The city of Marietta holds a reputation for its rich history and creepy ghosts. To commemorate the spooky season, Marietta hosts annual ghost tours encouraging believers and skeptics to walk through Marietta Square with a storyteller and hear the city’s dark history through all of October.

“We did not experience any ghostly activity much to mine and my husband’s dismay. We were really hoping, especially when they were talking up some of the haunted areas like the art museum, that looking up at the window we would see  [a ghost] walk by, but we loved the enthusiasm of the tour guide and his extensive knowledge of Marietta’s history,” Marietta ghost tour attendee and AP Lang teacher Lindsay Theaker said.

One storyteller/tour guide, Amanda Melton, begins the adventure assuring the group that, regardless if they believed in ghosts or not, the shocking stories would scare them. The stops of the tour in order included the train tracks, Church Street, Root House, Thaicoon, the Kennesaw House, a sinkhole in a nearby parking lot, Eddie’s Trick Shop, the Museum of Art, and Glover park—all prominent hubs of activity during the day time.

“At the Kennesaw House, where it is believed there are around 700 ghosts, sometimes on the tour we see a shadow cross in front of the window. You never know if it is the lights playing a trick, or if it is the old glass, but I like to believe,” Melton said.   

Throughout the tour, Melton tells shocking and horrifying tails dating back to the Civil War. Starting off with the train tracks, which historically carried the bodies of injured and wounded soldiers to the city from Kennesaw Mountain, the tour guide described an infamous site full of bloody battles during the war. She claims the souls of  those dead men haunt the tracks, including the ghost of a tall, skinny man who people occasionally claim seeing listening in on the tour.

The Root House, only steps away from the railroad tracks, once held the Root family, which held nine people under one single roof. Now a museum created to resemble the original set up, the ghost of one of the Root family’s sons who died in his youth roams about the empty manor. He sleeps in the beds at night, leaving an indentation of his small body on the blankets and terrifying the museum workers.

As one of the creepiest stops on the tour, the boarded up tunnels leading under the city stump residents of Marietta. Due to the fact that the city of Marietta does not feel the need to pay a professional to excavate the tunnels, they remain unexplored and unknown. Theories regarding the tunnels claim that it stood as a coal shoot, provided transportation for bodies during the war, or even housed a leg of the Underground Railroad. Citizens also believe the tunnels hide original court documents of the city. Until further inspection, no one will know what lurks right under their feet.

As the tour progressed with spooky and shocking stories to fit each location, the common educational theme of the tour continued as the culture and identity of the city shone through. The evident historical importance of Marietta during the gruesome Civil War proves as a major factor in the hauntings of the old city. To spice up this frightening season, walk down to Marietta Square and attend the ghost tour, but pay attention to who walks in the group—ghosts lurk everywhere.