Spooky Nashville: Haunted Tours, Ghost Stories & Hidden Speakeasies

Ryman Auditorium · Downtown

Thomas Ryman’s ghost, Hank Williams’ shadow, and the Grey Man in the balcony

Captain Tom Ryman built the “Union Gospel Tabernacle” in 1892 after a revival meeting changed his life. When it turned secular — the Grand Ole Opry, the shows, the bourbon — he reportedly stopped being at rest. Staff and performers have described his footsteps on the balcony for over a century.

He’s not alone up there. Hank Williams was banned in 1952 and has been seen backstage more times than anyone counts. Patsy Cline is heard singing after hours. And down in balcony Section 11, guests keep meeting the “Grey Man” — a Confederate soldier who won’t take his seat.

Union Station Hotel · Downtown

Abigail is still waiting in Room 711

Ranked #1 haunted hotel in America by USA Today, Union Station’s most famous guest never checked out. Abigail was staying here in WWII when she got the news her fiancé wasn’t coming home. She’s said to have taken her own life in Room 711. Staff still leave the room shut some nights. Guests who book it don’t always sleep — and yes, you can request it if you want to try.

The Hermitage · Donelson (10 mi east of downtown)

Andrew Jackson’s estate — and the 482 who never left

Old Hickory’s home ground has more documented deaths than any other property in Middle Tennessee — over 482, including a full Confederate Soldiers Home that operated on the grounds. The 2026 ghost tour season runs Thursday–Sunday, September 17 through November 7, with 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm departures. It’s the only after-dark access to the mansion all year.

Bell Witch Cave · Adams, TN (45 min north)

America’s most famous haunting — the one Andrew Jackson himself couldn’t explain

The Bell Witch tormented the Bell family in Adams from 1817 to 1821. Andrew Jackson visited, encountered it, and later said “I’d rather fight the British at New Orleans.” The cave and Bell family cabin are still there, still on the original land. Tours are ~40 minutes, cave + cabin, open Friday–Sunday in August and September, extended hours in October with lantern tours and hayrides. Tickets $12–23 at the gate.

The Hermitage Hotel · Downtown

The lobby mirror that mends itself

Not to be confused with Andrew Jackson’s estate — this is the Beaux-Arts hotel on 6th Ave that JFK once used as a campaign headquarters. Room 912 gets the most reports: guests wake to a baby crying in the small hours, said to be a child who fell from the window in the hotel’s early years. On the eighth floor a Lady in Blue is spotted crossing hallways. And in the lobby itself, the ornate mirror sometimes cracks in front of guests — by the time staff walks over to look, the crack is gone.

Skull’s Rainbow Room · Printers Alley

The murdered nightclub owner who never left the basement

David “Skull” Schulman opened his cabaret and burlesque room in 1948 in the basement of the historic Southern Turf building. Andy Griffith was a house comedian. Waylon, Hank, and The Supremes all played the room. In January 1998, a vendor found the 80-year-old Schulman on the floor with his throat cut, one of his poodles wandering the empty bar. He died the next day. For years afterward, employees claimed to see a shape resembling Skull in the shadows. Nashville ghost tours still stop there — and the room is back open, jazz nights and all.

Cheekwood Estate · Belle Meade

Mabel Cheek is still walking her gardens

Leslie Cheek made the family fortune with Cheek-Neal Coffee — the one that eventually became Maxwell House. He and his wife Mabel Wood Cheek finished their 30,000-square-foot Georgian estate in 1932. Leslie died in 1935, only three years into the house they’d spent a decade planning. Mabel stayed on for ten more years, alone in a home built for two. Locals will tell you she never truly left — that if you walk the boxwood gardens near dusk in October, you’ll catch the smell of her perfume, or hear a woman’s footsteps on the marble a beat behind yours. Every fall, Cheekwood transforms for Cheekwood Harvest (mid-September through October) with 10,000 carved pumpkins in the gardens, scarecrows, and evening lantern walks. If you want spooky atmosphere without the jump-scares, this is the setting.

Two Rivers Mansion · Donelson

The 1859 antebellum home hiding behind the golf course

Just a few minutes from Opry Mills, tucked behind a golf course most tourists drive right past. Two Rivers went up in 1859 for David McGavock and his bride Willie Harding on the land where the Stones meets the Cumberland. Reports over the decades include a male figure in the upstairs windows, lights moving across the golf course at night, and objects rearranging themselves inside the mansion. Fever now hosts a haunted cocktail experience on-site during October — 21+, ADA-accessible, roughly 90 minutes.

Nashville City Cemetery · Rutledge Hill

Suicide Rock, the lantern, and the woman who was afraid of the dark

Nashville’s oldest public cemetery — opened 1822, over 67,000 people buried here, including Confederate generals, mayors, and early music legends. The most-visited grave is a huge boulder with an antique lantern on top, known as “Suicide Rock.” The story goes that Ann Rawlins Sanders jumped into the Cumberland River in 1836 after a lover’s quarrel, and her fiancé brought the boulder from the water and the lantern because Ann was afraid of the dark. Historians will tell you the details don’t quite hold up — but visitors still swear they see a woman’s silhouette by the boulder at dusk. Free to explore, gates open daily.

