Cemetery ghost tours have a certain morbid charm, in theory.
The promise of tragic love stories, unsolved mysteries, shadowy figures lurking just beyond the flicker of a lantern — it’s all very atmospheric if you squint hard enough and forget that ninety percent of cemetery ghost tours take place in cemeteries where the only spirits wandering around are the deer that figured out nobody’s enforcing leash laws.
This one, however, was a particular masterpiece.
The “Historic Whispering Pines Cemetery Twilight Walk” began in a parking lot behind a Subway restaurant, where our guide, a woman named Fern (real name, judging by her nametag), handed out battery-powered candles and sternly warned us that “spiritual energy must be respected.”
Respect, apparently, included paying a mandatory five-dollar “spiritual enhancement fee” to upgrade from regular to “high-vibration” candles.
Mine flickered sadly the entire time like it, too, regretted its choices.
The cemetery itself was old enough to have a few tilted headstones and not much else.
We shuffled along muddy paths while Fern spun dramatic tales of star-crossed lovers, murderous tavern owners, tragic lost children, and one particularly confusing story about a Civil War drummer boy who supposedly haunts the grounds by whistling “Yankee Doodle” at 3 a.m.
None of the graves we passed matched any of the stories. When I asked her why, Fern smiled beatifically and said, “The spirits don’t limit themselves to one plot of land.”
Translation: “We made most of this up but please keep walking.”
At the halfway point, we paused by a particularly mossy stone while Fern urged everyone to take photos, because “spirit orbs” might appear. Several people spent ten minutes snapping blurry iPhone pictures of each other’s jacket buttons and calling it evidence. One woman gasped over a mysterious “blue light” on her screen, which turned out to be the LED from her own battery-operated candle reflecting off the lens.
The grand finale was supposed to be the “Haunted Tree,” an ancient oak where, according to Fern, countless people had “felt the chill of unseen hands.” What we actually got was a dying sapling wrapped in twinkle lights, plus a stern reminder not to lean on it because the town was still paying off a liability settlement from “an incident.”
No surprise: the Historic Whispering Pines Cemetery Twilight Walk didn’t offer a glimpse into the spirit world. It offered a glimpse into the human need to turn absolutely anything — mossy stones, dead trees, stray LED reflections — into a story worth selling for twenty-five bucks a head.