Downtown Logan Hosts Public Ghost Tours

Looking for a fun way to embrace the spooky season? Interested in hearing local folk and ghost tales? This year, Bridgerland Storytelling Guild has partnered with Downtown Logan again to host the annual Historic Downtown Ghost Tours, private guided tours that walk you through Logan’s haunted history.

The tours are held nightly at 7 p.m., 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. every Friday and Saturday during the month of October as well as Monday, Oct. 28, alongside the Logan City Zombie Walk. The ghost stories told change every year, making it a unique experience every Halloween season.

“Because I’m not from Logan, I wanted to get a little bit of Logan culture and history since this is my home now,” Camila Summers, a biochemistry major, said. “I feel like the tour made me feel more familiar with Logan and different places in the town that are significant with its history, and it was a good way to combine culture and history of Logan with the Halloween season.”

The tour starts with attendees meeting and checking in at Cold Storage Lockers. There, they are given blue glow stick necklaces and watch a short ghost-themed play put on by the Green Canyon High School before splitting into groups and heading out on their tour.

There are three different stops on the tour, all located at historic Logan sites. Attendees gather and sit around the storyteller to hear the haunted tale of their location. 

Lauren Shanley, one of the storytellers, got involved with the Historic Downtown Ghost tour when her friend David Sidwell, a tour guide, asked her help out.

“I’ve been friends with David for about 11 years, and nine years ago, he asked me if I wanted to do the storytelling,” Shanley said. “I had never done it before, but I was interested and said yes.”

The stories told are researched by members of the Historic Downtown Ghost Tour like Sidwell and assigned to the storytellers, who are then allowed to rework the the tales into their own words. Some of the storytellers will ask attendees to turn their glow lights on or off depending on the mood they think will best capture the underlying message of their tale.

“For my approach, I just really wanted to show the decline of a good person and that we can all decline ourselves,” Shanley said as she described her method for telling her ghost tale.

The tours are open to people of all ages, though young children that are easily scared are advised not to attend. The locations include tight and small spaces with stairs leading up to them.

“At one of the locations, there was a cell in this abandoned building where one of the ghosts supposedly haunts, and looking at it, you could feel yourself being transported in the past and get a grasp of how people lived back then,” Summer said. “The story that accompanied the cell was told in a way that really made you feel like you understood Logan life back in the 1920s. After hearing her tale, my friend and I went to the Bluebird Cafe, also mentioned in the story, because I really wanted to become more familiar with Logan.”

Tickets for the Historic Downtown Ghost Tour cost $13.13 a person except for the tours on Monday, Oct. 28th, which are discounted to $7.77 a person. They can be reserved online at http://www.logandowntown.org/ghost-tour.html. Space on the tours is limited.

“It’s a really fun tour because you get a chance to go to places in Logan that you wouldn’t normally get to go to, and you get to hear history that you never hear about,” Shanley said. “It’s just a great time and a short walk.”

—nichole.bresee@aggiemail.usu.edu

@breseenichole