Some Tucson ghost stories begin with a reported sighting. Others start with something much smaller: a sound, an object out of place or a light turning on when nobody’s there.
At Hotel Congress and Old Tucson, some guests are said to have never left. Whether you believe in ghosts or just enjoy a good ghost story, there’s plenty to be curious about.
We explored the stories connected to both places, talking with the people who tell them and learning what visitors might experience themselves.
Tour guide Ken Abbiss, left, talks about some of the tales of the Iron Door Mine with Melina and Bryan Lewis on the Ghost Tour out at Old Tucson Studios, Tucson, Ariz., October 14, 2026.
Old Tucson’s after-dark residents
At Old Tucson, a ghost story starts with a running faucet.
Historian and ghost tour guide Ken Abbiss was talking with a tour group a few weeks ago when he heard something behind him. He turned around to find the bar sink running, he said. Nobody was standing at the motion-activated faucet.
He’d heard about the sink turning on by itself from others. This time, he said, he was there to experience it.
“I haven’t personally seen any spirits,” Abbiss said. "But the faucet turning on and off was quite a thrill for me.”
For Abbiss, who leads visitors through Old Tucson after dark, the possibility of an unexplained encounter is part of the appeal.
His path to the job started with a much simpler goal: retirement and a chance to play cowboy.
“I went there and I said, ‘I’m here. Pay me or not. I just want to play cowboy,” he said.
After working in different departments, he began helping with history tours, eventually taking on a larger role and learning to lead ghost tours, too.
Along the way, he collected stories from coworkers about experiences they couldn’t explain.
Among the spirits said to inhabit Old Tucson are a young boy called Jimmy and a woman in white called Sylvia, Abbiss said. He learned those names from accounts of past paranormal investigations at the property, though he doesn’t know when those investigations took place.
One of his own stories involves the children’s play area, where attendants are always sure to put toys away at the end of the day.
After one of his early ghost tours, Abbiss returned to turn off the lights and lock up. He found a stick pony and a hat sitting on a bench, he said. He took the discovery as a sign that the boy had been playing.
Other stories offer Abbiss a little reassurance when he’s walking the grounds after guests leave.
Guide Ken Abbiss describes some of the sightings in the McLintock Mercantile on the Ghost Tour out at Old Tucson Studios, Tucson, Ariz., October 14, 2026.
When he first started leading tours, he was nervous about returning alone to lock the buildings, mostly because of the wildlife he might encounter in the desert.
One night, after a visitor asked whether he was scared to do that alone, his electromagnetic field reader activated in an area where a former security guard, who has since died, liked to spend time, Abbiss said.
He took it as a sign that the guard was still looking out for him.
“I thank him for having my six,” he said. “He lets me know that he’s there, and I’m safe.”
Visitors can hear these stories and more during the roughly 90-minute walking tours that take them inside several buildings.
They have electromagnetic field readers available, and Abbiss also uses light-up devices and a phone app in attempts to communicate with spirits.
Some nights, he said, the devices respond. Other nights, nothing happens.
For Abbiss, that uncertainty is part of the experience.
“Being a historian, I don’t want to fake anything, and we don’t fake anything,” he said.
Old Tucson’s ghost tours are offered year-round, with start times varying by season. During Nightfall, tours take place Wednesdays at 6 and 8 p.m. Each tour lasts about 90 minutes.
Hotel Congress, 311 E. Congress St.
Hotel Congress' paranormal guests
In its almost 108 year history Hotel Congress, 311 E. Congress St., has played host to cowboys, passengers from the nearby Southern Pacific Line, and even notorious mobsters.
It’s no surprise then, that Hotel Congress is believed to be home to a number of resident spirits.
“We see the liminal energy of all that hustle and bustle, and the in-between status of everything around it as being foundational to the energy,” said Melissa Williams, hotel administrator and hotel tour facilitator. “We think that that energy either attracts or keeps spirits around.”
Some of the most notable inhabitants include a cowboy who chats with customers over a drink at the bar, a Victorian gentleman who is often seen in the second-story window of room 214, the spirit of a woman who took her own life inside of the hotel in the 1990s, and a lady in lace who haunts the staircase.
Melissa Williams, far left, leads a Haunted Hotel Tour at Hotel Congress.
One of Williams’ favorite ghostly residents however, is Vince, the Hotel’s retired handyman.
“He was a World War II veteran that moved from the East Coast to Tucson by rail, and he lived in room 220 for 36 years,” she said. “He was pretty mischievous. He would put on a little bit of a grumpy face, but he was very silly, and he played pranks with the employees. After he passed in 2001 in the room, people started having experiences, particularly with butter knives. In life he was taking butter knives from the restaurant because he was there every morning and was having a bagel and cream cheese, and that was part of his prank playing. So people started finding butter knives moved around by him.”
Williams said the room has a really playful energy, and that guests still often see Vince around the property.
Vince’s story is just one of several that Williams shares on the weekly Haunted Hotel Tours, which run Fridays and Saturdays all year long. The tour covers the history of the hotel and highlights 4 of the most haunted rooms in the building- 212, 214, 220 and 242. Each tour visits one or more of the rooms as well as the seance room on the third floor.
“We do start the tour somewhere on the ground floor, typically with the foundational history of Congress, and there's some really interesting stuff about the land that Congress sits on because Tucson has been inhabited continuously for almost more than 4000 years. It's one of the longest places in North America,” Williams said. “We do also go into the seance room, which is something that's only done on the tours. It's the only room that survived the fire of 1934.”
In room 212, Williams says a locksmith’s apprentice is hard at work.
“People hear locks being played with, and metal workshop equipment being used in the room,” she said. “Then there is 242, which is one of our most famous, there was a woman who completed suicide in that room in the 1990s.”
Williams said that despite the room’s troubled past, some guests and visitors report feeling a sense of comfort in the room.
"Haunted" Room 242 at Hotel Congress.
One of the other common experiences guests have, Williams said, is encountering the woman who guards the staircase, or smelling roses while ascending or descending the stairs.
“The folklore with her goes that if you smell roses and don't freak out, that you're allowed to keep having more ghost experiences on property,” she said. “But if you do freak out, then she is a gateway guardian, and she closes the door.”
And it’s not just the living quarters that have ghostly apparitions.
“There were pretty extensive tunnels in downtown,” Williams said. “We do say that there is a ghost that's in the tunnels, a cowboy ghost. There's evidence that there was like a card game, a regular card game that was happening, and there was a fight that broke out, and someone passed away in the tunnels.”
To this day visitors to the hotel can still see the glass panels on the patio that were installed to let light into the tunnels.
Having worked at Hotel Congress for two years now, Williams said she has some paranormal stories of her own.
“Employees definitely have auditory experiences and smell experiences a lot,” she said. “I had one really stark experience when I had been there for about a year.
Williams said she was behind one of the bar areas grabbing water bottles for the front desk fridge on a relatively quiet afternoon when she heard something she just couldn’t quite explain.
“I was in an area where there is access to the club, but there's curtains there, and the curtains are closed. But all of the sudden, on the other side of the curtains, I hear people clinking champagne glasses and laughing, and it sounded sort of fancy, like a normal party,” she said. “I stood there and was like, ‘whoa, okay,’ Then I moved the curtains, and of course, the lights were on in the club, and absolutely no one was there.”
Foo more information on Hotel Congress, it's history, or the haunted hotel tours you can visit their website at hotelcongress.com.
