To hear Melissa Rowell talk about them, ghosts are a friendly seasoning to Baltimore life, much like Old Bay is to seafood. Since 2001, she and co-owner Amy Lynwander have operated Baltimore Ghost Tours, offering an everything-is-not-what-it-seems look at Baltimore’s waterfront past.
Born in the North Georgia town of Calhoun, Rowell has spent most of her life in Baltimore, most notably in Fells Point, the rowdy ghost-rich section of the harbor in the southeast part of Baltimore. (Lynwander is a native of Ridgewood, New Jersey.)
The pair authored “Baltimore’s Harbor Haunts: True Ghost Stories,” and while they no longer lead the tours they trailblazed, they have a group of seven steady guides (“Two tour guides have been with us over 20 years,” Rowell says.) who lead the tours, many of which welcome children and pets.
For those who think Halloween is a particularly auspicious day for ghost tours, Rowell warns that Baltimore Ghost Tours will be closed that day. Read on to find out why.
Baltimore Style: You’ve been offering ghost tours since 2001. What is it that people like about ghosts, and ghost stories and ghost tours?
A: I think people enjoy hearing history told this way. It brings history to life when you talk about actual people who may have lived in a place and you’re standing in the spot where such and such happened.
Q: Have your tours changed over time? Have people’s interests in ghosts and history changed?
A: We started right after the Sept. 11 attacks. That was just a fluke. There was a huge upsurge and interest in ghosts. And, you know, all those ghost-hunting shows came on television.
I think people are always interested in ghosts and the unknown. Dark history tourism has really taken off in the past 10 years. It’s like its own category. Now, there’s more than just ghost tours. Some cities have murder tours. New Orleans has vampire tours.
Q: How did you and Amy Lynwander come to dedicate yourselves to the ghost community?
A: We got our start in 1997 or ’98. Amy and I had both moved to Fells Point, and we were new in the neighborhood. We met at a homeowners’ association meeting and became friends. We were always wondering what sort of business we could start together.
Amy had been a convention planner, and she used to travel to different cities [to look for convention sites]. And whenever she would go to places like Savannah or New Orleans, she would take a haunted tour, because she felt like it was an interesting way to hear about history.
She said we should do one in Baltimore. And so, for the next three years, Amy and I trekked through Fells Point, going door to door with notebooks. And we were just really collecting oral histories from all these people that lived or worked there. We spent hours, and hours and hours in the Maryland room at the Enoch Pratt library going over maps.
After three years of that, we wrote up what we had as a script and memorized it. Amy and I were the first tour guides, and we did it for about a year before we hired some other guides to help us out, because we were growing.
Q: How did your haunted pub crawls come about? Was it an inevitable matching of spirits and spirits?
A: The reason we started doing pub crawls is because the Fells Point ghost walk stops outside of the buildings. So, the pub crawl is a way of going inside the bar and giving visitors a chance to buy something.
Q: Is Baltimore more haunted than other cities?
I think a lot of port cities are especially haunted. When you think about haunted tours in cities, the famous ones are in New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, you know, all these places by the water. And Baltimore is a port city, too.
In Fells Point, there was this mix of immigrants, and sailors and the people that built the ships. Lots of these people weren’t wealthy. There were brothels, there were boarding houses, you know, there were fights breaking out. And that all mixes together to form ghosts, especially since Fells Point wasn’t destroyed in the great fire in 1904. The buildings in Fells Point are some of the oldest in the city that are still standing.
Q: We’re coming up to the spookiest of day of the year — Halloween. Is that a special day on the ghost tour calendar?
You can’t give tours on Halloween. We never have in Fells Point on Halloween night. It’s so crowded and so crazy. On the weekends leading up to Halloween, yes. On Halloween night itself, no.
Q: The nighttime seems to be the right time for ghosts. Can you do this kind of thing during the day?
We do it at night, but we try to be done by 9 o’clock, before all of the rowdiness starts. Fells Point has always been and [still is] a rowdy waterfront neighborhood with lots of bars and lots of people drinking and having fun and whatnot. And we tried to exit the area before it gets too late at night and too crazy, yeah.
We have people that book group tours all times of day. School groups. They’re not going to bring a bunch of middle school kids to Fells Point at 9 at night. They’re just not. And so, we do a lot of school groups during the day.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
What we’re working on right now is our Mount Vernon tour. It’s going to be starting up in October. That is only available during October, on Friday and Saturday nights.
Q: Do you get a feeling if something’s haunted? Like when you walk past an old building and you go, “Haunted”?
Well, I’ll tell you a story. Right after I moved to Baltimore, my dad came down to visit, and we went to Fells Point and we walked around, listening to different bands. And when he goes home, he calls me and he says, “Hey, would you mind getting me a T-shirt from Cat’s Eye [Pub]?” So, I go down. And it’s about 11 in the morning. And I’m the only one in the bar, except the bartender, and he’s this tall, kind of distinguished-looking fellow, very striking looking. And I said, “Hey, can I buy a T-shirt?” He gets it for me, and I give him the money. He gives me change and I leave.
A couple years later, Amy and I are doing research for the tour, and we go into Cat’s Eye, and we’re talking to the bartenders. And I said, “Where is that tall, thin bartender that works during the day? He’s very distinguished-looking. I want to interview him.” One of the bartenders looks at me and she’s like, “Hon, the person you were describing was named Jeff Knapp, but he died eight years ago.”
So, I have no idea what happened there. It’s not like he in any way looked like a ghost. He took my money, and he gave me change and a T-shirt.
If You Go
Baltimore Ghost Tours (Fells Point)
Mt. Vernon Ghost Tours (October only)
[email protected]
877-293-1571 (tickets) or 410-357-1186 (general info) baltimoreghosttours.com