Tennessee State Capitol · Downtown

The architect entombed in his own wall, and the footsteps on the marble

Finished in 1859, one of the oldest working state capitols in the country. Its architect, William Strickland, and its builder, Samuel D. Morgan, feuded so bitterly during construction that they arranged to be entombed inside opposite walls of the building — literally buried in the marble they fought over. Strickland died before it was finished; Morgan followed years later. Night security has reported echoing footsteps on the marble halls with no source, apparitions on the winding staircases, and the sound of arguing men from the northeast interior wall where Strickland is interred. Free to explore during business hours; ghost bus tours slow-roll it after dark.

Downtown Presbyterian Church · Downtown

Egyptian Revival, a cholera pit, and the pipe organ that plays itself

One of only three surviving Egyptian Revival churches in the country — pillars, lotus columns, and a painted sanctuary that looks like a set from The Mummy. During the Battle of Nashville (1864) it was pressed into service as a Union Army hospital; cholera and typhoid killed dozens on-site, and the yard is said to hold a mass grave the city never officially catalogued. Congregants and ghost tour guides describe the pipe organ starting up on empty afternoons, and shadowy figures in the pews. Tours are free by appointment during the week; the sanctuary is unlike anything else in Nashville.

Printers Alley · Downtown

The Mayor of Printer’s Alley — the wandering figure every guide points out

Printers Alley is one narrow block wedged between 3rd and 4th, one of the last true speakeasy alleys left in the South. In the 1940s and ’50s it was Nashville’s underground — mob-run gambling rooms, gin joints, and a self-styled character called David “Skull” Schulman who unofficially ran the alley for so long everyone called him “the Mayor of Printer’s Alley.” The same Skull whose 1998 murder we told you about. Guides say he still walks it. On slow nights bartenders in the alley will tell you they see a small, stooped figure in a fedora at the far end — and by the time they look up again, he’s gone. This is where nearly every downtown ghost tour ends, and there’s a reason.

Percy Priest Lake · East Nashville / Hermitage

The lake that swallowed 2,243 graves — and the town it was supposed to flood but didn’t

When the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Stones River in the 1960s to keep Nashville dry, they had to move the dead first. Under what is now Percy Priest Lake sat 97 cemeteries — family plots, church yards, Native American burial mounds, and one of Nashville’s oldest documented Black burial grounds. Crews exhumed and relocated 2,243 graves, along with 478 gravestones and 1,738 new concrete markers. Most of the remains were moved to Mt. Juliet. Not every grave was found. Scuba divers today still report old stone fences, foundations, and paved roads leading into the dark center of the lake, and Navionics charts show submerged bridges, buildings, and even churches.

Two lost towns anchor the story. Couchville was a small, self-sustaining Black community founded after Emancipation — a church, a Rosenwald school, a cemetery that may have been the oldest Black burial ground in Nashville, and family land held for four generations. In the mid-1960s the Corps flooded it. Part of the original main road still sits on the lake bottom, and the recreation area on the north shore still carries the community’s name. Old Jefferson, an 1803 town that had once been the Rutherford County seat, was the town everyone knows the legend about — but its story ended stranger: crews razed and burned the entire town in anticipation of the flood, and then the water never came. Engineers had missed a hidden cave system (now Long Hunter State Park) that drained the reservoir south. Old Jefferson is a ghost town by fire, not water.

The lake averages 28 feet deep across 14,200 acres, and Nashville has an uneasy relationship with it. Locals will tell you there are usually two or three drownings a summer, and the pattern is always the same — swimmers go under and don’t come back up. Whatever you believe about spirits, it is a strange body of water to swim in at dusk. Bryant Grove and Long Hunter State Park are the best places on shore to walk the story: quiet trails, exposed foundations at low water, and interpretive markers where the towns used to be.

Frankenstein’s Mad Scientist Cocktail Lab · Germantown

Immersive Bucketlisters pop-up — opens September 18

Bucketlisters is transforming a Germantown space into an immersive Frankenstein-themed cocktail experience: mad-scientist bar, bubbling test-tube drinks, staged theatrical moments, photo sets built out to look like Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. General admission from $22, opening September 18 and running through November 7, 2026. Ticketed — book ahead, weekends will sell.

House of Cards · Downtown

Magic, fine dining, and Houdini’s actual handcuffs

Underneath the Johnny Cash Museum on 3rd Ave S, House of Cards is one of the country’s few genuine magic-bar-plus-fine-dining rooms. Strict dress code, 21+ (except Sunday family brunch, 10 am – 3 pm), 1930s speakeasy vibe with Houdini artifacts on the walls. Dinner Mon–Thu 6 pm – midnight, Fri–Sun 5 pm – 2 am. Reservations via OpenTable — book at least a week ahead for weekends.

