Haunted Places in St. Augustine

The two cemeteries every list ranks first are locked twenty-nine days out of thirty. What is actually open after dark, what it costs, and the one building that lets you inside at night.

Both famous cemeteries are locked

The Huguenot Cemetery and the Tolomato Cemetery lead every haunted-St-Augustine list, and both are closed to the public almost all of the time. Each opens on the third Saturday of the month, around 11am to 2pm, with free guided tours; on every other day you look through the railings from the pavement. That is also what the evening ghost tours do - they stop at the fence. It is not a swindle, and the Huguenot through its railings at dusk is genuinely one of the better sights in the town. But nobody selling a ticket is likely to mention that the gate has not been open in three weeks.

The cemetery exists because of an epidemic and a rule

Tolomato, inside the old city gates, was Catholic ground and closed to everyone else. When yellow fever went through St Augustine in 1821, the city discovered it had nowhere at all to bury its Protestants, and the Huguenot was established that year on ground beyond the gates. So the burial place people now queue past for its ghosts was created in an emergency, by a city that had not planned for the dead it suddenly had. Few of the people in it were Huguenots. The name stuck anyway.

The lighthouse, and the girl nobody named

On 10 July 1873, while the lighthouse was being built, four girls rode a handcart down the tramway that carried construction material to the site. The brake failed at the end of the track and the cart went into the water upside down. Mary Pittee, fifteen, and her sister Eliza, thirteen, drowned, along with a Black girl of about ten whose father is thought to have worked on the site and whose name was never recorded. Four-year-old Carrie Pittee was pulled out alive. The lighthouse tells this story straight, including the part about the missing name, which is more than most places manage.

The fort shuts at dusk. The lighthouse does not.

Castillo de San Marcos is a national monument and closes in the late afternoon, so no ghost tour goes inside the fort after dark - anything advertising the Castillo at night means the grounds and the seawall outside its walls. The lighthouse is this town's exception: it runs its own after-hours tower climbs into the evening. If being inside a building in the dark is the point for you, that is the one that actually does it. Check current hours before booking either; both move with the season.

Free, paid, and what a tour is for

The old town is free to walk and it is the best thing here at night - narrow streets, coquina walls, almost no traffic. The cemeteries cost nothing on the one Saturday they open. The fort and the lighthouse charge. So an evening tour in St Augustine is buying you stories and pace rather than doors: the doors are shut, and the guides worth paying say so before you pay.

That sits in the typical band for the category, whose median is $30.

St. Augustine ghost tours

4 of the 4 St. Augustine tours we track . Ordered by review depth.

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Questions people actually ask

Why is St. Augustine known for ghosts?
Because it has had longer than anywhere else in the country to accumulate the dead. Founded in 1565, it is the oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement in the continental United States, and four and a half centuries of epidemics, sieges and burials are compressed into a few walkable blocks. Add a yellow fever epidemic in 1821, a fort that changed hands repeatedly, and a mature tour industry, and the stories have had every chance to settle.
Are there any haunted houses in St. Augustine?
It depends which kind you mean. Seasonal haunted-house attractions with actors and sets are a separate business from the historic sites. Among real buildings, the St Augustine Lighthouse and its keepers' house carry the town's best-documented story - the drowning of three girls on the construction tramway in July 1873 - and the lighthouse is unusual in offering after-hours access. Most of the rest of the town's ghost material attaches to streets, inns and cemeteries rather than to houses you can enter.
What are some creepy things to see and do in St. Augustine?
The Huguenot Cemetery through its railings at dusk; a night climb up the lighthouse tower, which is bookable and genuinely unsettling at the top; the old town's back lanes after the day-trippers leave; and the seawall beside the Castillo once the fort has closed. Three of those four are free. The one that costs money is the only one that puts you inside a building after dark.
Is it safe to walk around St. Augustine at night?
The historic district - the few blocks around St George Street, the old city gates and the seawall - is small, well lit and busy with tour groups most evenings, which is exactly why the walking tours run there. Ordinary care applies, as in any tourist town. If you are asking because you are weighing a self-guided walk against a booked tour, the honest answer is that the streets themselves are not the reason to book.
Can you go inside the Huguenot Cemetery?
Only on the third Saturday of the month, roughly 11am to 2pm, when it opens for free guided tours. The Tolomato Cemetery keeps the same limited schedule. Every other day and every night of the year, including on every ghost tour that stops there, you are looking through the fence. Worth planning around if getting inside matters to you - it is the single most common disappointment here.