| Welcome to the New England Ghost Tours Area. In this page and additional pages you will find ratings of New England Ghost tours from all over the New England area. If you have been on one of these tours or any tour please send us your comments at Ghostmaster. We are going to the Salem-Spellbound tour. October 30th. |
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Ratings are based on four criteria: Authenticity, Fear Factor, Professionalism of Ghost Tour Host, and Telling of Stories. Costs of tour are noted wherever possible. If you have a tour that you feel is deserves to be included please e-mail me and we will be happy to go on the tour and review it.
Authenticity: Four Stars Professionalism: Four Stars Telling of Stories: ranged from one star to four stars, Fear Factor: ranged from zero stars to four stars Review: We went on Friday night, October 27th. The tour departs from the John Carver Inn, and goes on a one mile walk around Plymouth. Even though, there were four tour guides, we went with one tour guide and 22 people. I thought they should split the tour up to at least two people, rather than have a large group. Even though the tour says it goes at 9 p.m. and lasts 90 minutes, in fact it does not. The tour left John Carver at 9:15 and it took a few minutes to walk around the Grist mill and then stop at a park area, so the tour did not commence until 9:22, and therefore lasted about 1hr and 13min. This tour has enormous potential, but in the end failed for a few reasons, which will be noted down below. The strengths: taking people to some haunted and allegedly haunted sites including the Sparrow house and the alley as well as a house on a hill overlooking Plymouth harbor, see Strange #1. At these locations the tour guide gave a great couple of stories and also mentioned about sightings that happened on her past tours and to other guides. Some of these included a ghostly head in the house on the hill, and a little girl named Abigal seen walking in front of the Sparrow house and alley as well as inside the house. Fear factor was high for both houses. On the flip side, having some initial stories about the park area, and the Native American tribe and the colonists while a legend i.e folklore and somewhat interesting, it starts off the tour as a letdown. A low point was talking about the spiking of the head of King Phillip and you expect her to say it happened on this spot--which would explain why you are standing there. Nevertheless, it did not, so what is the point of telling me the story? The real low point--which included walking the park area: the pointing out of a stone wall and mentioning it was part of an indian village. Interesting, but why tell me and then say nothing else. Did it have ghosts? I guess, this was part of the legends. Our guide was good and mentioned stories about North street, supposedly having hauntings and sightings on it, and about the Tasker museum, which was not on our tour, but we went back and took some interesting photographs. There were several young children on the tour, and we felt maybe the guide toned down some of the stories. This tour receives three stars, because although it has all the elements to be a great tour, it fails with the legend stuff (which is pre-advertised) and not with enough ghostly areas to visit (considering the potential. We give it three for the sightings we had both on and afterwards. We also have an amazing photograph taken near an allegedly haunted house. 
Haunted Footsteps Tour:
Salem, MA. 8 Derby Square Salem, MA 01970 (978)745-0666. Cost for adults
was $8 per person. This is a walking tour.
We found the tour to provide a 4-star rating in terms of authenticity, professionalism of the ghost tour host. The telling of ghost and haunted stories was only two and half stars. Strengths of the tour: starting off at the Joshua Ward house reportedly one of the four most haunted houses in the United States. The Tour also hits other haunts throughout the Salem area, including the haunted street next to a Salem graveyard which is near the supposedly haunted jail. We found the host to be knowledgeable in some areas and lacking in others-which she acknowledged that she did not know all in regards to Salem ghost sites. Sadly, we did not get to go to the reportedly haunted jail because the size of the tour group. In addition, the tour included some houses which either were or not haunted but the tour guide talked about the architecture of the houses and never went into the alleged hauntings. We never figured out why that would be included in a tour. This tour though was super on authencitiy and making sure this was not a "campy" tour which we were glad. Overall fear factor: 2 1/2 stars.
This tour starts off strong but has some serious problems. The authenticity factor is one star, the fear factor is zero, telling of stories ranged from 3 stars to zero depending on the ghost tour host (there are three: one is the driver in a really bad hungarian accent-which she lost on a few occasions, one is at the Boston Common who has a british accent and quite good and the last was in the north end area and he really was horrible-at one point he said something out of an Ed Wood film. When talking about a gravestone he said this person died in the 18th century in the 1800's. Uh, that would mean 18th century-1700's). Other fallables, the driver whose accent sounded at times like Dracula's voice was hard to understand and talked too fast, at one point they apparently run out of stories because they started to talk about Lizzie Borden's case which was in Fall River, MA not even close to Boston! Because you are driven around in a trolley like car-you miss some cool stops, but you do get out of the trolley car and walk through the Boston Common area and a graveyard featuring Ben Franklin's parents and Crispus Attackus as well as walking around Nob Hill in the North End. When the tour starts talking about the Big Dig and singing really bad songs you know you are in trouble. Fear Factor: Zero Stars!
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