Things to do: Cursed Cincinnati Ghost Tour

Oct 14

Oct 14 Things to do: Cursed Cincinnati Ghost Tour

Our tour for this post was sponsored by US Ghost Adventures.

September and October are times when people start thinking about spooky season and ways they like to participate. These methods range from actual religious practices, movies, books, home decor, parties… to browsing Spirit Halloween… to haunted houses and other attractions. I’ve done basically everything at one point or another, but one thing I had never done was a full on Ghost tour.

As an American, I have always heard about Ghost tours and seen buses adorned with advertisements, or A-frame signs in cities, talking about after-dark adventures you can take if you dare. While my brother wanted to attend one on a family trip to Texas, it never came to pass, and so until this year I had never been on one. They’ve been added to lists of things to do when out of town friends visited us, but I just never pulled the trigger or had someone give me a reason to give one a chance. I struggle with horror movies, and haunted houses don’t need to be traditionally good to get me scared and punching my partner who stands behind me.

This year was different, because US Ghost Adventures reached out about their Cincinnati tour. Phantoms of the Pig Iron Past: Cursed Cincinnati Ghost Tours runs nightly with an 8 PM and 10 PM option. The tour itself is 1 hour, but you can book an extended version that goes for a bonus amount of time with more stops and stories. You can also rent some gear, like an EMF activity detector that reads electromagnetic waves, and a ghost plushie that is the most adorable plushie (and I wish I had sprung for it).

US Ghost Adventures is a national company. They have tours and overnight haunted stays in over 200 cities in the US. I do mean overnight. They have four famous haunts that they help maintain and you can book stays through them. The four houses are the Lizzie Borden House, Jennie Wade birthplace, Villisca Axe Murder house, and the Welty house. You have plenty of options to join US Ghost Adventures for a spooky time.

As a company started by Lance Zaal, they have a lot of well-earned pride in their tours as well as the company itself. I can’t add everything I learned from their about page, but I highly recommend the read to understand just how passionate US Ghost Adventures is about their guiding principles. Veteran Lance Zaal spent time helping others in his service after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. He has also done humanitarian work in Cuba and the Ukraine, and he built this business to align with this spirit of community. The tours and rooms they host all serve in the greater mission of preserving history and stories of those that time tries to forget, upholding their values of “liberty, justice, and equality,” and creating moments of “joy, wonder, and entertainment” in the communities they serve. Profits and donations through the company go to a wide range of charities and activist groups that help communities directly, either through preservation of historic sites, supporting nonprofits that fight for the constitutional rights and free speech, providing aid in war torn locations, the Innocence Project, supporting disabled veterans, Animal rescues, and the Make-A-Wish foundation.

To Lance and US Ghost Adventures, the ghost tours aren’t just a gimmick to sell to believers and skeptics for a quick buck. The community and the bonds we make as humans guide the direction of the company and the way the tours are ran. They want to keep the history of those that have suffered in the light, and give back to those still in need and suffering today. The guides aren’t there to recite a script but to weave a story as if we’re back in our old days, sharing oral histories around a campfire. Sharing the history of a location and area to guide us to the supernatural experiences people have had, we keep that history of atrocious things that happened. These aren’t sugar coated, but told with raw and emotional depth.

My tour in Cincy with Sydney was such a time. We made 8 stops between the main tour and the extended tour. Most were buildings, and one was Washington Park. Sydney told us two to three stories of a haunting at each location, with the history that gave credence to each story as we went. She kept things light with her special brand of humor to keep the gore and gristly stories engaging with tension breaks as she wove her stories of terrible acts committed by people and governments alike. Starting with Memorial Hall and the experiences of the night watch with children in their halls. She gave us facts about the architecture, the eras it went through, and the changes in use of the building before landing on how its haunts came to be. She managed to keep the biggest plot twist hidden until our second location across the street in Washington Park that tied the ghosts to the inhabitants and lost souls of the park.

While waiting for people on a bathroom break she was still prepared with more stories to keep us engaged and learning without missing a beat and giving us a healthy sense of unease for underground parking garages. We visited the sites of speakeasys and underground cellars (while still on the street!) and learned more about Prohibition in Cincinnati than I ever knew before, even as someone from Southwest Ohio. By our last building in Music Hall, we even got to walk through a haunting she experienced while giving a tour previously. She also had history to share about buildings and locations that had to be removed from the tour as they grew more dangerous.

In the extended tour, we did get to experience an uncanny if not damn good coincidence of a happenstance with our group. While a few members checked out the haunted public bathroom of the location’s stop before hearing the story, they reported the same feeling as the story Sidney shared while they were gone. I’m more a skeptic—but the coincidence of that moment had me scrambling for any empirical explanation I could find. Sydney had more such first-hand accounts for us, and many others gathered in the deep research the company does of the city and locations just for the experience of us visitors.

I would recommend this tour to anyone with a passing curiosity in the supernatural—but especially for skeptics like myself and those that need to see to believe. The reason for that is not to be disproven, but for my biggest love for Ghost tours like these and other companies; because the history they preserve is important and the more we remember that, the better off we are. School will always only cover so much, and even people like me that took a major in a history or history adjacent (Anthropology here), the degree will never teach everything. History is for the larger picture and bigger events, but the tales of the everyday man, and the people otherwise forgotten in time should be given the chance to breath and exist as well. US Ghost Adventures has many driving forces in what they do, but the attention to detail and care they use for the preservation of history and the stories of these people that met tragic ends is invaluable work. Without it, we wouldn’t know about the children lost to Washington Park’s Orphanage, or those abandoned in the pauper’s field. They matter too, and thanks to tours like US Ghost Adventures, their bones might rest a little easier knowing we haven’t forgotten them.