In Savannah, Georgia, spend an evening wandering historic squares while a guide recounts stories of people who supposedly never left. It’s a city with excellent nightlife, even if some of its most intriguing personalities have been dead for centuries.
Historically, finding out your hotel was haunted meant asking for another room. Now it might be the reason you booked it to begin with.
According to Booking.com’s 2027 Travel Predictions, 72% of surveyed U.S. travelers are interested in paranormal experiences, while 57% are open to trying to contact someone on the “other side.”
For context, that means more than half of the people surveyed might willingly spend their hard-earned vacation time trying to communicate with someone who hasn’t returned a phone call in quite some time.
Talk about being ghosted. Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Booking.com calls this emerging interest “Trip to the Beyond,” one of nine trends it believes could shape travel in 2027. And while Halloween seems like the obvious occasion for a little supernatural sightseeing, the company believes travelers’ fascination with haunted history and paranormal experiences could extend well beyond October.
Seriously, when did a haunted hotel become an amenity rather than a warning?
Ian Ackland, Booking.com’s managing director for the Americas, says that the attraction isn’t exclusively about being frightened.
“For some, it’s about the thrill of the unknown, but for others, it’s much more personal,” he said, explaining that travelers may be seeking connections to lost loved ones or exploring questions about spirituality and memory.
Okay, so that’s worth taking seriously. A haunted city is rarely just a collection of conveniently creaky buildings. It’s a place where history has lingered long enough to become folklore.
Related: Virgin Wants to Pay Someone $100,000 to Travel the World. All You Have to Do Is Say Yes.
Where to Go Looking for Trouble
Savannah offers historic ghost walks and the usual suspects: New Orleans’ French Quarter tours and Salem’s collision of history and supernatural folklore. But America’s ghosts haven’t all settled along the Eastern Seaboard.
In San Jose, California, the Winchester Mystery House offers a 160-room Victorian labyrinth of architectural curiosities and reported paranormal activity. At the former Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, visitors can sign up for ghost hunts in a prison better known to movie fans as a filming location for The Shawshank Redemption.
In Jerome, Arizona, the old copper-mining town clings to a mountainside above the Verde Valley. You can taste local wine, roam steep streets, then check into the Jerome Grand Hotel, a former hospital with a reputation for ghostly company.
Spirits, apparently, come by the glass, or you can just spend the night.
And across the Atlantic, Edinburgh’s underground vaults offer a haunting introduction to Scotland’s darker history.
Related: Planning a Trip to Ireland? Here’s When a Guided Tour Is Actually Worth It
Ackland sees a business case for these stories. “That doesn’t mean hotels should ditch the rooftop pool, but there’s a real opportunity to make a property’s history part of the experience,” he said.
Fair enough. You can build another rooftop pool. Centuries of local legends take a bit longer.
The best ghost tours understand that whether or not anything supernatural happens, you leave with a stronger sense of the people who lived there, what they believed, and what they left behind.
Just know the dead tend to require a late checkout time.
