Shadows In The Pines

Off Oregon’s northern coast, Tillamook Rock Lighthouse became known as “Terrible Tilly.” Before its first light shone in 1881, its construction had already claimed a life. For the keepers who lived and worked there, isolation and powerful Pacific storms were part of the job. In this episode of Mini Pines, join Rebekah for the history of Terrible Tilly, from the dangerous work of building the light...

Spokane has plenty of ghost stories. But how much of what gets repeated is actually documented? In this episode of Mini Pines, Bekah explores five of Spokane’s reportedly haunted locations, including the Bing Crosby Theater and the Davenport Hotel. We’re talking historic theaters, grand mansions, and hotel rooms with stories of tragedy and unexplained encounters attached to them. Join us as we loo...

For more than thirty years, the DNA profile investigators called “Individual A” had no name. In the second half of our investigation into the murders of Jay Cook and Tanya Van Cuylenborg, the case finally begins to move. After decades of dead ends, investigators turn to new DNA technology and forensic genetic genealogy. A GEDmatch upload produces distant family connections, genealogist CeCe Moore...

As October approaches, the Pacific Northwest seems to take on a different feeling. The days grow shorter, the shadows stretch longer, and old stories seem to come alive.   Join me for a fireside journey through Northwest folklore, mysterious waters, legendary creatures, haunted places, and the stories woven into the landscape around Spokane.   Because maybe the Northwest isn’t haunted…   Maybe it...

In November 1987, 20-year-old Jay Cook and 18-year-old Tanya Van Cuylenborg left Vancouver Island for what was supposed to be a simple overnight trip into Washington. Jay’s father needed materials picked up for the family business, Tanya came along, and they expected to be home the following day. They never made it back. In the first ten parts of this episode, we get to know Jay and Tanya before f...

We continue with the story of Dayton Leroy Rogers 

Dayton Leroy Rogers: The Molalla Forest Killer — Part 1: The Crimes Before Dayton Leroy Rogers became known as the Molalla Forest Killer, women in Oregon had already survived him. In Part One, we follow Rogers from his earliest documented violence through the crimes that eventually exposed what he had been doing. We look at the teenage girls he attacked years before the murders, the women who knew...

 The Big Burn In August of 1910, three million acres burned in two days. At least eighty-five people died, and nobody can say exactly how many, because most had been hired off barstools without anyone writing down their names. Outside Wallace, Idaho, a forest ranger named Ed Pulaski put forty-some men into an abandoned mine shaft and held the door until his body quit. That’s the part everyone reme...

Aidan Victoria Spear — Found, But Without Answers In January 2022, 21-year-old Aidan Victoria Spear was supposed to meet her mother, Jessica Brown. After years of struggling with addiction and homelessness on the streets of Tacoma, Aidan had told her mom she was ready for treatment. Jessica began making the arrangements. Aidan never arrived. For more than four years, Jessica searched for her daugh...

In 1997, a man called a late-night radio show to report a bottomless pit outside Ellensburg, Washington. Nineteen feet across, fifteen miles of fishing line, no bottom. Over five years the story grew a resurrected dog, a government payout, and a wombat sanctuary — then the man vanished for good. No hole was ever found. No Mel Waters ever existed.

A quick update on what we’ve been working on this last week 

The Man Who Carried His Own Key You hike eleven miles on snowshoes to a locked Forest Service cabin. You have the only key. And the stove is warm. For thirteen years in the 1930s and ’40s, someone lived off the locked backcountry cabins of north-central Idaho, letting himself in and out without ever breaking a thing. The men who worked that country had a nickname for him before they ever had a fac...

Bryan Kohberger pleaded guilty to the murders of Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin. But that plea ended the case before a jury ever heard the evidence, before experts were cross-examined, and before some of the biggest unanswered questions surrounding 1122 King Road were tested in open court. Now, with Kohberger attempting to withdraw his guilty plea, those questions...

The House Made of the Hill: The Wilbur-Hahn House At the end of a dead-end road on Spokane’s South Hill sits a century-old house built directly into the basalt beneath it. It’s beautiful, historically significant, privately owned—and by local reputation, one of the most haunted houses in Spokane. But the documented history of the Wilbur-Hahn House is stranger than most of the legends. Built in 191...

Finding Kit: Missing in Omak In the summer of 2021, sixteen-year-old Kit Mora left Yakima for what was supposed to be a temporary stay with their biological mother in Omak, Washington. By November, their closest friends and family had stopped hearing from them. Kit stopped posting online. They stopped attending school. And yet months would pass before anyone realized this teenager had seemingly di...

The Bridge of the Gods   There was a bridge across the Columbia River. Not the steel one at Cascade Locks with the toll booth and the hikers walking single file — the first one. Stone and dirt and the broken bones of a mountain, wide enough to walk across, with the river running underneath it in the dark.   For a long time, the people who told you about it were not believed.   This is the story of...

The day after Thanksgiving in 1989, 18-year-old Mandy Stavik left her family’s home in the small community of Acme, Washington, for an afternoon run along the roads she’d known her entire life. She never came home. What followed was one of the Pacific Northwest’s most haunting unsolved murders. Despite an extensive investigation, a massive search effort, and crucial biological evidence, detectives...

Don't Whistle Back: The Stick Indians of the Pacific Northwest There's a rule some people in this part of the country still follow: don't whistle at night. No explanation offered. Just — don't. Because something will hear you. This episode is about what's on the other end of that whistle. The Salish called them tsiatko. The Nisqually called them Seatco. In English they became the Stick Indians, or...

The Lewis-Clark Valley murders remain one of the Pacific Northwest’s most haunting unsolved mysteries. Between 1979 and 1982, five people either disappeared or were murdered across southeastern Washington and north-central Idaho, leaving investigators to wonder whether they were hunting a single offender who operated undetected for years. In the conclusion of our series, we follow the investigatio...

Deep in the cedar and spruce forests of the Oregon coast, where the fog comes in sideways and you can lose fifty feet of visibility in the time it takes to blink, the men who logged those slopes in the 1880s and 1890s had a story. It was called the Gumberoo. Coal-black, barrel-bodied, and completely indestructible — bullets bounced off its glossy hide, axes glanced away, even a charging elk got kn...

The Lewis-Clark Valley was already living with unanswered questions after the disappearance of Christina White and the murder of Kristin David. Then, in the span of just a few months, the investigation took a devastating turn. In Part Two of our deep dive into the Lewis-Clark Valley murders, we examine the disappearance of two-year-old Ricky Barnett, the vanishing of Kristina “Brandy” Miller and K...

In April 1979, twelve-year-old Christina White left a friend’s house in Asotin, Washington, and never made it home. Two years later, University of Idaho student Kristin David disappeared while riding her bicycle between Moscow and Lewiston. Her murder would send shockwaves through the Lewis-Clark Valley and leave investigators asking whether these two cases were connected—or simply heartbreaking c...

The Selkirk Mountains are among the oldest and most remote wilderness areas in the Pacific Northwest—and for generations, they’ve been home to stories of something that walks upright through the trees. In this episode of Mini Pines, we explore documented Bigfoot encounters, Indigenous traditions, eyewitness accounts, mysterious tracks, and why the Selkirks have quietly become one of North America’...

The Witches of Rathdrum | Mini Pines For decades, people across North Idaho whispered about a lonely stretch of Highway 41 where hooded figures formed human chains across the road, bonfires flickered deep in the trees, and anyone brave enough to drive through after dark risked encountering something they couldn’t explain. But where did those stories come from? In this episode of Mini Pines, we sep...