About the guide
HauntsUSA is a national editorial field guide for people who want more than a list of spooky names. The site focuses on historical haunted places, haunted towns and cities, regional folklore, preservation, and the geography that gives a story its setting. Commercial haunted attractions are intentionally outside this project’s scope.
A legend is rarely detached from its surroundings. Rivers, mountain passes, port cities, industrial corridors, battlefields, hotels, prisons, hospitals, lighthouses, theaters, and old residential districts all produce different kinds of public memory. A strong HauntsUSA guide explains that setting before it asks readers to consider the ghost story.
Town pages therefore include geographic context, settlement and civic history, population references when useful, archives and preservation resources, and links to related places. Property pages combine a documented timeline with attributed folklore, practical access information, official profiles, and a transparent source list.
The directory is structured so editors can update each fact without rebuilding a page. Names, phone numbers, official websites, Google Maps links, Facebook pages, hours, access notes, sources, and verification dates live in reusable data fields. Elementor Pro controls visual layouts; Gravity Forms manages public submissions; the HauntsUSA Core plugin controls content types, geographic taxonomies, publication safeguards, and structured data.
This separation keeps the design cinematic while making the catalogue maintainable. It also helps search engines and answer systems understand that a place, a town, a story, and a source are different entities connected by clear relationships.
Local historians, museum staff, preservation groups, property stewards, residents, researchers, and readers can suggest additions or corrections. Every submission asks for a name, phone number, email address, reason for contacting us, and supporting sources. It enters a private editorial queue; it does not publish or overwrite a page.
HauntsUSA will grow state by state, with depth taking priority over volume. The goal is a useful catalogue of haunted America that respects both evidence and tradition—one that tells readers what can be verified, what people have reported, what communities remember, and where uncertainty remains.