormal encounters.
“There is a long tradition here in the Northwest of being open to the paranormal and even embracing it so maybe perhaps people here have more of an interest for looking for this kind of phenomenon and perhaps because they’re open to it, their subconscious mind allows for it to happen,” said Davis. “On the other end you could have people who’s expectations are very, very, high that they perceive an ordinary event and perceive it as ghostly.”
An example Davis gave is one house he was investigating had a rodent that died within the walls emanating a foul odor. One could perceive the stench as a demonic presence when, in actuality, it was just an ordinary critter in the wall.
To Davis a ghost can be many things. The traditional definition, he said, is an abandoned spirit but to him, he considers it more of a psychic energy left behind.
“There are different kinds of ghosts,” said Davis. “There’s no universal definition of the paranormal. It could be some sort of energy that people leave behind that plays itself over and over again. Another ghost could be someone who lived and died and doesn’t want to move on because they’re afraid, or they want to look over their family, or that have something in the world they can’t let go of. Others, like poltergeists, are often energy attached to adolescents experiencing puberty and when they mature, they typically go away.”
Davis has a hard road in his writing career, he shared, subscribing to the camp that his work needed little editing after writing. He credits working with one of his archaeology editors as being the best mentor he had to learn the craft of honing, and polishing, his written work.
His decision to become a writer full-time happened after he returned from deployment in Bosnia when he noticed most of the archaeology jobs in Washington State had dried up. Having some reserves saved up during his active duty he told his wife that he wanted to try writing full-time.
At first his wife was hesitant, but Davis made her a promise that he would become successful in a year and, if he didn’t, he would abandon the dream. If he had one thing going for him it was that there weren’t a lot of authors specializing in Northwest ghost books at the time which quickly worked in his favor.
Through mostly self-promotion and a handful of television appearances, Davis’ books took off until he was mobilized in the military again after the events of September 11, 2001. Though his time in deployment understandably got in the way of his writing career, what he noticed when he returned is that the region’s interest in the paranormal had grown so he just kept on going.
Davis is currently working on getting a podcast going sometime early 2025 and is working on a revised Pacific Northwest haunted tour guide which he plans to release as an e-book edition sometime in the coming years. This haunted tour guide will cover over 100 locations across the Pacific Northwest.
You can meet Jeff Davis at several events and bazars across the region including Quatchfest in March, Oddmall: Emporium of the Weird in Monroe and several Christmas craft bazars across the state. Meeting customers personally, Davis said, is his preferred method of advertising his work to going through bookstores or promoters.
Author: Kienan Briscoe
