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This story was originally published at HistoryLink.org. Subscribe to their weekly newsletter.

Worlds at War

Eighty years ago, on October 30, 1938, Martians invaded our planet and annihilated much of the populace with heat rays — or at least that’s what some folks believed when they turned on their radios. That evening, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre broadcast an hour-long dramatization of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds on the CBS radio network, and although the possible end of mankind still had commercial breaks, some thought the end days had arrived.

The show’s “live reports” originated from the East Coast, but local news outlets were flooded with calls from panicked people who feared that aliens might have also landed here in the Northwest. Up in the mountain town of Concrete, people panicked when a power outage plunged the community into darkness in the middle of the broadcast.

In the cold light of dawn, no alien war machines could be found hereabouts. Or were they just biding their time? In 1947 the world’s first modern “flying saucers” were spotted over Mount Rainier, Seattle, and Maury Island. The last sighting proved to be a hoax, but suspicious events gave conspiracy theorists their first “Men in Black” to chew on. Add in all the Cold War jitters, and by 1954 all it took was a few windshield dings to trigger panic in the streets.

Spirits and More

Halloween is here again, and this week HistoryLink takes a look at some of Washington’s spooky visitors over the years, beginning with some ghostly encounters in Seattle. From a supposed poltergeist at the old Burnley School of Professional Art to apparitions spotted at Ye College Inn and the Pike Place Market, the city is no stranger to reports of paranormal activity. Even the shades of the Reverend Daniel Bagley and his wife Sarah reportedly show up, lurking around the parsonage of the Capitol Hill Methodist Church.

And if those weren’t scary enough, witness the response to ABC’s 2002 telecast of Stephen King’s Rose Red, based on Ridley Pearson’s Diary of Ellen Rimbauer about a haunted mansion in the middle of downtown Seattle. Presented with an air of historical verisimilitude, the house and the story were completely fictional: A Lakewood estate and Seattle’s Arctic Club (scene of at least one true tragedy) doubled for the movie’s man-eating mansion. Notwithstanding the transparency of the hoax, HistoryLink was inundated with emails demanding the truth of Rose Red. To the disappointment, even anger, of some, all we conjured up were cold, dead facts.

But lest you think that Halloween is only filled with tricks and treats, the holiday has its share of truly grim events, beginning with the October 31, 1906, “Shootout in Poplar Grove” at Kennewick, which left three lawmen and one outlaw dead. On Halloween Eve, 1926, 14-year-old Letitia Whitehall went missing in Kirkland. Two weeks later, her body was found submerged in the Sammamish River. The killer was never found, but an innocent man was put on trial for his life. And on Halloween Eve, 1934, Tacoma police arrested serial killer Jake Bird right after he hacked two women to death with an axe.

NEWS THEN, HISTORY NOW

New Name

The name “Seattle” appeared in print for the first time on October 30, 1852, when the Olympia-based newspaper The Columbian carried an ad for the Seattle Exchange general store run by Doc Maynard. The paper also told of Seattle’s first steam-powered sawmill, then under construction by Henry Yesler. With the filing of the first plats for the “Town of Seattle” in May1853 the new name became official.

Wires Came

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, it took weeks for the news to reach Olympia. On October 25, 1864, Seattle connected with the outside world when Western Union telegraph lines finally made their way to the city. Western Union demonstrated telephones in the city more than a decade later, but it wasn’t until 1893 that the Northwest’s largest cities began chatting among themselves.

Musical Fame

On October 28, 1927, star guitarist John Coppock returned from Hollywood for a homecoming concert in the town of Peshastin. And 10 years ago this week, on October 31, 2008, Northwest ’60s garage-rock icons the Sonics performed a triumphant reunion concert at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre.