GHOST TOUR REVIEW BEST OF CONVENTION
Michael Scott, Oxford HS (Oxford, Miss.)

What you get is an ordinary man in ordinary clothes. No tricks here. Navigating the darkened streets and ancient graveyards of Columbia, SC, Chuck McConnell spins tales of murder and revenge to a small group of intrigued strangers.

The first thing that McConnell tells his group every night on his Ghosts and Legends Walking Tour is that all of his stories are not true. What’s important for Chuck is not whether his tales are credible, but simply whether they are entertaining. His web of secondary and unreliable sources makes for a night of guessing and amusement. “Are there ghosts?” McConnell repeats throughout the night. “I don’t know.”

What the tour offers is not a bunch of cheap frights – there is not a mask or costume to be seen. The only thing McConnell promises are some good stories and a nice walk through Columbia.

The tour begins on the steps of SC’s capitol, and if you don’t know what to look for, you might just miss the guide. People expecting some sort of ghoul or grim reaper will be disappointed.

Once the tour begins, it feels just as much like history class as it does like a haunted house. The first attraction of the night is the capitol itself. McConnell relates the story of when General Sherman came through Columbia during the Civil War ad burned the city to the ground while his group stares up at he capital nervously, waiting for someone to pop out of the bushes and grab them. But McConnell has no creepy-crawlies up his sleeves. All he has is his stories.

He explains how Sherman left the capitol standing and segues into a tale about the renovation of the building, involving a mysterious patch in the ceiling and red stain on the floor of the capitol’s main hall. The strange thing, McConnell says, is that there is no entry in the architect’s records that suggests that anyone ever fell through the ceiling. Are there ghosts? I don’t know.

After leaving the capitol, McConnell leads the group into a more fitting place for a ghost tour: a church cemetery. In the cemetery, he tells of a woman from the church’s congregation who was buried there in the 1800s. This woman was supposedly so beautiful that her husband had her casket made with a window so that he could come to the cemetery, uncover her tomb and look at her face. Eventually, the church needed to expand to accommodate its growing congregation, and since her grave was so near to the church, they simply built over her. Ever since, McConnell said, the building has been plagued with strange occurrences and sightings of a beautiful woman dressed in white. Are there ghosts?

While the cemetery setting allows from some spookiness, the tour is not meant to scare its patrons in the way that a Halloween haunted house or cheesy horror flick would. The source of all of the scares of the night is McConnell’s masterful storytelling. As he gets deeper into each story, his voice gets softer and softer, forcing his audience to lean in further and further. Then just as the group members hold their breath in suspense, McConnell claps his hands and raises his voice to illustrate the slamming of a door or the shot of a gun. McConnell relies on a smarter type of scares than most movies. He makes you think.

If what you’re looking for is cheap scares and stage makeup, you would most likely have more fun at the movies, but if you’re looking for a good story to tell your friends in the dark around a campfire, then Ghost Tours is for you.

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GHOST TOUR REVIEW AWARD OF MERIT
Mika Ross and Jason Schulte, Wando HS (Mt. Pleasant, S.C.)

Columbia Ghost Walk: Enjoyable Alternative to Run-of-the-Mill Entertainment

Simple story-telling is the oldest form of entertainment known to man. Whether it’s wholly factual or built upon a mere shred of historical evidence, it never ceases to captivate its listeners. The Ghosts and Legends Tour of Columbia does just that.

The tour is a crash course in the history and lore of this historical city. The accounts are passed down through generations and taken from a myriad of sources. In this intriguing trek through downtown Columbia, the past is brought to life through factually sound published accounts, stories based on events occurring anywhere from a century ago to just last week and good old fashioned southern story-telling.

The tour is an exciting alternative to your usual movie-going night out. Prices range from $8 for children to $15 for adults, and there is a special group offer of $12 per person. Although it may be on the pricey side, it’s worth the empty space in your wallet.

The tour originates on the steps of the capital building and begins at the appropriate ghouling hour of 7:30 p.m., typically concluding somewhere around 9:30 p.m. Guests are led on a four mile walk through historic downtown Columbia by a single guide.

The tour would be severely lacking without the enthusiastic and passionate manner in which the guide related the stories of the city to the audience. Animated and charming, he brought a personal quality to the stories and contributed to the overall atmosphere of the tour. He seemed to have a genuine interest and respect for the history of the city and its people that came through in his delivery. This is an essential key to the tour’s overall entertainment value.

The tour begins with the guide revealing some interesting yet little known facts about the capital, such as the origin of the seemingly innocuous stars on the outer walls of the statehouse and the unexplainable red stain hidden beneath the elaborate rugs that cover the atrium floor. Judging by the gasps of the audience after hearing a particular story involving an old hotel building and it’s subsequent haunting by a man who plunged to his death from it’s ninth story window, the stories possess a very realistic shock value. This and other stories provide an enthralling and intellectually stimulating look into the city’s past.

While our particular tour was cut short by the time constraints of our schedule, it is a testament to the quality of the tour that we were left wanting the full experience. So I guess there’s only one question you have to ask yourself: in the words or our guide, “Are ghosts real? I don’t know.” You’ll have to figure that one out on your own.

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Ghost Tour Review Winners 2005

Best of Convention
Michael Scott
Oxford HS
Oxford, Miss.

Award of Merit
Mika Ross and Jason Schulte
Wando HS
Mt. Pleasant, S.C.