Ghost Tours, Modern Medicine, and the Comfort of Being Haunted Together

Ghost tours are a funny thing.

Everyone pretends they’re there ironically. For the history. For the vibes. For the camp. We insist we’re not scared even as we cluster closer together, listening a little too carefully, glancing over our shoulders when the guide’s voice drops.

I went on mine at night, when St. Augustine feels like it’s holding its breath. Cobblestones slick with age and humidity. Streetlamps casting that specific kind of light that turns every shadow into a possibility. Gravestones tucked behind iron fences, names half-erased by time and weather and indifference.

The tour leaned into the theatrics. Of course it did. Dramatic pauses. Stories polished smooth by repetition. Just enough unease to raise the hairs on your arms, never enough to truly unsettle.

Safe fear.

That’s the appeal, really. Fear with guardrails. Fear with an exit ramp and a gift shop nearby. We like our hauntings communal and contained, shared with strangers who laugh at the same moments we do.

And yet.

Every so often, something slips past the performance.

Inside a supposedly haunted pharmacy, I stopped short in front of a display I hadn’t expected. On one side, old Victorian medicines. Bottles promising cures they could never deliver. Tonics, powders, elixirs labeled with confidence and ignorance in equal measure.

Right next to them, modern medications. Bright packaging. Clean fonts. Familiar names. Still promising relief. Still fallible. Still doing their best with the knowledge of the moment.

It wasn’t meant to be commentary. But it was.

Two eras of medicine side by side, both convinced they had figured it out. Both haunted, in their own way, by what they didn’t yet know.

That’s when the camp fell away for me.

Because the truth is, ghosts aren’t always about rattling chains or unfinished business. Sometimes they’re about proximity. About standing next to the past and realizing how thin the wall really is between then and now. How much we repeat ourselves with better lighting and improved branding.

When the tour ended, I scrolled through my photos. Cobblestones. Shadows. A blur or two that looked interesting at first glance and mundane upon closer inspection.

Nothing unexplained.

I felt a flicker of disappointment. Not because I believe I caught something, but because part of me had hoped I might. That there would be proof of something lingering. A smudge of mystery I could point to and say, see?

It was a very Cressida thought.

But maybe that’s the point of ghost tours. Not to convince us the dead are walking, but to remind us that we like wondering together. That we find comfort in shared unease. That fear feels safer when someone else is standing beside you, squinting into the dark too.

We don’t go looking for ghosts because we want to be afraid.

We go because we want permission to feel something in the dark, together, and then walk back into the light laughing about it.

And sometimes, that’s haunting enough.