Ghost tours are an increasingly popular alternative or addition to traditional tourist activities and are a growing area of heritage tourism and dark tourism. Furthermore, recent literature is showing a growing academic interest in dark tourism, but little research on ghost tourism, a specialized subfield of dark tourism. This study contributes to the understanding of the intersection between historical and paranormal content of ghost tours. It provides an overview of historical and modern ghost tourism to provide context for the ethnographic data collected for this study, which updates and combines earlier and modern contexts of the consumption in ghost tourism. The ghost tour operators and locations researched for this study were: New Harmony Ghost Walks in New Harmony, Indiana; paranormal tours in the Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky; The Willard Library Grey Lady Ghost tour in Evansville, Indiana. Although there were differences in the tours based partly on unique characteristics of each site, all of them combined history with accounts of the paranormal, and in all sites the tour guides established credibility to admitting their own beliefs and openly or inherently relying on authoritative sources. They added to the authenticity of the tourist experience by recounting personal paranormal experiences; in most tours, they also enhanced this through tourist participation in activities. All the sites intentionally linked stories with the specific stops on the tour, further enhancing the tourist experience. These are likely qualities that can be used as a model for other successful ghost tours.