Haunted Places in Burlington, VT

The history

Burlington's haunted ground is a lake port's ground — Vermont's largest city, on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain. Wikipedia records Burlington as the largest city in Vermont and the county seat of Chittenden County, with a population of 44,743 at the 2020 census, 45 miles south of the Canada–United States border, and home to the University of Vermont and Champlain College. The university is part of the city's deep layer: Wikipedia records the University of Vermont as founded in 1791, the oldest university in Vermont. The nightly ghost-tour operator's own account of the city's making stresses the working waterfront underneath the college town: 19th-century mill accidents, devastating blazes along the waterfront and Church Street, and dangerous industrial labour built on the lake trade.

Two downtown buildings carry the documented core of the tours. The Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Wikipedia records, is an arts venue based in a refurbished Art Deco movie palace on Main Street — the Flynn's own history, summarized in Vermont coverage of its ghost lore, dates the theatre's opening to 1930, first for vaudeville and then as a movie theatre, falling into disrepair before its restoration in the 1980s. Above the waterfront stands the Follett House: Wikipedia records it as a historic house at 63 College Street, built in 1840 for a prominent local businessman, the last surviving grand 19th-century lakeside mansion in the city and one of the state's finest examples of Greek Revival architecture, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. North of downtown, Lakeview Cemetery — Wikipedia records it as a historic rural cemetery created in 1867 and dedicated in 1871, overlooking Lake Champlain — holds the city's dead in a landscaped ground that one of the ghost tours walks by flashlight.

Burlington's ghost tradition has an unusually documented keeper. Queen City Ghostwalk's own site records that the tour was created in 2002 by Thea Lewis, a Vermont native, historian, and author of seven books of haunted, wicked, and true-crime stories for The History Press, who researches and writes every story told on her walks. The nightly national operator arrived much later; between Lewis's two decades of local collecting and the national operator's researched downtown route, Burlington's haunts are told twice over, from two different directions, which is more sourcing than most haunted cities get.

The legend

This section is folklore — reported by the tour operators and Vermont coverage, and never asserted as fact here.

Queen City Ghostwalk's repertoire, in its own summary, features "theater ghosts, smugglers, serial killers, and more." Its best-known single spirit is the Flynn ghost. Vermont coverage of Lewis's telling describes a ghost said to appear when volunteers are working late installing lights high above the seats on the catwalk — protective, in the theory Lewis relays, because he does not want them to take a tumble and end up like him. The same coverage names American Flatbread among the downtown places Lewis tells stories about. These are Lewis's stories as Vermont writers report them, and they are labelled folklore here.

The national operator's Burlington repertoire overlaps and diverges. At American Flatbread — once home to Carbur's, in its telling — staff and visitors are said to report unexplainable occurrences, shifting objects, and sudden cold spots tied to a tragic past in the basement. At the Follett House, the spirit of the original owner is said to tend the property, alongside a gentle female figure said to interact with visiting children. Along the waterfront railroad crossing, passersby are said to have reported disturbances with locomotive lights and strange sounds where early industrial accidents occurred. On Lake Champlain itself, both operators trade in the lake's shipwreck tales — Queen City Ghostwalk builds a whole tour, Ghosts and Legends of Lake Champlain, around railroad and maritime history and the waterfront's "scandalous and sometimes deadly past." Shipwrecks on the lake are documented history; the ghosts said to linger from them are folklore, and stay labelled that way here.

Haunted today

Hountix lists 5 places in Burlington, VT. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.

• American Flatbread — haunted place, St. Paul Street, Burlington, VT (street number not in source)
• Converse Hall, University of Vermont — haunted place, University of Vermont campus, Burlington, VT (street address not in source)
• Flynn Center for the Performing Arts — haunted place, Main Street, Burlington, VT (street number not in source)
• Follett House — haunted place, 69 College St, Burlington, VT 05401
• Shanty on the Shore — haunted place, Lake Champlain waterfront, Burlington, VT (street address not in source)

Attraction stories

The Flynn Center for the Performing Arts

The Flynn is Burlington's downtown theatre — and this guide's clearest case of a famous ghost that belongs to the tour guides, not to the building. Its own homepage gives the working frame: The Flynn, at 153 Main Street, presents a full calendar on its Main Stage and in its smaller Flynn Space, alongside camps, workshops, and community programs, under the stated idea that it is "more than a theater." Its programming at collection time ran from touring theatre to a "Serial Killer Speakeasy" in Flynn Space — the closest its own calendar comes to the haunted season.

Wikipedia's documented account supplies the building's identity in one line: the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts is an arts venue in Burlington based in a refurbished Art Deco movie palace. Vermont coverage of the city's ghost lore, summarizing the theatre's history, fills in the arc: built in 1930 as the Flynn Theatre on Main Street, first designed for vaudeville performances and eventually a movie theatre, falling into disrepair over the years and restored in the 1980s into the performing arts centre it remains. A 1930 vaudeville palace, an Art Deco restoration, and a working stage — that documented building is what both of Burlington's ghost tours stop outside after dark.

The ghost itself is told here at exactly its sourced weight. The Flynn's own site, in the material collected for this guide, publishes no ghost lore at all — no resident spirit, no reported sighting, no haunted tour of its own — and this story invents none. The claim in circulation belongs to Queen City Ghostwalk's Thea Lewis, as Vermont writers report her telling: a Flynn ghost said to appear when volunteers work late installing lights high above the seats on the catwalk — protective, in her theory, because he does not want them to take a tumble and end up like him. A theatre ghost who guards the living from his own fate is a kinder story than most in this program, and it is folklore all the same: attributed to Lewis's telling, reported in Vermont coverage, and never asserted as fact here.

*Website: https://www.flynnvt.org/*

Sources

• Queen City Ghostwalk — https://queencityghostwalk.com
• Queen City Ghostwalk, About — https://queencityghostwalk.com/about
• Burlington Ghosts (US Ghost Adventures) — https://usghostadventures.com/burlington-ghost-tour/
• The Flynn Center for the Performing Arts — https://www.flynnvt.org/
• Happy Vermont, Thea Lewis Shares Tales of the Most Haunted Places in Burlington — https://happyvermont.com/2018/10/18/most-haunted-places-in-burlington/
• Wikipedia anchor: Burlington, Vermont — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burlington,_Vermont
• Wikipedia anchor: Flynn Center for the Performing Arts — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_Center_for_the_Performing_Arts
• Wikipedia anchor: Follett House — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follett_House
• Wikipedia anchor: Lakeview Cemetery (Burlington, Vermont) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeview_Cemetery_ (Burlington,_Vermont)
• Wikipedia anchor: University of Vermont — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Vermont