America may be a young country by European standards but it has packed an extraordinary amount of tragedy, conflict and human drama into its relatively brief history. Slavery, civil war, epidemic disease, violent frontier expansion and the kind of industrial accidents that the 19th century considered perfectly acceptable have left their mark on the American landscape in ways that go considerably beyond the historical record.
The result is a country with a paranormal tradition as rich and varied as its geography. From the subtropical heat of Louisiana to the frozen winters of New England, America's haunted cities each have their own distinct flavour of supernatural activity. Here are the most haunted cities in America and why each one deserves a place on every paranormal enthusiast's list.
Bring a torch. And maybe a change of clothes. Just in case.
1. New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans is America's paranormal capital and it is not particularly close. No other city in the country combines such a concentration of violent history, unique cultural tradition and documented supernatural activity in such a compact and walkable area. The French Quarter alone contains enough haunted locations to fill a week's worth of investigations, and that is before you venture into the Garden District, the cemeteries or the surrounding bayou.
New Orleans was founded in 1718 on land that was simultaneously below sea level, prone to catastrophic flooding and already considered sacred by the indigenous peoples displaced to build it. The city subsequently experienced yellow fever epidemics that killed tens of thousands, the largest slave market in North America, a Civil War occupation and the kind of colourful criminal history that tends to generate paranormal activity at a remarkable rate.
The LaLaurie Mansion on Royal Street is the city's most infamous haunted location, home to the ghost of Delphine LaLaurie, a socialite whose systematic torture and murder of enslaved people was discovered by a fire in 1834. The house has been associated with paranormal activity ever since and has had numerous owners over the centuries, none of whom have stayed particularly long. Nicolas Cage owned it briefly in the 2000s. He lost it to foreclosure. Make of that what you will.
The St Louis Cemetery No. 1, the oldest cemetery in New Orleans, is the resting place of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen, whose tomb is covered in X marks left by visitors seeking her favour. Her apparition is regularly reported throughout the French Quarter. The city's above ground tombs, necessitated by the high water table, give its cemeteries an atmosphere found nowhere else in America.
Must investigate: LaLaurie Mansion, St Louis Cemetery No. 1, The Lalaurie House, Bourbon Street after midnight if you dare.
2. Savannah, Georgia
Savannah is widely considered the most haunted city in the American South and makes a strong case for being the most haunted city in the entire country after New Orleans. Founded in 1733, the city's extraordinary grid of moss draped squares, antebellum mansions and ancient oak trees creates an atmosphere of Gothic beauty that seems purpose built for paranormal activity. It was not purpose built for paranormal activity. It just worked out that way.
The city was built on the site of multiple Native American burial grounds and experienced catastrophic yellow fever epidemics throughout the 18th and 19th centuries that killed enormous numbers of its population. Many of the dead were buried in mass graves beneath what are now the city's famous squares, meaning that virtually every park bench in central Savannah sits above human remains. This is the kind of fact that changes how you feel about a picnic.
The Marshall House on Broughton Street served as a hospital during both the Civil War and yellow fever epidemics and is considered one of the most haunted hotels in Georgia. The Sorrel Weed House, the most haunted building in Savannah according to most investigators, has documented paranormal activity so extreme that the Travel Channel has filmed there multiple times. The Moon River Brewing Company, a former hotel with its own violent history, regularly tops lists of Savannah's most active paranormal locations.
Savannah's ghost tour industry is among the best in America and the city's beauty makes it one of the most rewarding paranormal destinations regardless of what you actually encounter.
Must investigate: Sorrel Weed House, Moon River Brewing Company, Colonial Park Cemetery, Forsyth Park at night.
3. Salem, Massachusetts
Salem is America's most famous paranormal city and its most complicated one. The witch trials of 1692, in which nineteen people were executed and hundreds more imprisoned on charges of witchcraft, have defined the city's identity for over three centuries in ways that are simultaneously a source of pride, profit and genuine historical reckoning.
The trials were not, it should be noted, about actual witches. They were about fear, social conflict, political manipulation and the catastrophic consequences of mass hysteria in a community under extraordinary pressure. The people executed at Proctor's Ledge in August 1692 were innocent. Their memory deserves better than a Halloween gift shop, though Salem has plenty of those too and some of them are genuinely excellent.
The paranormal activity in Salem is real and well documented regardless of how you feel about its commercialisation. The Old Burying Point Cemetery, the second oldest cemetery in America, is one of the most atmospherically charged locations in New England. The Witch House, the only structure in Salem with direct ties to the trials, has a documented history of paranormal activity. The Hawthorne Hotel is consistently rated among the most haunted hotels in America.
October in Salem is an extraordinary experience, the entire city transforming into a month long paranormal festival that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors. If you go in October, book everything months in advance and accept that you will share the experience with a very large number of people wearing witch hats. They mean well.
