Portsmouth NH Ghost Tours and Halloween Events 2026

Portsmouth is a small city with an unreasonable amount of history stacked into it — a working port since the 1600s, a naval yard across the river, and a downtown where the buildings genuinely predate the country. It should be the best ghost tour town in New Hampshire.

What it actually has, as of the end of July 2026, is one nightly walking tour whose operator won't tell you the price, one excellent family event with its dates already locked in, and one tour company whose website has stopped existing.

What runs

That's not an oversight — that's the market. Here's the detail.

Penance by the Phantom Pier is the nightly guided walk, run by US Ghost Adventures. It meets outside the Langdon House at 143 Pleasant Street, covers a mile in about an hour, and runs every night. The operator says you don't need a printed ticket, just ID. What it doesn't say, anywhere on the page, is what it costs. If you see a price quoted elsewhere for this tour, that price came from a reseller, not the operator.

Deadwick's Spectral Stroll used to be the other name in town, operating out of 19 Sheafe Street. Its website currently returns a domain configuration error rather than a page. We're not listing a tour we can't confirm is running — if you know it's still operating, tell us and we'll check again.

The one with confirmed dates: Ghosts on the Banke

This is the Portsmouth Halloween event worth planning around, and the only one in the city that has published its 2026 dates.

Strawbery Banke Museum, 14 Hancock Street. October 16-17 and October 23-24, 2026. Arrival at 5pm or 6pm; it wraps at 8pm.

The museum designs it for children aged 4 to 8 and calls it "spooky, not scary" outright. Costumes encouraged. If you have small kids and you've been looking at haunted hayrides wondering whether they'll cope, this is the answer — and it's a trick-or-treat route through actual 18th-century houses, which is a better setting than any built attraction in the state.

Four evenings, capped arrival times, in a city that fills up in October. Book it.

What the tours are built on

Portsmouth's ghost stories have better foundations than most, because the town's real history is unusually well documented and unusually grim in places.

The African Burying Ground on Chestnut Street is the genuine article — a colonial-era burial ground for enslaved and free Africans, built over and largely forgotten until construction work in 2003 uncovered coffins. It's now a memorial park. Tours that treat it as a spooky stop rather than a burial ground are getting it wrong; the good guides handle it carefully.

The Isles of Shoals, nine miles out, carry the Smuttynose murders of 1873 — a double axe murder that remains one of New England's most-told true crimes. Not a ghost story, and often better told than the ghost stories.

Portsmouth burned repeatedly. Major fires in 1802, 1806, and 1813 took out much of the downtown, which is why the surviving early buildings matter so much and why so many of the ghost stories involve fire.

Practical notes

Park once. Portsmouth's downtown is compact and the garage on Hanover Street is the sane option; the meeting points on this page are both an easy walk from it.

It's a working harbour in October. Wind off the Piscataqua at 8pm in late October is a different proposition from the walk to dinner at 6. Layers.

If you're combining trips, Portsmouth is an hour from Salem and about the same from Boston. Our Salem ghost tours comparison and Boston ghost tours cover both, and the haunted hotels list includes Three Chimneys Inn in Durham, fifteen minutes inland and built in 1649.

The WickedStrange October Guide

Every haunt, tour, and date worth knowing across New England — verified, not copied from last year. One email before the season, then we leave you alone.

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