The Ghosts of Knoxville Tour

Most people who see a show at the Bijou Theatre walk through its front rooms without a second thought. Those rooms were the Lamar House, a hotel finished in 1817, and in the fall of 1863 the Union army was running it as a hospital. Brigadier General William P. Sanders was shot west of town on November 18, and he died in the hotel's bridal suite the next day. People in Knoxville have been telling stories about him ever since, and some of them say he never checked out.

Knoxville is full of places like that: a storefront you pass on the way to dinner, a cemetery you drive by on the way to work, a downtown block with a date attached to it that almost nobody remembers. The Ghosts of Knoxville Tour is Ghost City Tours' family-friendly walking ghost tour, and it's about the people behind those places. Who they were, what happened to them, and why their stories are still being told.

The town began in 1786 as James White's fort on a bluff above the Tennessee River. Five years later territorial governor William Blount made the settlement his capital and named it for Secretary of War Henry Knox, and it went on to serve as an early capital of the state of Tennessee. Knoxville grew into a river and railroad town, split its loyalties in the Civil War, and spent the end of 1863 under siege. Each of those chapters left people behind, and a few of them left ghost stories.

Knoxville's oldest ghost story shows how that happens. In the 1880s, boys in North Knoxville were passing around the tale of a pale, silent woman in white seen near Old Gray Cemetery. By 1889 a grown man was telling a newspaper columnist that he'd seen her leaning against a tree in the pine woods near Central Avenue. A librarian at the Knox County Public Library's McClung Historical Collection later traced the legend to a real death in 1879, and over the years Knoxville has named two different women as the one in white. Not every story is that old. The same library traces Old Gray's other ghost, "Black Aggie," to high school boys in the middle of the twentieth century. Telling those two apart is half the fun.

Your guide for the evening is a Ghost City Tours Ambassador, a professional storyteller who has done the reading. You'll hear what the historical record shows, what local legend says, and what people have reported experiencing, and you'll always know which is which. The pace is easy, there's time for questions, and the stories are built for a mixed group: a ten-year-old and a retired history teacher should both leave with something to talk about.

Family-friendly describes how the stories are told. Your Ambassador skips the graphic detail and the cheap scares, and nobody in a costume is waiting around a corner. The stories still have weight, and one or two of them may have you looking twice at a dark upstairs window on the walk back to the car.

That makes it a good choice for families, couples, groups of friends, visitors spending a weekend in town, and Knoxvillians who have walked these streets for years without hearing any of this. You don't need to bring children to enjoy it. A well-told story about a real person works on adults just as well.

Nobody can schedule a ghost, so we don't promise you'll see one. You will come away knowing whose hotel you're standing in the next time you walk into the Bijou, and Knoxville will look a little different after dark. Book your evening below, and we'll send meeting point details with your confirmation.