We’ll be taking a brief hiatus and closing the office from August 1st ( M.R. We’re offering a pared-down schedule of our classic Manhattan ghost tours on Saturday nights in July to keep the focus on all things spectral and chilling on these hot summer NYC nights.

Here at Boroughs of the Dead, we’re taking this summer to reconnect with our roots and the things that originally drew us into the world of ghosts and storytelling. Sometimes called the Hungry Ghost Festival, it is a time to reconnect with the spirits of ancestors, similar to our Day of the Dead or All Soul’s Day in November. On a more spiritual and less spooky note, August is traditionally the time of the Ghost Festival in China. A hundred storytellers would light a hundred lanterns and with each story told, they would extinguish one lantern so that the night would get literally darker and scarier as things went on. During the Edo period (1603-1868), groups of storytellers would gather to tell kaidan, or weird tales. In Japan, it is a traditional time for telling ghost stories. Outside North America, summer holds similarly spirited significance. In fact, genre and summer go together like Texas and chainsaws. It’s a great season for sci-fi, too, I might add (B movies at the drive-in, anyone?). Other rites of passage - staying up late, telling ghost stories by summer camp firesides - reinforced the association of hot weather and chilling tales in my subconscious (and the subconscious of millions of other North American kids). Some of my fondest childhood memories are of reading ghost story anthologies in my room on warm August nights, having convinced my grandma to buy me pulpy paperbacks with garish covers over the school break. I’ve always been fond of ghost stories in the summertime.

Summer of fear book