Haunted Tucson

Tucson's story doesn't begin in 1775. At the Clearwater site, at the foot of Sentinel Peak beside the Santa Cruz River, people were growing maize by about 2100 BC, and canals dug in the Tucson Basin are the oldest known evidence of canal-irrigated farming in the United States, at least 3,500 years old. The Hohokam farmed the valley for centuries after, and when Spanish missionaries arrived they found an O'odham village whose name, recorded by Father Eusebio Kino in the 1690s, referred to the dark base of the peak. Tohono O'odham and Akimel O'odham communities remain part of this region today, and their traditions are living ones, not ghost stories.

Kino founded Mission San Xavier del Bac south of the village in 1700, and San Agustín, at the village itself, was served from there as a visiting mission. On August 20, 1775, Hugo O'Conor, an Irish-born officer in Spanish service, selected the site of the Presidio San Agustín del Tucson. After a near-disastrous Apache raid in 1782, its adobe walls were finished in May 1783. Tucson became part of Mexico in 1821, and the Mexican garrison stayed until March 1856, after the Gadsden Purchase made the town American.

The American town grew fast and roughly. Confederate troops held Tucson briefly in 1862, and from 1867 to 1877 it was the capital of Arizona Territory. In March 1880 the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived; Estevan Ochoa, a Mexican-born merchant, presented a silver spike to the railroad's president, Charles Crocker. Chinese workers came with the railroad's construction, and the town that had been Spanish and Mexican for more than a century changed quickly. The last standing section of the presidio wall came down in 1918.

Some of that history lies beneath the streets. From 1862 to 1881, almost 2,000 men, women and children were buried in Tucson's National Cemetery, near what is now the corner of Stone Avenue and Alameda Street. When the city ordered the graves moved, many were not, and the land was built over. Archaeologists working on the Pima County Joint Courts Complex found almost 1,100 graves and recovered the remains of about 1,300 people. They were the town's own residents, and we tell their story as history, not as a ghost story.

South of downtown, in Barrio Viejo, stands El Tiradito, the Wishing Shrine. Its legend, usually set in the 1870s or 1880s, tells of a man killed and buried where he fell; the University of Arizona's Southwest Folklore Center holds more than twenty versions, and the earliest written record is an 1893 newspaper article. People still light candles there and pray. In 1971, when a planned highway threatened the shrine and the neighborhood, residents won its listing on the National Register of Historic Places, the first Arizona property listed for its traditional cultural values. It is a living shrine, and we talk about it that way.

The neighborhood around it carries its own loss. In 1966 Tucson voters approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project, and from 1967 the city demolished some 80 acres of downtown, then the most densely populated in Arizona and largely Mexican American, an area the historian Lydia Otero calls La Calle, to make way for the Tucson Convention Center. Hundreds of people were displaced, and Barrio Viejo, just to the south, is part of what survived.

Hotel Congress opened in November 1918 beside the Southern Pacific depot. On January 22, 1934, a fire broke out in the basement and spread upward to the third floor, where members of John Dillinger's gang were staying under false names. They escaped down firefighters' ladders, then asked two firemen to go back for their luggage, and the luggage helped give away who they were. Within days the gang, and Dillinger himself, were arrested in Tucson. They were arraigned upstairs in the Pima County Courthouse, completed in 1929 to a design by Roy Place.

Hotel Congress is also Tucson's best-known haunted building, and it says so itself. The hotel describes guests feeling a tangible heaviness in Room 242 and seeing a woman in a long white dress sitting on the edge of the bed, and a stately man from another time standing at the window of Room 214. The Arizona Daily Star has reported staff lore about Vince, a longtime resident and fix-it man who borrowed butter knives from the restaurant; workers say they still turn up all over the hotel. Accounts of who the woman in Room 242 was differ, and we tell them as accounts.

A few blocks away, the Fox Theatre opened on April 11, 1930, closed in 1974 and reopened at the end of 2005 after a long restoration. Becky McKiddy-Gydesen of the Tucson Ghost Company told the Arizona Daily Star about a man in the lobby who asks for spare change, and whose coins fall through his hands, and about a presence near the projection booth door when the theater is empty. These are reported experiences, not records, and they sit alongside the documented history rather than replacing it.

That is why Tucson is considered haunted: a place lived in for thousands of years, a presidio town that passed between nations, a cemetery built over, a neighborhood bulldozed, and hotels and theaters full of stories. On The Ghosts of Tucson Tour, our family-friendly walk, and The Dead Wait for Sundown, our adults-only tour through the city's darker history, our Ambassadors share the documented history and the local legends side by side, and always tell you which is which.