Writer Lauren Liebhaber lives in Salem, Massachusetts, and loves Halloween more than most. She is a spooky season expert. For this story, she dug into the legends of ghost stories in some of the country’s most popular national parks.
From a headless bride in the Old Faithful Inn to phantom hikers in the Grand Canyon, she researched five haunting tales, their origins and the truth behind them. National parks are fertile ground for storytelling. These lands hold deep geological, cultural and sacred histories stretching back thousands of years, and places like this have a way of inspiring and collecting stories.
They get passed around and retold, with old details dropped and new ones added until the story itself becomes a sort of Frankenstein’s monster. Fact and folklore blend together until it’s hard to tell where history ends and legend begins. And national parks have no shortage of settings for the unexplained.
They’re full of dark caves, old buildings, abandoned settlements, battlefields and vast stretches of wilderness. Spend a night at the bottom of a canyon or in a century-old hotel, and every unexplained footstep, flicker of light or movement in your periphery starts to feel a little more…otherworldly. So it’s probably no surprise that some of the stories we’ve attached to these places involve ghosts.
What is surprising is where some of those stories came from. Old Faithful Inn is a gabled monument to lodgepole pine. Opened in 1904, it was built for people who wanted to watch Old Faithful erupt, then retire somewhere a little more comfortable, but still suitably rustic.
It has character, and if you ask the right person, it was also home to Yellowstone’s most famous murder. It’s 1915, and the rebellious teenage daughter of a wealthy New York shipping magnate has refused an arranged marriage. She’s fallen for an older man who works in their house as a servant.
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