Sun, Sand, and Spirits? Haunted Beach Towns You Need to Visit

There’s nothing scary about the beach, save for the risk of getting some sand in some unfortunate spots…or is there?

While most of us associate ghosts with the typical haunted spots—rambling old houses, castles with bloody pasts or dark and dreary forests—the supernatural isn’t limited by the living’s idea of where ghosts should stay. As such, if you go looking for them, you’ll find quite a few beach towns and even individual beaches with haunted histories.

Here are 8 supposedly haunted spots to visit the next time you don’t want to choose between surf and spooks.  

Just south of Myrtle Beach, you’ll find haunts aplenty in Pawleys Island. If you don’t want to stray too far away from the beach, keep your eyes peeled for the most famous ghost in the bunch, The Gray Man. As you could guess from his name, The Gray Man appears in all gray and, if he does show up, it’s a sign that a hurricane is on its way. (Some say the Gray Man is actually famed pirate Blackbeard, but that theory is up for debate.)

The ghost of Alice Flagg is known to walk Pawleys Island as well. Flagg’s backstory is a typical one. Flagg fell in love, was forbidden from marrying her suitor and then died shortly after. She was buried at All Saints Episcopal Church Cemetery. If you visit the cemetery and are married, you may feel her pulling on your wedding ring.  

Want to book a potentially haunted stay? Grab your room at The Pelican Inn, where the resident ghosts include a woman in a gingham dress and two Boston Terriers.

If that’s not enough ghosts for you, you can head up to Myrtle Beach to uncover even more spectral phenomena. Yes, while Myrtle Beach—with its lively oceanfront, family-friendliness and, admittedly, tons of tourist traps—doesn’t seem like the first place that a ghost might go to hang out, the town has its fair share of haunted hotspots. There’s The Bowery, a famous music venue and bar, with its ghostly bar patron, Barman Joe; Pyler Park with its boo hags (a creature from Gullah folklore); and supernatural entities derived from the area’s connections to the Civil War and shipwrecks.

As the oldest European-settled city in the United States, established in 1565, it’s no surprise that St. Augustine is haunted. You don’t have to look long or far to find a ghost tour or business that claims it’s haunted.

Some of St. Augustine’s most famous haunts include the Old Jail, which was built in 1891. There, some say that they still see Sheriff Joe Perry watching over his domain, unable to move on.

The jail was built by Henry Flagler, who is also still residing (if not exactly living) in St. Augustine. He’s taken up digs at Flagler College, in a building that was originally a hotel and where his funeral was held in 1913. During the funeral, the windows were closed (old traditions dictated that windows be left open during funerals, to allow the deceased’s spirits to pass on), trapping Flagler within the building.

Meanwhile, multiple ghosts call the St. Augustine Lighthouse home, including two lighthouse keeper’s daughters, who drowned off shore, and a different lighthouse keeper who likewise died tragically on the grounds.

Not too far away at all, another island takes a top spot as one of the most haunted beach destinations in the United States.

If you book a stay at the Jekyll Island Club, you may encounter General Lloyd Aspinwall, who helped found the club but died before it could open. Now, Aspinwall walks the property he never saw to completion. Meanwhile, another ghost at the hotel is busy dipping into guests’ coffee and rustling their newspapers. Samuel Spencer would, every morning, drink coffee and read the paper in his room, before he died in a tragic accident in 1906. Now, guests who stay in the same room find their coffee and papers disturbed. Additionally, you might just spot a 1920s bellman at work in the halls.

If you visit DuBignon Cemetery, you might just see some floating orbs. It’s rumored that the small family graveyard is filled with mysteriously empty graves. Then, at Driftwood Beach, you may spot some footsteps appearing out of thin air, courtesy of a man who died when confronting turtle poachers at work in the surf.

Further north along the East Coast, Cape May offers ghost stories in abundance. Beyond its packed Jersey beaches and charming Victorian inns and B&Bs lie quite a number of scary stories. For example, there’s the Cape May Lighthouse, where a ghostly woman and her child reside. At The Washington Inn, a ghost named Elizabeth knows the kitchen staff and servers by name. At The Southern Mansion, the original owner’s niece has stuck around long after her demise. If you book a stay at Congress Hall, you might see some ghosts that aren’t quite over the fact that the original building burnt to the ground in 1878.

Of course, this beach town, like so many others on this list, also has ghosts strolling the actual beach on occasion. At Higbee Beach, one of the beach’s namesakes, Thomas Higbee, supposedly walks up and down the coast wearing a long coat.

Don’t worry—you can find haunted beach towns when you travel abroad, too. Whitby is a popular seaside resort town on the Yorkshire Coast, but it’s also one of the most haunted locales in all of England. The town’s creep factor gets an upgrade thanks to its connections to Dracula. It’s said that the Whitby Abbey ruins inspired Bram Stoker’s famous work, and numerous settings around Whitby show up in the tale.

Folklore says you can indeed see ghosts in the abbey ruins, including the ghost of St. Hilda, who was said to have prayed the town free from a snake infestation. Other haunted spots include nearby St. Mary’s Churchyard, where multiple ghosts live. However, the churchyard’s most interesting ghost story states that, when a Whitby sailor dies on land and is buried at the churchyard, headless horses bearing a ghost coach filled with skeletons will visit the churchyard to fetch the sailor from his grave. You’ll even potentially hear some ghosts when walking the 199 steps that lead up to the ruins and churchyard—the ghosts of monks carrying coffins up the steps to their final resting places.

Okay, so Moss Beach may not be home to seemingly dozens of ghosts like St. Augustine or Whitby, but it does have one of the most famous ghosts in all of California, and that’s the ghost that resides at Moss Beach Distillery.

Moss Beach Distillery on its own is worth a visit, due to its intriguing history. The property started as a speakeasy in the 1920s, then became a restaurant after Prohibition ended. However, the distillery has been featured on many a television show and in articles not for its history, but for its haunting. The Blue Lady is the resident ghost, a woman dressed all in blue.

The story behind her restlessness differs. Sometimes she’s unlucky in love and drowns herself in the nearby ocean. Sometimes she has an affair with the speakeasy’s pianist and her husband murders her. Whatever her origin story, though, she’s gained quite the fame in California and beyond.

Long Beach’s biggest haunted attraction is, of course, The Queen Mary. The Cunard Line ocean liner is now a hotel, museum and haunted attraction, but it boasts a long prior life ferrying passengers over the Atlantic Ocean, as well as serving in World War II. With such a long history, it’s accumulated some ghosts over the years, including the ghost of a murdered passenger in a stateroom, the ghost of a drowned girl in the pool and the ghost of a man who committed filicide.

Other haunted spots abound in Long Beach, though. At Sunnyside Cemetery, you can see Bessie the ghost, who was supposedly hit by a car down the street. On the Cal State Long Beach campus, a Tongva burial site is plagued by ghostly chants, drumming and fog. For a haunted stay, book a room at the Long Beach Marriott and specifically ask for Room 217, where you might just be awoken by a TV that’s suspiciously not working correctly, or by a spectral hand pulling the covers off your body.

Manzanita is charming and picturesque, with a side of ghosts. Stories of a nearby shipwreck range, but the result is the same: ghosts that wander the area at night and mysterious piles of rocks that appear on the beach in the morning, with no evidence as to how they got there. 

Then, there’s the nearby Old Wheeler Hotel, where ghost orbs hang out near the basement and resident ghosts like to watch TV in their free time, when they’re not haunting. You can even see where they’ve left an indention on the bed and, more creepily, see that they’ve turned the television to a movie on a channel that doesn’t exist in the present day.