A curated travel guide
for the haunted-and-curious.

Why we built this

Dark tourism — visiting places marked by death, the macabre, or the genuinely strange — is an old human impulse with a thin online presence. Most "haunted travel" content online falls into one of three buckets:

• Listicle aggregators that copy each other and rarely visit anywhere
• Forum posts that mix urban legend with real tragedy without distinguishing them
• Tour-operator marketing that has its own incentives

We wanted something different: a structured directory with sources, verified booking links, accessibility data, and family-comfort scores. A site we'd actually use to plan a road trip.

Who's behind it

HauntBound is a Michigan-based family project. We're parents who like haunted history, road trips, and the kind of weekends that involve poking around an abandoned asylum on the way to a covered-bridge breakfast spot. The catalog grew out of trying to plan one such weekend and discovering nobody else had built the resource we wanted.

It's also a companion to the Haunt Bound podcast — same editorial sensibility, same focus on places you can actually go.

How the catalog is built

Every venue you see on HauntBound goes through editorial vetting before it's published:

• Coordinates and address are mandatory. If we can't pin a venue on a map, it doesn't make the catalog.
• Historical claims are sourced. The bibliography on each venue page is the sources we used. Legends are clearly labeled as legends; we don't dress up urban folklore as documented fact.
• Hero images carry attribution. Photos are CC-licensed (Wikimedia Commons or Flickr) or sourced from venue websites with credit. Our credits page links to the original creator.
• Booking URLs are checked at curation time. If we say there's a ghost tour, we link to where you can buy a ticket. We re-audit on every batch.
• Trespass-only sites are excluded by policy. If the only way to visit is to break the law, we don't list it. We respect property owners and we don't want anyone getting hurt.
• Family-comfort and accessibility are real fields. We capture wheelchair access, terrain, age restrictions, sensory warnings, gore level, jump scares, and a per-venue family-fit rating. Filter by them.

What we're explicitly not

• Not a paranormal-claim verification site. We're not adjudicating whether ghosts are real. We're cataloging the places where stories are told and giving you the tools to go investigate yourself.
• Not a UGC forum. Brand safety in this vertical is a moderation nightmare. The catalog is editorially curated.
• Not a tour operator. We list other operators' tours so you can compare and book directly. Our affiliate cuts (where they exist) don't change which venues we feature.
• Not chasing programmatic display ads. We'd rather be a clean, fast, legible resource than serve another autoplay video on a haunted-asylum landing page.

Reach us

Have a venue we should add? A correction on a venue we already have? Photos you took yourself and want to license to us? Press inquiries? Email us at editor@hauntbound.com.

Or pick the channel that matches your need:

• editor@hauntbound.com — corrections, additions, editorial
• partners@hauntbound.com — venue claim, affiliate partnerships, licensing
• data@hauntbound.com — bulk-data questions, API requests