Black Rabbit · Printers Alley

Al Capone’s smuggling tunnel, Jimmy Hoffa’s attorney, and a Southern speakeasy on top of it all

Chef Trey Cioccia (The Farm House) took over an 1892 building on 3rd Ave N with more history than most city blocks. When his crew started excavating the basement to build the bar, they kept hitting weird channels running through the foundation — hollow, arched, going somewhere. His landlord, who lives across the street and knows the block, walked over and gave him the story: 218 3rd Ave N sits on a straight line between a limestone cave on the banks of the Cumberland River and Printers Alley. During Prohibition, Al Capone’s people used that cave-and-tunnel run to move booze from riverboats up into the Printers Alley speakeasies. Nashville was the midpoint between Chicago and Miami; Capone reportedly kept an Art Deco apartment above Printers Alley with its own tunnel entrance, so he could come and go without ever hitting the street.

The Hoffa era gets stranger. In the 1960s the building was the law office of Z.T. “Tommy” Osborn Jr., Jimmy Hoffa’s Nashville attorney. During Hoffa’s 1962 jury-tampering trial the FBI allegedly broke into the office and left a listening bug inside the fireplace. Osborn’s Nashville Bar Association gavel is still on display at the bar today.

What Cioccia serves on top of all that: seasonal Southern menus, an oyster program, and one of the best cocktail lists downtown. Mon–Thu 4–11 pm, Fri–Sat 4 pm – 12:30 am, Saturday brunch 10 am – 2 pm. Closed Sundays. Happy hour 4–6 pm daily.

Skull’s Rainbow Room · Printers Alley

Steaks, burlesque, and the ghost of Skull himself

The 1948 supper club we told you about in Chapter One is back and one of the most atmospheric rooms downtown — red velvet booths, live jazz nightly, burlesque and cabaret revues on weekend nights, an oyster and steak menu that punches. Around Halloween the room leans hard into cabaret theatrics with themed cocktails and burlesque showcases. It’s the only room in Nashville with actual documented ghost lore serving actual filet mignon.

The Patterson House · The Gulch

A speakeasy-style cocktail room, 5 floors up in The Gulch, no phones allowed

The Patterson opened in Midtown in 2009 and became one of Bon Appétit’s top cocktail bars in the country. In May 2025 they moved into the top of the Bill Voorhees Building in The Gulch — fifth floor of 700 8th Avenue South, entrance around the back on Paseo Pl. Same exacting cocktail program. The house rules haven’t changed either: no cell phones except quick texts, no standing, and you have to be seated to order a drink. The new room was designed by Dryden Studio — red oak bar, cherry wood walls, intimate booth seating. It’s not sold as “haunted,” but it feels like a room the twentieth century forgot to close. Perfect nightcap for a ghost-tour night. Open 7 days a week, 4 pm to 1 am last call.

Hidden Bar at Noelle · Downtown

The hotel bar you have to find

Tucked inside Noelle Nashville — down a hallway, behind an unmarked door. Low lighting, deep leather booths, one of the best cocktail programs in the city. Every October Noelle traditionally runs a themed vampire pop-up here (Oath & Fang in past years). Even without the theming, it’s the moodiest hotel bar downtown.

1865 Club · Midtown

The 1865 Club — Midtown’s tobacco-heritage cocktail room

Rocky Top sits inside a Midtown building whose origin is a 19th-century tobacco barn and auction house that later served US Tobacco — the upper floors are now condo residences and our Rocky Top rental is one of them. Next door is the 1865 Club, a cocktail room carved into the original industrial bones of the neighboring building: moody lighting, plush lounge seating, an elegant bar, and a private performance room that hosts Nashville songwriter nights — Writers Rounds, solo acoustic, duos and trios. Our Rocky Top guests get the elevator down and a short walk over as part of staying with us. Everyone else books a table through Resy on the club’s site. It’s a 21+ room.

Pushing Daisies · Under Fifth + Broadway

The subterranean margarita speakeasy across from Bridgestone

You’d never spot the entrance. Down a set of stairs on Broadway, beneath the Assembly Food Hall / Fifth + Broadway complex directly across from Bridgestone Arena — Sam Fox’s dark, low-lit margarita room. Over 100 tequilas and agaves, a serious cocktail program, subterranean acoustics, no windows. Perfect pre- or post-show stop for anything at Bridgestone. Wed–Sun evenings.

Barrel Proof · Germantown

Whiskey-forward, ceiling-full-of-shelves, low lighting

Germantown’s serious brown-liquor room. Hundreds of American whiskeys and ryes lit like a cathedral, dark walnut, dim amber lighting, and one of the deepest bourbon programs in the city. Not marketed as spooky, but the room reads like one — low ceilings, close tables, glow-in-the-shadows vibe. Great late-night pairing after a Bridgestone or Ryman show.

The Green Hour at Tempered Café · Germantown

A chocolate shop by day. When the green light turns on, it becomes an absinthe bar.

Our favorite hidden-in-plain-sight room in Nashville. Tempered Café + Chocolate operates as a coffee and chocolate shop through the day. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 7 pm the green light out front turns on — that’s the signal that Tempered has become The Green Hour, a proper Belle Époque absinthe lounge. Each table gets its own antique absinthe fountain with slender spouts for the classic sugar-cube-and-water ritual. House-made truffles are paired to each drink. It is the closest room in Nashville to an actual 1890s Paris bar. Small space, so reservations are essential in October.