The Atlas Obscura Guide to Halloween Travel

There is a version of Halloween tourism that involves a man in a rubber mask jumping out from behind a plywood wall. It has its pleasures. It is not this. The places below are real. The things that happened in them are documented — in court records, in coroners' reports, in parish registers, in the diaries of people who were there. Some have ghost stories attached. The ghost stories are almost always less frightening than what actually took place, which is the point. This is not an itinerary. These places are scattered across three continents and you are not meant to visit them all. Pick the kind of dread you are in the mood for, and go. One exception, and it is worth leading with, because this year there is somewhere you can only go now. Salem and Monroe: the one with a deadline For most of fifty years, the artifacts Ed and Lorraine Warren collected sat in the basement of their house in Monroe, Connecticut. Objects from the Amityville case. The mirror. The dolls. Things they believed were actively dangerous and locked away accordingly. The Warrens' Occult Museum closed to the public in 2019, the year Lorraine died, over a zoning dispute — and for six years the most famous collect…