The Most Haunted Places in North Carolina

Ranked

1. 

   1. The Grove Park Inn Asheville · Haunted Hotel / Inn · Family Comfort: High

   The Grove Park Inn opened in 1913, built by tonic magnate Edwin Wiley Grove and his son-in-law Fred Loring Seely as an Arts and Crafts resort faced in Sunset Mountain granite. Hotel tradition holds that a young woman in a pink gown fell to her death near room 545 around 1920, though no official death record survives. Staff describe a gentle pink presence on the fifth floor, sometimes said to tickle sleeping children's feet.

   5 original accounts · documented across 5 decades, 1913-1996 · retold in 4 later publications

2. 

   2. Devil's Tramping Ground Bear Creek · Outdoor / Natural Site · Family Comfort: High

   The Devil's Tramping Ground is a nearly perfect 40-foot circle of bare earth in Chatham County, documented since the 1880s, where 1946 soil tests found the path sterile but did not explain how it formed. A 1949 book popularized the legend that the Devil paces the circle nightly plotting mischief. Visitors report objects left on the path overnight turning up outside it by morning, and dogs refusing to cross the bare ring.

   5 original accounts · documented across 6 decades, 1882-2025 · retold in 7 later publications

3. 

   3. Wilmington Railroad Museum Wilmington · Museum / Historical Site · Family Comfort: High

   The Wilmington Railroad Museum has occupied an 1880s warehouse since 1979, preserving the history of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, headquartered in the city until its 1960 move to Jacksonville. The museum interprets the legend of Joe Baldwin, a brakeman said to have died in a rail accident, whose spirit was long blamed for a swinging light reported on the tracks outside town. Staff and visitors report disembodied voices and footsteps in the empty warehouse.

   4 original accounts · documented across 5 decades, 1873-1974 · retold in 1 later publication

4. 

   4. Bostian Bridge Statesville · Outdoor / Natural Site · Family Comfort: High

   Bostian Bridge, a railroad trestle two miles from Statesville, was the site of North Carolina's worst train disaster in the early hours of August 27, 1891, when a speeding train jumped the sixty-foot span and fell into Third Creek, killing more than twenty people. On the 50th anniversary in 1941, an unnamed woman whose car had broken down near the bridge said she witnessed a train plunge off the bridge into the darkness and heard screaming, then fainted on learning in Statesville that a wreck had happened there exactly fifty years before. In 1942, a woman stopping to look at the bridge with her husband and young nephew caught her foot on the rail and fell as a train bore down; the three lay flat on the crossties and the train passed inches above them, unharmed. Published accounts describe the 1941 event as part of a recurring anniversary legend of a phantom train, and a paranormal investigator has reported candles going out unexplained during an anniversary vigil at the bridge.

   3 original accounts · documented across 2 decades, 1941-2010 · retold in 7 later publications

5. 

   5. USS Battleship North Carolina Wilmington · Museum / Historical Site · Family Comfort: Moderate

   The USS North Carolina, commissioned in 1941, earned 15 battle stars in the Pacific war, the most of any American battleship, including a 1942 torpedo strike that killed five sailors aboard. Saved from scrapping by a statewide campaign, she has been moored in Wilmington as a memorial since 1961. A longtime night watchman and other visitors report a young man in a World War Two uniform near the blast site, gone when approached.

   4 original accounts · documented across 2 decades, 2008-2018 · retold in 3 later publications

6. 

   6. Thalian Hall Wilmington · Theater / Performance Venue · Family Comfort: High

   Thalian Hall opened in Wilmington in 1858 as a combined city hall and theater, the only surviving design by architect John Montague Trimble and one of the oldest continuously operating performance venues in the country. Touring guides and staff describe two men and a woman in period evening dress seen in the first balcony, along with whispers and missing props backstage. No account ties the activity to a documented death in the building.

   2 original accounts · documented across 2 decades, 1969-1996 · retold in 3 later publications

7. 

   7. Battery Park Hotel Asheville · Other Dark Tourism Site · Family Comfort: Moderate

   The Battery Park Hotel, a 14-story hotel built in Asheville in 1924, closed in 1972 and now operates as senior apartments. In 1936 a young guest, Helen Clevenger, was shot to death in room 224; the employee convicted was executed within the year, a verdict historians now call a likely miscarriage of justice. Residents report a red glow in the room's window each July and an elevator that runs with no one aboard.

   3 original accounts · documented across 2 decades, 1936-1943 · retold in 7 later publications

8. 8. U.S. Highway 70 Underpass (Lydia's Bridge) Jamestown · Outdoor / Natural Site · Family Comfort: High

   HauntBound identified one distinct published account at this outdoor site, across four kinds of published source, known through a later source that names an earlier original. Two later publications retell those accounts. Reported phenomena include apparitions.

   1 original account (known through later citation) · documented across 7 decades, 1920-2022 · retold in 2 later publications

9. 

   9. Thomas Wolfe Memorial (Old Kentucky Home) Asheville · Museum / Historical Site · Family Comfort: High

   The Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville is the 1883 Queen Anne boardinghouse known as Old Kentucky Home, bought by Julia Wolfe in 1906 and immortalized as Dixieland in her son Thomas's 1929 novel Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas's older brother Ben died of influenza in an upstairs bedroom in 1918, at age twenty-six, a loss he wrote into the novel. Visitors and staff report a chill and footsteps outside that room, knocking within the walls, and a typewriter's clatter from empty rooms; local lore associates a rocking-chair figure with Ben and a dining-room figure with Julia, who ran the house until her death in 1945.

   1 original account · documented across 3 decades, 1918-1945 · retold in 4 later publications

10. 

    10. Carolina Theatre Greensboro · Theater / Performance Venue · Family Comfort: High

    The Carolina Theatre opened in Greensboro in 1927 as a vaudeville and movie palace and later hosted a 1963 sit-in against its segregated balcony. In 1981 a woman who had set a fire in a stairwell was found dead there; staff since describe a woman crossing the mezzanine and vanishing into a wall. Other reports include a workman glimpsed in the halls and a boy blamed for moved chairs and rattling doorknobs.

    3 original accounts · retold in 4 later publications

Superlatives