Business ideas can be pretty wild and varied. And, there’s none more so than that of Lance Zaal from Williamsburg, Virginia.
Zaal and colleague Josef Krugerset set up the company that would become US Ghost Adventures, a leader in “out of this world” experiences in the United States.
Traveltalk’s Dan Lake spoke to Josef to find out what’s behind some of the spookiest journeys in America.
Q: How did the company begin?
A: The company began in 2012 as a business school project called Taste of Williamsburg. This project evolved into a food tour and pub crawl experience in Williamsburg.
Lance Zaal, then a graduate student at William & Mary, realised the potential and confirmed it when he saw multiple ghost tours operating in Colonial Williamsburg.
However, he believed a better product and service would be a self-guided app so people could take the tour at their own pace and on their own time.
He created the Junket: Explore Your World self-guided tour app almost 10 years before many other companies would develop similar products in the middle of and after COVID.
Again, he realised the potential would actually be realised in ghost tours led with live tour guides. He started Colonial Ghosts soon after and opened other local ghost tour companies in cities like New Orleans (New Orleans Ghosts), Gettysburg (Civil War Ghosts) and and New York City (New York Ghosts).
In 2018, he began US Ghost Adventures, then just an idea to connect the local ghost tour companies and tour guides under one umbrella.
When I joined the company it was operating in seven to eight cities with around 25 guides. They are now open in around 130 cities with just under 600 guides.
Q: I heard some great stories about how it still operated during COVID. How did that happen?
A: When COVID first hit in March 2020, we had a company leadership meeting and Lance, the President and Founder, stated straight out that nobody would be let go.
He also said that we would not put our heads in the sand or hide in a cave, but we would find ways to adapt and ideas to generate revenue and keep the business not just alive but thriving and growing.
That’s what we did. The company was run out of a workspace in Williamsburg called Ignition, a non-profit business accelerator that Zaal had started after the Junket tour app and Colonial Ghosts took off.
We also worked out of King of Clubs and Joker Brewing – a coffee roasting facility that doubled as a kombucha brewery that hand-roasted coffee in small batches and served some of the only hard kombucha available on the East Coast (at that time).
We moved Drink Williamsburg and Drink Richmond from drink buses to a partnership with Lyft. These were craft brewery tours driving guests in Williamsburg and Richmond to the most iconic and popular craft drink facilities in the area, including winery tours outside of Richmond and Williamsburg.
We pivoted to focus on safe, outdoor activities and invested a huge amount of time and effort into expanding the Junket App to include more self-guided experiences and scavenger hunt “adventures”.
We expanded the list of cities in which we operated outdoor walking ghost tours from 10 to almost 40 cities, increased our tour guide staff and created GhostFlix, a series of live-streaming events that showcased ghost tours in multiple cities around the U.S.
We formed a partnership with Match.com to offer ghost tour events to singles and had clients like Amazon sign-up for live GhostFlix events to bring the haunted stories and locations of cities across the country straight to their employees as one of their signature team-building events in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
In addition, we acquired the Historic Lizzie Borden House, the site of the unsolved double-murder in 1892, which we still own and operate profitably.
Finally, in addition to offering safe, fun and unique events through livestreams and on-site outdoors in multiple cities – which turned out to be a lifeline during the ‘Spooky October’ and holiday seasons – we unveiled Lily, the haunted doll, our “host a ghost” version of elf on a shelf. We have sold tens of thousands of Lily dolls to date and it is an Amazon’s Choice product to this day.
Q: What are the most popular tours?
A: There are so many popular tours all over the country. It really depends on the city and the location, but some of the most popular tours are and have been:
Secret History tours in Williamsburg, Black History experience in Williamsburg, Salem Witch tours and Boos and Booze haunted pub crawls, Boston True Crime tours, Portland and Seattle ghost tours, our LA Walk of Fame and Hollywood Sign Hike Adventure, and some of our newest cities are growing very quickly: Deadwood, South Dakota; Wilmington, North Carolina; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
Q: Do you have a favourite story to tell about an experience that’s happened on a tour?
A: Yes! when I was a tour guide in Williamsburg I led tours almost every night for more than three years (I am still a licensed tour guide there and could also give tours in Richmond, D.C., Gettysburg and Salem if I had too!).
The first 13 nights I ever worked, it was the summer of 2019 and there was thunder and lightning almost every night in the humidity of southwest VA. On the 13th night I remember standing outside the Peyton Randolph house – across the street on the grass actually – and I was telling guests some of the phenomena that occurred at and around the house.
Things like batteries draining, the temperature changing suddenly and drastically, and people seeing things in the windows. At that moment I had two separate people gasp and sit down on the ground. They both said they felt light-headed. They went to text/call a family member and their phones were completely dead.
Everyone else in the group immediately began feeling cold to the bone with goosebumps and it felt like a winter night for about 30-60 seconds. In that moment, someone screamed and pointed to the house across the street.
In the upper window it looked like a ball of glowing light (not an orb) that seemed to be coming from a candle. A shadow was walking through the upstairs rooms and you could see the light moving from room to room – then the light began going downwards, down the stairs and… immediately disappeared.
In its place was a shadowed figure. There was no ball of light but the shadowed figure was still somehow easily seen. It reached the bottom of the stairs and then it and the light just disappeared.
No one came out of the house. No light came back on. No one was supposed to be in the house – only security guards possibly and they would have flashlights, not lit candles (that would be a fire hazard).
That is just one of the creepy stories about the house and since then, I’ve told people to stay on the grass until they felt comfortable because I was always worried someone would faint on the street or sidewalk and get hurt. It was…unbelievable is the only word to describe it, really.
Q: Can you explain how the tour works?
A: Depending on the city and tour, guests choose their experience. They book a tour for 60, minutes, 90 minutes or two hours. They can choose add-ons to make the tour more fun and interactive, including bonus tours that extend the experience and add locations and ghost stories exclusive to the bonus tour.
They can also choose to rent an EMF detector, choose to purchase a little ghost plush, go on a late-night tour (usually for adults) or even choose a ghost hunt in select cities where they get to use a variety of equipment to “hunt” for ghosts at the most haunted spots in town.
On all ghost tour experiences, the local expert guide and history expert takes the guests to as many haunted locations in that city or destination and tells them the dark history and tragic events, and the historical figures that were involved.
They then recount the authentic hauntings that were reported by locals, employees, visitors, tourists, guides, newspapers, etc, all based on historical research, interviews and lore from the local area. Real history. Real hauntings.
We also have adults-only booze and booze haunted pub crawls which are like ghost tours but much of the time is spent inside popular pubs, bars, breweries and restaurants in the area, listening to ghost stories while enjoying local drinks. We also stop at some of the iconic haunted spots from the ghost tours.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
A: We continue to add more tour experiences and guides yearly. We have more than 500 guides and more than 200 unique tour experiences in more than 125 cities and 35 states.
We own and operate three historic and haunted houses. The Historic Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts, the Villisca Axe Murder House in Villisca, Iowa, and the Brickhouse Inn and Historic Welty House (a Civil War-era building and a Victorian-era building) in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
We have gift shops at each location as well as an online gift shop, an Amazon store, an Etsy store opening, and a new line of ghost-hunting equipment at ghostdaddy.com that is being released this month.
The focus is on affordable, well-made, user-friendly and cool designs that are durable and longer-lasting than the other ghost-hunting products.
The user-friendly design makes it fun and easy to use for anyone who is interested in ghost-hunting and investigations to delve more into the supernatural dark history and unexplained phenomena common at haunted locations around the country and the world.
