Do you dare? Haunted Carnegie walking tours spook, delight attendees
Carnegie by day is a quaint, historic town filled with chic shops and beloved eateries.
But at night, legend has it, the spirits come out to play.
“Carnegie is super special, since it has so much packed into a one-mile radius,” said Melanie Luke, a self-proclaimed ghost enthusiast who in 2017 founded Haunted Walking Tours of Carnegie.
“I will go toe-to-toe any day with the Gettysburg haunted tours. Carnegie has a funeral home, a haunted library, a cemetery. It has an abandoned building. It’s tough to find another neighborhood where there’s so much history that’s packed, and so much spooky stuff that’s packed, into a one-mile loop.”
The one-mile walking tour begins at 8 p.m. every Friday and Saturday through Oct. 29 at Corba Funeral Home along Main Street, where docents share stories of lunatic asylums and embalmings.
From there, folks armed with ghost nets journey through the borough, stopping at 10 local haunts to hear spine-tingling tales of fires, deaths and restless spirits. The tour ends at a small cemetery, where attendees search gravestones dating to the 1700s for a secret symbol before receiving a certificate of completion.
There are no jump scares; it’s simply dark history shared with the bravest souls.
“We just want people to hear it and then feel it. All the stories are true. All the stories are documented in history,” Luke said, wide-eyed, over a latte inside Carnegie Coffee Company on a recent weekday. “They’re real people. The stories are definitely relatable because they are just average people getting caught up sometimes in accidents, and sometimes in tragedy.”
The climax of the tour is a trip through the Husler Building, home to the Carnegie Historical Society, where a docent leads attendees up an old staircase to the vacant third and fourth floors.
“The Husler Building is a magical place,” smiled Luke.
The fourth floor served as a Prohibition-era speakeasy, and rumors of secret societies swirl about the third floor. Both have remained empty since the 1930s.
“We don’t know why exactly it was abandoned and why it was never reoccupied. It hasn’t been touched since. It’s in a state of beautiful decay,” Luke, clad in a jean jacket artfully decorated in Halloween-season patches, said.
Luke has always been fascinated by the paranormal – she’s toured Dracula’s Castle in Romania, and has a supernatural trip to New Orleans booked for later this year – but it wasn’t until she learned her building, which Luke has since sold, was home to a ghost that the energetic blonde dove into haunted Carnegie research.
“People don’t care about stuff until it happens to them,” Luke said, weaving a tale of mysterious footsteps creeping about the inaccessible second story of Flying Squirrel, which is now Scoops. “Carnegie is really lucky to have a historical society. Some neighborhoods don’t. This is where you get the elders that know the oral history. I said, I would like to do some research on some of the buildings on Main Street. (The historical society) is a wealth of information. It’s full of goods. This is how it all started.”
With the help of the historical society and some deep digging of her own, Luke unearthed eerie tales and wrote the haunted tour. She partnered with local building owners to bring tour guests into their spaces, where spooky stories come to life.
Luke encourages locals and out-of-towners alike to sign up for a 90-minute haunted tour. Walking tours make the best history lessons and they don’t feel like a lecture, she said.
Tours are suitable for ages 12 and up. Photography is encouraged.
“If you catch something,” Luke said, “we’d love to see it.”
Luke, whose enthusiasm for ghosts is catching, loves to see crowds roaming the streets on weekend nights, marveling at tales of those long dead and buried.
“Any time you get to go into abandoned places, do it,” Luke said, eyes sparkling. “Be a tourist in your own neighborhood. Be a tourist in your own city. Do it. It’s worth it. It’s so cool.”
For Haunted Walking Tours of Carnegie updates, follow https://www.instagram.com/flyingsquirreltoys/ on Instagram.
To purchase tickets, visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/haunted-walking-tours-of-carnegie-tickets-411400920227.