“If you want to understand a place,” Colin Dickey writes in Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, “Ignore the boastful monuments and landmarks, and go straight to the haunted houses.”
The Washington region has its share of spooky spots, from Decatur House and St. John’s Church to the Oak Hill Cemetery and Exorcist Steps.
This Halloween, we explore our area’s haunted history with a few experts on local lore, a Baltimore podcaster talks the “noir and the bizarre,” and Ghostland’s author unravels why we seek out spooky stories in the first place.