Must investigate: Proctor's Ledge Memorial, Old Burying Point Cemetery, The Witch House, Hawthorne Hotel.
4. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Gettysburg is America's most haunted battlefield and one of its most haunted cities, the site of the deadliest battle of the Civil War over three days in July 1863 in which over 50,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or went missing. The scale of suffering concentrated in such a small area has left a paranormal legacy that investigators have been documenting for over a century.
The town of Gettysburg itself absorbed the battle in ways that went far beyond the military engagement. Houses, churches, hotels and farms served as field hospitals where surgeons worked around the clock in conditions of unimaginable horror. The dead were buried where they fell, in shallow graves across the fields and orchards of the surrounding farmland, many not properly interred for months after the battle.
Devil's Den, the rocky outcropping where Confederate sharpshooters were stationed, is considered the most paranormally active location on the battlefield. Visitors regularly report camera malfunctions, unexplained figures in photographs and encounters with a barefoot young man who gives directions and then vanishes. The Farnsworth House Inn in the town is one of America's most famous haunted hotels, with over a hundred bullets still embedded in its southern wall from the battle. Guests report being touched by unseen hands, hearing unexplained footsteps and waking to find a soldier standing at the foot of their bed. The usual pleasant hotel experience, essentially.
Must investigate: Devil's Den, Little Round Top, the Farnsworth House Inn, Gettysburg National Cemetery at dusk.
5. Chicago, Illinois
Chicago is America's third largest city and one of its most paranormally active, with a history of violence, corruption and tragedy that has left its mark on the urban landscape in ways that even the most sceptical visitor tends to find affecting. The city that gave the world Al Capone, the St Valentine's Day Massacre and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was always going to accumulate a few ghosts along the way.
Resurrection Mary is Chicago's most famous ghost, a young blonde woman in a white dress who has been hitchhiking along Archer Avenue since the 1930s, vanishing outside Resurrection Cemetery before frustrated drivers can work out what has happened. She is one of the most consistently reported roadside apparitions in American history and shows no sign of stopping.
The site of the St Valentine's Day Massacre on North Clark Street, where seven members of Bugs Moran's gang were executed by Al Capone's men in 1929, has a documented history of paranormal activity despite the building itself having been demolished in 1967. Dogs reportedly refuse to approach the site and several people have reported seeing the apparitions of the massacre victims in the area. H H Holmes's Murder Castle, where America's first serial killer dispatched an unknown number of victims during the 1893 World's Fair, no longer stands but the site in Englewood is considered one of the most paranormally charged locations in the city.
Must investigate: Resurrection Cemetery, Graceland Cemetery, the site of the St Valentine's Day Massacre, the Chicago Water Tower, one of the few buildings to survive the Great Fire.
6. San Antonio, Texas
San Antonio is one of America's oldest and most historically layered cities, founded as a Spanish mission settlement in 1718 and subsequently the site of some of the most significant and most violent events in Texas history. The Alamo, where 200 defenders were killed by Mexican forces in 1836, sits in the heart of the modern city as a constant reminder that the ground beneath San Antonio's streets has witnessed extraordinary human drama.
The Alamo itself is considered one of the most haunted locations in Texas, its defenders' spirits reported throughout the complex by staff and visitors for nearly two centuries. Mexican soldiers sent to demolish the building after the battle allegedly fled in terror, reporting ghostly figures emerging from the walls with flaming swords, which persuaded their commanding officer to leave the structure standing. We are choosing to believe this story entirely.
The San Fernando Cemetery is one of the largest in Texas and one of the most paranormally active, while the Emily Morgan Hotel adjacent to the Alamo, built on the site of a former medical building and psychiatric facility, is consistently rated among the most haunted hotels in America. The River Walk area has its own collection of reported apparitions connected to the city's Spanish colonial history.
Must investigate: The Alamo, Emily Morgan Hotel, San Fernando Cemetery, the Spanish Governor's Palace.
7. Washington DC
The capital of the United States is not a city that immediately springs to mind as a paranormal destination, which is part of what makes it so interesting. Washington DC is in fact one of the most haunted cities in America, its concentration of historic buildings, violent history and powerful human drama having generated a paranormal tradition that is surprisingly rich for a city less than 250 years old.
The White House is America's most haunted government building, with Abraham Lincoln's ghost being the most frequently and most credibly reported apparition in its history. Lincoln's ghost has been seen in and around the Lincoln Bedroom by numerous guests and staff over the decades, including, reportedly, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands who allegedly fainted upon opening her bedroom door to find him standing in the corridor. Winston Churchill refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom after a personal experience he declined to specify in detail. If Winston Churchill found something too unsettling to discuss, that is worth taking seriously.
