Downtown Phoenix has a history — its buildings tell a story. Ghosts are part of that story, as local self-described “hip historian” Marshall Shore would say. An entrepreneur in spirit, Shore will be leading his second annual Haunted Phoenix bus tour exploring the city’s ghostly past starting Oct. 12.
“People think we don’t have that history. And we do,” Shore said. “There have been murders. There have been suicides.”
Shore will be renting a yellow school bus to take tourists around downtown. The tour will start at the Clarendon Hotel and it will stop at various locations along the way including the Hotel San Carlos, First Baptist Church and Orpheum Theater.
There will be a guitarist on the tour to “encourage community” through spooky Halloween music and 1920s and 1930s standards.
“It gets people to look at downtown in a different way,” Shore said. “Talking about the spirits, the energies that are still there. They also get a chance to talk about the buildings.”
Not every hotel advertises about their ghost encounters, however. Scared of frightening off customers, some businesses will not allow the tour to enter their buildings, Shore said.
“We will stop and talk about them,” he said. “Sometimes we are able to get off and go in. Sometimes we aren’t able to.”
There’s a business for ghosts in Phoenix, as seen by the reinstatement of Hotel San Carlos’ ghost tours this year. Hotel San Carlos appointed a ghost tour guide for the hotel every Friday and Saturday night in October, guest representative Bob Leone said.
Last year, the Hotel San Carlos owner Gregory Melikian canceled the tours in fear that it was damaging business. Three hotel guests had checked out of the hotel after discovering that it was haunted.
Shore said that although the hotel is said to be haunted by the ghost of Leone Jensen — a young woman who committed suicide by jumping off the top of the building two months after the hotel’s opening — it is one of the locations that stopped the allowance of outside-sourced ghost tours.
“There was too much traffic at night, too many people,” Leone said. “We still get people coming in and asking if they can go up to the seventh floor and look around.”
Although Hotel San Carlos chose not to be part of the ghost tours this year, it hasn’t stopped Shore from continuing the bus tours.
Elli Edgar, permanent makeup artist and salon owner of Painted Ladies, went on Shore’s Haunted Phoenix bus tour last year and was amazed by the knowledge he held.
“I think that’s what was even better than anything,” Edgar said. “Learning more about my home.”
Shore’s love of the community has only grown since he came to Arizona from New York 13 years ago. Originally a librarian, he has worked for the New York, Brooklyn, Phoenix and Maricopa County public libraries.
He left a stable income to work part time at the Clarendon Hotel and to do various history-based projects. The tours provide Shore with a supplemental income.
The haunted ghost tours are a way to look at downtown Phoenix in a different light — to strengthen the local community through history and the Halloween season.
“It’s still very much a grey area, but there are a lot of stories,” Shore said. “People are very willing to share, and that’s encouraged.”
Contact the reporter at jessica.obert@asu.edu
