Piedmont Pit Stops: Halloween Haunts in Winston-Salem's West End

In Celtic tradition, Halloween is the one night a year when spirits of the dead can return to Earth. But tour guides from Carolina Haunts and History believe some spirits roam the city of Winston-Salem all year long.

For this spooky edition of Piedmont Pit Stops, WFDD’s April Laissle tagged along on a ghost tour of the city’s historic West End. 

The ghost on the hill

Just as the sun sets on a crisp autumn evening, we find the tour group waiting near the stately Rosenbacher House. Our guide, Kim Gleiser, is wearing a long black dress and carrying a candle-lit lantern. She starts with a question. 

"Do I have any believers of ghosts with me tonight?" she says. 

A few hands go up. 

“All right, well, so my job isn't to make anyone a believer," she says. "It's to present things in a way that makes you think, and then it's up to you whether that changes your mind or not."

With that, we set off. Leaves crunch beneath our feet as we follow her down the winding sidewalks of the West End. Eventually, we stop at a park called Grace Court.

“So right across the street, here at the top of the stairs, there is a woman who is seen in a long blue dress in a white apron," she says. "Now she starts here at the top of the hill, makes her way down to the old YWCA building, and then makes her way back up, just roaming in this area. This next story that I have to share with you is just one of the explanations as to why she could still be here with us.”

Gleiser explains that we are near the site of the famed Hotel Zinzendorf, a four-story Victorian-style resort with 10 elaborate turrets. 

“This hotel opened May 1892 and burned down Thanksgiving Day 1892, taking with it the dream that Winston would turn into a resort town," she says.

The fire began in the laundry room.

“And then spread to each individual floor, where maids wearing their uniform of a long blue dress and a white apron were working.”

She tells us the maid is not the only paranormal activity reported here. 

“Such a significant and traumatic event as this can leave a scar on the land, and these are known as residual hauntings," she says. "Residual hauntings allow folks to experience a lot of very similar things, so like the smell of smoke, as if the fire is still burning, that feeling of the temperature change if you get nearby, and of course, seeing a woman in a long blue dress.” 

Bringing legends to life

The story is a mix of fact and legend. And Dan Riedel, the co-founder of Carolina History and Haunts, says that’s exactly what he intended when he designed these tours. He got the idea after going on a ghost tour during a trip to Lexington, Virginia. 

“The leaves were crunching on the ground, black cat in the cemetery and all that stuff," he says. "And the guy comes walking out with the lantern, top hat, and long coat and starts not just telling us ghost stories, but combining the history behind it to where you can learn an appreciation of the city. And I absolutely fell in love with it.”

He and his wife, who is a history teacher, immediately started thinking about how they could recreate the experience back home in Greensboro. They began by interviewing residents and business owners downtown. 

“It's a weird thing to ask someone if they have any ghost stories, but people were very receptive to it, and started sharing their experiences with us," he says. "And what we do is we work backwards, so we learn people's experiences, but we're not just telling a ghost story on a tour, because anyone could do that. We want to find out the history, dig into it, and figure out how it makes sense”

After collecting local legends, they worked with libraries and local historians to flesh them out. Their first tour launched in Greensboro in 2008. Fall is their busiest season, but they operate year-round. Most of their customers are visitors from other cities, but many are local, and often bring family along. 

“Because they want them to hear the history of the area, because people are proud of it," he says. "They're proud of what Winston has been through, even though some of it may be troubled.”

As the tour wraps up, we return to the Rosenbacher House, where Gleiser points out one way people of the past tried to ward off some of those troubling hauntings described through the night.

“The white is most likely the original color of the home, but that light blue color on the porch ceilings and the trimmings, that is the color known as haint blue. It is based off of belief that spirits cannot cross water.”

Despite that color choice, Gleiser says the home is still considered to be haunted. But that doesn’t stop our fellow tourists, both believers and non-believers, from going inside to see for themselves.