Some say the best way to get to know a city is to take a ghost tour. Most of those people are ghosts. The following is a review of ghost tours I have participated in, with analysis of the haunting level of each. Next week, The Toast will feature a piece by a ghost tour conductor!
Lantern Ghost Tour of Boston, 2003
Tour details: This is an evening activity for a Literary Pilgrimage I have elected to go on during my junior year of high school. The stops on the Pilgrimage range from highly literary (Louisa May Alcott’s childhood home) to confusingly not-literary (performance by the Blue Man Group). The Ghost Tour falls at the absolute zero between these two poles. Each participant holds a large lantern which I am happy to report had a real candle, none of that flickering faux-votive stuff. I quite cannily manage to land in a group with my best friend and a few other people who I trust to take something like this seriously. At one point everyone stops to take a picture with an aggrieved-looking Native American statue. As a group, we spend a fair amount of time discussing what the creepiest type of ghost is, with the males of the group claiming angry suicide victim (The Sixth Sense had come out two years prior) and girls deciding that old-woman-ghost just barely supercedes child ghost. Given the location and the stories the guide tells, we remain on the lookout for witches and/or ghosts of witches as well. Strangely, one of the highlights of the tour is seeing Plymouth Rock itself, sitting at the bottom of a dungeon-like structure intended to keep people from wearing off its carved 1620 with grimy fingertips.
Haunted Level: High. Several days prior we spent an afternoon at the Salem Witch Museum. They drove home the point that teenage girls have been highly suggestible creatures from time immemorial. As we peer around shadowy lamplit corridors and I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, I refuse to believe that it has anything to do with my status as a 16-year-old girl. At some points I think I hear whistling that comes from the ether, but when you go anywhere with a group of teenagers there will always be someone making unnecessary noises to distract themselves from the history they’re being forced to take in. The most surprising part of the tour for me is that the guide manages to make me care more about what actually happened and less about the legends associated, which was probably their goal all along.
Ghost Tour of Fort Erie, Canada, 2010
Tour details: My boyfriend and I decided to celebrate our three year anniversary by driving from New Jersey to Niagara Falls (the good side, in Canada). One can only gaze admiringly in the direction of the falls for so long, so in the interest of branching out from the usual attractions, I lobby for an outing to Fort Erie Ghost Encounters. I’m happy to be faced with very little protest from my boyfriend, whose main concern is actually locating the fort, as my GPS refuses to function in Canada. Mid-way through our harried drive, he asks if Fort Erie was named after the lake, and if so, that’s really out of the way. I said no. 45 minutes later we arrived at the Fort, on the banks of Lake Erie. Apropos of the setting, I receive a death glare.
Haunted level: low at actual tour, though we didn’t stay long because of swiftly-escalating crankiness levels. We were turned off by the weirdness of the tour guides who were sword fighting with canes while waiting for the next tour to start. I temporarily thought a ghost had followed us back to our hotel, but actually the entire structure had lost power and so the door to our room was perilously unlocked because of science, not paranormal activity.
Ghost Tour of Princeton, New Jersey, 2010
Tour details: This was a bar crawl/ghost tour hybrid for one of my best friend’s birthdays. Our guide was a real professional–he had ghost measuring equipment as well as decorative stop signs he used to direct his charges. For one of the first times in my life I am dressed appropriately, so I can concentrate on ghosts while other girls who have dressed less for haunting and more partying shiver. The tour begins inauspiciously at a Starbucks where we witness some paranormal detection devices. We spend time in a cemetery with Grover Cleveland’s remains. Shannon the tour guide gets to wax rhapsodically about death masks. The birthday girl gleefully joins a pack of Princeton University students at one point, abandoning the tour to sprint across a quad lined by dorms.The night ends when Shannon calls a local bar to tell them we’re coming for mozzarella sticks and nachos. He pulls the phone away at the wrong moment to reveal the he is actually speaking to no one.
Haunting level: Medium. A cold October night in Princeton gets points in terms of atmosphere and a sizable portion was spent in an actual graveyard. Any time spent discussing the Menendez Brothers by moonlight is bound to give you a mild case of the creeps. The tour guide is too bizarre to really deliver the scare, but I appreciate his high-tech, flashlight-related technology for spiritual detection. While I never felt Grover Cleveland’s presence, I did get to learn about why Hawaiian people love him so much.
