The St. Louis Cathedral, the oldest Catholic cathedral in continual use in the United States, on April 9, 2020, in New Orleans.
Chris Graythen/Getty Images/TNS
Paranormal adventures aren’t just a Hollywood thing. Some travelers are obsessed with them too, eager to spot the unsettled spirits of the not-quite-departed-enough and hear haunting tales of, well, hauntings.
To slake that thirst, Travel and Leisure, the travel magazine and website, is offering up its own take on the 20 most haunted cities in the U.S. We’re not talking single-ghost destinations like Lizzie Borden’s house in Fall River, Massachusetts. These are entire cities brimming with spooky sightings.
San Francisco, for example, makes the list in the No. 15 spot thanks to its abundance of ghosts on Alcatraz Island, the magazine notes, as well as at China Camp State Park (ahem, not SF — it’s in San Rafael) the Mare Island Shipyard (again, not SF — Vallejo ) and aboard the USS Hornet, which is in Alameda. There have been so many ghost sightings on the latter ship, Cal Tech has an entire web page devoted to the stories.
The legendary city of New Orleans tops the list with its vampires, ghosts and sightings of long-gone luminaries — author William Faulkner, midwife and Voodoo queen Marie Laveau and pirate Jean Lafitte among them.
Here’s just a peek. Find all 20, plus ghostly tales and travel tips, at www.travelandleisure.com.
The 10 Most Haunted Places
1 New Orleans
2 Pawley’s Island, South Carolina
3 Chicago
4 Pine Barrens, New Jersey
5 Savannah, Georgia
6 RMS Queen Mary, Long Beach, California
7 St. Augustine, Florida
8 Shoshone Ice Caves, Idaho
9 Portland, Oregon
10 The Stanley Hotel, Colorado
