Bar Harbor Ghost Tours: The Indigenous-Owned One and the Other One

Bar Harbor in summer is a town of about five thousand people hosting several million visitors a year, most of them on their way to or from Acadia. By eight in the evening the day-trippers have gone and the streets are quiet, which is when both of its ghost tours start.

There are two. They are not equivalent, and the difference is worth understanding before you book.

The two tours

The Original Bar Harbor Ghost Tour

$25 adult, $18 youth. Nightly at 8:00pm. Capped at 28 guests. VIP at $45 adult and $28 youth adds around thirty minutes of storytelling.

Written by the authors of Haunted Bar Harbor, which means the material is researched rather than assembled, and it walks half a mile to a mile over sixty to ninety minutes at a deliberately easy pace.

The thing that distinguishes it: this is the only Indigenous-owned tour company in Maine, and the tour includes Wabanaki spirit stories alongside the local hauntings, described by the operator as verified and authentic.

That matters more than it might sound. This industry retells Native stories constantly, almost always through non-Native operators, usually without saying where the story came from or who it belongs to. We ran into exactly that problem writing about Pukwudgies, where a living Wampanoag tradition gets flattened into a cryptid for tour scripts. A tour told by the people whose tradition it is has a provenance that a repackaged version simply doesn't.

Bar Harbor Ghost Walk

$30 plus tax, ninety minutes, nightly at 6:30pm and 8:30pm. Recommended for ages 10 and up.

American Ghost Walks operates across several Maine towns, and its Bar Harbor route covers the haunted history of the village. The practical advantage is two departures a night — in July and August, when Bar Harbor is genuinely full, a single 8pm slot can be gone.

Which to take

Take the Original if you want the deeper material and the Wabanaki stories, or if you're travelling with children — the $18 youth rate is the clearest signal on this page that younger guests are expected.

Take the Ghost Walk if 8pm doesn't work or the Original is sold out. The 6:30pm departure is also the better option in late season, when it's fully dark by eight and considerably colder.

What Bar Harbor's stories are actually built on

Bar Harbor's history is stranger than the Gilded Age postcard version suggests.

The town was a summer colony for some of the wealthiest families in America, whose enormous cottages lined the shore. In 1947 a fire burned across Mount Desert Island for weeks, taking dozens of those estates and a huge area of what is now Acadia. Much of the architecture the ghost stories attach to no longer exists, which is its own kind of haunting — the tours walk you past absences.

Beneath that is a far older layer. Mount Desert Island is Wabanaki homeland, occupied for thousands of years before any summer cottage, and the island's Wabanaki name predates every English one on the map.

Practical notes

It gets cold on the water. Even in August, 8pm on the Frenchman Bay shore is a different temperature from 4pm on Main Street. Layers.

Book ahead in July and August. A 28-guest cap fills.

Combine it with the fort. If you're touring Maine's haunted side, Fort Knox in Prospect is about two hours down the coast and has four confirmed 2026 events, including an overnight ghost camp in September.

For a haunted overnight, the Kennebunk Inn is on our stays list — considerably further south, and like nearly every property on that list, silent about its own ghost.

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