It’s 7:45 p.m. at the Alvin C. York statue near the Capitol, and Steve Stern is telling a crowd about the time he brought a ghost home.
“There was this little poof of bright white light,” he explains.
“Like an orb?” asks a woman.
“No, not like an orb,” he says emphatically. “There’s orbs up there.”
Stern is a guide with Nashville’s imprint of the ghost tourism company Ghost City Tours. The orbs are spirits that have been spotted at the fountain at the Tennessee Capitol, which, during a recent Ghosts of Nashville Tour, Stern described as the most haunted state capitol in the U.S. He estimates that on a single night in Nashville, about 200 people are taking a ghost tour — a number that climbs on the weekends and leading up to Halloween.
What makes a good ghost story? Nestor Ilagan, another Ghost City Tours guide, says they age like fine wine. Unlike other true-crime attractions, the adults-only Murder in Music City Tour he runs has a vintage focus, with stories mostly sourced from the Victorian era. To him, it’s more fun that way. “You could talk about modern murders, but it’s much more haunting when there’s repeated [ghostly] activity over 50 to 100 years.”
He and Stern navigate their grisly material with an upfront approach. Both lead by warning that they’ll be covering topics like murder, suicide and abuse. Stern sources sensitivity feedback and contextualizes his tours with real-life systemic horrors, noting that all three Tennessean presidents with statues at the Capitol were slave owners.
Ilagan indicates a window with a laser pointer
This is the kind of job where everyone has a backstory. Stern says, perhaps unsurprisingly, that most people are ghost tour guides on the side of another gig. His own journey to the job has a Music City twist: He spent years as the stage manager of Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, which is allegedly haunted by notorious local spirit Mrs. McGavock. He wrote an Americana song about her, and was discovered by Ghost City Tours.
Ilagan, meanwhile, is a stay-at-home dad during the day who calls his tours “adult storytime.” Unlike some guides, he doesn’t dress up in historical garb, joking, “I have yet to find a suitable costume for an Asian American.” He’s added his own props to his tour, though: an Aztec death whistle replica that he 3D printed at the library, and a stunt pocketknife, which he picked up at a previous job at Friedman’s Army Navy Outdoor Store.
The Southern Turf building
In this town, even the ghosts are entertainers. Both Ghost City tours end at Skull’s Rainbow Room in the Southern Turf building, reportedly haunted by former owners Ice Johnson and Skull Schulman himself. At the Ryman’s Haunted History tours, which traditionally happen in October but are starting to run more throughout the year, you’ll hear about hauntings from Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. There’s also Tom Ryman himself, who’s said to stomp his feet when acts he doesn’t approve of play the venue.
While common, believing in ghosts isn’t required in the industry. “I’m probably one of the biggest skeptics in the building,” admits Joshua Bronnenberg, the Ryman’s museum curator and tour manager — and creator of their ghost tour. “Several of my co-workers and staff members do [believe],” he adds, “and they claim to have had experiences.”
Stern is an avowed believer, and carries an electromagnetic field detector every night. Ilagan, meanwhile, believes in a “higher-dimensional physics” way. He incorporates the Filipino superstition of pagpag, or “dusting off,” whenever he finishes a tour: Instead of going straight home, he stops at a bar or hotel lobby to file his post-tour paperwork and avoid carrying any unwanted visitors back. He’s become a regular at several spots.
Though their interpretations of the supernatural vary, what unites the three tours is a passion for sharing history in a nontraditional way — and preserving stories of the past in a rapidly changing city. For Ilagan, that’s warts and all, from glitzy local legends to the Wilcox building, where stories of early Tennessee serial killer Dr. J. Herman Feist lie just beneath the facade.
“You understand how much this place has been growing the last dozen years or so,” Ilagan says. “A lot of this history has been lost, and we’re trying to preserve it in our storytelling.”
Exploring Nashville’s ghost tourism industry, chatting with a historian about the bodies buried in our state Capitol and much more
