Tracking the spirits of Halloween

New England ghost hunters offer ghost tours of haunted hot spots

A tour of a haunted New England cemetery may or may not flush out any ghostly appearances on the spot, so tour leaders need to be ready with some good ghost stories for visitors eager to be scared out of their wits.

Janice Williams, president of Dead of Night Tours in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is a paranormal investigator whose company also leads nightly ghost tours of Plymouth. The Mayflower touched down here nearly 400 years ago, so the neighborhood is brimming with stories of people who suffered troubled deaths and cannot seem to lie down and stay down. (See below for more tours of New England’s haunted houses, graveyards, forests, and more).

When she is on duty to lead the tour, Williams and her staff can be found at about 7 p.m. curbside on Water Street, spitting distance from Plymouth Rock, gathering her group around the company’s black hearse, bearing the license plate “Lastryde.” They set out lanterns for people to carry on the tour and display photos that purport to show spirits in local settings; usually the spirits appear as orbs of light or white mists.

On a recent night, Williams offered a spirited welcome to the tour group and explained that we might feel a touch of an invisible hand or a patch of cold air, an indicator of the presence of ghosts. And she displayed her electromagnetic field meter, which indicates areas of energy, showing that a ghost might be present. (On some tours, everyone’s camera has gone dead at a specific place in the cemetery – a sign that the spirits are sucking battery power there.) Then the tour heads out to:

• Cole’s Hill, above the harbor, where a large sarcophagus holds the bones of Pilgrims. The earliest people off the Mayflower buried their dead on this hill, and the bones had been washing down into the harbor for 300 years, give or take, before the sarcophagus was erected in 1920;
• At the Court House Museum (built in 1749), where people today sometimes hear the shuffling feet of rescuers dragging the bodies of seamen into the court house basement in the winter of 1778, when the Brig Arnold capsized in the harbor and most of the crew died;
• Then, up several flights of stone steps to Burial Hill cemetery, spread across a magnificent hill thickly forested with giant, old trees. The stairs are flanked by crypts that families built to fend off grave robbers (in the 1800s, people attending medical school had to show up with their own cadaver, a big boost for the grave robbing trade of those days);
• Up in the cemetery, Williams describes various coffin-construction techniques of the 1700s and 1800s that allowed people who had been buried alive to ring an alarm from underground. (This was not rare in the old days: amateurish use of homemade elixirs and potions sometimes induced a death-like coma.)
• Then there are the ghost stories: a Pilgrim girl standing in a yard on North Street; Abigail Townsend, who used to live in the Spooner House on North Street and is spotted there regularly; a haunted pram at the Taylor Trask Museum that moves around, possibly pushed by a 5-year-old child who died of polio.

For the most part, Williams says, ghosts are not malevolent. They are just hanging around, stuck between before and after. They might even be sprinkled in your community; you’ll just have to take the tour to find them.

Here is a sampling of some New England ghost tours. These names are offered as information only; a mention here is not an endorsement by VisitNewEngland.com.

Spellbound Tours
Salem, MA
978-745 – 0138

Dead of Night Tours
Plymouth, MA
508-866-5111

New England Ghost Tours of Boston
Wellesley, MA
781-235-7149

New England Curiosities
Portsmouth, NH
207-439-8905

Ghost Tours of Newport, Rhode Island
Newport, RI
401-841-8600

Ghosts & Gravestones Trolley Tour
Boston, MA
617-269-3626

Ghostly Tours
York Village, ME
207-363-0000

Haunted Connecticut Tours
Darien, CT 06820
203-656-0207

Salem Spirits Trolley Tour
Salem MA
978-745-0666

Cemetery Grave Matters Tour
Salem MA
978-745-0666

Haunted Footsteps Ghost Tour
Salem MA
978-745-0666

Salem Witchcraft Walk
Salem, MA
978-745-0666

The Terror Trail and Witch Trial Trail
Salem MA
978-745-0666

Providence Ghost Tour