I’d reached out to the company first and they refused to address the quality of the tour and offered us rain checks even though we won’t be able to use them. If I could give no stars I would.
I struggled on whether to write this review but finally felt like I had to talk about our ghost tour experience. I had high hopes based on reviews, description of the tour, and, quite frankly, the price of the tickets.
I purchased six tickets for a ghost tour on Saturday night at 10 PM. I picked this tour based on the 350+ five star reviews. Our friends were visiting from out of town and we had been so excited to learn about the dark past of Charleston. We ended up with Ray as our tour guide. From the very beginning it was VERY hard to hear her even when gathered closely around her. We tried our best to gather closer but that was only the beginning of a tour that was steadily going downhill.
This tour was very uncomfortable. The history and stories that Ray proceeded to tell us were hard to follow, historically inaccurate, and painfully long. All of us had background on the stories she was telling based on historical tours we had taken before. Story details were told out of order, omitted, and she kept saying "you know what I mean" when she couldn't find the words she was looking for. In fact, we didn't know what she meant. The stories had no sequential order with their events and were SO confusing. Twenty minutes into our tour people started to leave, leaving our group and another couple. Many stories she told were butchered and didn't even end in a relationship to how they related to ghosts or hauntings. At times it felt like we were just wandering aimlessly until she found something to tell us about. Many of her stories were anecdotes that she offered from her own encounters of "paranormal activity". For instance, she tried for 15 minutes to convince us that her purse strap breaking was a ghost ripping it from her body...though the purse strap was also weighed down with key chains and a heavy metal water bottle. It was upsetting.
Ray often would pull out her phone and show us photos that she took trying to convince us that pixelations in the photos were ghosts. It was very uncomfortable. Our group was not expecting to see paranormal activity, but instead learn about some of the seedier stories that makes Charleston unique. Instead we followed Ray as she kept trying to painfully convince us that the paranormal happened to her and her colleagues all the time.
To try and savor any of the tour, some of the remaining group members would attempt to listen to other tour guides to glean some information on the historical context of the locations we were visiting. It was readily apparent that our tour was lacking.
We wanted a fun, historical tour and what ended up happening was us walking aimlessly through Charleston for 2 hours. It was truly terrible. Out of empathy for her feelings we stayed until the end of the tour but were very upset and disappointed with the experience.
All of our group members have taken ghost and history tours, in both Charleston and other cities, and this was by far the worst.
I feel upset and taken advantage of by the amount of money that was spent considering our experience. I wanted to speak with someone from your team first before sharing our review/thoughts publically.