If you like a good ghost story, Valerie Stafford has more than a few to tell you. We’re not talking about your run-of-the-mill, sit-around-the-campfire-eating-s’mores-giving-each-other-the-shivers genre of creep outs and urban legend gore. Oh, no, my friends. We’re talking real ghost stories here.

Which shouldn’t come as a surprise if you know anything about Val and her husband Fred, the owners and restorers of Concrete Theatre and Act One Ice Cream. As it turns out, their hometown of Concrete, WA is a pretty haunted place — and you might say that Valerie Stafford knows where the bodies are buried, or at least where their spectral remains might be encountered. For nearly two decades now, Val has organized an annual Halloween tradition known as the Concrete Ghost Walk.

The inspiration behind the Concrete Ghost Walk was similar events that the Stafford’s had experienced in Atlanta, Georgia as well as other American towns. “Port Townsend has a ghost walk as well,” noted Val, “and many of them start out in a cemetery. When we came back to Concrete I wondered if it was haunted…so I started asking around.”

Val’s investigation benefited in no small part from the fact that she has been Concrete’s long time Chamber of Commerce president — but it benefited even more from her avid curiosity about the history of her hometown. “I thought it would be fun to go door-to-door to ask anyone who lived or worked there if they thought their building was haunted. This was 17 years ago, and I discovered that everyone that I talked to said that there were so many weird things that happened here, so I sat down with a friend and we planned a ghost walk that would start at the iconic Thompson Bridge (which was once the longest single span concrete bridge in the world).”

Despite some initial apprehensions over event turnout, the inaugural Concrete Ghost Walk was an immediate triumph. “I thought nobody would come, but that evening there was a swarm of people who showed up — and we’ve had sell-out crowds ever since,” said Val. “A big difference with our ghost walks and others that I’ve experienced is that we actually have people portraying the figures from the past and telling their stories as we take groups around town.”

The popularity of Concrete’s haunted history was such that when some 90 people showed up one year, Val decided that it was time to sell tickets in advance, and the Concrete Ghost Walk now takes place over the course of several Saturday nights leading up to All Hallows Eve. This year, Val included the Mount Baker Hotel as a haunted venue. “It was actually the first thing that popped up when I did a search on haunted places in Concrete,” she said. “There is supposedly a little girl there who has a story to tell…and like all of our ghost stories, it’s based on reality. We embellish them a bit for entertainment purposes,” she added with a wink. “I’m proud to say that this is the only time of the year when Concrete is truly a ghost town.”

There is, however, another Halloween tale that Valerie Stafford and her theater love to share, although it’s not a ghost story. It’s the story of the evening the Martians landed in Concrete, WA.

The year was 1938, and as was the case prior to the advent of television, most American families were clustered around their radios on the night of October 30. I’ll let Valerie pick up the story from here.

“People had two programming choices back then: CBS and NBC. One of them played music and the other was broadcasting the Mercury Theater, which featured the popular radio personality Orson Wells (who would go on to greater fame as a Hollywood actor and film director). Wells was doing a radio dramatization of the H.G. Wells science fiction class, War of the Worlds, but he was doing it as though it was a live newscast. If listeners were switching back and forth between the two broadcast stations, they might have missed the disclaimer that the events Wells was so dramatically relating were fictional. As it was, a lot of Americans actually believed we were under attack by Martians.”

“Here in Concrete, the Mercury Theater radio show came on at around 5pm, and people were listening to Orson Wells describing an alien invasion. Our phone service at that time was sketchy at best, so folks weren’t able to get outside confirmation of the hoax. What happened instead was frightening. At the point in the broadcast when Wells was announcing the landing of the Martians and a resulting power outage — at that very moment the power went out in Concrete.”

Needless to say, some panic ensued as people ran out into the darkened streets of Concrete to check on the status of loved ones and neighbors. “There were maybe 1,500 people living here on October 30, and to this very day we don’t know whether or not the Martians actually landed,” said Val with a laugh, “but there was a sudden exodus of men who headed up into the hills to protect their moonshine stills. The sheriff eventually had to go up and reassure some of them that they and their hooch were safe.”

A week after the commotion, said Val, the editor of The Concrete Herald wrote an article claiming that nobody in town had really been all that concerned about an alien invasion, but in what might well be the only known mention of Concrete, WA on the front page of the New York Times, there appeared an article about a “small town in Washington state” that was in a panic over Orson Wells’ October 30, 1938 broadcast. In celebration of its town’s endearing gullibility, the Concrete Theatre pays an annual cinematic tribute to War of the Worlds with an old black & white film adaptation of the H.G. Wells classic, along with portions of the celebrated radio broadcast that snookered a lot more folks than just the good citizens of Concrete…although to far less acclaim than the front page of the Times.

Note: Above screen shots are from an October 2023 presentation by Valerie Stafford at the Concrete Theatre