Halloween

During a spine-chilling tour of Washington called Capital Hauntings (www.washingtonwalks.com/dc-hauntings.html) we pause in gloomy Lafayette Square and look towards St John's Episcopal Church. Our guide explains that presidents can walk across the park from the White House and that every leader has attended church there, all sitting in Pew 54. 'But they're not the only ones who've been here,' she whispers. 'On nights when someone important has died, six white-robed curates have appeared, taking their places in Pew 54 and vanishing on the stroke of midnight.' Even the White House seems eerie as we hear how, weeks before his assassination, Abraham Lincoln told a friend about a dream in which people stood by a coffin wailing and saying the president was dead. When he peered into the coffin he saw ... himself.

For another dramatic eye-opener board Boston's Ghosts and Gravestones Black Widow trolley (www.ghostsand gravestones.com), on which a fellow claiming to be a long-dead gravedigger leads visitors through burial grounds where revolutionary figures Paul Revere and Samuel Adams were interred. His most intriguing tale concerns an Irish boy who heard a banshee wailing and found his grandfather dead. Hearing the sound again while serving in the second world war with a young Irish lieutenant named Jack, he laughed ... until news arrived that his father had died at exactly the time of the wailing. Years later, he heard it one last time. Phoning home, he was relieved to hear that his family was safe. Our story-teller pauses. 'But turning on the TV, he was shocked to learn that his old friend Jack [John F. Kennedy] had been assassinated in Dallas at exactly the moment the banshee was heard.'

What wilder place for the paranormal than Canada's easternmost province of Newfoundland, with the city of St John's often blanketed in fog from the North Atlantic? Here, the Reverend Thomas Wyckham Jarvis leads the Haunted Hike (www.hauntedhike.com) through the city, telling tales such as one about the three-storey house at 92 Queen's Road. A grandmother in the house heard babies crying. Nobody believed her, until it was revealed that in 1957 a woman living there had been charged with disposing of two children's corpses, but she was acquitted. 'Now the house is home to the shadowy figure of a woman climbing the stairs ... and the sounds of unseen babies crying out.'