Curated trip-planning for dark tourism — real logistics, family ratings, and verified travel info for every location.
Chicago, IL
Chicago Hauntings Ghost Tours, now operated under the American Ghost Walks brand, runs evening walking and bus tours through Chicago's Loop, Lincoln Park, and southwest suburbs. The company's flagship Original Chicago Hauntings Tour departs Saturday evenings from the Congress Plaza Hotel.
Weston, WV
Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia is the largest hand-cut stone masonry building in North America. Construction began in 1858 on the Kirkbride plan — a 19th-century therapeutic design philosophy emphasizing fresh air, natural light, and spatial dignity for psychiatric patients. The facility opened in 1864 with intended capacity for 250 patients. At its mid-20th-century peak, it held approximately 2,600.
Westland, MI
Eloise opened in 1839 as the Wayne County Poorhouse on 280 acres of farmland in Nankin Township, west of Detroit. Over the next century it grew into a self-sufficient complex of seventy-five buildings spread across 902 acres, peaking at roughly 10,000 residents during the Great Depression and combining a poorhouse, psychiatric hospital, tuberculosis sanatorium, and general hospital.
Marietta, GA
The Kennesaw House was built in 1845 as a cotton warehouse on what is now Marietta Square, adjacent to the railroad tracks that would define its Civil War history. Purchased by Dix Fletcher in 1855 and converted into the Fletcher House hotel, it served as both a staging point for the famous Great Locomotive Chase of April 1862 and as a hospital and morgue for Confederate and Union forces during Sherman's Atlanta campaign. Today it houses the Marietta History Center.
Alton, IL
Alton, Illinois, founded in 1818 on the Mississippi bluffs near St. Louis, served as a Civil War prison site and Underground Railroad stop. Its layered 19th-century history and dense surviving building stock support one of the country's most active small-town ghost-tour programs, operated by American Hauntings and based at the Mineral Springs Hotel.
Eureka Springs, AR
The 1886 Crescent Hotel was built as a luxury Victorian resort atop the Ozark mountains of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, then briefly operated as a women's college before its most notorious chapter: Norman Baker's fraudulent cancer clinic from 1937 to 1940. Baker charged dying patients for treatments that offered no medical benefit, and the hotel retains his intact basement morgue.
Free PDF Guide
16 pages of vetted overnight stays where the haunting is real, the rooms are bookable, and the front desk won't laugh at you. Free.
One email to confirm, then the PDF link. Unsubscribe anytime.
Fresh destinations from our research desk this week.
Judsonia, AR
Evergreen Cemetery, also called Judsonia Cemetery, is a historic burial ground in Judsonia, White County, Arkansas, dating to the 19th century. It contains the 1894 Grand Army of the Republic Monument surrounded by graves of Union veterans, and a notable marble statue marking the grave of Laura Lee Henson, an 18-year-old who died in 1914 of injuries from a fire.
Jonesboro, AR
Keller's Chapel Cemetery is a rural burial ground roughly south of Jonesboro in Craighead County, Arkansas, associated with a small country chapel. The cemetery holds approximately 1,200 interments, about 75 of them members of the Keller family for whom the site is named, including nine Keller infants.
Scott, AR
Mama Lou's Bridge is the local name for a crossing of Wolf Bayou on Old Highway 30 north of Scott, in Pulaski County, Arkansas. The original bridge that gave rise to the legend was replaced in 2005. The area around Scott is a historic farming community east of Little Rock along the Arkansas River bottomlands.
Mena, AR
Rich Mountain Pioneer Cemetery is a small 19th-century burial ground on the slope of Rich Mountain in the Ouachita National Forest, Polk County, Arkansas, west of Queen Wilhelmina State Park. James Witherspoon set aside a two-acre family plot here, and roughly twenty Rich Mountain settlers were eventually buried in the cemetery, most marked only with native stones.
Fort Dodge, IA
Bannwell Bridge, a rural railroad-area crossing west of Fort Dodge, Iowa, was originally known as Tara Bridge for a nearby town that no longer exists, spanning the North Lizard Creek. Its ghost tradition traces to an 1893 Fort Dodge Messenger report of railroad workers hearing phantom sounds. The bridge was taken down and rebuilt in 2004.
Sioux City, IA
Calvary Cemetery is a Catholic burial ground at 28th and Cassleman on Sioux City's west side, and is the city's second-oldest cemetery. Its older, upper section — reached by a dirt cut-through — is the setting for a long-circulated 'hanging tree' headstone legend, though the claim is disputed by some visitors who say the marker is simply a tree-form stone.
3,276 venues across 50 states and DC.
Booking alerts, deep-cut stories, and family-friendly picks — every other week. No spam.