?Travel has a way of providing genuine scares in a variety of forms, whether braving a stern-faced border patrol guard while attempting to enter a reclusive country or trying a plate of some exotic fare you’d wince at if served to you back home. In many ways, this is half the challenge and all the reward of travel. With Halloween just around the corner, these seven hotels provide a more in-your-face scare for the brave traveler. Test your nerve by checking into one of these historically haunted hotels around the U.S.?
1. The Queen Mary
Long Beach, California?
After decades of transatlantic travel starting with her maiden voyage in the 1930s, the Queen Mary (pictured above) is rich in history and, as it turns out, paranormal activity. Today the ocean liner sits in Long Beach and lives on, much like the spirits that haunt it, in the form of a floating hotel. You can experience all the Queen’s paranormal happenings on the Haunted Encounters and night tour programs, which include a visit to the ship’s hot spots, seances and even a “dinner with the spirits” where you just might spot the Lady in White, a sailor who refuses to pass on, or any number of ghosts that are said to haunt the ship’s halls.
2. The Stanley Hotel
Estes Park, Colorado?
Photo by Kent Kanouse, CC BY-NC 2.0
Serving as the inspiration for the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining, The Stanley Hotel rightly earns its spot on this list. The entire fourth floor is said to be haunted, along with other nooks and corners of this stately 140-room hotel. Several tours are offered that explore these activities. The adult-only paranormal investigation is said to be downright chilling. During the only-slightly tamer nightly ghost tour, you can explore the most haunted spots of the hotel from its basement to the secret tunnels. If you’re lucky, or perhaps not, you might even catch a glimpse of the hotel’s proprietor F.O. Stanley and his wife Flora who are believed to still roam parts of the hotel.
3. Hotel Provincial
?New Orleans, Louisiana
Photo by Hotel Provincial
The ghosts of soldiers are said to haunt the halls and countless other paranormal activities have been reported at New Orleans’ Hotel Provincial. The land that the hotel sits on has a storied past, reportedly serving at one time or another as a wartime hospital. A number of homes that also occupied the land reportedly burned to the ground. Today the hotel, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, shares its charming French Quarter rooms with its fair share of spirits that linger from the site’s eerie past.
4. The Sagamore Resort
Lake George, ?New York
Photo by The Sagamore
