During spooky season and beyond, groups love a good ghost story.
Roughly 40% of Americans say they believe in ghosts, and as many as 18% report having seen one themselves. Regardless of your belief or non-belief in the paranormal, ghost tours and other paranormal ventures are a tourism staple across the country. They combine history lessons with the thrill of storytelling while hinting at the possibility of experiencing the paranormal firsthand.
No matter the skeptic-to-believer ratio among your travelers, here are some group-friendly tours at haunted hotspots across the country.
House of the Seven Gables
Salem, Massachusetts
Salem’s connection with all things spooky largely stems from the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, but one of its other talked-about attractions, the Turner-Ingersoll House, is also rumored to be a paranormal hotspot. The 1668 mansion started as a humble family home, but it was added to throughout the years. The house’s nickname came from famed author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote the novel “The House of the Seven Gables” based on his visits there as a child. Locals and visitors report hearing footsteps and murmured voices, and even seeing shadow figures and a woman in white peering out the windows.
Groups can tour the mansion and the grounds. While the official tours focus on history rather than the paranormal, many local Salem tour operators consider it one of the most haunted sites in Salem and an integral stop on their walking tours of the town. The home hosts readings of macabre and haunted poems and works of literature during the month of October.
The House of the Seven Gables
Myrtles Plantation
St. Francisville, Louisiana
Continuously topping lists of the most haunted homes in America, Myrtles Plantation is a former cotton and indigo slave plantation that was built around 1796 in St. Francisville, Louisiana. The home’s long history has yielded plenty of legends and paranormal tales, from spectral sightings on the grounds to handprints on the home’s antique mirrors. According to legend, the property is haunted by one of the plantation owner’s young daughters, as well as a slave, Chloe, who was said to have been murdered on the property.
Whether these tales are rooted in fact or fiction, the plantation has also gained notoriety as the site where some of the most famous examples of ghost photography were taken. The plantation offers group discounts on its daytime or evening tours; in addition to the historic home, the property also has a bed and breakfast and a restaurant.
The Myrtles
Waverly Hills Sanatorium
Louisville, Kentucky
In the early 20th century, an outbreak of tuberculosis in Louisville, Kentucky, prompted the building of a new hospital to treat the sick. Known as Waverly Hills Sanatorium, the five-story sanatorium treated thousands of patients with little efficacy until streptomycin was discovered as a treatment. After closing in 1961, the sanatorium fell into disrepair until it was bought in the early 2000s by a couple who began an effort to restore and preserve the old property. It gained a reputation as one of the most haunted buildings in the United States, thanks to its appearance on popular paranormal television shows and the sheer number of patients who died within its walls; no exact number is known, although estimates range from 8,000 to 63,000.
Daytime and evening tours are offered March through August and take visitors through its alleged paranormal hotspots, from the “body chute” designed to remove the dead without alarming other patients, to the fifth-floor children’s ward, where the ghost of a little boy is rumored to still play.
Waverly Hills Sanatorium
RMS Queen Mary
Long Beach, California
Originally built as a luxurious ocean liner in Scotland in the 1930s, the RMS Queen Mary soon transitioned into a troopship to transport soldiers during World War II. It could carry more than 16,000 passengers at once. When the war was over, it resumed its work as an ocean liner until 1967, when it was retired and moved to its permanent home in Long Beach, California. It has since become a tourist attraction and hotel, with multiple restaurants and shopping inside.
One of its major draws is its ties to the paranormal: with more than 49 deaths having occurred on the ship, not to mention the hundreds of lives lost when the ocean liner accidentally plowed into a smaller ship, it’s rumored to be one of the most haunted places in the U.S. Visitors, crew and overnight guests report seeing apparitions, hearing disembodied voices and feeling a strange sense of unease. The Queen Mary leans into its haunted reputation, offering ghost tours, seances and other spooky experiences to groups interested in learning about its haunting happenings.
Missouri State Penitentiary
Jefferson City, Missouri
Located in Missouri’s capital, Jefferson City, the Missouri State Penitentiary housed prisoners from 1836 until its closure in 2004. The prison was one of the largest in the country and the oldest continuously operating prison west of the Mississippi. It held about 5,000 inmates at one point, including famous prisoners like professional boxer Sonny Liston, bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd and serial killer Robert Berdella. Throughout its bloody history, tales of prison violence, riots and executions abounded.
The penitentiary is now a museum and tourist attraction, offering daytime history tours and evening ghost tours March through November. Groups can learn about the prison’s history and its alleged hauntings or even conduct their own paranormal investigations overnight. Guests report seeing apparitions, hearing disembodied voices and even being touched by invisible hands when visiting the prison.
Missouri State Penitentiary
