Tours currently on hiatus

Boroughs of the Dead will be on hiatus through Summer 2025. We’ll return with a brand-new book and some new-and-improved tours!

We’re spending this time putting the finishing touches on America’s Most Gothic, which will release just in time for Spooky Season 2025, and is available for pre-order now! (See below for more about the book.)

In the meantime, you can still support our work: check out our online bookstore for copies of books by our guides, including A Haunted History of Invisible Women, and some of our NYC and spooky history favorites.

And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter to receive updates, early ticket sales, discounts, and other promotions. (Just click the “Join Our Newsletter” button on this website.)

Thank you for your patience, and stay spooky until we meet again,

Andrea Janes

Owner and Founder, Boroughs of the Dead

More About America’s Most Gothic

The Gothic. Brooding, atmospheric, chilling, and not always the outpouring of a feverish imagination. Reality can be even stranger as borne out in this lush and ghostly look at real people who lived–and died—amidst the trappings of the Gothic.

Fog clinging to an isolated mansion. A dangerous patriarch or an overbearing matron. Locked doors and forbidden rooms. Whispers of murder and madness. And a woman shadowed by omnipresent threats. You’ve guessed it. You’ve stumbled into a Gothic tale, and it will haunt you like a ghost.

We often think of the enduring tropes of the Gothic in terms of fiction and film—breath-catching escapes that tap into our fears, anxieties, forbidden desires, and unsettling dreams. But what if some of these chilly vibes are rooted in the experiences of real and tragic people who danced a macabre waltz with love and death? That’s why we’re here. Take the case of teenage Mercy Brown, victim—or was it predator?—of Rhode Island’s vampire hysteria of the 1890s. Marguerite de la Roque, a French noblewoman condemned for “sexual crimes” to Canada’s long-lost Isle of Demons. What happened to her and the barren landscape itself is the stuff of legend. And “Mad Lucy” Ludwell, the decidedly peculiar eighteenth-century high-society hauteur driven mad in the Virginia estate she prowls to this day. President Helen Peabody’s spirit still stringently watches over her Women’s College, now part of Ohio’s Miami University. Ghosts of workers lost in horrific conditions while building the Hoosac Tunnel warn of imminent danger. Settle in. There are more.

Welcome to the phantom ships, haunted academic halls, menacing landscapes, and family curses of America’s Most Gothic—a tour of true spectral sightings and disordered minds. But beware: it’s sure to get under your skin. The haunted—and haunting—figures herein want it that way.