Halloween is here. Time to get spooked and bring history to life on a ghost tour
WASHINGTON – On a chilly October night, a few brave souls gathered under the light of the fall’s first full moon in the heart of the nation’s capital.
The gaggle of Midwestern tourists was awaiting Anna Surratt, whose mother was hanged as an accomplice in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Though Surratt – much like her mother – is long dead, she emerged from the darkness wearing a long, hooded cloak and carrying a lantern to guide the group around Capitol Hill to the spots haunted by her fellow spirits.
Surratt, played by theater actress Victoria Sova, recounted gruesome tales of deaths that took place in and around the country's most vaunted and historic sites.
Taking a ghost tour in the nation's capital brings added resonance and renown to what has become an American pastime: getting spooked at Halloween. Among the ghosts still haunting Washington: Lincoln, who has been spotted wandering the corridors at the White House, as has his 11-year-old son, Willie, who died there in 1862 from typhoid fever. At the U.S. Capitol, where John Quincy Adams suffered a fatal stroke after voting against a resolution, his ghost can be heard late at night yelling "No!" and a feline apparition known as Demon Cat often appears to frighten people in the basement.
At midnight on Halloween, Sova herself said she saw the cat with piercing green eyes racing toward the Supreme Court, a site also reportedly haunted by the phantoms of Confederate prisoners of war.
The true believers like Sova who lead ghost tours here and across the country say the spooky strolls aren’t just a good way to send a chill down your spine at Halloween, they also teach real local history and boost tourism at sometimes overlooked historic sites. And while ghost tour guides can’t guarantee everyone will encounter a spirit – though they say many have – guides promise to provide an entertaining evening for believers and skeptics alike.
Death befells all, and Sova warned the tourists gathered in Washington one recent night they may not survive the night. They might suffer the same ghastly fate as those doomed to haunt stops on the tour.
“Whoever dies on the hill, stays on the hill,” she warned.
How ghost tours became America's haunted hobby
Paranormal tourism has long been a manifestation of America's fascination with the macabre, according to Rachael Ironside, an associate professor at Robert Gordon University who studies dark tourism. She said the industry traces its roots back to the rise of spiritualism in the late 19th century when many Americans took an interest in seances and mediums, and the first paranormal research centers were founded.
By the early 2000s, Ironside said, supernatural television shows that featured ordinary people exploring haunted places like "Ghost Hunters" helped give rise to the modern ghost tour. Frankie Harris said it was around that time he and his wife Kim decided to launch their ghost tour company, Amerighost Tours, in Nashville.
At the time, Harris recalled, so few people knew what ghost tours were that he was once stopped by a police officer who wanted to know why he was telling ghost stories outside a church so late at night. Over the past two decades, they've expanded to Louisville, Kentucky, and Washington and participants have grown more devoted.
“People that do ghost tours, it becomes kind of a hobby for them. They often will take the ghost tour in any city that they visit,” he said.
Harris’ tourgoers follow actors in Victorian dress on foot to haunted sites around Nashville including the Ryman Auditorium – former home to the Grand Ole Opry and the ghost of music legend Hank Williams Sr., according to lore. In Louisville, they are regaled with tales of poltergeists like The Lady in Blue at the old Seelbach Hotel, once frequented by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Al Capone.
“Ghost stories really are sort of sneaky history tours, in a way,” he said.
Ghost tours go cut-throat for tourism dollars
Paranormal tourism is a multimillion industry in some cities and has allowed historic facilities like abandoned hospitals, schools and prisons to rebrand themselves, “to remain intact or to receive much-needed funding and renovations,” according to a 2020 study published in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly.
When Mike Vitka first started working for Spellbound Tours in 2000, he said they had just one competitor in Salem, Massachusetts. Now, he estimates there are more than 80 tour operators in the city, which draws more than a million visitors each year.
“It's very, very busy now," Vitka said. "Salem, it's gone from being a day trip, an afterthought of a Boston trip, to something that people from around the globe plan for their whole vacation.”
