The Signal: Connecticut Turns Its Witch Trial History Into a Statewide Ghost Trail
September 22, 2026 · Pharos Paranormal Society
No new gear this week — we went looking, and everything currently listed as “new” on the usual equipment sites turned out to be a year or two old once we checked the actual release dates, so we’re not going to dress up old stock as breaking news. Instead, three stories about the places themselves: a state government making an official case for its own ghost stories, a small Canadian group running a hands-on investigation as a museum fundraiser, and a historical society bringing back a ghost tour it shelved nearly a decade ago. Every claim below is sourced — links at the bottom so you can read the original reporting yourself.
Connecticut Just Made Its Ghost Stories an Official Tourism Product
On September 16, Connecticut officially unveiled a new statewide “haunted history” tourism trail — more than 130 locations tied to paranormal lore, unexplained history, and the state’s own witch trials — launched at the Webb Deane Stevens Museum in Wethersfield, a town with its own documented witch-trial history. Governor Ned Lamont was there for it, framing the trail as “a different side of Connecticut” and pointing out that the state’s witch trials predate Salem’s by nearly half a century: Alse Young of Windsor was executed in 1647, and Connecticut lawmakers formally proclaimed the innocence of those convicted of witchcraft back in 2023. State tourism director Rachel Lenda was blunter about the motive: “The ghosts may or may not show up, but the economic impact does.” Tourism generated $20.1 billion for Connecticut in 2025, and the trail follows the same format the state already uses for its oyster, beer, pizza, and Christmas-movie-filming-location trails.
We’re used to writing about haunted places fighting to be taken seriously, or fighting each other in court over who owns the reputation. This is the opposite: a state government putting its name on 130 ghost stories at once and calling it economic development. Worth watching whether other states follow, and worth a look yourselves if you’re ever route-planning through New England.
A Vancouver-Area Group Investigates for a Good Cause
Cornerstone Supernatural, a Vancouver-based paranormal investigation group, is running a two-night benefit investigation at Haney House in Maple Ridge, BC, on October 2 and 3 — guided 75-minute sessions departing every 20 minutes between 6 and 8 p.m., with participants learning investigation techniques and using the team’s equipment alongside the house’s own history. It’s the Maple Ridge Museum’s biggest annual fundraiser, supporting upkeep of the house itself. The honest version of the history: two people are documented to have died at Haney House over the years, but the museum doesn’t formally claim it’s haunted. Executive director Gordana Dimovska put it about as carefully as we would: “It’s an old house… a lot of people feel like they can sense an energy there.”
We like seeing a museum let an outside investigation team in as the actual draw, rather than just decorating a historic house for Halloween and calling it a ghost tour. It’s a small, specific, well-documented event, which is exactly the kind of “other groups doing the work” story we’d rather run than another TV-adjacent name.
Lethbridge Brings Its Ghost Tours Back After Nine Years
The Lethbridge Historical Society, working with the Galt Museum and historian Belinda Crowson, has revived a “Deathbridge” series of flashlight cemetery tours and ghost tours in Lethbridge, Alberta — a program Crowson used to run annually during her time at the museum but hadn’t touched in nine years. Flashlight tours of St. Patrick’s cemetery started September 17, capped at 20 people per tour with tickets required; the ghost tours proper start October 9. Crowson’s own summary of the gap: “I haven’t really done it for nine years, and no one has really done it for quite a few years.”
Nothing dramatic here, just a reminder that a lot of what keeps local ghost lore alive is unglamorous institutional memory — one historian deciding a program is worth restarting. We’ll take a quiet revival over a manufactured controversy any week.
Got a location, a case, or a strange find of your own? Send it our way — we go where the evidence points.