Ghost Tour of Old City Prague, Czech Republic, 2013
Tour details: Despite the Fort Erie Ghost Tour Debacle, my relationship continues and I marry my husband several years later. On our honeymoon I discover that there are Ghost Tours available in Prague. We sign up, arriving at a shabby storefront on a November evening. Our guide is a petite Czech woman with a great accent and velvet top hat. She is not prepared to wrangle a small hostel’s worth of stoned Dutch teenagers, who, along with an American guy who enjoys reminding people he is a doctor, are the tour’s customer base for the night. Stops along the way include a rumored alchemist’s den (creepy), a convent (creepier), and an abandoned hospital (creepiest). The streets we wander are near-deserted at some points and there are portions of the tour where we are encouraged to peek through the windows of an old building, which is something that happens just as music swells and ghosts appear in a movie.
Haunting level: Medium. Prague gets a lot of good ghost story action partially due to age. If a nunnery with a gated courtyard has existed for 400 years you can almost guarantee that there are some truly miserable lady ghosts milling around those parts. Still, I don’t feel much spectral presence. At one point I consider adding to the ghost population by defenestrating two teenagers in our group who apparently find the combination of cannabis and cobblestones arousing. They manage to detangle themselves in time to hear the tour guide ask us all to fill out a TripAdvisor review, which would be a funny thing for a poltergeist to do, when you think about it.
I grew up very close to Princeton, and I had no idea they had ghost tours there!
OH MAN I am going on a ghost tour of downtown New York tomorrow and I am SO EXCITED. It’s been a while since I’ve been on a ghost tour. My friends and I also have plans to go on a ghost tour when we go to New Orleans this winter.
I think my favorite ghost tours were in Gettysburg, but I’m probably biased. I’m always a sucker for ghost tour guides who dress up, so Oxford and Edinburgh are also at the top of my list. I did almost faint before going into the vaults in Edinburgh, but I think that was less ghostly and more because I smoked a joint before going on the tour. I now wish I had taken notes on all the tours I’ve been on.
Ghost tours in NOLA are amazing- make sure to get one that includes at least one hurricane in the price of the ticket. Most of the tours have at least one bar stop, but there are plenty of haunted bars, so WIN.
Oh man you guys, I went on the suckiest ghost tour imaginable in St. Augustine. So first, the tour guide could not decide if he was going to adopt the persona of some long-dead Sheriff or his actual persona of a guy who once worked for the St. Johns County Sheriff Department. He kept exhorting us to check out his TripAdvisor page to see all the pictures of ghosts that previous tourists had taken, which is a really great way to admit that the tour you’re taking us on right now is boring and lame. He made several ham-handed references to race, culminating in a story about a black servant woman who was murdered (and probably became a ghost or whatever), prompting him to note that she was supposed to have looked a lot like the one black woman in the tour group. And at the end, he had all the women come up and do this stupid thing where they closed their eyes and a ghost lifted their arm or something. (I think it was supposed to be some kind of mild hypnotism, but my girlfriend said she just raised her arm to hurry things up.)
Oh, bummer! I went on one in St. Augustine, but I was pretty young, so I remember very little about it, except some story about a face in the floor of a building at Flagler College.
Oh yeah, the face is totally there! But I think they did it on purpose, without ghost involvement. (What a beautiful building, by the way.)
Aw that’s the worst! I have been on three ghost tours in St. Augustine, as my dad lives in Florida nearby and if we go I’m like COME ONE there might be ghosts we haven’t seen yet. All three have been pretty great! But tour guides can make all the difference.
The best was the ghost tour that was also a bar crawl, where my dad said “you know guys don’t HAVE to get a drink at EVERY BAR” and I was like, do you even know me at all, Dad???
I went on a ghost tour of the Charleston jail and I was taking pictures and in a couple there are little skull orbs and as much as I want to be normal and skeptical I just am still so freaked out. Mostly by the terrible inhumane conditions of the jail but also because there was some freaky windows banging against the wind and then the orbs and no more ghost tours for me ever.
