THERE'S SOMETHING STRANGE IN YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD: HAUNTED WALKS, DARK TOURISM & LOCAL HERITAGE

 Heritage Moments | Madison Carmichael 

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In 2014, Victoria, B.C. proudly branded itself as British Columbia’s “most haunted city.” At a cursory glance, this seems a strange way to promote tourism; but in 2014, being spooky was all the rage, as evidenced by Tristin Hopper’s article for the National Post, wherein he declared that a haunting could make the difference between profit and bankruptcy. According to John Adams, founder of Victoria’s Ghostly Walks, the public’s taste for the paranormal saw a marked increase in 2014. Not only were places willing to admit that they were haunted; they promoted it. Ghost walk tours are now offered in virtually every Canadian city.

These walking tours are wildly popular. The Haunted Walk, a tour agency operated out of Ottawa, Kingston, and Toronto, has hosted over 400,000 guests on such tours (including yours truly!) over the past 25 years. Put “ghost walk” into Google, and you’ll be bombarded with results announcing an astronomical number of such tours all across the country, regardless of locale. 

The allure of ghost tourism has, of course, found its way to heritage work. As a result, chilling walking experiences such as those offered by The Haunted Walk bolster local heritage work through the addition of ghost stories, paranormal intrigue, and even the outright macabre to the local, historical repertoire, attracting visitors and raising much needed revenue that supports heritage work.

Guide for A Haunted Walk in Ottawa Jail. You see the spook? (Source)

Beatriz Rodriguez Garcia describes ghost tourism as the visitation of places associated with ghosts, such as cemeteries, haunted houses, castles, and historic towns. Ghost tours are structured very similarly to your run-of-the-mill tour, but they are done so in direct contrast to such tours, offering participants an alternative experience —namely, a spooky one. 

While these tours vary immensely based on location, they all have a similar structure: lantern-wielding guides lead participants along a route through a city or site, stopping along the way to tell ghostly or else esoteric stories at important landmarks. Most tours occur around evening time, as the encroaching darkness adds a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to the spooky stories. These tour routes depend on the stories they tell — some lean on existing ghost stories, but many organizations will do additional, archival research — as the tours map either directly onto the places where the events took place or nearby.

Edinburgh is colloquially considered one of the world's most haunted cities, and it certainly has a dark history to back that up. (Source)

Ghost tourism is oft regarded as a lighter form of dark tourism, which is most simply defined as tourism associated with sites of death, disaster, or difficult heritage. Dark tourism is a recent entry to the heritage industry and a highly contested one at that. Ghost tourism sits rather awkwardly in dark tourism literature, as most scholars consider it a frivolous and superficial form of entertainment. The “frivolity,” as it were, derives from the fact that ghost tours focus mostly on the paranormal, and they tend to mix entertainment, fun, and education in with the spooks. On the whole, ghost tours are an emerging, geographically dynamic form of dark tourism. 

But as with most aspects of dark tourism, there is an ethical dimension to consider. In her study of ghost tours in Edinburgh and Toledo, respectively, established and emergent destinations for ghost tourism, Rodriguez Garcia surmised that both tour companies considered their tours in the same light as any other tourist activity: an indirect means to preserve local history and, since their sites were privy to greater atrocities and more macabre stories, a means to promote awareness that would prevent such events from occurring again. The ethical issue arises from charging ticket prices for the telling of “horrible and macabre stories” in these cities, as their tours were largely related to tales of human. However, she does admit that ghost tours are mainly entertaining and perhaps a dash educational, and so as with any other service commodity, there is a fee.

This particular haunted, historic inn caught my eye on my Haunted Walk. Every time I walked past this inn after I took that tour, I thought about the ghost. (Courtesy of Madison Carmichael)

Last summer, on a lark, I went on a Haunted Walk. This was deeply uncharacteristic of me, as my threshold for ghost stories has always been very, very low. But I was a tour guide in Kingston, Ontario, at the time, so while I knew a great deal of the local history already, I was intrigued by the idea of rereading streets I’d walked for five years previously in the context of ghosts. 

This is the strength of ghost tours; they are just as enticing to locals as they are to tourists. Locals map their daily lives onto particular routes and specific landmarks. In contrast to tourists, they have an intensely personal sense of geography of a given space. My haunted walk cast all the gorgeous little historic inns near my neighbourhood in Kingston, many of which I walked by to get coffee or go to work, in a truly creepy light. 

It’s been argued that the benefits of bringing paranormal tourism to historic sites are many. Local ghost tour groups interpret historic sites as well as their ghosts, and in the process, they teach visitors about their historical significance. The intermingling of the haunted and the historical allows for ghostly reinterpretation of the site and renewed interest in its history for demographics new and old, bolstering local heritage in the process. 

The Haunted Walk proclaims that “You’ll never look at the city the same way again!” They certainly refer to the inherent spook of the tours, but ghost tours do add new context to the ordinary. And whether you believe in ghosts or not, there’s always a bit of history mixed in there to make up the difference.