Haunted Cities in America

How this guide works

Freaky Foot Tours has led ghost and history walks in Flagstaff, Tucson and Prescott since 2015. Arizona is the only place we run tours, and we like it that way. But guests kept asking us the same question at the end of the night: where should we go next? This guide is our answer. For every city here we did what we do at home. We read the record, sorted the documented from the theatrical, and picked the experiences we would book on our own vacations.

One honest note before you dive in. Outside Arizona we do not operate anything. We research the operators guests rate best and link to them, and some of those links pay us a small commission at no extra cost to you. That never decides who makes a list. When a tour stops earning its spot, it comes off the page.

How we choose what to recommend

Every city guide is built on the same criteria we use to build our own tours:

• Story quality. A named building, a date and a person beat a vague chill every time. We favor tours built on the record, not the fog machine.
• Small groups. Walks where you can hear the guide and ask questions rank ahead of megaphone crowds.
• Local guides. People who live in the city they walk tend to know which stories hold up and which are marketing.
• Guest ratings. We weigh what recent guests say across booking platforms, not one cherry-picked review.

These are the things we look for when we research a city, not a claim that we have walked every tour ourselves. When a legend does not hold up, the city page says so.

Start with Arizona, the state we walk every night

If your travels bring you to our home turf, skip the research and come walk with us. Our guides lead the Flagstaff tours beneath the San Francisco Peaks, the Tucson tours through the Old Pueblo, and the Prescott tours along Whiskey Row. The Arizona guide also covers the satellite towns we get asked about most, from Jerome to Tombstone.

Questions people ask

What is a ghost tour?

A ghost tour is a guided walk, usually after dark, through the streets, hotels and saloons where a city's strangest history happened. A good one is really a history tour with the lights turned down: real dates, real names and the stories locals still argue about. Some operators lean theatrical and some lean documentary. Our own guides fall in the second camp, and each city guide tells you which way an operator leans.

Are ghost tours worth it?

In the right city, yes. A well-run walk is one of the cheapest ways to learn a city's actual history, it fills the gap between dinner and bed on a travel night, and it points you at buildings you would have strolled past. The trick is picking an operator who does the homework, which is the whole reason this guide exists.

Which cities keep coming up as the most haunted in America?

There is no official scoreboard, but the same names surface in nearly every conversation we have with guests: New Orleans, Savannah, Salem, Charleston and St. Augustine, with Chicago, San Francisco and Washington DC close behind. We cover each of them here, along with the Arizona towns we know firsthand, like Jerome and Bisbee, which hold their own against any of them.

How do we pick the tours we link?

We start with the operators guests rate best, then read the routes and recent reviews against our own criteria: story quality, group size and local guides. We link the ones we would book ourselves, disclose the affiliate relationship on every page, and revisit the picks when the reviews shift.