by Scott Vierick, Senior Historian and Interpretive Planner
As the days grow shorter, the air grows colder, and the leaves on the trees begin to fall, Halloween and tales of ghosts, goblins, and other monsters rise to the forefront of people’s minds. Autumn is prime season for scary movie marathons, haunted houses, and, of course, ghost tours. Head to a historic town, park, house, or battlefield in the evening and you’re liable to see a guide, often carrying a lantern, telling a crowd about the area’s paranormal haunts and tales of terror. It’s enough to send shivers down the spine of any historian…
…because the stories being told are often complete fabrications.
Yes, many historians take issue with ghost tours and the wider ghost tour industry. These tours have the reputation of being more about shock and sensationalism than well-researched historical interpretation. While many guides do their research, the idea of focusing on paranormal stories that may or may not be true rather than documented historical stories naturally rubs many historians the wrong way. But are all ghost tours alike? Is it possible to create a historically accurate ghost tour?
There’s more gravy than a grave
I’ll freely admit that my personal history has left me skeptical of ghosts and ghost tours. I’ve sat next to George Washington’s tomb until late in the evening, spent many nights at the farm where John Brown and his followers planned their raid on Harpers Ferry, studied until the morning hours in the historic campus buildings of the College of William and Mary, and walked the empty moonlit streets of Williamsburg and Old Town Alexandria. Did I ever encounter any ghosts or paranormal happenings? I did not. While I’ve heard stories that have made my skin crawl from coworkers and other professionals in the public history field, no spirit has ever decided it was worth it to pay me a visit.
No ghostly encounters for this historian. Credit: New York Public Library.
Aside from me not being a big believer in ghosts, the approach taken by most historians tends to err on the side of skepticism of the supernatural. The historical method emphasizes logic, well-sourced information, and a focus on what can be supported and documented. Since the existence of ghosts has yet to be scientifically proven, most historians will not treat the supernatural as fact. Anyone who tries to make a historical argument based around “the ghost did it” is not going to get very far. Historians will engage with sources that discuss the paranormal, but often not in the same way that the typical ghost tour does. As an example, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the former colonel of the 20th Maine, wrote in his memoirs that as his men marched towards the town of Gettysburg in 1863, some of the soldiers reported encountering a strange being. As he tells it, “From a dark angle of the roadside came a whisper, whether from earthly or unearthly voice one cannot feel quite sure, that the august form of Washington had been seen that afternoon at sunset riding over the Gettysburg hills.”1 Was George Washington’s ghost at Gettysburg? For a historian, that’s not the most interesting question. Instead, we’re likely to probe what the story reveals about the spiritual beliefs of the Union soldiers, and how they related to and used the figures of the Founding Era to advance their views of the conflict and build up their morale.
By contrast, many ghost tours focus on the ghost stories themselves with the primary goal being not to inform, but to scare. This can lead to fabrications. Elizabeth Motich describes taking a ghost tour of the supposedly-haunted “National Homestead for Soldiers’ Orphans,” where the guide informed the group that they would be walking through the actual orphanage building. However, as Motich notes, this was a fabrication. The actual structure is located down the street. Likewise, while Chamberlain described his men reporting a ghostly visit by Washington on the march to Gettysburg, the story has since been told, retold, and embellished over the years. Today the version recounted on some ghost tours is that Washington himself was present on a white horse (in broad daylight) to lead the 20th Maine on their fateful charge on Little Round Top.
“Coming back from the dead was tough, but I didn’t spend eight years fighting the Revolutionary War, only to let a couple of knuckleheads destroy the country. C’mon boys, let’s go save the Union!!!!” Created using: DALL-E.
When I went on a ghost tour recently, I had a similar experience to Motich. The guide began their program by emphasizing that the historical information we would hear was well-researched and backed by multiple sources. The first tour stop focused on “The Burning Bride,” a local resident named Laura Schafer who horrifically burned to death the night before her wedding day when her silk wedding gown caught fire. Her ghost allegedly haunts the building where her death occurred, which is now a gelato shop. The guide provided a detailed description of the gown itself, Schafer’s actions with her friends in the minutes before the tragedy, how her voluminous dress caught fire, and how her bridesmaids attempted to save her. However, when I investigated the story, I found that most of what we’d heard on the tour was fabricated. While Schafer had indeed suffered fatal burns after her clothing caught fire, the firsthand accounts we have describe her as “dressing for the evening,” and no specific details of her outfit are provided. She was in a room with her grandmother, not her friends, and while these sources describe her as being engaged, there’s nothing to suggest that her death happened the night before her wedding. “The Burning Bride” wasn’t even a bride.
