FILE - Costumed people dressed as witches walk though the street next to the old Town Hall as they visit the town where, back in 1692, witch trials took place, Oct. 27, 2005 in Salem, Massachusetts. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Spooky season is here and for those who are looking for a good scare this Halloween, consider a ghost tour.
Magic Hour, a browser-based creative platform that uses artificial intelligence tools to create and edit video, images and audio, compiled data from TripAdvisor of the highest-rated ghost tours across the country.
Check out these ghost tours to inspire your potential next Halloween-inspired activity:
Top 15 ghost tours in the US
Blending local history and the supernatural
Dig deeper:
The top-rated ghost tours across the United States blend rich local history with supernatural elements like witches, vampires, crime, and haunted lore, with Salem, Massachusetts dominating the list—including the number-one ranked History and Hauntings of Salem Guided Walking Tour.
Across diverse destinations like Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, Chicago, Galveston, and Solvang, these top 15 walking tours utilize atmospheric approaches such as pub crawls, adult-only themes, hands-on investigations, and candlelight to make regional history interactive and memorable for thousands of high-rating reviewers.
The sustained success of these top tours relies not just on popular location appeal or visual social media hooks, but on engaging storytelling and consistent tour guide quality that brings a city's past vividly to life, according to Magic Hour CEO Runbo Li.
What they're saying:
"Ghost tours work because they make local history feel less distant. People may not book a standard history walk, but add a graveyard, an old crime or a story about something unexplained and it suddenly feels more immediate," Li said.
The Source: Information for this article was taken from an emailed study from Magic Hour. Magic Hour used data from Tripadvisor that compared 218 ghost tours and paranormal experience across America and scored each tour in three factors: average Tripadvisor rating, percentage of 5-star reviews, and number of 4-star and 5-star reviews. This story was reported from San Jose.