Malaya Booth, right, led a group of about two dozen people downtown as part of the “Echoes From the Past” ghost tour last weekend. Over the course of an hour and-a-half, Booth knit together phantasmic local lore and legend with elements of village history. (Photo by Lauren "Chuck" Shows)
Ghost tour walks with village history
- Published: October 22, 2026
“Let me tell you about my personal ghost philosophy,” tour guide Malaya Booth told the group assembled near Short Street last Friday. The sun was going down, and before the group set off on the planned tour, Booth set the tone: Some ghosts had unfinished business or a traumatic end that bound them here. Others just loved their lives — or the places they lived them — too much to leave.
It’s a philosophy that makes a certain amount of sense in a small town, where an evening’s walk can carry a person past places that hold generations of other people’s memories. The “Echoes From the Past” tour, now in its second year, builds on those memories and on local history. Created by local resident Carrie Staugler, the ghost tour runs Friday and Saturday evenings through Halloween, winding mainly along Xenia Avenue before ending on the bike path near Glen Helen.
Staugler, who led all the tours herself last year, said learning local history was among the first things she did not long after moving here. After leaving corporate work, she found a new undertaking in the village’s old stories.
“Yellow Springs has two centuries of history, and people have been telling stories about it for as long,” she said in an announcement of this year’s tours. “This tour brings those stories together on the streets where they happened.”
Staugler said much of her source material came from Harold Igo, the Antioch College theater professor who collected villagers’ ghost stories for a series published in the News in 1943. The 24 tales were eventually gathered into “Haunted Houses: Spooky Tales of Yellow Springs.” As the News has reported and repeated over the years, Igo recorded what he heard without claiming to establish its truth — thus, some accounts closely followed historical records, and others meandered.
Igo’s stories have company in the recollections still circulating among people who live and work here, and within the ghost tour. Booth led the group down Xenia Avenue, weaving together Igo’s stories with local lore as the group made its way to the doorstep of Dark Star Books, where she works. There, she regaled the tour group with an account of books mysteriously leaving their shelves just days before. Paranormal investigators had visited the store a few years back, she told the group, though they reportedly came up empty-handed.
“But I think the ghosts were just a little shy that day,” she said.
A recent ghost tour stopped along Xenia Avenue to talk about Ye Olde Trail Tavern. (Photo by Lauren “Chuck” Shows)
Each tour participant had been handed a small, battery-free flashlight, powered by a button that engaged an interior crank. The little lights were a practical portent: it would get darker. As the tour progressed, people nervously pressed the buttons over and over, producing a dim chorus of whirs.
Booth made sure to weave some nonghost history in with the stories, too; she told the gathered tour-goers about the ancient biome of the Miami Valley, the Indigenous cultures who lived in the area for thousands of years, the iron-rich water of the Yellow Spring that later brought white colonists like the Owenites and William Mills, the foundation of Antioch College.
Booth comes to “Echoes From the Past” already a seasoned tour guide, having spent seven years as a YS Schools student leading The 365 Project’s “Blacks in Yellow Springs” history tours. She was recruited by John Gudgel for those tours, and eventually helped train other young guides.
“You have to do a lot of learning,” she told the News. “And I did it for so many years.”
That history, too, wended its way alongside the ghosts, with Booth invoking the Conway Colony’s flight from enslavement, the establishment of the Antislavery Baptist Church, the building of the Union Schoolhouse to integrate local schools. Outside Little Art Theatre, tales of mysterious rustling and phantom patrons shared space with the history of the theater’s segregation and those who challenged it — acknowledgments that old buildings can hold more than one kind of ghost.
The tour included tales that were decidedly domestic, too: At Sunrise Cafe, Booth shared stories of loaves of bread launching themselves from a cupboard and the sound of an old cash register ringing where modern equipment had taken its place. New employees, she said, endure a trial period of ghostly interference.
“Local lore says new employees get ‘seasoned’ by the ghost for three months once they start working there,” Booth said. “So it’s not your fault if your mop bucket tips over or your spray bottle moves to the other side of the table — and after three months, the ghost will leave you alone.”
Down the street, with the last faint rays of daylight waning above the horizon, the group stood across the street from Ye Olde Trail Tavern, well-known as both the oldest and most haunted building in Yellow Springs. There, the group heard the tale of a woman waiting for letters from a lover away at war and a postmaster accused of hiding their correspondence so he could marry the woman himself. The woman’s disappointment with her ensuing life supposedly outlasted her death, and some folks report that she can still, on occasion, be spotted in the tavern.
Folks who live in and around Yellow Springs may already know a good number of these histories. But heard again at night, outside windows they routinely pass without a thought, historical tours invite locals to engage with those stories with fresh eyes and ears. And a ghost tour, of course, invites them to make time for the question of who occupied a familiar place in days gone by — and, perhaps, occupies it even now.
Night had fallen entirely by the time the group reached the bike path near the Glen, and the little flashlights were finally put to work. Standing in the dark, surrounded by small pools of light, Booth spoke of lingering whistles in the woods and campus ghosts farther along the trail.
“The past is never far away,” she said, “and it walks with us still.”
For more information on “Echoes From the Past,” go to http://www.yshaunts.com
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