A town founded in 1888 by an Army chaplain and rebuilt in the 1950s as a cowboy theme park does not have a deep bench of ghosts. What Scottsdale has instead is a handful of genuinely strange true stories, a bank that became a saloon, a murder nobody solved, and a tour industry that has learned to tell them in a lantern’s glow. We are skeptics who enjoy this stuff. Below is the lore, the history it grew from, where the two part ways, and the month when the whole city plays along.
The Old Town walking tour
US Ghost Adventures runs the Scottsdale walk under the name Sinister Sins and Desert Sorrow: nightly around 8 p.m., about an hour and a mile, from roughly $26 for adults and less for kids as of this writing, with paid add-ons like an extended route and an EMF meter rental. The guide meets the group outside the Little Red Schoolhouse on the Civic Center mall, the right place to start: the 1909 brick school was also the city hall, the court and the library. Take the history seriously and the ghosts as offered.
The banker at the Rusty Spur. The Rusty Spur occupies the 1921 Farmers State Bank, Scottsdale’s first, which closed in the 1933 bank holiday and became a cafe in 1951 and a saloon by the end of the decade. The bank’s vault is now the walk-in cooler. The tour’s ghost is the “former owner” who drops in to pour himself a shot; the man they mean is E.O. Brown, the banker, farmer and postmaster who ran the town’s money until the Depression ended his run. Documented: everything but the shot.
The farmhands on the lawn. The Civic Center sits on ground that was part of Winfield Scott’s homestead, and the tour tells of two long-dead farmhands who keep a morning routine that city employees greet like coworkers, all within sight of the LOVE sculpture. The homestead is real. The routine is the guide’s.
The marshal in the church. The Community Design Studio at Indian School Road and 75th Street began life in 1952 as Ascension Lutheran Church, and the tour says a lawman who died by his own hand nearby in 1956 still stomps its floors looking for one last arrest. The city’s own history programs tell the same story, naming a town marshal, which makes this the best-sourced ghost in Scottsdale. Its public art is visible by day, without the stomping.
The party-bike version
Arizona Party Bike runs the Haunted Pedaler in October only: two hours on a motor-assisted pedal bar through Old Town with the usual captain plus a second guide who tells the ghost stories, a stop at a Halloween pop-up, and a price around $50 a head, 21 and over. A bar crawl with a narrator, not a history tour, and a very good bachelorette night.
The real crime
On June 29, 1978, Bob Crane, the star of Hogan’s Heroes, was found beaten to death in his bed at the Winfield Place apartments near Scottsdale and Camelback roads, an electrical cord around his neck, no forced entry, no theft. He was in town starring in a comedy called Beginner’s Luck at the Windmill Dinner Theatre at Scottsdale Road and Shea, and it was a co-star who found him when he missed lunch. His friend John Henry Carpenter was tried in 1994 and acquitted. The case is open. No tour has a ghost for it, to their credit, and the apartments are still apartments. The Windmill closed in the 1980s and survives in memory mostly because of this, which its singing waitstaff would have hated.
The lore around the edges
- Hotel Valley Ho. The 1956 hotel where Hollywood hid from the press gets called haunted every October, and we have never found a documented account that holds up; what it has is a restoration so exact the place feels like a set left running. It has thrown a Haunted Hotel costume ball on Halloween in past years; if it is on, go.
- The Hermosa Inn. The Valley’s most repeated resort ghost is cowboy artist Lon Megargee, who built the adobe hideaway in the 1930s and, staff and guests have said for decades, never checked out. Cheerful lore; excellent bar.
- Cavalliere’s Blacksmith Shop. The 1920 adobe forge on Brown Avenue is the oldest business in town and looks the part after dark. Nobody serious claims a ghost. The real story, four generations at one anvil since 1910, is better.
- The Old Adobe Mission. Fourteen thousand hand-made bricks, raised by the town’s Mexican-American families in 1933. Not haunted. Go anyway.
The escape
The one Scottsdale-adjacent story that needs no embellishment is Camp Papago Park. On the night of December 23, 1944, twenty-five German prisoners of war, most of them U-boat men, crawled out of the camp through a 178-foot tunnel in the largest Axis POW escape staged on American soil. All were recaptured, several after days in the desert. A marker on the Crosscut Canal path stands near where the tunnel came out. Walk it at dusk. No guide needed.
Cave Creek and the lost ones
Cave Creek keeps the best small-town ghost story in the area: Pee Wee Simmons sold her guest ranch in 1969 to become Frontier Town on the condition she could stay in her house until she died, which she did a year and a day later, and through the 1970s people reported a pale light drifting around the buildings. Harold’s Corral, pouring since 1935, has tall tales about lions, tigers and a gun fired at last call that are told as history and should not be. And Rawhide, the fake 1880s town on Scottsdale Road, closed on Halloween night 2005 and moved to Gila River land near Chandler, which is the only ghost-town story here in which the whole town actually left.
The October calendar
Scottsdale’s October is the reverse of Scottsdazzle’s December: the same lawns and streets, dressed for the dark instead of the lights.
- Enchanted Pumpkin Garden. The lost one. For five Octobers, 2015 through 2019, Ray Villafane’s studio carved pumpkins into faces and creatures across the Carefree Desert Gardens, and the town and the carver parted ways after a 2020 dispute. It has not come back. The page tells the story; don’t drive up expecting it.
- Día de los Muertos. Four free days of altars, folklórico and a Catrina contest on the Civic Center in late October.
- Spooktacular. Twenty-odd balloons glow on the Salt River Fields outfield for three nights, with trick-or-treating between the baskets and a haunted trail. Ticketed, aimed at families.
- The walking tour runs all year; the party bike only in October. Book early in the last two weeks of the month.
Our rule
Do the walking tour once, for the stories and the lantern. Then walk the same mile in daylight with our Old Town on foot note and see the bank, the school, the forge and the church for what they are. The buildings are the point. The ghosts are how the guides get you to look at them.