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Historic haunted places in Sacramento, CA. Each page gives the ghost story, whether visitors can go, and a link to the site the story came from. The stories are folklore, not documented fact.
4 listings shown.
CALIFORNIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Christened in 1927, this riverboat once carried passengers between Sacramento and San Francisco and sat abandoned after Navy service before its 1984 restoration. Employees say the …
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
CALIFORNIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Sacramento's oldest surviving cemetery has received burials since 1849. Visitors tell of a young girl playing near a child's headstone, a couple dressed in black, and a dog that tr…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
CALIFORNIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Founded in 1942 and in this building since 1949, the theater is said to host at least five ghosts. The most famous is Pinky, a glowing pink presence seen near the dressing rooms, j…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
CALIFORNIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
The former reference room of the Central Library now holds the Sacramento Public Library's special collections. Staff have reported a lady in red, unexplained noises, doors closing…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Explore verified haunted attractions and ghost tours in nearby cities.
Sacramento is California's capital, set at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers, with 524,943 residents at the 2020 census. Its haunted ground is its oldest ground: the riverfront district now called Old Sacramento, where the city began, burned, flooded, sickened — and then, in one of the strangest civic engineering projects in the American West, lifted itself bodily out of the mud.
The documented sequence, from the city's Wikipedia article, is a catalogue of early disasters. John Sutter arrived in 1839 and built Sutter's Fort; gold was discovered at his mill at Coloma in 1848; his son laid out the City of Sacramento with Samuel Brannan that December, and the city was incorporated in 1850 and made the permanent state capital in 1854. On January 10, 1850, a flood devastated the young city, uprooting homes and drowning livestock. Between October and December of that same year a cholera epidemic killed 1,000 residents, including the city's first elected mayor, Hardin Bigelow, and 17 of its 40 physicians; up to 80 percent of the populace left town. The first levee, completed in early 1852, was breached within a month. On November 2, 1852, a fire known as the Great Conflagration burned more than 80 percent of the city's structures, at an estimated six million dollars in damage — and within a month 761 structures had been rebuilt, many in brick. The Great Flood of 1862, from December 1861 into January 1862, was the worst in the city's history; Governor Leland Stanford travelled to his January 1862 inauguration by rowboat.
The response is the part you can still walk through. From 1862 until the mid-1870s, Sacramento raised the level of its downtown, building reinforced brick walls along its streets and filling them with dirt. The previous first floors of buildings became basements, with the old sidewalk level left open below the new street. Many of those underground spaces have since been filled or destroyed, but portions of the "Sacramento Underground" survive and can still be viewed.
Old Sacramento today is a National Historic Landmark District. The State Historic Park occupies about a third of it, and virtually all of its buildings date from the 19th century, the most notable from the period immediately after the 1852 fire. Its documented landmarks include the B. F. Hastings Building, western terminal of the Pony Express, and the Eagle Theatre — California's first permanent theatre, established in 1849, flooded on January 4, 1850, and since reconstructed. Moored on the waterfront is the Delta King, a 285-foot sternwheel steamboat that entered service between Sacramento and San Francisco in 1927 and is now a hotel, restaurant and theatre.
This section is folklore — reported by the city's ghost-tour operator, and never asserted as fact here.
Sacramento Ghosts, the local operation of US Ghost Adventures, frames the city in its own words: Gold Rush fortune and sudden disaster built Sacramento, and, in the operator's telling, left restless spirits behind — riverboat phantoms, underground secrets, and figures along the waterfront. That framing leans on the real record above (the operator itself names cholera outbreaks, the fires of 1852, and the great floods as its backdrop), but the spirits are the operator's stock in trade, presented here as its telling.
Its named stories are these. At the Delta King, guests are said to report hearing the faint bounce of a child's ball on deck and glimpses of a former captain quietly watching over his ship. At the Eagle Theatre, the operator says the venue is watched over by an unseen former director who tidies stage equipment and turns off light switches after closing. Its route also passes the River City Saloon, which its itinerary describes as a former epidemic hospital turned saloon, and the California State Railroad Museum area, where it tells of the labourers who built the rail lines. The operator's separate haunted-places writing on the Delta King goes considerably further — a small girl running the corridors, a man in a suit in the darker corners, activity in the theatre rooms, and a recounting of deaths aboard the boat in the 1930s, for which it lists newspaper sources. None of that is confirmed in the Wikipedia article on the Delta King, which documents the boat's service, sinking and restoration without any haunting, and this page keeps the blog's account exactly where it belongs: as the operator's published lore, attributed in full.
The honest centre of Sacramento's legend is simpler, and it is underground. A city really did bury its own first storey after drowning and burning repeatedly in its first fifteen years. The tunnels and hollow sidewalks below Old Sacramento need no invention to be unsettling, and every operator in this city eventually takes its guests down to them, in fact or in story.
Hountix lists 4 places in Sacramento, CA. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.
The Delta King is a 285-foot sternwheel steamboat, sister ship to the Delta Queen, built in Glasgow, Scotland and Stockton, California for the California Transportation Company's Sacramento–San Francisco service. The documented record, from her Wikipedia article, runs: entered service in 1927 on the ten-hour river run and continued until 1940, when new highways drove the boats out of service; requisitioned by the United States Navy in November 1940 and used as a receiving ship and then a ferry in San Francisco Bay; struck from naval service in 1946; used in the 1950s as an accommodation ship for construction workers at Kitimat, British Columbia; listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, by then with her engines and paddle wheel scrapped and much of her interior stripped; sank for unknown reasons at Richmond in 1981; raised a year later, when the damage proved minor; restored over five years at a cost of $9 million; and reopened at Sacramento on May 20, 1989. Today she is permanently moored at Old Sacramento as a 44-room hotel, with an award-winning restaurant and a resident professional theatre company, Capital Stage.
Her own hotel site publishes no ghost lore in the material collected for this page, and this page invents none for her. Her place in Sacramento's haunted geography comes from the tour operator that makes her its first stop. Sacramento Ghosts' tour page says guests report hearing the faint bounce of a child's ball on the deck and glimpses of a former captain quietly watching over his ship, and bills her as reportedly visited by three different ghosts. Its haunted-places blog tells the longer version — a small girl in the corridors, a man in a suit in the darker corners, activity in the theatre rooms, and a recounting of 1930s deaths aboard, with newspaper sources listed in its footnotes. Those are the operator's stories, attributed here in full; the Wikipedia article that anchors the boat's real history contains no haunting at all.
That makes the Delta King the honest emblem of an Old Sacramento evening: a real, documented, once-sunken riverboat you can actually sleep aboard, with a ghost tradition told about her by the tour that walks past her gangway. Stay for the history. The stories are included, labelled as stories.
*Website: http://www.deltaking.com/*