Most Haunted Towns in America

Salem, Massachusetts

Twenty people executed on suspicion of witchcraft in 1692 turned this Puritan port into the undisputed capital of American hauntings. Today the town leans into it hard, with Gallows Hill, the Witch House, and a whole October economy built on guilt and ghosts. No other town's haun

Founded: 1626Population: 44,000 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 10/10

added by IJR

New Orleans, Louisiana

Above-ground cemeteries, voodoo queen Marie Laveau, and the LaLaurie Mansion's torture-attic legend make the French Quarter feel haunted by design. Yellow fever epidemics and centuries of tragedy layered onto swampland give the city a density of ghost stories per block that few p

Founded: 1718Population: 370,000 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 9/10

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Savannah, Georgia

Built literally atop its old burial grounds, Savannah's squares and antebellum mansions hide so many reputed hauntings that it's often called the most haunted city in America by paranormal researchers themselves. The Sorrel-Weed House and Bonaventure Cemetery anchor a moss-draped

Founded: 1733Population: 145,000 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 9/10

added by IJR

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Fifty thousand casualties in three days of July 1863 left a battlefield so soaked in death that visitors report phantom soldiers, disembodied cannon fire, and lingering smoke to this day. The Devil's Den and Triangular Field are ghost-hunting pilgrimage sites unlike anywhere else

Founded: 1786Population: 7,700 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 9/10

added by IJR

St. Augustine, Florida

As the oldest continuously occupied European-founded city in the U.S., St. Augustine has had 450 years to accumulate grudges, and the Castillo de San Marcos and old jail deliver on the promise. The St. Augustine Lighthouse's drowned-children legend is one of the country's most re

Founded: 1565Population: 15,000 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 8/10

added by IJR

Charleston, South Carolina

Slavery, pirates, earthquakes, and war gave Charleston's cobblestone streets a body count that fuels the Old City Jail and Battery Carriage House Inn legends. The city's genteel Southern facade only makes its ghost stories, like the Provost Dungeon hangings, land harder.

Founded: 1670Population: 150,000 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 8/10

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Fall River, Massachusetts

Lizzie Borden allegedly gave her father forty whacks here in 1892, and the acquitted spinster's house is now a bed-and-breakfast where guests pay to sleep in the murder rooms. Few unsolved American crimes have generated this much sustained paranormal tourism from a single address

Founded: 1803Population: 94,000 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 8/10

added by IJR

Tombstone, Arizona

The Town Too Tough to Die earned its ghosts the old-fashioned way: gunfights, including the thirty seconds at the O.K. Corral in 1881 that killed three men. Boothill Graveyard and the Bird Cage Theatre, riddled with bullet holes, keep the Wild West's violent dead front and center

Founded: 1879Population: 1,300 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 8/10

added by IJR

Bodie, California

A gold-rush boomtown that went from 10,000 residents to zero, Bodie is preserved in a state of 'arrested decay' as a genuine ghost town, empty buildings and all. Legend holds that anyone who removes an artifact suffers the 'Curse of Bodie,' and park rangers still receive guilt-ri

Founded: 1876Population: 0 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: —Haunted Fame: 8/10

added by IJR

Eureka Springs, Arkansas

Built into Ozark hillsides around supposedly healing springs, this Victorian resort town's grandest building, the Crescent Hotel, doubled as a fraudulent cancer hospital run by 'Dr.' Norman Baker, whose victims are said to still wander its halls. The whole town markets itself as

Founded: 1879Population: 2,000 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 7/10

added by IJR

Sleepy Hollow, New York

Washington Irving's 1820 tale of a headless horseman turned a real Hudson Valley village into permanent Halloween real estate, complete with the actual Old Dutch Burying Ground the story references. The town leaned into its literary haunting so completely it renamed itself after

Founded: 1649Population: 10,000 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 7/10

added by IJR

Point Pleasant, West Virginia

A winged red-eyed creature terrorized this Ohio River town from 1966 to 1967, right before the deadly Silver Bridge collapse, cementing the Mothman as one of America's strangest cryptid-haunting hybrids. A dedicated museum and annual festival keep the legend commercially and spir

Founded: 1774Population: 4,000 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 7/10

added by IJR

Alton, Illinois

Once a stop where a Confederate prison held 12,000 men in conditions so brutal that smallpox killed thousands, Alton's Mineral Springs Hotel and McPike Mansion have made it a fixture on America's Most Haunted lists. The town's tragic Civil War and asylum history gives it an unusu

Founded: 1818Population: 25,000 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 7/10

added by IJR

Jerome, Arizona

Once the 'Wickedest Town in the West,' this copper-mining boomtown clinging to Cleopatra Hill lost 90% of its population when the mines closed, leaving a near-ghost town where the Jerome Grand Hotel, a former hospital, is famous for its self-moving gurney.

Founded: 1876Population: 450 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 7/10

added by IJR

Cripple Creek, Colorado

A gold-rush mining town that boomed to 50,000 people before busting hard, Cripple Creek's surviving Victorian buildings, including the Hotel St. Nicholas, sit atop tunnels full of mining-accident dead. Modern casinos now operate alongside advertised resident ghosts.

Founded: 1891Population: 1,200 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 6/10

added by IJR

Natchez, Mississippi

Antebellum wealth built on cotton and slavery left Natchez with more pre-Civil War mansions than anywhere else in the South, and places like Glenfield Plantation and King's Tavern trade on that fraught history's ghosts. The town's haunted reputation is inseparable from its unreso

Founded: 1716Population: 15,000 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 6/10

added by IJR

Key West, Florida

Home to Robert the Doll, a supposedly cursed toy blamed for decades of bad luck among those who mock it, Key West mixes pirate wrecks, yellow fever, and Hemingway-era eccentricity into a laid-back but persistent haunted-town brand.

Founded: 1822Population: 25,000 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 6/10

added by IJR

St. Francisville, Louisiana

Tiny and plantation-dense, this Mississippi River town's Myrtles Plantation bills itself as 'one of America's most haunted homes,' with a legend of a poisoned enslaved woman named Chloe that's been retold on nearly every ghost-hunting show on TV.

Founded: 1809Population: 1,700 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 6/10

added by IJR

Manitou Springs, Colorado

A resort town built around mineral springs that once drew tuberculosis patients, Manitou Springs' claim to fame is Emma Crawford, whose coffin famously washed down Red Mountain in a landslide; the town now holds an annual coffin race in her honor.

Founded: 1872Population: 5,500 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: ✓Haunted Fame: 6/10

added by IJR

Marfa, Texas

Best known for the unexplained 'Marfa Lights' that have drifted over the desert since at least the 1880s, this tiny art-world outpost turned a genuine unsolved optical mystery into a roadside attraction with its own official viewing platform.

Founded: 1883Population: 1,700 peopleOrganized Ghost Tours: —Haunted Fame: 5/10

added by IJRin 2 rankings