When it comes to the study of the past, everyone makes mistakes: that’s human nature. Still, since all the facts of the story, including the original newspaper accounts can easily be found through a quick Google search, it was hard to shake the feeling that the ghost tour company was choosing to ignore the real story to create a more gripping narrative. The guide had told the story sensitively and with respect, but the fact remains that the version I heard on the tour was very different than the version the sources give us.
That’s why many historians have problems with ghost tours. In pursuit of frights, these tours twist the record and repeat falsifications, leaving visitors with a distorted sense of the past. This would be fine if the tours were advertised as being completely fictional, but as my experience shows, many brag about the research they do and the “facts” they provide along with scares.
In some instances, ghost tour companies may also have strained relations with the places they visit. While some have formal agreements and share revenues with the historic sites they stop at, such as historic houses and graveyards, in other instances they may simply use a place’s resources without contributing anything to preservation and maintenance. This can lead to tense relationships with site stewards, particularly if the stewards consider some of the ghost stories to be disrespectful.
Building a Better Ghost Tour
Given all that I just described, readers might be surprised that the interpretive planning team at HAI has, on occasion, recommended that our clients create their own ghost tours. That’s because these experiences serve valuable visitor and organizational needs. They are popular with visitors, and some guests will only go on a history-focused tour if it’s a ghost tour. As such, they can bring visitors to a historic site and serve as a badly-needed source of revenue. Critically, there’s no reason that a ghost tour can’t be well-researched and historically accurate.
The historical record is full of primary sources that describe supposed encounters with the paranormal, which can be used to create a tour that’s based on documentary evidence. Old letters, newspapers, memoirs, and oral history interviews all contain stories of hauntings that can provide insights on the past and how people viewed their world—even if there’s a logical explanation for the supernatural. As an example, an article from the April 18, 1888 issue of The Alexandria Gazette notes that a family, after moving into a house of North Washington Street began to hear strange noises. According to the article, their growing belief that the home was haunted, “was strengthened about one hundred percent last night by the appearance from the spirit world of the former tenant.” The family subsequently moved. What’s interesting is that the article begins by noting that belief in ghosts was decreasing in Alexandria during this era as “scientific people have urged various theories in explanation of specters or apparitions.” The story offers a chance for the guide to both tell a spooky story and discuss how ghost stories clashed with more scientific approaches of understanding the natural world in the 1880s.
Even with this more grounded approach, the stories told on a tour can still be spooky. A supervisor at a previous job once interviewed a former resident of one of the site’s buildings. The interviewee told him that as a child, she would often awaken in the middle of the night to see, in her words, a beautiful lady in a red dress standing over her bed. As luck would have it, my supervisor told me this after hearing I would be spending the night in that very same building, and although no ghosts in red visited me, the evening was still a bit eerie. Assuming I could find a transcript of the interview, I would have no qualms about telling that story as part of a tour.
Colonial Williamsburg’s “Haunted Williamsburg” program is an example of a ghost tour that gets it right. The stories come from primary sources, rather than the guide’s imagination, and the guides connect the stories to the larger history of the 18th century. The program both engages the visitor’s desire for tales of the supernatural, but also provides an experience grounded in historical sources and interpretive best practices.
For anyone interested in taking a ghost tour this fall, there’s nothing wrong with exploring the past by way of the supernatural. Still, it’s worth keeping a skeptical mind when the guide wishes to impart some “truth.” Do they have a source for their stories? Are they able and eager to share their research process? Are stories that relate to controversial or difficult topics handled with respect? If so, that’s a sign that you’re getting a quality historical experience. If not, then treat anything you hear with caution and be sure to do some follow-up research using reputable sources. You might be spooked by just how different the actual history is from what you heard on the tour.
To learn more about what our historians do, read our blog here!
Notes:
1. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Bayonet! Forward: My Civil War Reminiscences, (Gettysburg: S. Clark Military Books, 1994), pg. 18.
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