How We Compare St. Augustine Ghost Tours

This page explains how the comparisons on this site are put together. It is an independent comparison site: no tour operator stands behind it, no platform owns it, and no guide on any of these streets works for it. What it lists is the ghost tours it found bookable in St. Augustine on Viator and GetYourGuide, which comes to eleven tours in total: four walking tours, three ghost hunts, two vehicle tours, and two pub crawls.

Nobody writing these pages claims to have taken the tours. The site works as an editorial desk: it reads the listings, checks the figures, reports what the operators say about their own routes and stories, and puts the results side by side so you can weigh a booking quickly. When a listing contradicts itself, as a couple do, the contradiction is reported rather than smoothed over.

That distinction matters in a town built on ghost stories. A tour's tales are told here as the tour tells them, and the history underneath them is kept separate and sourced.

What Gets A Tour On The List

Three conditions put a tour on this site. It must be bookable on Viator or GetYourGuide, it must operate in St. Augustine, and its figures must be readable from the live listing. All three must hold at once.

Tours with no platform listing do not get a card, however good their stories may be. That rule cuts both ways: it keeps the figures verifiable, and it means some well-liked local operations sit outside the comparison until they list on one of the platforms. When a listed tour stops running, its card comes down.

Where The Figures Come From

Ratings, review counts, durations, and meeting points are read from the live listings on Viator and GetYourGuide and quoted exactly. No figure is rounded, inflated, or trimmed. A 4.9 across 36 reviews and a 4.7 across 2,491 reviews tell you different things, so both numbers are always shown together rather than folded into a single score.

Prices are treated more carefully. Prices shown are from-prices per person, read from the listings; they change by date and group, so the live listing decides. No page on this site invents a price or averages two of them.

Where a listing disagrees with itself, the disagreement is passed on. One pub crawl is listed at 2 hours while its description says 2.5; one ghost hunt allots 2 hours in its itinerary against a shorter listed duration. Those gaps are flagged in the comparison, and the live listing is always the final word.

Legend And Record

Ghost stories are reported as claims, never asserted as fact. When a tour says a house is one of the most haunted in the city, this site says the listing says so. When guides tell of a woman in white at a fort wall, the phrasing is "the story goes" or "guides tell," because a legend told well is still a legend.

History is handled differently. Facts about what a place physically is, when it was built, and what happened there are checked against official sources kept on file. The Castillo de San Marcos is a 17th-century Spanish fort run by the National Park Service; the Old Jail was built in 1891 and served as the county jail until 1953, with eight documented hangings on the site; the Lighthouse and Maritime Museum runs its own after-hours ghost experiences on select dates. Those statements stand on records. The hauntings attached to all three, from Spanish soldiers to a lightkeeper named Peter Rasmussen, are attributed to the operators and ghost-story sources that carry them.

The split is deliberate. You deserve to know both what is on record and what the tour will tell you after dark, and to know which is which.

What This Site Will Not Do

• It will not promise a sighting. Reported apparitions are stories on a route, and no tour can guarantee what the night produces.
• It will not guarantee a departure. Weather decides; operators run rain or shine but cancel or reschedule for lightning, flooding, or unsafe conditions.
• It will not nudge a low rating upward or hide a thin review count. A 3.8 across 39 reviews is shown as a 3.8 across 39 reviews.
• It will not take payment, book a seat, or hold a place. Booking happens on the operator's listing, full stop.

How The Site Is Funded

Some links are affiliate links, and commission is the only income; no operator pays for placement. The full detail sits on the disclosure page, which names every link type that carries a commission and every one that does not.

Contact

Corrections keep this site useful. Things worth reporting include:

• A wrong figure, whether a rating, a review count, a duration, or a meeting point.
• A tour that stopped running, changed its terms, or changed its cancellation policy.
• A meeting point that no longer matches the listing, down to the street number.
• A missing tour with a live bookable listing on Viator or GetYourGuide and public reviews. Inclusion is free, and no operator can buy a spot on the list.

Email goes to info@staugustineghosttours.org. There is no call centre. The site cannot book, change, or refund anything, because the platform confirmation email is the document that matters; for questions about a booking, that email and the platform's own help pages are the right door to knock on. For everything else, the frequently asked questions and the guides cover the ground this page does not.

One last practical note: all eleven tours carry free cancellation on their listings up to 24 hours before the start, so a change of plan costs nothing as long as it comes more than a day ahead.