Ghostaholics

Picture it: May 19, 1536. Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII and the woman who turned England's religion upside down to marry him, kneels on a scaffold at the Tower of London and is beheaded on charges most historians now believe were fabricated. Three years earlier she'd walked those same grounds in triumph, dressed for her coronation. That whiplash is basically catnip for a ghost story.

And oh, has she delivered. Anne is widely considered the most frequently sighted ghost in Britain. Guards and visitors describe her gliding silently across Tower Green, sometimes leading a procession of lords and ladies from the green to the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, where her body is actually buried. Sightings have been logged inside the buildings and out on the lawn for centuries.

The most dramatic reported encounter comes from 1864: a sentry on duty spotted a headless white figure approaching, panicked, and lunged at it with his bayonet. The blade passed clean through. He fainted on the spot, and (legend insists) was later cleared of neglecting his post because witnesses backed up his story. Other Yeoman Warders over the years have claimed to see the same silent, headless procession crossing the green at night.

Whether you buy the ghost stories or not, the history alone is chilling enough to visit for.

Can you visit? Yes — the Tower of London is open daily for tours, and Tower Green and the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula are part of the standard visit.

• hrp.org.uk
• hauntedrooms.co.uk

The Queen Mary sailed the Atlantic in glamour through the 1930s, then spent WWII hauling troops as the gray-painted "Grey Ghost." Since 1967 she's been permanently docked in Long Beach as a hotel and museum — and, according to just about everyone who's worked there, she brought some passengers along who never checked out.

The best-known haunting centers on the first-class pool, drained and closed for decades, where visitors report the sound of splashing and children's laughter, plus wet footprints appearing on dry tile. The story attached to it involves a young girl named Jackie said to have drowned there, though the historical record on the drowning itself is thin — it's very much legend-tier at this point, repeated by tour guides more than verified by ship records.

Stateroom B340 has the more consistently reported activity: guests describe bedcovers yanked off in the night, faucets switching on by themselves, and knocking from inside the walls with no plumbing behind them. The room's reputation is strong enough that the hotel reportedly stopped booking it as a regular guest room.

Whatever you believe about spirits, the ship's WWII service alone (troop-carrying, occasional onboard accidents) gives the legends some genuinely grim scaffolding to hang from.

Can you visit? Yes — the Queen Mary operates as a hotel and museum in Long Beach and runs dedicated ghost and paranormal tours.

• ghostcitytours.com
• legendsofamerica.com

The Myrtles Plantation has been marketed for decades as one of the most haunted houses in America, and its headline ghost is Chloe: a servant, so the story goes, who had an affair with the plantation owner, was banished to the fields when he moved on to someone else, and poisoned a birthday cake in revenge — only for the plan to go wrong and kill the wrong people, after which she was hanged by fellow enslaved people in a panic.

It's a gripping story. It also doesn't hold up. There's no record of the Woodruff family owning anyone named Chloe, and the family members the legend says were poisoned actually died of yellow fever, a documented epidemic risk of the era. Historians who've dug into the plantation's actual ownership records trace the Chloe character to Marjorie Munson, who owned the house in the 1950s and appears to have built the legend from a vaguer local story about a 'woman in a green turban.'

None of that has slowed the sightings down. Guests and staff still report a woman in a green head wrap drifting through hallways and standing near windows, and the house leans hard into the legend on its tours — with a wink, since the plantation itself now acknowledges the story is more folklore than fact.

It's a good reminder that the spookiest story isn't always the true one — but the Myrtles' actual history, sitting on land tied to slavery and multiple real deaths, is unsettling enough without embellishment.

Can you visit? Yes — the Myrtles operates as a bed-and-breakfast in St. Francisville and offers mystery and history tours, including evening ghost tours.

• en.wikipedia.org
• myrtlesplantation.com