Haunted Hampden Split Into Two Tours This Year. Which One Fits Your October?

"This street has been a hubbub for a long time," Sam Classen, owner of Golden West Cafe, told The Baltimore Banner this week. "It's a place where people are coming and communing and spending a lot of time and energy, spending their lives working, eating and drinking. … I just think that that's a hard thing to leave."

That is one owner's theory about why The Avenue seems to have so many ghosts. Read the stories behind the 2026 Haunted Hampden tour together and another pattern appears. The hauntings cluster in buildings that have been gutted, renovated, or handed to a new business. A Civil War meeting house became an office. A fraternal lodge became a cocktail bar. A 19th-century jewelry store became Cafe Hon and then The Duchess. The tour is really a walking history of how often 36th Street has reinvented itself. In its third year, it now runs as two separate evenings.

Two Tours, Two Starting Points

The Hampden Village Merchants Association runs the tour Thursday through Saturday, October 1 to 31. This is the first year it offers separate family-friendly and boozy versions. The two versions differ on price, start location, age limit, and how long your evening runs.

The all-ages tour also has a feature the adult tour does not advertise. Ghost-hunting demonstrations are part of the Thursday tours and the tours on October 30 and 31. FOX45 describes the adult version as a pub crawl with stops at bars along The Avenue, but it does not name those bars. The organizer's page calls it "the haunted pub crawl you have all been waiting for." Both tickets also work as coupons for deals at participating businesses. The ticket pages do not say that any drink is included.

The Stories Follow the Renovations

The Banner's October 3 feature traces the stories to their buildings, and the common thread is change.

921 W. 36th St. houses Chalet Settlements and other businesses, and it was a meeting house for Civil War veterans until 1912. Gerri Tipton, an amateur ghost-hunter who works there, reviewed security footage from four years ago. Sometime between 2 and 3 a.m., a receptionist's desk drawer slid open by itself. Later she asked a spirit box for a name and heard "Steven" twice, half an hour apart. The answer to his occupation surprised her. He was a farmer, not the soldier or mill worker she expected.

The Bluebird cocktail room has the story that had already been reported before the tour existed. About a decade ago, contractors renovating the building found a casket with a full skeleton inside. The building had been a gathering place for a fraternal order, which may have used the bones in rituals.

Golden West Cafe, a crosswalk away, reports a martini glass flying off a shelf, music playing when no one had started it, and motion alarms going off with nothing on camera. Classen said the activity seemed to pick up during building renovations. Tipton offered her own explanation: spirits don't like change.

The Duchess, a block away, sits in a building that was a jewelry store and a hardware store going back to the 19th century, and most recently Cafe Hon, which closed in 2022. General manager Danvic Celebrado-Royer has heard unexplained noises late at night, and an employee once saw an apparition of a woman at the bar.

The owners rate their own buildings, too. Classen puts Golden West at maybe a five or six on a scale of one to haunted. Celebrado-Royer puts The Duchess at about a two. "You won't feel anybody grab your feet," he said.

Each of these addresses has served more than one purpose, and in most cases the story surfaced while the building was being changed. Because the Booze Tour meets outside Golden West, its evening starts at one of the most heavily reused corners on the tour.

Why a Yarn Shop Started a Ghost Tour

The tour began as a business idea. Melissa Salzman, owner of Lovelyarns and a board member of the merchants association, pitched it as a way to bring more customers to nearby shops. Her reasoning: if Fells Point had a popular ghost tour, why not Hampden? Her own store has no ghosts, as far as she knows. Once she started asking around, she found stories up and down The Avenue, including a child's footprints in spilled flour on a bakery floor and a ghostly customer seen at a bar after closing. "I didn't realize we had so many ghosts in the neighborhood," she said.

That origin shapes the tour. Groups may stop at nearly 20 other Hampden businesses, including Sage Cosmetic Tattoo, Atomic Books, and the Baltimore Art Gallery. The coupon built into every ticket makes the same point. The ghost story gets you in the door, and the shop gets a visit on a weeknight in October.

Atomic Books Is Reusing Its Own Building Right Now

One of the named stops is changing its building this fall. Atomic Books at 3620 Falls Road has been in its current location for two decades. Co-owners Benn Ray and Rachel Whang announced in August that a second floor would open this fall, growing the shop from 2,000 square feet to about 6,600. "We'll have more space, more room to browse, more things that we aren't carrying right now," Ray said.

The upstairs space used to house dance studios, which Ray said were loud neighbors. "That's a really terrible thing to be underneath of, so part of it was we just can't take the noise anymore," he said. Baltimore Fishbowl reported that the first plan was to open the upstairs on weekends and by appointment. As of early October, we could not find a public announcement that the second floor has opened, so check with the shop before planning a visit around it.

Picking Your Night

Today is Sunday, October 4, so the first weekend is over. As of today, the ticket pages list these remaining dates:

1. All-ages Ghost Tour: October 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 29, 30 and 31.
2. 21+ Booze Tour: October 9, 10, 16, 17, 23, 24, 30 and 31.
3. Ghost-hunting demonstrations: Thursdays, October 8, 15, 22 and 29, plus Friday and Saturday, October 30 and 31. On October 30 and 31, both tours run on the same night.

If you want to see the equipment Tipton described, a Thursday all-ages tour is the clearest choice: radio scanners said to pick up voices, cat toys that flash at the slightest movement, and a meter that reads electromagnetic fields. The 6:30 p.m. start gets a household with kids home early, and parking in the ACCE lot is free. If you are planning an adults' night out, the Booze Tour's three hours and 8 p.m. start take up most of the evening. Golden West, where the tour meets, is also one of the stops with its own story.

The organizer's pages do not list a rain policy, route distance, or accessibility details. The all-ages page says only to wear comfortable walking shoes. If any of those matter for your group, contact the merchants association before you buy. The ticket pages warn that tours may sell out, but they show no seat counts.

After October 31

More changes to Hampden's buildings are already on the calendar:

• The Dedicated Golfer at 1750 Union Ave., Suite E-2, held an open house on August 22. It offers public indoor golf simulation using Trackman IO, open 4 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week.
• The Hampden Blockbuster, a free community box for swapping DVDs, Blu-rays, VHS tapes and video games, stands in the 3100 block of Chestnut Avenue.
• Magoobys Joke House plans a 120-seat comedy club at 3602 Hickory Ave., in the former Green Room event space. Owner Andrew Unger told The Banner in August it could open as early as February.
• The Hampden Holiday Market is set for Saturday, December 19, from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at St. Luke's Church, 800 W. 36th St., with more than 40 vendors and artists.

Every story on this tour rests on what a building used to be. That history is also what William Weeks looks into when clients ask about a Hampden rowhome or storefront: the prior uses, the renovations, and what has changed inside the walls. If you are curious about the background of a building on The Avenue, or of your own home, schedule a consultation and we can look into it together.