Baltimore Ghost Tours

Since 1786, Westminster Burial Grounds has served as Baltimore's most prestigious cemetery. Edgar Allan Poe's grave attracts thousands, but he's not alone. The phantom gravedigger Edgar Tuttle still walks among the stones, tending graves he swore to protect. Visitors report shadow figures, mysterious voices from the catacombs, and an overwhelming presence among the dead.

Since 1798, Fort McHenry has guarded Baltimore Harbor. Its finest hour came September 13-14, 1814, when it withstood 25 hours of British bombardment, inspiring 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' But some defenders never left. Lieutenant John Clemm, killed by British fire, still walks the ramparts on foggy nights. Phantom soldiers stand guard. And the echoes of that famous bombardment still thunder across the harbor.

Since 1928, the Lord Baltimore Hotel has exemplified Baltimore luxury. But elegance has a dark side. Molly, a bride jilted on her wedding night, searches the 19th floor for the groom who never came. Room 1910 is so haunted that staff avoid it. And a mysterious gentleman in period formal wear guides lost guests before disappearing. The hotel's glamorous facade hides decades of heartbreak, tragedy, and spirits who refuse to leave.

Cobblestones, fog off the harbor, and two and a half centuries of sailors, immigrants, and tragedy. Fells Point is Baltimore's most haunted waterfront, home to a saloon where a famous poet may still drink, an inn where guests phone the desk about visitors who were never checked in, and a square where dockworkers still wait for ships that sailed long ago. Here is the history behind the hauntings.

At the foot of Broadway, where the cobblestones of Fells Point meet the harbor, the Admiral Fell Inn has stood for more than two centuries — boarding house, ship chandlery, seamen's mission, and now Baltimore's most famous haunted hotel. Phantom sailors walk its halls. A Lady in White appears and vanishes. And guests still ask to change rooms in the middle of the night. Here is the history behind the hauntings.

Baltimore's ghost stories usually belong to sailors, taverns, and famous landmarks. Some of the city's darkest history unfolded somewhere quieter: the Almshouse, the poorhouse where the elderly, the sick, the orphaned, and the destitute lived and died, often to be buried in unmarked graves. The hauntings here are not about spectacle. They are about thousands of people the city chose to forget.

Dim red light, vintage Art Deco fixtures, and generations of artists and night owls. Club Charles is one of Baltimore's most beloved dive bars — and one of its most quietly storied haunted watering holes. This is less a ghost story than a piece of Baltimore itself: how a legendary bar gathered its legends, and what to make of the figure some patrons swear they've seen after the crowd thins out.

Most of Baltimore's haunted places are public — waterfront taverns, an old poorhouse, a poet's grave. Crimea Mansion is the opposite: a private hillside villa hidden in the woods of Leakin Park, built by a Baltimore family that made its fortune in imperial Russia. Its haunting is quieter and stranger, rooted in isolation, an unusual name, and a remarkable history most of the city has forgotten.

Most haunted places earn the name through tragedy or violence. Evergreen Mansion earns it through preservation. The Garrett family's Gilded Age estate is kept so completely intact — books, art, portraits, and furniture left where they stood — that visitors and staff have long felt the family is still at home. This is the history behind one of Baltimore's most personal hauntings.

After dark on the cobblestones of Fells Point, The Horse You Came In On is still pouring drinks where sailors and privateers once gathered. One of the oldest saloons in America, deeply tied to the mystery of Edgar Allan Poe's death, and widely considered Baltimore's most haunted bar, the Horse blends maritime history, literature, and folklore into a single, much-told story.

A narrow brick rowhouse in West Baltimore holds an outsized place in American letters: the home where a struggling young Edgar Allan Poe lived, wrote, and grieved in the early 1830s. Given Poe's reputation as the master of the macabre and his still-unexplained death in Baltimore in 1849, it was perhaps inevitable that ghost stories would gather here. This is the life behind the legend — and the legend that outlived the life.

Low light, antique furnishings, and a deliberately uncanny atmosphere: the Ulysses Hotel in Mount Vernon doesn't feel like a typical historic hotel, or quite like a new one. A recently opened boutique property in an old Baltimore building, it has quickly gathered ghostly rumors — a modern haunting forming in real time, and the newest chapter in the city's tradition of ghost stories.

Three tall masts against the Inner Harbor lights, rigging creaking in the dark, empty decks that still belong to another century. The USS Constellation is the last sail warship the U.S. Navy ever built and one of the most famous haunted ships in America. This is the vessel's hard history — slave-trade patrols, war, disease, and death at sea — and the ghost stories that grew from it.