It is no wonder that Queen Anne would house a number of stairways leading up and down the hill. But have you ever tried to find a map that would guide you on the location of these stairways?  Urban hiker and mapmaker Thomas Horton has just the map for you: Map of the (oft) Pedestrian Public Stairs of Queen Anne Hill.”  As reported in the Seattle Times, 

A self-described urban hiker, Horton became curious about the many stairways that lead up and down his “home hill” and began to look for information on the stairs. After discovering that nobody outside of the Seattle Department of Transportation had a public record of the stairways, he decided to devote the summer of 2007 to walking and mapping them — spending at least 120 hours exploring 120 of Seattle’s 550 stairways before publishing his map last May.

Not only does the map give you intriguing locations for the stairs, but there is history and folklore associated with many of the stairways.

Arguably the most hair-raising history belongs to the Boston Street Haunted Stair, No. 54 on the map. According to local legend, the original wooden stairway crumbled down the hill in the early 1900s, killing a woman who was on her way to meet her fiancé. (Is it just me, or is there a preponderance of fiancés in ghost stories?) Decades later, the legend continues, a woman was walking on the concrete steps that had replaced the ill-fated originals when a disembodied voice whispered urgently for her to turn back. The woman heeded the eerie warning and narrowly avoided serious injury when the stairway broke apart, crashing downhill.

Copies of the “Map of the (oft) Pedestrian Public Stairs of Queen Anne Hill” can be purchased for $5 at Queen Anne Books, 1811 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle; 206-283-5624.  Or order it online from the Queen Anne Historical Society,www.qahistory.org.