To tell you the unfortunate truth, I didn't love this tour. It ended up taking 2hrs, and I felt that only maybe half an hour of that was actually telling ghost stories. There were many conversations about how they found the stories or how they didn't believe the stories, about the paranormal teams and psychics that they teamed up with... but when they got right down to it I found there to be very little substance on this tour.
One moment that particularly frustrated me: the tour guides explained that after excavation began on Washington Park, the crew was forced to stop because they started finding dead bodies. I am fairly confident that this was actually a planned stage of the park renovation, as it was well known that the Washington Park was once a cemetery. If that's the case, then a large chunk of the tour was very misleading.
Other stories began but never really concluded. There was a large amount of setup about the cholera epidemics that once swept Cincinnati, and while the guides insisted that would play a role in later stories, we never heard about it again. There was a good portion of time spent talking about the hospital, asylum and medical college that operated in Over-the-Rhine, but there never ended up being any stories about related spirits or hauntings. Murders, yes! Ghosts, no.
I think Dan and I would have been better off taking the "Newport is Haunted" tour, because at least we would have learned something new about an area of town we know significantly less about. Because we'd already done the "Queen City Underground" tour, we'd seen the spaces and buildings that this tour touched on, and there was very little to keep us interested other than a view of Music Hall at night.
NOTE: This coming weekend, the tour is actually going to go into Music Hall at night, which -- dangit!-- would be a sight worth paying for if you ask me! Even if you don't spot any specters, I'd consider taking the tour on Halloween weekend!
DOUBLE NOTE: Overall I really enjoy these tours and the Queen City Underground team. I think the attention they're bringing to this part of town is incredible. If you haven't taken any of their tours I highly recommend it, but this one wasn't for me. I think their real forte is the history lessons, not the spook-outs, and I'd recommend you stick with those.
Queen City is Haunted: http://queencityishaunted.com/
Queen City Underground: http://www.queencityunderground.com/
5 comments:
Now I'm wondering if it comes down to the luck of the draw, which guys you end up with. Ours got us through the whole tour in little over an hour. I didn't believe in ghosts in the first place so wasn't too surprised when we didn't find any, but I did enjoy the stories. Maybe the Adam and Jeremy (who we had) are just better story tellers?
I should probably add I did the tour for free, so I didn't have buyers remorse either.
Oh yeah, I'm sure you get very different tours depending on who you end up with. I thought our guys were good, I just didn't love our overall experience.
Ooh, how'd you score free tickets? We bought ours through Groupon so at least we had HALF the buyer's remorse.
My husband and I had an amazing time. I loved the tour. We did it two weeks ago and we are going back for the tour this weekend.
The story about the pool really freaked us out. Also, there was a person on the tour whose cell phone kept going off inside the building as well as outside and it was dead.
I don't know who you guys had as tour guys, but we had the two teachers and it was so much fun.
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