A Conversation with Witchland author Tim Mulligan

As I sat on a bus riding through the Hanford Site, our stern Department of Energy tour guide got on the radio to see which way the wind was blowing. Turned out we were in luck, and the conditions were safe for our group to take a peek at an environmental restoration disposal facility, or ERDF, a big hole in the flat Washington plain full of toxic waste.  

OK, this tour might not be on everybody’s bucket list, but I’ve long been fascinated by the three sites of the Manhattan Project — Hanford, Washington; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee — so I jumped at the chance to tour the site of the famous B Reactor. Getting to hear about schemes to dispose of 56 million gallons of radioactive waste was just a bonus.  

I took this tour about 15 years ago. Since then, the last of the lawsuits from the downwinders — people who suffered from cancer or thyroid conditions due to radiation exposure from Hanford — have been settled. But the toxic waste is still there. And now it’s inspired a gripping series of graphic novels about living in the shadows of the world’s first full-scale plutonium production reactor. 

Lawyer-turned-human resources professional Tim Mulligan grew up in Richland, Washington, one of the Tri-Cities near Hanford, and now lives in Southern California. During the Covid pandemic, he turned his many talents to playwriting. And then he transformed his plays into graphic novels. 

Starting with Witchland — followed by Snitchland, Twitchland, and the upcoming Ditchland — his series blends the real-life horrors of toxic waste with the supernatural and stars a family based on his own: a gay white couple raising a Black daughter. (The World of Witchland books are available on Bookshop.org and on Amazon). I interviewed him twice in 2025 about writing, the horror genre, and growing up in one of the U.S.’s leading toxic waste strongholds. The interviews have been edited for length and cohesion. 

Teresa Bergen: What are your earliest memories of toxic waste in Richland? 

Tim Mulligan: I was born and raised there. Even in high school, I worked out at Hanford in an internship, and I even went back as a young lawyer out of law school. And I’ve never had a discussion about toxic waste with anyone in my world or family until I started writing these books. It’s a topic that people who live there don’t talk about. 

I can’t even tell you what I was doing when I worked out there. It was so top secret that I didn’t even know what was happening where I worked. So I don’t recall any discussions. There were no warnings about the water, about the air, about animal testing. We would go out there and drink beer at the nuclear sites.  

I went to Hanford High School right on the grounds of the reactor. And even when they stopped producing plutonium — that was the year I graduated from high school, 1986 — we weren’t taught anything about any of that in high school.  

TLB: Hanford started as a top secret World War II project. The workers recruited didn’t even know they were being moved to this remote part of Washington state to help build the world’s first nuclear weapons. It seems like that tradition of secrecy persists.   

TM: Completely. I mean, even the people that got sick, like I had family members that got sick. There was a relative who worked very closely — I’m not going to give his name out — with handling the toxic materials. He got cancer and was really sick. And never wanted to be a part of the class-action lawsuit. As he was dying, some representative from Hanford offered a check to his spouse to help with his expenses. They didn’t even know what it was for. So I think everything was hush-hush. 

And even now when everything’s kind of more out in the open, you’d think there would be more discussion about it. Not to knock the Tri-Cities and Richland, but I don't think anyone who lives there even has concern. 

TLB: How did you start writing this graphic novel series? 

TM: When I first started writing, I’d been gone for a long time. I wasn’t even writing about the toxic waste/nuclear side of it. I was actually writing a scary story about a witch. Because there was a  woman there who lived there who kind of terrorized my small circle of friends throughout my high school years. It was during Covid where I thought I could write a play about that. Scary plays were having a moment.  

So then I said, what if I dropped my family — myself and my partner, we’re gay, and we have two Black children who are now college-age and more — what if we moved back now at this time? We would be not just fish out of water, I didn’t know how welcome we would be. And we definitely would feel out of place. I said, what if I take this modern family and drop them into modern-day Hanford?  

TLB: Your series involves real-life events. Tell me about your research. 

