We have helped farms, escape rooms, museums, tree farms, ski resorts, horse race tracks, municipal storage facilities, schools/colleges and universities, aquariums, car dealerships & the list goes on…..

Oct. 31, 2006, 12:05 PM EST / Source: The Associated Press

Legend has it that University Hall is haunted. That’s the story anyway. Maybe you believe it, perhaps you don’t — but it’s a safe bet you’ll encounter the lore on the Providence Ghost Tour, a popular weekend walking tour to places of murders, suicides and reported spooky sightings on the city’s historic East Side.

Similar tours have blossomed around the country, from the antebellum south to colonial New England to the west, with guides marketing the macabre tales of their cities to those with an interest in the supernatural — or simply eager for a cheap spook during Halloween season.

“It’s not as hocus-pocus as it was before where you had people going around trying to scare you. It’s trying to be a little bit more factual,” said Mike Gertrudes, a 26-year-old entrepreneur who founded the Providence Ghost Tour this year with his friend Courtney Edge, also 26.

Tour organizers, explaining the industry’s popularity, say people are increasingly comfortable about discussing their paranormal sensations. The supernatural also figures prominently in contemporary television and film — think “The Sixth Sense” — and technology like digital cameras and camera phones gives believers hope they can capture an orb or apparition and see it appear instantly on their screens.

“I really think the people are fascinated by the supernatural, the life afterwards, the spirit, what happens to our spirit,” said Jim McCabe, whose New England Ghost Tours offers walking tours in Boston and bus trips to other places in Massachusetts.

McCabe’s tour includes stops at the Omni Parker House Hotel, where he points out a mirror on the mezzanine floor that Charles Dickens rehearsed in front of before literary readings. The ghost of the long-dead hotel founder, Harvey Parker, is said to still tend after his guests.

The tour also capitalizes on the city’s rich Revolutionary War history with a visit to the Central Burying Ground, where McCabe says the remains of hundreds of redcoats were uncovered in the late 19th century.

McCabe’s business started in the mid-1990s with bus tours to Salem and Marblehead, Mass., on Boston’s North Shore. It has since expanded, operating from May through November, and attracts more women than men.

“I think women are more spiritualistic,” McCabe said. “They’re more attuned to the spiritual world than men are.”

In Providence, on a recent wind-whipped and cold Friday evening, about 40 customers assemble for the start of the tour in a park at the base of the East Side. They huddle round a statue of Roger Williams, Rhode Island’s founding father, and learn that his remains lie below.

The guides offer a dose of deadpan humor. Participants are warned to stay on the sidewalks lest they get hit by a car and become another ghost. And as the group ambles through the cold, Gertrudes, mustering the exuberance of a football coach rallying his players, hollers out, “Are you excited?”

The tour, which runs Fridays through Sundays, lasts about an hour and 45 minutes. Several spooky sites are dormitories at the Rhode Island School of Design, including one residence hall that is said to have spirits roaming the basement and a parlor with a television that turns itself on and off.

Animatronic Cauldron Stirrers.

This Life Size character that has realistic movements. It stirs a large caldron with lighting for the glowing embers and lighting in the caldron as well.

If you want more information on renting our Life Size Stirrers, follow this link.