By Adam Tremper

October has arrived. The evenings come a little earlier, the air turns crisp, leaves scrape across sidewalks and old streets, and cemeteries somehow look a bit more interesting. For a few weeks each year, even the most skeptical among us seem more willing to wonder about things that go bump in the night.

It is spooky season, and if you really want to experience it, go on a ghost tour.

As a kid, my parents took me every year to Harpers Ferry for the historical ghost tour offered there. We went in October, when the cool night air chilled our bones and the old town, tucked between the mountains along the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, seemed like the perfect setting for a ghost story.

It was a tradition that I loved. Listening to the amazing Shirley Dougherty tell her stories enthralled me. They were ghost tales. There were murders, tragedies, unexplained happenings, and souls who, for whatever reason, just didn’t seem ready to leave. There was also history. A lot of history.

After the tour, my mom would bring out warm apple cider. We’d sit there in the parking lot drinking it, and I would replay some of those stories in my head. Who were these people? Did that really happen? What else could I learn about them? I wanted to get home to my encyclopedias and find out more.

Looking back now, I wonder if my love of history, and especially my obsession with researching the stories of ordinary people, came at least in part from those annual October pilgrimages to Harpers Ferry.

Today, ghost tours can be found in cities big and small. Old Town Alexandria is home to Alexandria Colonial Tours, Alexandria’s Original Ghost and Graveyard Tour, which has been sharing the city’s fascinating history and haunting stories with visitors for almost 40 years. Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Annapolis, Richmond, and Frederick all have ghost tours. So do smaller communities like Sharpsburg, Ellicott City, Staunton, and, down where I live, beautiful Solomons Island.

Travel farther and you’ll find ghost tours in Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, Boston, Gettysburg, Key West, San Francisco, and hundreds of other communities across the country. Even paradise has ghosts. In Honolulu, Mysteries of Hawaii explores the supernatural traditions and haunted history of the islands. They have also undertaken the enormous task of documenting ghost tours around the country, creating one of the largest databases of ghost tours I have found.

October is the perfect time to seek one out. Darkness comes early, old streets look different beneath the glow of a lantern, and stories that might seem improbable on a sunny afternoon become just a little easier to believe when you’re standing outside an old house at night.

Out of the hundreds of ghostly attractions that appear every October, a good historical ghost tour offers something more than a jump scare. Most ghost tours focus on history, legends, lore, and something that is a little harder to define: what I like to call the spirit of a place.

Every town has a different spirit. When we travel somewhere new, how often do we stop to wonder who built the town and why? Who lived in those old houses? What was that restaurant before it became a restaurant? Who walked these streets a hundred years ago? Two hundred? What happened there that people remembered long enough to tell someone else?

For most people, the answer might simply be, “Why does it matter?” Truthfully, knowing what happened inside an old house in 1816 probably isn’t going to have much impact on your everyday life. One day, though, all of us will be gone. Most of our names aren’t going to appear in history books. There probably won’t be monuments built to us. Future generations aren’t going to memorize our birthdays or study our accomplishments in school.

We are the ordinary people. We work, fall in love, have our hearts broken, raise families, laugh, argue, struggle, celebrate, grieve, and somehow make our way through life.

Preserving local history, legends, and lore is one way of remembering people like us. Ghost stories, strange as it may sound, can keep the memory of ordinary people alive long after almost everything else about them has disappeared.

Old Town Alexandria offers a perfect example. One of the city’s enduring mysteries is the story of the “Female Stranger.” In 1816, a desperately ill young woman arrived at Gadsby’s Tavern accompanied by a man believed to be her husband. Her identity was carefully guarded, reportedly even from some of the people caring for her.

She died soon afterward, taking her identity with her. More than two centuries later, we still don’t know who she was. Her grave at St. Paul’s Cemetery identifies her simply as a “Female Stranger,” and over the generations, stories naturally began to grow around the mystery. Who was she? Why the secrecy? Why did the man traveling with her guard her identity so carefully? Some say the mysterious woman never entirely left Alexandria.

You may arrive looking for a ghost story, but you leave wondering about a real woman who walked those streets more than 200 years ago. Somehow, despite her real name being lost to history, we are still talking about her.

Travel over to Annapolis and you’ll hear another sort of story: two lovers separated by war who come tantalizingly close to finally embracing again, only to have that anticipation dashed to pieces because someone didn’t look both ways before crossing the street. According to legend, these two continue searching for one another long after death.

Down in Solomons Island, where I lead the ghost tours, you’ll hear about the Drum Point Lighthouse and the young woman who died there and, according to local legend, never left. You’ll hear stories about shipbuilders, watermen, terrible storms, murder, tragedy, and generations of people who made their lives along the Patuxent River and Chesapeake Bay.

Some of those stories can be documented. Others exist in that murky place between history and legend, passed down through families and repeated for generations. Every once in a while, someone on one of my tours will wait until the crowd has moved away and quietly tell me something that happened to them, their parents, or their grandparents. Sometimes it fits perfectly with a story I have already been telling. Sometimes it sends me down an entirely new rabbit hole.

Those stories are still being created. Details are added, corrected, and rediscovered. History, legends and lore mix together to form a more complete picture of the people, culture, and spirit of a place.

Then there is Harpers Ferry, where for me it all began. The old town itself seems designed for ghost stories, with historic buildings climbing the hillside, narrow streets, old ruins, mountains looming overhead, and enough bloodshed and tragedy in its history to keep storytellers busy for generations.

Somewhere in those stories is John Brown and his ill-fated raid on the federal arsenal. I still remember Shirley Dougherty telling that story when I was a kid. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who might take the tour this October, but more than 35 years later, I can still hear her voice reaching the most deliciously creepy part of the tale:

Those COLD. DEAD. EYES.

You’ll have to go to Harpers Ferry for the rest.

Whether you’re traveling across the country or staying close to home, October is a wonderful time to discover the haunted side of a place. You don’t have to believe in ghosts.

A ghost tour encourages you to slow down and look at a place differently. That old brick building stops being just another old brick building. Someone lived there. Someone loved there. Someone died there. Something happened there that another person thought was important enough to remember and tell someone else.

Sometimes the history is perfectly documented. Sometimes fact and folklore have become tangled together over generations. Sometimes all that remains of someone’s life is a name, an old house, and a story whispered on a dark October night.

Maybe that is what a ghost really is: a story that refuses to be forgotten.

This October, when night comes earlier, the leaves begin to drop, and you are looking for something spooky to do, find a local ghost tour and follow them into the dark. Perhaps you’ll start your own tradition.

The easiest and best way I have found for you to find a ghost tour near you is to check out Mysteries of Hawaii’s list of tour operators from all over the world. https://www.mysteries-of-hawaii.com/tour-partners

About the Author: Adam Tremper is the owner and tour guide at Spooky Solomons, a year–round historical ghost tour in Solomons Island Maryland. Sharing Southern Maryland history, legends, and lore is a passion of his.