TM: I feel like I know more about Tri-Cities than anyone I know who lives in Tri-Cities or grew up there. I’ve researched it like crazy. I’m not writing scientific treatises. It’s just that I want to make sure I’ve got the whole picture. 

The first book, Witchland, really got into the history of the downwinders. And the accident that happened, the real-life tunnel [full of stored radioactive waste] that collapsed in 2017. My goal has been to have each of the stories represent a different angle of Hanford and living in a nuclear site like that. And then of course there’s always some supernatural stuff. 

The second book, Snitchland, I tried to make less supernatural and more of a drama/thriller, about why the tunnel collapsed and the whistleblower aspect. There’s a nonprofit organization that helps Hanford whistleblowers. I did a bunch of research on whistleblowers’ fears and stories. There’s a lot of allegations and stories about, and a lot of consistency about, phones being tapped, the person being made out to look like they’re crazy, being followed. There are stories of break-ins.  

When I was a young lawyer, a friend’s mother wanted to meet me in Seattle. Her husband had worked there for many years in a high-up role. She told me this crazy story of her phones being tapped and how she could hear people on her phone all the time. She didn’t trust anybody. And she was kind of losing her mind because of it. I thought it was kind of crazy talk. This was probably in the late ‘90s, and I just didn’t think much of it until later on when I was writing Snitchland. But now I’ve seen all these documents. I thought back, and I’m like, maybe she was telling the truth. 

I’ve been in human resources for a long time. Not at a nuclear facility, but in other places. So I know very well about workers comp and whistleblowing and the fears of it.  

TLB: In your more recent release, Twitchland, you have an interesting take on addiction and toxic waste. 

TM: For the third story. I wanted to write something even darker and grittier. It started off as a vampire story. My idea was, what if some bats got into the tanks? And they start creating all these vampires. So I started there. But I’m not a vampire expert. It gets too tricky in the lore of vampires. And what does that have to do with Hanford? And also I had just come across a news article about a big fentanyl bust last year or the year before. And it just got me thinking of telling a more modern-day story. Obviously it’s not particular to Richland. It could be any town that has a drug issue, especially with the fentanyl crisis. But what if I made these bats bite people and they get radiated, and what they want is more and more and more drugs. But instead, that drug is toxic waste.  

TLB: How have people in Tri-Cities reacted to the Witchland series? 

TM: I haven’t gotten much reaction. The people I know love it, they think it’s fun. I haven’t gotten any reaction from Hanford, the Department of Energy, or anybody. I reached out to a couple of groups that help the whistleblowers but never heard back. I had somebody reach out about doing the play in Richland. That would be an interesting thing, but it never really materialized. 

TLB: Tell me about Pyrink, the artist you work with to illustrate the stories. 

TM: He’s out of Mexico. I got him through a search through Upwork. I posted a graphic design job. People from around the world bid for it. It was my first graphic novel. I demoed his work. And he was the first one I really gravitated toward. Now we’re working on a fourth book together. It’s been a great working relationship. 

I think he’s getting better and better. In Twitchland, even though there are some disturbing images, the work is so beautiful that I’m blowing the prints up and framing them. It’s really cool. 

TLB: What can your fans expect next? 

TM: Now I have two more books coming out. One to cover the animal testing. And the last one to come out is going to cover the UFO angle. 

TLB: Animal testing? Was that to learn about the effects of radiation? 

TM: Yeah, there’s so many stories. It’s sad. It was in the ‘70s. Beagles and alligators. There’s all these stories of these alligators that escaped. And they made their way into the Columbia River. And for years there were rumors of radiated alligators in the river. And tons of pigs and sheep and farm animals.  

But in my story, it’s a werewolf story. It’s still kind of pulling back the curtain on this ugly chapter of Hanford for all the different animals they did testing on, and turning it into a modern-day monster story. 

TLB: What’s the scariest thing about Hanford? 

TM: The biggest fear is for the river, especially if you go east toward the Tri-Cities. You don’t want that radiation to hit the river. They have these leaking tanks that they’re doing all they can to stop. But that’s the fear.