When "The Haunting of Flagstaff" finally aired on April 2, 2022, the town watched it together. The freaky, the frightened, and the just plain curious filed into Charly's at the Weatherford Hotel and cheered as familiar faces showed up on screen. The Weatherford, featured prominently in several segments, was the perfect venue in which to sit back, enjoy refreshments, and dissect the show's take on haunted Flagstaff. Many thanks to Chelsea, Drew, and all the boo-tiful people at Charly's and the Weatherford for hosting a good party. If you missed the backstory on how the show landed here, start with Dead Files came to Flagstaff.
Who from Flagstaff made the cut?
Freaky Foot Tours showed up on screen and in the audience. Co-founder Susan Johnson gave detective Steve DiSchiavi the full account of the 1937 Walkup family tragedy, the case Susan researched for the book The Walkup Family Murders. Another member of our team walked DiSchiavi through darker chapters of the region's past. And co-founder Nick Jones appeared several times, relaying a frightening account of feeling suffocated one night in the Hotel Monte Vista, then gamely underwent testing when the show had Northern Arizona University's high-altitude center check whether hypoxia might explain hallucination-like experiences at 7,000 feet.
Which Flagstaff locations did the episode cover?
Crystal Magic anchored the episode; reported activity in the shop's basement is what drew the show to town, and psychic Amy Allan explored that basement at length. The Flagstaff Train Depot brought its own stack of haunting reports, with Josh Hudlow sitting in for the big reveal. The Downtown Diner turned out to have a basement ghost even we had not heard of, and the infamous Orpheum Theater and the Weatherford Hotel each surfaced at least one new eerie story. Several of these buildings are perennial contenders for the most haunted place in Flagstaff.
The psychic's downtown, and ours
So, the takeaway? We have always known Flagstaff to be a town with ghosts, and the locals' reports in the episode rang true. The harder part to square is how Amy Allan calls out spirits on demand; that is her forte, and perhaps they simply answer her. She described three spirits that walk the streets of downtown or the old steam tunnels beneath it, two of them ugly and, by her read, angry at the locals. One footnote from the history side: those tunnels were sealed shut long ago. Nobody tours them, so if someone ever promises you an underground tour, ask what you will actually see. We dug into that whole legend in Flagstaff's underground tunnel systems.
Being part of the episode was great fun, and it sent us home with a little more history and a few more hauntings to chase. Not a bad night's work for a town this size.
See it all on foot
Every building the show investigated sits along or near our downtown route. The Flagstaff Haunted History Tour runs nightly at 7 PM, plus 8 PM Fridays and Saturdays, 75 minutes, $29 for adults, and it is told by the team the show turned to for Flagstaff's history. The stories that did not make the final cut get told on the tour.
Keep reading
- Dead Files came to Flagstaff
- The Notorious Walkup Family Tragedy
- Flagstaff's Underground Tunnel Systems
Boo.
