Kind of place · 7 hauntings
Haunted Towns & Ghost Towns
Whole towns, old quarters and abandoned settlements with more than one ghost.
- 7 places
- 4 in the USA
- 7 you can visit
Some places are haunted all over: whole towns, old quarters and ghost towns where nearly every building has a story. St. Augustine in Florida, Savannah in Georgia, New Orleans’s French Quarter, Salem in Massachusetts and Gettysburg in Pennsylvania all have thriving ghost-tour trades; in England, York has long been promoted as one of Europe’s most haunted cities and the Kent village of Pluckley as England’s most haunted village. Bodie, a California gold-mining town preserved by the state in “arrested decay”, is said to curse visitors who take souvenirs.
Ghost towns – Bodie, Goldfield in Nevada, Jerome in Arizona, Kolmanskop in Namibia – combine real history with the eeriness of empty streets. Their stories record boom and bust, mining accidents, epidemics and lawlessness, and many are now protected historic sites.
Ghost tours are big business, and the stories told on them often grow in the telling. Our files check the history behind each town’s best-known ghosts, list the hauntings in each place, and point to official tours and historic sites.
Haunted Towns & Ghost Towns in the USA
Shanghai Tunnels
Basements under Portland’s Old Town, sold on tours as tunnels where sailors were kidnapped – a story historians call a myth – and home to the ghost Nina. Regional legend
Bannack and the Hotel Meade
Montana’s first territorial capital is a preserved ghost town where a girl in a blue dress, said to be drowned teen Dorothy Dunn, haunts the Hotel Meade. Regional legend
Wallace and the Oasis Bordello
A Silver Valley mining town whose brothels operated openly until 1988 – now a museum town with ghost tales of working women and a heartbroken Maggie. Local legend
Virginia City and Nevada City, Montana
Gold-rush Virginia City and its neighbour Nevada City keep their 1860s saloons, hotels and vigilante graves – and a nightly summer ghost walk. Regional legendAround the world
Kuldhara
A ruined desert village near Jaisalmer whose people, legend says, left in a single night and cursed the land so that no one could live there again. Regional legend
Mary King’s Close
A buried 17th-century street under Edinburgh’s City Chambers, haunted since the 1680s by floating heads — and since 1992 by a lost girl called Annie. Widely reported