Adrienne Parks and her husband, Bill Bowman, moved into their New Orleans Queen Anne-style Victorian house on Halloween in 2005. But it had a long history before them. Built as a single-family home in 1884, the 5,500-sq-ft structure became a boarding house in the 20th century before falling into disrepair. In the 1980s, a couple purchased it and decided to restore the building to its original glory, ripping out sheet rock and tearing out the drop ceilings. Years later, the property found its way to Parks and Bowman.
Not long after moving in, Parks took a walking tour of her neighborhood, which happened to be led by one of the home’s previous owners. They made a stop at the house.
“She mentioned having seen a ghost in the house,” Parks said. “I told her I would have paid more if I’d known that we’d gotten a ghost with it!”
The spirit, according to the previous owner, was of a young woman in a yellow dress, who usually showed up in the first-floor dining room. Parks herself had seen a presence with loose, dark hair walking down the stairs in front of her wearing a long, white garment. She and her husband had been renting out extra rooms, so she simply thought the person was supposed to be there. “I thought she was a guest staying [with us],” Parks said. “So I said, very brightly, ‘Good morning!’ And she vanished.”
After a while, rather than conceal these ethereal incidents, the couple decided to lean in.
Take a look at the Parks-Bowman Mansion’s Airbnb listing and you can see the multiple spooky experiences the home has to offer. Visitors can choose to stay in the library, the red room, or the haunted bedroom. “I couldn’t think of what else to call the room on the third floor, so I called it the haunted bedroom,” Parks said. “I figured, you know, why not?”
But anyone on the fence shouldn’t worry – as the listing states, the room’s ghost “is very shy”.
A catchy name is important when it comes to hawking these so-called ScareBnBs, rentals on online platforms like Airbnb and VRBO that may come with a little extra supernatural something. You can blame their rise on the expansion of streaming paranormal reality TV shows like Ghost Hunters and Most Haunted. Or simply on news sites needing spooky-related content for the season – in 2023 alone, the Parks-Bowman Mansion has been mentioned in StyleCaster, the Hollywood Reporter, and Travel Noire.
Media hits can be a gold mine for sales. Erin Ghedi’s Haunted Magnolia B&B in Seguin, Texas, was put on the map after she told a friend what happened when she and her husband chose to celebrate their new property purchase with champagne. “As soon as he popped the cork, the doors started slamming and this cold breeze went right through us,” Ghedi said. “As a joke, I went to a reporter friend of mine and said, you’re not gonna believe this. The very next weekend we were on the front page.”
Much like the managers of vacation rentals sans supernatural activity, owners of supposedly haunted lodgings also must differentiate themselves from competitors. Adam Zimmerli found his haunted rental, the Black Monarch Hotel, in Victor, Colorado, a town two and a half hours outside Denver with a population of 379. “I knew I needed to draw people to this remote location,” Zimmerli said.
Before the Black Monarch, Zimmerli had years of experience in the specialty rental business as the owner of Denver’s first “420-friendly B&B”. He found he had a knack for it. (“I had Dave Chappelle come and rent the house,” Zimmerli said.)
An itch to invest brought Zimmerli to Victor, where he quickly fell in love with the town’s history. “I’m a high school drop-out and come from a blue-collar background,” he said. “[I] was making more money than I thought I should, and thought, I got to invest it in something. Then I found this property.” Victor was the location of one of the country’s largest gold strikes, with plenty of subsequent backstabbing, gunfights, labor strife and general sin. But it wasn’t until after he purchased the building that he learned about its supposed paranormal activity.
“I got pulled over by this angry sheriff’s department deputy, and she’s like, ‘what are you doing here in Victor?’ I was like, ‘I bought this building,’ and she said, ‘why would you buy that, it’s haunted,’” Zimmerli said. “It was like I’m in an episode of Scooby Doo and they’re trying to scare away the city folk.”
Zimmerli was undeterred, painting the building black and theming one of his first rental rooms after HH Holmes, the infamous serial killer at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. It paid off: he received a media mention from Travel & Leisure magazine. “It ended up being in like over 100 newspaper articles and magazines,” Zimmerli said. “It was an internet sensation overnight.” Zimmerli does believe that the place is at least partially haunted – multiple people have told him they’ve heard bar fight sounds in the middle of the night. But to him, all that matters is that other people think so.
“I’m out in the middle of nowhere, man. Nobody’s coming to Victor for anything,” Zimmerli said. “But we do get a ton of business from people seeking out the paranormal experience, and people aren’t disappointed.”
Even stronger than media mentions is: location, location, location. A weekend stay in the Henry Derby House in Salem, Massachusetts – a city known for its macabre history – can run up to $1,300 a night in October, despite no ghosts being advertised.
“When my mom still operated the B&B, she had a girl who helped out. She was living on the third floor, and had some sort of interaction with a ghost,” owner Phil Marchand said. “She was also working in town on one of the ghost tours, so for years [our house was] on a ghost tour, and people would talk. But to be honest, this girl’s story was kind of questionable.” While Marchand says other renters have had haunted experiences, the town itself is the main draw. “Salem is insane in October,” Marchand said. “If anything, [the ghosts] probably help my off-season. You know, come to the house in February if you’re just looking to stay at a spooky haunted house.”
But perhaps the most vital part of getting people to book your haunted rental is the backstory.
Michelle Belanger, a rental manager in Oberlin, Ohio, said her stay is a building that “was built as a two-room log cabin by a Texas Ranger who only got to live in it for a year”. That tenant then was massacred by Comanches, “who buried him right where he lay”, said Belanger who said 80% of her business comes from ghost-seekers. “I have a spirit in each room.”
However, ScareBnB owners warn, renting out haunted properties isn’t for everyone. All of them advise getting your history right. “I’ve gone through newspapers, I’ve gone through the archives, I’ve gone to grave sites to confirm,” Ghedi said. “[Visitors] don’t want a made-up spirit. These people do their research online too.” Others suggest making it clear that it’s not a Halloween attraction with fake chainsaws or blood dripping down walls, as a way to foreclose any potential disappointment from silent nights. “It’s not like the ghosts are paid,” said Becca Bissette, owner of Stroud House, in Wake Forest, North Carolina. “We can’t make them come out when we want.”
The Bissettes, in fact, have taken their listing off the marketplace. “We had one guest completely trash the room, and that left us kind of sour,” Bissette said. “The last several months people ask if we’re still open, but we’re like, sorry, we decided to close.” The hardest part about managing a haunted rental, it turns out, may be dealing with the rest of us still on this mortal plane.
“I had a decade [of] experience doing short-term rental landlording and building maintenance, so I already had a decade of horror stories,” Zimmerli said. “Pee and poop in the bed is scarier than any ghost, if you ask me.”