I always half-wanted to go on a ghost tour when I was in Oxford and was too cool-studenty to actually get on and do it. But a friend of mine ended up as a ghost story author and he wrote one set on an Oxford ghost tour, so having read that I am vicariously fulfilled Oxford-ghost-wise.
Noooo! Oxford ghost tour was the best! If only because going down all the walled streets adds a delicious level of creepiness.
The first house I lived in in Kingston, Ontario was along the route for the Haunted Walk (which stopped basically in our backyard) and my housemate and I decided we would go on the tour as soon as we moved out of the house to see what is was about. HOLY CRAP THAT THING WAS SCARY. Also they informed us at the beginning of the tour that they were not allowed to tell us stories about private dwellings and then proceeded to tell a ghost story about LITERALLY EVERY BUILDING THAT WAS NOT A PRIVATE DWELLING within a few blocks of our old house, so therefore it was almost definitely haunted, probably by eighteenth-century nuns (which is not too bad, because nuns are cool).
I’ve been on that tour! (Also the one at Fort Henry!) I remember it being very, very ghost concentrated, just a few blocks of literally all ghosts. Oh, and the alleyway with the old house where they found bones in the wall!
THAT ALLEYWAY LEADS TO THE PATIO ENTRANCE OF THE TOUCAN, A BAR THAT MY HOUSEMATE AND I HAD FREQUENTED WITH SOME REGULARITY UNTIL THAT VERY MOMENT
(that is a lie, we still went to the Toucan, but we never ever used the patio entrance again.)
I mentioned this last week, but it bears repeating: On a sunny, brisk fall afternoon, I went on a cemetery tour and it was really, really good! Had tons of fun, learned lots (or should I say “plots”? HEE!) and in this town’s typical backcountry mountain fashion, someone brought their dog which was soon joined by a stray that everyone seemed to know by name. So the two dogs romped around while we stomped the grounds and at the end of the tour, was immensely pleased with my little adventure.
As a wee FYI, this is the cemetery: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=cr&…
It doesn’t surprise me that the Canadian tour was the one with the lowest haunting level. If my impression of Canadian ghosts is in any way accurate (keeping in mind, 100% of my impression comes from my love of due South and Slings and Arrows), they seem to be a fairly mild-mannered if self-absorbed bunch.
Her description of the feelings of crankiness at being in Fort Erie and the weird cane sword fighting staff are solidly accurate. I’m originally from that town and while there is A LOT of natural beauty it’s a weird, weird WEIRD place. Also boring.
I went on a tour there once in grade 1 and spent the time clinging desperately to my teacher out of terror. They started with a demonstration of the Cat o’ nine tails and then talked at length about the dead soldiers buried beneath the Fort that were dug up and repatriated to the US. My freaked outness may have been from that, but I like to think it’s because I was a tiny sensitive who could feel the vibes of suffering and death. Totes science fact.
There’s a ghost tour in my home city which is sadly dull, despite the sky-high haunting levels where I live. The tour guides wear cheap tophats and cloaks that don’t fit, and they mostly look like out-of-work postmen.
City of the Dead tour in Edinburgh is the best ghost tour in the world hands down,
Edinburgh is rife with crappy ghost tour outfits, but this one stands above mostly b/c the tour guides are drama students at one of the universities. They really get into their roles and when augmented by ancient dark cemeteries, spooky trees, moonless nights, gothic architecture, a looming castle and centuries of truly gruesome history to reference, you really can’t escape unscared.
Wish I’d gone on that one when I was there, Edinburgh is totally full of creepy haunted places. I went on one that took us into a large space under some buildings and they told us about how witches had been burned there and people had been left to rot and all of the terrible things. And afterwards we got free drinks from the bar above the crypts or whatever. That improved things a bit.
Haha, they might tout themselves as all drama students, but having worked for them I can confirm they definitely aren’t (I’m not, for a start, and nor were a good half dozen other current/former CotD guides with them I can think of). What they do have though is practice a pretty good line in psychological torture – scaring tourists for fun and profit – oh, the lies I told!
