Haunted places in North America

North America’s ghost stories follow its history. In the United States they gather where the past was violent or dramatic: Civil War battlefields such as Gettysburg, the Alamo in San Antonio, Southern plantation houses whose legends often hide the real stories of enslaved people, Gold Rush ghost towns, and grand hotels like the Stanley in Colorado, where Stephen King’s stay in 1974 inspired The Shining. Prisons are a speciality – Eastern State Penitentiary, Alcatraz and the Ohio State Reformatory all run night tours – and so are the haunted houses of popular culture, from the Winchester Mystery House to Amityville.

North of the border, Quebec City’s old town, the Fairmont Banff Springs and Montreal’s Château Ramezay have ghosts of their own, many with French colonial roots. Mexico has the continent’s best-known spirit of all, La Llorona, the weeping woman of rivers and canals, as well as the eerie Island of the Dolls in Xochimilco and the former Lecumberri prison, now the national archive. Indigenous traditions across the continent have their own understandings of the dead, which are living beliefs rather than ghost stories, and we treat them that way.

North America also gave the world the modern ghost-hunting industry – the Fox sisters’ séances of 1848, the Warrens’ case files and decades of paranormal TV – and, in response, much of the skeptical research. Across these pages you’ll find both: the stories people tell, the records behind them, and the explanations, from old wiring and carbon monoxide to the power of a good tour guide.