It’s the scariest ghost tour in Raleigh — because all of its spooky stories are true
In 1939, with the Great Depression still raging, R.P. Jones walked into Raleigh’s busiest store with $5 in his pocket — quite likely the last of his money.
He’d lucked into a job driving a laundry truck, which he crashed.
Then he’d further lucked into a forgiving boss who gave him a second truck, which he also wrecked.
So with his fortune expired, he asked the clerk at Briggs Hardware to see a rifle. Not the expensive $22 model. The $4 rifle with the high-powered cartridges.
Then as the cashier took his money, Jones knelt on the floor, pressed the gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger — ending his ordeal on a crowded sales floor, never hearing the clerk’s gruesome punchline:
“He didn’t even wait for his change.”
Dark Raleigh walking tours
This story of desperation, madness and public bloodshed kicks off this year’s Dark Raleigh walking tours coming Thursday and Friday — a collection of scary stories all the more terrifying because they actually happened.
In a city with a century-old habit of sweeping away its history, building parking decks and Subway franchises on the street where it used to hold public hangings, these real-life ghosts scream from the past louder than any dusty phantom peeking out a window somewhere.
On this tour, the City of Raleigh Museum starts off with the bloodstains in its own building — which was once the haunted hardware store where Jones gave in to his demons.
“Everybody does ghost stories,” said Ernest Dollar, museum director. “We are purveyors of facts. Raleigh is not the pristine college and government town that we are told about. It does have its dark corners, and we celebrate them every year.”
Walking Civil War skeletons
Dark Raleigh started in 2016 with Dollar and museum staff leading crowds through the city’s recesses, offering a rubberneck view at its tortured spirits. But the idea grew as more crowds kept coming, and now the voices of Raleigh’s doomed get delivered by live actors.
Instead of ghost dogs or spooks rattling chains, Dollar offers the story of the walking skeletons of Union soldiers marching back from Andersonville Prison after months of starvation, dysentery and typhoid fever.
As one of them passes through downtown Raleigh, he spies a stray dog on the street, grabs it and eats it raw while crowds look on.
“Andersonville, right?” said Dollar, recalling a Dark Raleigh nugget from the past.
The tour includes no midnight meetings with demons, no witches tossing newts in a cauldron, and, thank the stars, no Crybaby Lane — a sham Raleigh ghost story riddled with factual errors.
Raleigh’s notorious former madam
But it does include the story of Bertha Brown, Raleigh’s notorious madam of the 1920s and ‘30s whom Dollar describes as “a woman of many means.”
“Ever been to Transfer Food Hall?” asked Dollar. “If you are eating there, you are eating in what was Raleigh’s Red Light District.”
And it does tell the story of William Avera, the Raleigh carpet-layer who in 1916 spent three months tracking down his kidnapped baby boy.
“The actor who plays him absolutely tears your heart out and stomps on it,” said Dollar.
He makes clear that the museum doesn’t make light of these poor spirits. They are not portrayed in a joking way.
Rather, these tours aim to dig out the terrible dramas Raleigh has hidden in the night, hoping nobody would notice or remember, then dust off the victims and let their anguished voices make for a true Halloween.
If you want to go
Dark Raleigh walking tours run at multiple times on Thursday, Oct. 26, and Friday, Oct. 27. Tickets cost $25 and can be purchased by following the links at www.cityofraleighmuseum.org.
This story was originally published October 23, 2023 at 6:00 AM with the headline "It’s the scariest ghost tour in Raleigh — because all of its spooky stories are true."