Courtesy of Uptown Westerville
Westerville Ghost Tour
Uptown Westerville provides guests with a one-of-a-kind Halloween experience with ghost story tours.
It's a culmination of stories from across the Uptown community combined into a theatrical and historical walking tour.
With 12 different stops including Westerville Antiques and the Hanby Magnet School, the tour covers over six blocks of Uptown Westerville. The tour features performers from Good Medicine Productions, a nonprofit theatrical performance company in Westerville. Good Medicine performers strive to bring their audience joy through improvisation, comedic performance and innovative storytelling. Good Medicine wrote the script for the tour from the stories collected from community members. They also auditioned, trained and prepared all the performers leading the tour.
The stories collected from community members might hold historical roots as well.
“Each story was researched to see if there was a historical connection,” says Lynn Aventino, executive director of Uptown Westerville. “If the reported ghosts at each location could have been a person who had lived or had another association to the haunted properties.”
One of the many stories the tour will capture takes guests back to May 17, 1886, where a touring company performed Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the building that is now The Old Bag of Nails. That night, an actor knocked off the top of a kerosene footlight and the lamp started a fire. Two 9-year-olds and an adult woman were killed. An unidentified ghost now haunts the sights, either the young girl or the adult woman.
Each of the 12 stops on the tour features its own unique ghost story.
Tours are 7-9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays through Oct. 30 and start at Otterbein Cemetery and end at Morgan’s Treasures Custom Jewelry. Recommended parking is at the Westerville Library.
Tickets are $23 per person.
Megan Roth is an editorial assistant. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
