I understand the appeal of a good ghost story.
I really do.
I have spent enough time working in old buildings, historic cemeteries, abandoned places and centuries-old communities to understand why people feel something different when they walk through a historic site after dark. Buildings have sounds. They have smells. They have shadows and unexplained drafts and rooms that somehow feel different from the ones around them.
And history is full of stories that are genuinely strange.
But the longer I have worked in museums and historic sites, the more uncomfortable I have become with the way we sometimes turn those stories into entertainment.
Especially when the ghost story belongs to someone who suffered.
Historic sites are not movie sets
A historic building is not simply an interesting backdrop for a scary evening.
It is a place where something happened.
People lived there. They worked there. They were married there. They raised children there. They were imprisoned there. They were enslaved there. They were injured there. They died there.
And sometimes the very things that make a place attractive for a paranormal tour are the things that should make us pause.
A prison is atmospheric after dark. An old hospital is atmospheric after dark. A former asylum is atmospheric after dark. A battlefield is atmospheric after dark.
But atmosphere isn’t the same thing as history.
And the people associated with those places deserve more than to become the cast of a ghost story.
That is where I think historic sites have an ethical responsibility to ask some difficult questions.
Would we tell this story this way if the family members of the person involved were sitting in the audience?
That question has stayed with me.
Because sometimes the answer is obvious.
When tragedy becomes entertainment
There is a difference between telling a story about a death and using that death to sell tickets.
There is a difference between documenting a crime and making the crime into a spooky attraction.
There is a difference between acknowledging that generations of people believed a building was haunted and telling visitors that the people who suffered there are now entertaining us from beyond the grave.
Those distinctions matter.
Imagine a historic site where people were incarcerated under terrible conditions. Imagine the stories of abuse, illness, suicide and death that may be associated with that place.
Now imagine advertising a “ghost hunt” there.
For some visitors, it may feel like harmless fun.
But for the people whose lives are represented by that site—and particularly for their descendants—it may feel very different.
Their ancestor isn’t a ghost story.
Their ancestor was a person.
That person had a name, a family, hopes, fears, relationships and a life that existed beyond the moment of their death.
Museums are entrusted with those stories.
We should be careful about what we do with that trust.
There is also a problem with evidence
Another reason paranormal programming makes me uneasy in historic settings is the way it can blur the line between what we know and what we believe.
Museums are in the business of evidence.
We look at documents, photographs, artifacts, oral histories, archaeological evidence, architectural evidence and contemporary accounts. We try to understand what happened and acknowledge what we don’t know.
Folklore has a place in that work.
So do legends.
So do stories that have been passed down through generations.
But there should be a clear distinction between:
“People have told this story for generations.”
and
“This is what happened.”
Those are not the same statement.
Nor should a dramatic retelling quietly transform an unverified story into historical fact.
If visitors leave believing that a particular person definitely died in a particular room, when the museum’s own research cannot substantiate that claim, we have stopped interpreting history and started creating it.
That may make for a better ghost story.
It doesn’t make for better history.
But does that mean no paranormal programming?
No.
I don’t think the answer is that every historic site needs to ban anything remotely paranormal.
People have always been fascinated by death, ghosts, spirits and the unexplained. Those beliefs are themselves part of cultural history.
There is tremendous interpretive potential in exploring why people believe in ghosts.
What did Victorian mourning traditions look like?
Why did people photograph the dead?
How did different cultures understand death and the afterlife?
Why do particular buildings acquire reputations for being haunted?
How does folklore develop?
Why do communities preserve ghost stories?
Those are fascinating historical questions.
And there are ways to explore them without pretending that folklore is fact.
A historic site could offer a candlelight history program. It could explore mourning customs. It could tell documented stories of crime and justice. It could examine local folklore. It could explore the architecture of a building after dark. It could invite historians, folklorists and community members to discuss the stories that have grown around a place.
Those programs can be atmospheric.
They can be entertaining.
They can even be a little spooky.
But the history remains the star.
What about the people who died there?
This is the question I keep coming back to.
Museums frequently say that they want to tell stories that are inclusive, community-centered and honest.
That commitment shouldn’t disappear when the sun goes down.
If a site interprets the history of slavery, incarceration, institutionalization, violence or other forms of trauma, the people involved deserve to be treated with the same dignity at 8 p.m. that they receive at 2 p.m.
In fact, perhaps even more so.
There is something deeply uncomfortable about taking a place where a person experienced unimaginable suffering and reframing that suffering as an evening of thrills.
We should ask ourselves whether the program helps visitors understand the history—or simply gives them an opportunity to be frightened by it.
Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Preservation has a responsibility beyond the building
Historic preservation isn’t just about saving bricks and mortar.
We preserve places because they can help us remember.
The building is evidence.
The stories are evidence.
The people are the reason we care about the evidence in the first place.
When we strip away the humanity of the people connected to a historic site and reduce them to “the ghost in Room 3,” we have preserved the building while losing part of the history.
That seems like a poor trade.
And it is particularly troubling when the site belongs to a community whose history has already been minimized, distorted or forgotten.
The descendants of the people represented by a historic site should have a voice in how those stories are interpreted.
Not necessarily a veto over every program.
But a voice.
Follow the evidence. Tell the folklore. Know the difference.
I think there is a much more interesting way to approach historic places after dark.
Tell us what we know.
Tell us what we don’t know.
Tell us what people believed.
Tell us how the story changed over time.
Tell us what the documents say.
Tell us what the folklore says.
And let visitors wrestle with the mystery themselves.
That is actually more compelling to me than a scripted ghost story.
Because history is already fascinating.
We don’t need to invent a haunting to make an old building interesting.
Sometimes the truth is stranger than anything we could make up.
And sometimes the truth is much harder to hear.
Those are the stories I want to follow.
The question I want historic sites to ask
As someone who has spent years working in museums and historic interpretation, I don’t think the question should be:
“Can we make this place scary?”
It should be:
“What does this place have to teach us?”
And then:
“How can we tell that story in a way that respects the people who lived it?”
There may be historic sites where a paranormal program makes sense.
There may be communities where ghost stories are an important part of local folklore.
There may be visitors who genuinely enjoy exploring the unexplained.
I’m not interested in taking that away.
I am interested in asking museums and historic sites to think carefully about the difference between history and entertainment, folklore and fact, mystery and exploitation.
Because historic sites are not movie sets.
They are places where real people lived real lives.
Some of those lives ended tragically.
Some ended violently.
Some were never properly remembered.
And when we have been entrusted with those stories, I think we owe those people something.
We owe them their humanity.
So go explore the old places.
Walk the cemetery.
Listen to the legends.
Turn on the flashlight and see what you find.
But before we ask whether a historic site is haunted, perhaps we should ask a more important question:
Who was here—and what do they deserve us to remember?
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