Vitka said he leads tours detailing the history of the witch trials, where 200 women were accused of witchcraft, and 20 were executed, the city’s “thriving vampire community,” serial killers like the Boston Strangler, who visited Salem, and “terrifying true ghost stories," many of which he says come from personal experience.
Competition can be fierce. Several tour guides including Vitka and Harris told Paste BN they have to compete with national chains moving into their market and even poaching stories from local tours.
“Our approach with that is just to ignore it and just do our thing and just focus on our customer,” said Harris. “But if you talk to people around the country, you'll learn of these various feuds and things and lawsuits and all of that.”
How ghost tours handle dark history
The guides that spoke with Paste BN stressed that their tours are thoroughly researched, but Ironside said research has shown the accuracy of ghost tours can vary, and over time, the stories of real crimes or tragedies can get exaggerated for entertainment.
“It can be a compelling way to engage people in the history of a place that maybe ordinarily wouldn't engage with that topic,” she said. “But at the same time, there are ethical issues.”
Across the South, for example, ghost tours held on plantations can turn the horrific realities of slavery into titillating tales, according to Tiya Miles, author of "Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era." But Miles said when stories are handled with care, they can illuminate the plight of people marginalized during their lifetimes, including people of color, women, and people with disabilities.
“That's something that ghost stories can do, that perhaps other kinds of cultural productions or creations can't do,” she said.
Vitka said some Salem locals can be hesitant to embrace the city’s history, either because they’re frustrated by the throngs of tourists or because they don’t want to promote its violent past. But he said, “The best way to deal with the witch trials is to embrace the history so we can learn from it, and something awful like that doesn't happen again.”
Why do people go on ghost tours?
Unlike a haunted house or a horror movie, ghost tours aren’t necessarily designed to raise your blood pressure with jump scares. As a result, the tours don’t always attract thrill seekers, but people interested in the supernatural, history buffs, true crime fanatics, families and even skeptics, Ironside said.
For some, the tours can also be a spiritual experience. Lopaka Kapanui said he became fascinated with ghost tours when he took one in the late 1990s and saw many similarities to the lessons on Hawaiian culture and spirituality his mother had taught him growing up.
Kapanui now runs the Mysteries of Hawaii tour with his wife and shares stories of Hawaii’s journey from kingdom to state and its melting pot of spiritual practices. He said he ends each tour with a prayer asking spirits to make sure everyone gets home safely.
“It's my favorite part because at the end while I'm doing the prayer in Hawaiian, I get to see family members and friends huddle close together, hug each other, hold hands,” he said. “So that makes me feel good.”
So, will I see a ghost on a ghost tour?
Many ghost tour operators say they got into the business because they had a paranormal experience of their own, but how likely you are to see a ghost on tour depends who you ask. Kapanui said he’ll sometimes see a deceased relative – of his or of someone taking his tour.
“It doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen ... in the past, what these spirits have done is basically hijack the whole thing until I say something,” he said.
A 2023 IPSOS poll found 39% of respondents said they believe in ghosts and about 25% said they’ve seen or been in the presence of a ghost. Ultimately, Ironside said, it may not really matter if a ghost appears on a tour or if they exist at all. What keeps people coming back over and over, she thinks, is the mere chance they might see something they can’t quite explain.
At the U.S. Capitol, a set of marble steps is inexplicably slippery, and Sova said the phenomenon has caused several reporters to fall and break bones – revenge so it goes, for the killing of William P. Taulbee, a lobbyist and former congressman whose long-running feud with journalist Charles Kincaid turned deadly in 1890.
Tensions between the men escalated over Kincaid's scandalous story exposing the Kentucky congressman’s affair until the reporter fatally shot Taulbee on the steps. The blood stains can still be seen to this day.
"With so many bloody and gory deaths, duels, wars, and battles, it makes you think," Sova said, "how much of this marble city is just drenched in blood?"