The big secret: that ‘most haunted tomb’ at the end? We used a different tomb depending how big the tour group was.
I think the scariest ghost tour I ever went on was in Edinburgh, which is reputedly one of the most haunted cities in Europe. This particular tour took us down under the city into the catacombs and underground communities that developed around the time plague was sweeping the area. Not only did these people live underground, a bunch of them also baked to death after a huge fire in the city above. Maybe it was the atmosphere or just my general suggestibility, but I was absolutely terrified.
YES oh my god, I definitely took a similar tour while living in Edinburgh and will go to my grave swearing that I saw a ghost??? I do not even believe in ghosts, but I swear on my life I saw the face of an old man in a hat, and I thought he was just part of our tour group, but then he VANISHED and immediately after that the tour guide was like “oh btw, this is one of the most active rooms in the catacombs” and told this story about an old man ghost who is “quite malevolent” and “known to follow visitors throughout the tour” and I was like …….what might this man look like and the guide proceeded to describe exactly the face I had seen, and I almost passed out. THIS WAS ALSO LIKE, THE FIRST ROOM IN THE TOUR? I went through the next 45 minutes scared out of my goddamn mind. 0/10 would go again, I would rather peel off my face than experience such terror
They’re vaults, technically, rather than catacombs, as they were never for storing dead bodies.
Fun fact: no one ever baked to death in that vault. The fire did spread down the mile that far, but not into those vaults. Nevertheless I had fellow guides when I worked those tours who swear up and down that they had stones thrown at them from the empty vault behind the one where they end the tour. Most of the guides though were much more scared of the ‘old coven’ – the one with the stone circle in it and the damp down one wall. Those who claimed to be ‘sensitive’ said that room was much worse than ‘the Haunted Vault’ where we lied about the fire.
London ghost tours are tops – including the Jack the Ripper Tour.
My husband and I did a Raleigh (NC) ghost tour/pub crawl for our first date-anniversary. Not a good time. It really felt like the historical society was doing it at gunpoint. Too much actual historical detail delivered in dry tones, nowhere near enough good ghosty spookiness. Worth it, however, for introducing us to the local cherry bounce (bourbon + cherries + sugar) which I now make every year.
Galway – weak.
Old Town Alexandria – pretty good!
I am one of those who believes that ghost tours are a nice way to see a city after dark. :3
The last ghost tour I went on was at the Whaley House in San Diego (www.whaleyhouse.org), and it was pretty disappointing. The guide was annoyed that people weren’t asking enough questions (what questions were we supposed to ask?) and she kept talking about all the spooky pictures that she and other employees of the house had taken, but she was only able to produce one of them and it was not impressive. I scare easily and I definitely believe in ghosts, but I only felt mildly creeped out at one point in the tour (creepy painting!) and that was it.
Aw, that’s disappointing. I went on the Whaley House tour in elementary school and was terrified – partly by the part about someone who died by clotheslining themselves by running into the actual clotheline in the backyard, and partly because I accidentally got left all alone in the upstairs hallway and had to navigate my way back out.
My fiance worked for a ghost tour company years ago, first in Louisville, KY, then in Greenwich Village after we moved to NYC. I tagged along on his Louisville tour probably a dozen times, mostly because he was so adorable in his costume. The company had him encourage the groups to try to photograph orbs, and the groups got so excited when someone did. It was most exciting at this place called The Old House. It was a super old house that had been a tuberculosis hospital and a lot of other things, but during his tours, it was vacant. On rare nights, someone on the tour would get a picture of a figure standing in a first-floor window, arms akimbo, like Superman. Sometimes it almost looked like it WAS Superman, with a faint S on the chest. Everyone else would freak out and try to capture it too, but couldn’t. Since the building was like a proto-split level house, the first floor windows were above our heads and we couldn’t see in from the street. There was a parking garage across from the house, but there was never anyone in it who might have been reflected in the window. Big mystery, big excitement, and big tips for Fiance at the end of the tour. 🙂
One evening at The Old House, I held my mom’s digital camera up high and took a picture. There it was, the figure in the window, fists on hips…and it WAS Superman. It was a bit hazy, but I could make out the blue top, the S on the chest, the dark hair, everything. I almost peed my pants. I don’t believe in ghosts, but…well. I showed the picture around and everyone went nuts, and it was a really big group that night, too. We all tried, but not one of us was able to capture Superman again.