The Octagon House near the White House is considered one of the most haunted buildings in Washington, the site of multiple deaths and decades of documented paranormal activity. Congressional Cemetery, where numerous significant figures in American history are buried, has its own collection of reported apparitions and is one of the most atmospheric burial grounds in the country.
Must investigate: The White House exterior and grounds, Octagon House, Congressional Cemetery, Ford's Theatre where Lincoln was assassinated.
8. San Francisco, California
San Francisco is one of America's most beautiful and most dramatic cities, built on hills above a bay of extraordinary natural beauty and sitting directly on one of the world's most active earthquake fault lines. It has experienced Gold Rush violence, devastating earthquakes, epidemic disease and enough human drama in its relatively short history to generate a paranormal tradition that punches considerably above its age.
Alcatraz Island, the former maximum security federal penitentiary that housed some of America's most notorious criminals from 1934 to 1963, is the city's most famous paranormal destination. Al Capone, Robert Stroud the Birdman and countless others spent years in its cells, and the island has been associated with paranormal activity since long before its time as a prison. Native American tradition considered the island a place of evil spirits and avoided it entirely. They may have had a point.
Cell Block D, where the most difficult prisoners were held in solitary confinement, is considered the most paranormally active area of the prison. Rangers and visitors report unexplained sounds, sudden drops in temperature and in cell 14D, a terrifying presence that has been reported so consistently that even long serving staff members refuse to enter alone. The city's Winchester Mystery House in nearby San Jose, built by the widow of the Winchester rifle fortune who allegedly believed she was haunted by the victims of Winchester guns, is one of America's most extraordinary and most genuinely unsettling buildings.
Must investigate: Alcatraz Island, the Winchester Mystery House, the Presidio, San Francisco's Chinatown at night.
9. Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville is not the first city most people would name when compiling a list of America's most haunted destinations, which is precisely why it deserves a place on this one. Kentucky's largest city has a paranormal history centred on one location so extraordinary that it alone justifies the journey from anywhere in the country.
Waverly Hills Sanatorium on the outskirts of Louisville is widely considered the most haunted building in America, a former tuberculosis hospital where an estimated 63,000 patients died during the epidemic of the early 20th century. The sheer concentration of suffering and death within its walls has created paranormal activity of a consistency and intensity that has made it a destination for investigators from around the world.
The Body Chute, a 500 foot tunnel used to remove the dead discreetly so as not to demoralise recovering patients, is the most famous and most actively reported area of the building. Room 502, where a nurse was found hanged in 1928 in circumstances that were never fully explained, is considered the most paranormally active room. The fourth floor, where the most severely ill patients were housed, has produced some of the most extreme documented paranormal experiences in the building's investigative history.
Louisville itself has additional paranormal attractions including the historic Cave Hill Cemetery and the Seelbach Hotel, where F Scott Fitzgerald stayed while writing The Great Gatsby and which has its own well documented ghost story involving a woman named The Lady in Blue.
Must investigate: Waverly Hills Sanatorium, Cave Hill Cemetery, The Seelbach Hotel, Louisville's historic waterfront.
10. Deadwood, South Dakota
Deadwood is one of America's most extraordinary small cities, a former Gold Rush boomtown in the Black Hills of South Dakota where Wild Bill Hickok was shot dead while playing poker in 1876 and where the entire history of the American frontier seems to be preserved in amber. With a population of barely 1,500 people it is the smallest city on this list by a considerable margin, but its paranormal history is entirely disproportionate to its size.
Wild Bill Hickok's ghost is the most famous in Deadwood, reported most frequently at Saloon No. 10 where he was shot by Jack McCall while holding what became known as the Dead Man's Hand, aces and eights. The saloon still operates today and still has a poker table where visitors can sit in the approximate spot where Hickok met his end. We would suggest not holding aces and eights if you do.
Mount Moriah Cemetery above the town, where Hickok is buried alongside Calamity Jane, is one of the most atmospherically charged burial grounds in the American West. The entire town of Deadwood has a quality of preserved history that creates an atmosphere unlike anywhere else in America, as though the frontier era is not quite as finished as the history books suggest.
Deadwood is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most remarkable places in America, haunted or otherwise. The drive through the Black Hills to reach it is one of the great American road trip experiences and the town itself rewards several days of exploration.
Must investigate: Saloon No. 10, Mount Moriah Cemetery, the Adams Museum, Deadwood's historic Main Street after dark.
Explore These Cities and Hundreds More Haunted Locations on HauntMap
Every city on this list contains far more haunted locations than any single article could cover. HauntMap maps haunted destinations across the USA, the UK and beyond, complete with full paranormal histories, ghost stories, visiting information and experiences submitted by real investigators from around the world.
Download the HauntMap app on iPhone or Android and start planning your paranormal road trip today. America's most haunted cities are waiting and unlike some of their residents, they are very much still alive.
Have you investigated a haunted location in any of these cities? Tell us about it at boo@haunt-map.com