By Paula R. Stiles

I’ve been on a fair number of ghost tours around Halloween. I guess it’s become an impromptu tradition since I lived in Scotland. The Brits have a lot of dark history on which to draw. These tours never cease to fascinate me, not just for the thrill of the Halloween mood and the odd scare, but for the history of a place that it draws out. Halloween is a time of masks stripped off to show the darkness and the spirit world, a function of its main source origins in the Celtic festival of Samhain. Thus, Halloween ghost tours are the dark side of those sunny, daylight history tours that stick to the official script of whatever stories a community has made up for itself. But ghost tours revel in all the scandal and dark deeds of the area, often to the chagrin of that community. Scandal and dark deeds are the very meat and wine of ghost tours and that’s probably why they’re so popular.

Savannah, Georgia
My most recent ghost tour was last Saturday night in Savannah, Georgia, USA. Family has lived in Savannah off and on over the years, so we happened to be there for the weekend before Halloween and decided to try a ghost tour. We took the Hauntings Tour, a 90-minute-ish walking tour through the Historic District with author Robert Edgerly. The itinerary is based on a ghost stories book that he wrote, Savannah Hauntings.

It wasn’t the scariest tour I’ve ever been on, though that might have been a function of its being the early one at 7 (there’s another one at 9) and the fact that we had a family of five on the tour. So, Mr. Edgerly probably toned down the darker stuff and played up the “fun” stuff like the mannequins and statues that they had on various balconies, masquerading as ghosts. And, like a dummy, I didn’t bring a camera, either. We were also mostly outside the haunted buildings (except for a restaurant that we visited while it was open), which also cut down a bit on the creep factor. The presence of various other tours, all doing quite well the weekend before Halloween, also cut into the spooky atmosphere, enlivening it with the sense of a party, instead. Mr. Edgerly greeted his fellow guides as they passed by. I’m not sure how many Savannah tours there are, but we saw a hearse tour (you ride around in a hearse with the top taken off), one with horses and carts (ooooh, horsies), a trolley tour, a bus tour, and a walking tour that went through the city cemetery.

But though it wasn’t that spooky, it was still entertaining and shone a dark light on the city of Savannah. Savannah’s got a lot of ghosts to choose from. The best part of the tour, I thought, was a house that had been the old slave quarters. It had “haint blue” paint on it, which, the guide explained, was put there with the idea of keeping out ghosts and other evil spirits. Behind the house was one that had belonged to a Caribbean witch who had built it as part of her earnings from selling spells to Savannah’s inhabitants in the early 1800s. It’s said that she won’t let anybody spend the night there without driving them out. I gotta say that I was on her side.

Salem, Massachusetts
About four years ago, I went to Salem, Massachusetts, USA, also on the weekend before Halloween. We went on the Salem Witchcraft Walk, as I recall, which consisted of visiting sites from the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, such as the memorial of flat stones in downtown historical Salem, the field where the witches were hung and one accused man was crushed with stones during questioning, the cellar of the house where the child accusers lived in Danvers, and the Danvers stone-monument memorial to the Witch Trials. Danvers, for those of you who don’t know, was formerly Salem Village, where most of the accusers came from, whereas Salem Town is the Salem we know now, where lived many of the accused.

The tour was a mixed walking and trolley tour, started around sundown. It lasted about two hours and it was fully dark by the time we got to the cellar in Danvers. That was one creepy place. One of the strange things about it was how small it was. You could easily imagine how these kids, cooped up in that house all the time, might have gone a little buggy. Doesn’t justify what they did, but it does make you understand a little better.

The tour guide wore black and used a spooky voice, but a lot of what she said was reasonably-sensible history. One of the creepiest things she said was that the victims of the Trials never received any real justice and that it would be impossible to get reparations now: the descendants of both sides had long since intermarried. I got a chill when I realized she was talking about some of my ancestors, who were in New England at the time of the Trials. I also found the attitude of today’s Salem authorities decidedly odd. Downtown Salem goes a bit wiggy the week of Halloween (no surprise there), but the response of National Park interpreters at the local museum was an “Oh, let’s not talk about the Salem Witch Trials anymore. We want to talk about what a great port the town was” kind of denial. Yup. Let’s just bury that inconvenient dark past.

St Andrews, Scotland
When I was going to the University of St Andrews in Scotland in the early oughts, I went a couple of times on the local ghost tour, called The Original St Andrews Witches Tour. Salem does a good, creepy tour, but they’ve got nothing on St Andrews. The tour guide shows up with a lantern, in period garb, and claims to be the ghost of a dead witch from the past. The same woman did it for years and she does a good job. I gotta hand it to her; she’s creepy. You half-believe she’s a ghost, at least when she first shows up, walking toward you through that narrow close by Greyfriar’s Hotel on North Street. One time, it was just me, so I had to wear a rope halter at some point as part of the storytelling and get terrorized by the tour’s “ghost”. I got to meet him afterward, too, which was cool. The guide referred to him as “a mad Fourth-Year Divinity student”. I just thought, “Is there any other kind?” Bless them both, the fact that I was the only one didn’t make them slack off. They pulled out all the stops on me. That was one memorable tour.

St Andrews has a very, very dark history that includes murders of bishops, castle sieges, cathedral despoilations, ships wrecked, churches knocked down, heretics burned, witches drowned and burned, and so on. The tour takes in a lot of it. From the White Lady who reportedly roams the graveyard around the Cathedral (I saw a lot of weird stuff in St Andrews, though I never saw her) to Witch Hill and Witch Lake (where Witches were tried and executed) to a lovelorn young woman who died a disfigured nun, it’s a creepy walking tour that lasts around 90 minutes. One of the scariest bits is that the guide leaves you at the end in a cul de sac after telling you a tale about how the Devil comes there to take the odd, unwary soul (with the Mad Divinity Student providing suitable FX). Doesn’t seem that bad…until you’ve actually been left there. Yeah.

Someday, I’m going to go back and check out Edinburgh’s Underground City tours, where they take you to the closes underneath the Royal Mile. Hard to believe, but many poor people actually lived underground in Edinburgh for centuries and, just a few years ago, a fire down there burned for several weeks before it could be put out. From what I hear, it’s a creepy place.

Dublin, Ireland
I went on the Dublin GhostBus tour about six years back (again, not long before Halloween). Ironically, I won a t-shirt because I was the only one who recognized an audio from The Fog (the part where the backstory about the ghosts comes out). The guide was so happy to get somebody who recognized the passage that I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hadn’t had a chance to see the whole film, yet, at that point. I just knew the backstory and recognized it that way.

Well, the Ghost Bus tour was a blast. They have blackout curtains so that you’re stuck in there in the dark, as if you were inside a hearse, and they tell you spooky stories about Dublin while you go from spot to spot (a lot of them graveyards, of which Dublin apparently has a ton). You find out about the Vikings, of course (who founded the city a millennium ago), and also about the hauntings in the graveyards, and the exploits of 19th-century, grave-digging bodysnatchers, and the life of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. You also visit the site of an old gallows (cue lots of atmospheric tales of bodies swinging from the gibbet that weren’t quite dead). Dubliners have an oddly boisterous sense of humour when it comes to the darker side of life…and death. Our guide took full advantage of that.

Lots of fun. Check it out if you ever go there around Halloween.

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