SCOOBY DOO! WHERE ARE YOU?: Visit Govan, Washington

SCOOBY DOO! WHERE ARE YOU?: Visit Govan, Washington 

OK, so I thought I’d do something different in my ongoing series of articles on Tiny Towns. I wanted to explore a ghost town. I’m talking good ol fashion haunted grounds that once housed a town that has long been abandoned, occasionally visited by a YouTuber.

I don’t want a ghost town where those meddling kids in the Mystery Machine roll in, only to find out that the creepy creature that’s been keeping YouTubers from visiting, is just Mr. Crowley underneath the sheet. 

I want a ghost town where Zac Bagans comes in, set up camp with an EMF to capture disembodied voices that’ll scare the crap out of Aaron Goodwin. I love the expression on Aaron’s face when a paranormal whisper is heard. He looks just like a shocked Taylor Swift when she finds out she’s won yet another Grammy.

We may have found a true ghost town in Govan, Washington just off highway 2, not far from the Tiny Town that we explored earlier, Wilbur. Although ask the gentleman who actually lives in Govan (pronounced go-van), he has never seen any supernatural phenomenon. More on him later.

 Govan was always a small town that started in 1889 as a railroad depot stop on the new Central Washington Railroad line, with a post office established inside. In fact, it was all about the railway. Govan was named after a Northern Pacific civil engineer. By 1890 there were about 80 people serving the railroad, loading grain and fruit grown in the region onto trains bound for Spokane, which is 70 miles east of Govan.

 And like many towns back in the day, fires would sweep from wooden building to wooden building. Sometimes they’d rebuild, only to have it burn down again. Slowly people left town. By the 1940’s, the schoolhouse closed. Finally the fire of 1974 caused the last few in the community to simply not rebuild and just move out of town.

OK, so here comes the part of Govan’s history where people believe Govan is haunted. Early on, the town had several unsolved murders. In 1902 Judge J. A. Lewis and his wife were brutally murdered. Judge Lewis was killed by an axe and his wife was drug around by the barn and beaten to death. Why? No one knows for sure, but Judge Lewis was known for keeping large sums of cash in his home and not the bank.

In the spring of 1903, a gunman walked into the saloon and killed C.S. Thennes. The gunman ws arrested…but he was never convicted. What?! 

Then in 1941, Lillie Lesnew was murdered on her farm, and her son suddenly went missing. Was he the one who killed his mom? No one knows. But seven years later, the son’s bones were found on a farmland.

 Today, grain still gets collected and delivered. And there’s only 3 people that live in the unincorporated town in the Lincoln county. One of them is Joe Sullivan. He says that he’s never encountered any ghosts. But jokes, “Of course, I go to bed at 9 o’clock, so the ghosts may not be up yet.” Outside of the photographers who come to shoot some of the remaining rotting buildings (can you blame them?) “It’s quiet here. Doesn’t matter, day or night. It’s nice and quiet.” “Come visit, just don’t move here.”