photo by: Contributed/Photo by Nathan Kramer

Ric Averill has hosted ghost tours around Lawrence for around ten years. He will lead several "Ghosting Lawrence" tours this week for the Lawrence Arts Center that blend local history and ghost stories.

With Halloween just around the corner, it’s the time of year to see some ghosts, but a tour from the Lawrence Arts Center adds a little local history to the city’s spooky sights.

This week, the 2025 “Ghosting Lawrence” tour will take its guests on a bus ride that explores haunted sites across the city and brings local ghost stories to life.

Ric Averill, the tour guide for the event, said he first started doing ghost tours around 10 years ago. His tour started out as a walking tour — where he would intersperse ghost stories with banjo playing — but it expanded as he “got more familiar with ghosts in Lawrence.”

Averill said Lawrence’s history creates interesting tales as it has always been “a very activist community.” The city was first founded by radical New England abolitionists determined to make Kansas a free state, which of course led to the “Bleeding Kansas” period and Quantrill’s Raid. That raid plays a key role as part of the tour, Averill said, with Shawn Franklin, a local actor joining a portion of the tour as Larkin Skaggs — the only member of Quantrill’s Raid to die that day.

Besides that infamous day, Averill said Lawrence has been a “stopping point” for other national movements, like women’s voting rights, the temperance movement, the Civil Rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests. Averill said the tour is able to highlight that kind of activist bent in Lawrence.

“It’s interesting to see how the time has evolved and what ghost stories linger and how they illuminate the history of Lawrence,” Averill said.

While the stops on the tour change every year and different actors join Averill on what he calls an “enhanced ghost tour,” there is a spooky reality for many of the sites. Averill said that three sites — the Eldridge House, now the Eldridge Hotel; the Stubbs Mansion, now the home of KU’s Sigma Nu fraternity and the McAlister House at 724 Rhode Island St. — have had “authentic paranormal research” completed on them. Averill said his research into Lawrence’s haunted history turns up other ghosts. He said for years, he thought if the The Ludington-Thacher House on 1613 Tennessee St. wasn’t haunted “it should be,” only to find out this year it is considered haunted.

Despite the spooky nature behind the stories, the just over an hourlong bus tour is a “causal and comfortable” time, Averill said. The center also offers a Saturday afternoon tour as a family friendly option as well. He and his fellow actors portraying the ghosts “don’t take themselves too seriously” as they look to entertain the prospective ghost hunters.

“We have a lot of fun,” Averill said.

The tours are offered on Thursday, Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. ; Friday, Oct. 24 at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. and Saturday Oct. 25 at 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. at the Lawrence Arts Center, 940 New Hampshire St. Tickets are available at the Lawrence Arts Center’s website, and are almost sold out, according to Averill.