Boston's Ghosts and Gravestone Tour

If you cannot tell I have a huge love for the paranormal, minus aliens and if possible when I am traveling I try to do a ghost tour or something similar. I’ve never done an actual investigation with a ghost hunting team, but doing a tour in haunted places with some history thrown in is still fun. So it was a no brainer that while I was in Boston, going on a ghost tour was a must. It’s a good place to do one, since the city has such a rich history and a lot of bad things have happen that spirits would remain.

There were two tours that I found, but I had no problem choosing one over the other. The one we choose was Ghost and Gravestone, organized by Historic Tours of America. Now while looking at the website and the brochure this one looks gimmicky, but it won me over because $4 of your ticket price (it was $38 a person when the other was $18) went to preserving the historic grave sites they take you to visit. So this is why I choose this one.

Me and half my sister on the trolley

So this tour takes you around Boston on a black trolley, but stops to let you off with a tour guide. Our tour guide’s name was Oxymanis, not sure if I am spelling that correctly. So the tour guides are actors, but they do a great job telling the stories, making jokes and giving the tour a great ambiance. While we were sitting in the trolley waiting for everyone to arrive, our two was actually two trolleys; the cast was doing a great job getting people in the mood. The trolleys were playing all sorts of Halloween theme music i.e. Ghostbusters, The Munster’s Theme and so on. The cast, the two tour guides, the second was a female name Scarlett, and other casts were walking around the trolleys trying to scare people. They did a great job. Neither guide talked to anyone, just look spooky and did whatever they could to get people frighten, a few were scared before we even left.  

Once everyone had arrived, you had to make reservations in advance, we stopped by the day before we wanted to go to see if there were tickets and buy them so we didn’t have to worry about missing out. Our guide, Oxymanius finally spoke, he had a… I want to say Irish accent, actually all the actors who did speak had either a cockney accent or an Irish accent.  As corny as it was it did set the mood and the time period for the tour. He had a story on how he came to lead people around graveyards, he was a gravedigger for the cemeteries and got into grave robbing, when he got caught and was killed. I am not sure what Scarlett’s story was. When on the trolley our guide told us about Boston’s haunted past and stories that were truly terrifying like a nurse who killed hundreds of people in her care, the Boston Strangler and the Molasses Flood.

Oxymanius, our tour guide

We stopped at three graveyards, one in North End, one where Paul Revere is buried and Boston Common. Yes, the famous park has lots of bodies under it. I cannot remember all the names of the first two and with the accents our guides had it was hard to understand if they were saying cobb or something else.  They did a great job pointing interesting things out and telling a story or two about certain gravestones and their occupants.  They made it a lot of fun and truly played their parts.

I was trying to take as many pictures as possible to see if I caught any ghosts and whatnot. It was hard to take pictures because we were walking a lot and I had to use flash, which I hate to use. So I didn’t take as many pictures as I would have liked. I didn’t see anything unusual when I viewed my pictures, but I am not trained it photography or anything so I might have missed something.

Victims being hanged

The one downside to the tour was that since we were two groups when walking our guides would face forward, even with them shouting if you were too far back you could not hear what they were saying. I do give tours to people in my job and I always face them. Which means I am walking backwards, but I know my way around well enough not to fall. I know using mobile microphones are not effective most of the time, but it would have been nice if the group were smaller. Maybe stager the two groups so we are not together. 

Overall my sister and I had a lot of fun. I saw that this company has other tours in large cities and will be another one if I an ever in one of those cities. If you want to check out the tour I went on visit them at http://www.ghostsandgravestones.com. You do have to be 13 and older to go on these tours, there was a lot of inappropriate humor and information given during the tour. There was a family with 3 kids who I thought looked younger than 13 and even they said they were scared even though they knew it was pretend. 

So if you are ever in Boston, or any great town with a lot of ghost stories do take a ghost walk/tour. I am sure you will have a lot of great memories to share. I’ve taken others and this one was by far the best!