I spent the next couple hours staring at the picture and losing my mind. At the end of the tour, when the last of the group wandered off into the night, I turned to Fiance (who’d gotten EXCELLENT tips) and demanded to be taken to The Old House. Once there, we Scooby’d around trying to figure out how to investigate without trespassing. More photos yielded nothing. Finally we just climbed the stairs to the front door and leaned waaaay over–and there was Superman. After two seconds of sheer terror, we realized that whoever had vacated the building had left a cardboard cutout of Superman standing in the middle of the front room.
I don’t think Fiance told future groups that it was a cardboard cutout–the excitement and tips were too good to resist.
They're vaults, technically, rather than catacombs, as they were never for storing dead bodies.
Fun fact: no one ever baked to death in that vault. The fire did spread down the mile that far, but not into those vaults. Nevertheless I had fellow guides when I worked those tours who swear up and down that they had stones thrown at them from the empty vault behind the one where they end the tour. Most of the guides though were much more scared of the 'old coven' – the one with the stone circle in it and the damp down one wall. Those who claimed to be 'sensitive' said that room was much worse than 'the Haunted Vault' where we lied about the fire.
Lexington, VA ghost tour. A lady trussed up in full antebellum gear. A two chalk boards together with chalk in the middle to “call the spirits just as they did in the 18th century.” The cemetery where the Jackson family is buried. Dear Stonewall’s head moves at twilight towards the grave of his beloved. IT MOVES TOWARDS THE GRAVEEEE!
So…why DO Hawaiian people love Grover Cleveland?
Oh man, I remember going to a “ghost museum” in Prague a couple years back. It consisted mostly of someone’s basement, containing a handful of dioramas of Dreadful Scenes from local legends.
My favourite part was the story of the man crucified for being irreligious, and by the way his tortured soul is still pinned to THIS VERY CROSS RIGHT HERE NEXT TO THIS SIGN by all the nails in it, and by the way here’s a hammer and a tin of nails in case you want to add one.
(Faded sepia photographs of unsmiling people are very creepy.)
I went to a Catholic school from ages 7-12. It has fairly spacious grounds because aside from the new nun dorms, it also contains the old convent which was built around mid-1600s. We had official ghost tours every year, and ghost tours for the lols whenever we feel like it because ghosts also include teachers and students. The Catholic church near the school, which was built 50 years later, has 3 wells in it and there’s a story of a priest and his student who fell while sitting on one, studying.
(Faded sepia photographs of unsmiling people are very creepy.)
I went to a Catholic school from ages 7-12. It has fairly spacious grounds because aside from the new nun dorms, it also contains the old convent which was built around mid-1600s. We had official ghost tours every year, and ghost tours for the lols whenever we feel like it because ghosts also include teachers and students. The Catholic church near the school, which was built 50 years later, has 3 wells in it and there's a story of a priest and his student who fell while sitting on one, studying.
I've been on only 2 ghost/history tours, I think: Jack the Ripper is London and Williamsburg ghost tour. Jack the Ripper was slightly better (sorry Williamsburg!). I toured Hyde (?) Prison in Australia and while it's not an official ghost tour, they do play dramatized recordings of prisoners' writings. Some of those were harrowing to listen to.
That was like watching Boyhood, but if the film only caught up with him on ghost tours.
That was like watching Boyhood, but if the film only caught up with him on ghost tours.
I’ve only been on one ghost tour, in Jefferson, TX a gorgeous Victorian era small town that is supposedly one of the most haunted in Texas. It was included in a package thing or I wouldn’t have gone. I am a HUGE skeptic and so spent most of the tour rolling my eyes, right up until we got to go in this abandoned Victorian dentist’s office and there were no lights and the tour guide refused to actually go inside because she had bad experiences in there. And I was too freaked out to explore the place and instead stood near the top of the stairs pretending to be really, really uninterested and blase.
if the film only caught up with him on ghost tours.