About Spookt
What Spookt Is
Spookt is a guide to haunted places, the stories behind them, and how you can explore them yourself.
There is more than one way to do that.
Go on Your Own
We give you the locations, the history, and the lore so you can put together your own outing.
Take a Tour
We list the ghost tours that cover the cities, places, and stories you’re interested in. A tour gives you a guided look, and sometimes access you couldn’t get otherwise.
Stay the Night
We point out the haunted places where you can book a room and experience them firsthand.
Follow an Investigation
Investigators dug into the history of many of these places and spent time there looking for evidence. We help you find their work.
Read a Book
For when you want more than a page can hold.
Check the Sources
We list the sources we found so you can go down the rabbit hole yourself.
Start with a city: Salem Chicago San Francisco Seattle All city guides
Why We Built It
We’ve always been drawn to the supernatural and to the macabre history of the places we visit. Harry took his first ghost walking tour in Victoria, British Columbia about 20 years ago, and he has been hooked ever since.
In any new city, we dig up the legends and lore and try to catch a tour to learn the city’s past and its secrets. Sometimes a guided tour doesn’t work out, so we make up one for ourselves.
That has never been easy. The history and the stories are strewn across many different sources, and they can be hard to unearth and stitch together. We always wished something like Spookt existed to help us as we traveled.
Harry had always wanted to make a site like this, and he owned the Spookt domain for more than 10 years before we started. In 2020, COVID gave us the time to pull it off. We were shut inside our house in Seattle, and no tours were running, so every haunted outing we took was one we had put together ourselves. We started building the guide we had been wishing for. Later, we sold the house and began traveling all over the country, and the project fit that life naturally.
That’s the motivation behind Spookt! We want to make it as easy as possible for anyone to dig into the haunted history of real places and explore it for themselves.
How We Research
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It Starts With a Story
Most of what we cover starts with a story someone tells: a tour guide, an innkeeper, an author, an investigator, the people who work in the building. We note who tells it.
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Then We Check the Record
Next, we dig in to see what is behind the story. That means what was written down at the time: newspaper reports, court and census records, and the work of historians. When a legend depends on a death, a fire, or a crime, we look for the report printed when it happened, where we can find one.
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When the Two Disagree, Both Go In
Some famous stories don’t match the record. We give you the story and the record together, and we keep them apart: a story a guide tells on the sidewalk and a verdict in a court file are different kinds of claims.
Ghost stories can only be sourced so far. We leave out plenty that are too thin, the one-off tales nobody else tells. When a story has enough of a following that it is hard to ignore, we include it. We use the most reputable sources we can find, and when a claim has no source, can’t be verified, or rests on one person’s account, we say so.
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We Show Our Sources
Whenever we research a story or a claim, we list the sources we relied on so you can read them yourself.
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Edited and Reviewed by Us
We tie each claim to a source in our research notes. Then we edit and review everything we publish so it is as accurate as our research allows.
If we got something wrong, tell us. We’ll check it against the record and fix it.
Where AI Comes In
AI tools have improved quickly, and we now use them to help with the slow parts of this work: finding sources, sorting what they say, and writing first drafts. We copyedit and approve every draft before it is published. AI is never a source. Nothing is published just because an AI said so.
When we can’t find a photo or drawing that helps tell the story, we sometimes use AI to help make an illustration.
Are the Ghosts Real?
Spookt doesn’t say ghosts are real, and it doesn’t say they aren’t. We’ve had a couple of experiences of our own that nudge us toward yes. We want to believe.
Nearly every haunted place has something documented and terrible in its past, and that is usually where the ghost story starts. So the history gets as much room as the haunting.
Who Makes Spookt
Spookt is made by Harry and Leigh Anne Kautzman. We travel the country by RV and write about that life at Towmads.
Get in Touch
Tell us about a place we’ve missed, a story we got wrong, or a ghost tour you run.
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