Billy Ghol (ghoul?) was a prolific serial killer from the turn of the 20th century, operating out of the remote seafaring town of Aberdeen, Washington, on the Pacific Coast of North America. His modus operandi was to murder sailors as they put into port and drank at the local bars and enjoyed the local brothels and slept in the local hotels. Indeed, he would eventually become a local union official, and every visiting sailor would have to speak to him personally and register their stay. This gave him ample opportunity to gain their confidence, find a secluded spot, murder them, steal their valuables and last pay (which was often declared as they had registered), and he'd dispose of their body. He even had a sluiceway under his office that led directly into the waters of the harbor. He had a reputation as a bully and a thug, in the way many would exploit their union offices in the day, but his petty organized crime was only a cover for his true depravity.

His name is seldom remembered today, despite the great toll of lives that he stole. Consider a near contemporary, Jack the Ripper, who’s alleged to have killed five persons in total, far less active, yet far more infamous. This is likely due to the remoteness of the town. There were no rail lines in those days, and the easiest way in and out was by ship. Naturally there was more fame, or infamy, to be found in a metropolis like London. Jack the Ripper chose prostitutes as is victims, a common target, as the lay public often wouldn’t care, or even blame the victim. Given the resulting notoriety, his choice in victims did not appear to deter the police. Billy Ghol had a somewhat similar scheme. In the days of tramp steamers, when men would be shanghaied and pressed into service, a sailor jumping ship at any given harbor and simply disappearing was common. There were rarely any investigations.

Despite this, Billy Guhl was so overwhelmingly prolific in his proclivities that Aberdeen, Washington developed a sinister reputation. Sailors in far away ports like Copenhagen or Macao would whisper at how its tarry rotting docks, always under a gloomy overcast sky, should always be avoided. Its infamy, at least in sea ports, was briefly worldwide. And in time not even the locals could not ignore their troubles when so many bodies began to wash ashore at high tide.

After decades of operating under their noses, Billy Ghol was finally caught. Only convicted for a handful of murders they could conclusively prove, Billy Ghol ended up in state asylum for the mentally insane, his brain thoroughly riddled with untreated syphillus. Yet authorities suspected he was involved with the murder of over one hundred men.

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This was a significant underestimate. Authorities based their estimate upon the number of reported missing men. Only a small number of the missing had ever been reported.

Jonnie Jeremiah, at the time that Billy Guhl performed his deeds, was an older Native American man of an unrecorded tribe from the Salish language family. He was often considered the town's fool, or idiot, or mad man, back when they rarely distinguished these terms, and used far less acceptable slurs. Jonnie was certainly unwell, he suffered from chronic, untreated syphilis, what may have been bipolar disorder, and the terrible drama of seeing his friends, family, and loved ones all die of smallpox in his youth and middle age. Owing to Jonnie's condition, and his position on the lowest rung of the social ladder, nobody believed Jonnie when he tried to tell of the things Billy Ghol was doing. Jonnie knew, of course. Billy had been Jonnie's best friend. He spent all those years telling people, yet nobody would listen.

Jonnie, and sometimes Billy, had lived in a dilapidated shack on a grassy bluff overlooking the tidal flats of Grays Harbor. It's long gone, of course. The area was zoned and developed into a residential neighborhood in the 1960s. There is a lot of roughly 3000 square feet where his shack once stood. Now there stands a small three bedroom house, the kind that would have been a home for a working class laborer, almost certainly a logger. By the 1960s, the timber industry had long surpassed the trade steamer industry.

This house is often unoccupied. It sells cheap, and is often on the market.

Sometimes, late at night, usually in the fall when the weather is bad, and cold storms blow in off the northern Pacific. Sometimes the ghost of Jonnie Jeremiah appears. As his life had no geographical reference to the house that came later, he might appear in the living room, or the backyard, or just over the fence line, or halfway embedded in the door to the little closet space for the hot water heater.

The ghost of Jonnie tries to warn the observer about Billy Guhl. He yells. He cries. He screams. About those bodies. The bodies in the water. Dead. All dead. All of them. Billy and the dead. He has no voice.

Nobody ever listens to him.