Most people come to Asheville to enjoy its famous craft breweries or indulge in the beauty of the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains. Many innocent visitors don’t realize that lurking beneath the charming town, the scenic overlooks, and the Biltmore Estate, is a city with a dark and mysterious past…
Home to some of the nation’s most famous paranormal hotspots—including Helen’s Bridge, the Grove Park Inn, and the site of Zelda Fitzgerald’s tragic death—Asheville is a city built on more than 200 years of gruesome history.
On your 8 or 12 stop walking tour of the city’s historic downtown region, you’ll experience a side of Asheville that’s rarely seen. Learn the secret behind the hauntings at the Battery Park Hotel, the Jackson Building, and many more of Asheville’s most active paranormal locations! You’ll learn all about the Civil War’s impact on Asheville, how the Great Depression tore through the town, driving the Mayor to Suicide in one of the buildings downtown. Discover what makes Asheville the Paris of the South and one of the country’s most haunted places.
The ghost stories all spring from historical events, straight out of the pages of the history books. It includes established local legends and eyewitness accounts of paranormal activity. These supernatural happenings occur across Asheville’s downtown area. We’ve conducted extensive research on each of the stories your entertaining local guides recount at the 8 or 12 stops on your route. We strive to bring you the most accurate and up-to-date information about Asheville’s troubled past and paranormal activity. Visit the About Us page to learn more about Asheville’s history and find out why our tour is the best in town!
Book your tour today to experience all the thrills, chills, and fun Asheville has to offer!
The underground alcohol of Asheville!
Ashville has had a tumultuous history with Alcohol. It’s all come good recently with over 20 breweries in the downtown area alone. Voted no less than four times ‘Beer City USA’, there is a glass of something for everyone. But it wasn’t always this way. Asheville too voted for Prohibition in the 1920s, but the town had the taste of hooch deep in its veins even then, and a healthy bootlegging ring was soon in operation. The human cost of booze features heavily on this tour, with stories of domestic abuse, murder, and alcoholism terrorizing the town. But don’t worry, the revenge of the abused ghosts gets the upper hand in the end.
The Bootlegging operation in Asheville was centered on what is now Pack’s Tavern on Spruce street. Back then, it was a lumber warehouse, and the ferrying of lumber from the hills and out to the city and beyond made for a perfect cover. Tunnels were dug, routes were established, and soon the liquor flowed, even the police were involved.
Civil War in the Blue Ridge mountains.
The Civil War in Asheville can be found in the gruesome stories of the field hospital established in Pack Square, today a bustling park; the ground is soaked in blood from the only battle the town saw. A Union force of 1,000 men were making gains along the nearby French Broad River. The town hastily raised a force of 300 men and handily repelled the Union soldiers. The wounded were treated in the Peck Square field hospital, the many amputations left to fall to the ground. The square today bears no visible trace of the death, disease, and mutilation that happened before. Late at night, though, the square’s bloody past rises to terrorize those susceptible to seeing the supernatural.
Our tour passes through the square, and some have seen or heard the ghosts of the Civil War. Indeed Pack Square holds a monument to Colonel Zebulon Baird Vance, two-time governor of North Carolina and leader of the New South, a movement after the Civil War to modernize, integrate and throw off the agrarian and plantation-based economy of the old South.
