To kick off the 2008 Halloween events I organized a group to check out the Tucson Historic Ghost Walk. We actually ended up with a descent sized turn out for the first week of October and such a random event. The inspiration comes from my fascination with paranormal activities in general. Erica was up for whatever and Glenn thought it sounded really cool so it was settled, this would be our first event.

We all arrived right around 7:00PM at the visitors center down town. I was expecting a turnout of 9 and low and behold all 9 showed up. We had myself, Erica, Glenn, Veronica, Kelly and her husband Andrew, Bob, Sarah and Andy (aka Steve Jobs). If you have done any browsing around my site here you recognize Glenn and Erica. You might recognize Sarah from the August 8, 2008 Mount Lemmon Cruise. I'll see if I can give a brief run down of everyone else for you. Bob is a friend of ours from work, unfortunately he couldn't participate in the walk due to feeling under the weather… he did however show up and pay, which I felt guilty about. It was really too bad he couldn't come as I was looking forward to having him around. Veronica is a friend of ours from work at well that we hang out with quite a bit and you have likely seen her scattered about the website as well. Kelly and her husband Andrew Erica met the day of the event at the IBM's women conference, they were a lot of fun. Andy is a long time friend and former room mate of mine, somehow he and I always end up in interesting situations with interesting company.. and this was obviously no exception.

We actually all arrived pretty much right on time and met up with our “Ghost Host”. The lady was dressed in 19th century style clothing and spoke in a British style accent. We also had a journalist accompany us around for the trip, apparently he was from the Pima Community College Publication. Unfortunately, Bob was feeling under the weather and had to abandon the tour before it even got started. So off we went wandering around the streets of downtown Tucson.

Stops along the trip included the Hotel Congress, The Santa Rita Hotel, the old train depot, now a bus depot, The old Pioneer hotel, an old masonic building and an old church (which was under construction. The walk was cool as we all got together and had a good time and basically had an interesting history listen to some of Tucson's history as well as some more specific history and some of the gory details surrounding certain buildings downtown. Unfortunately, we were not able to enter any of the buildings and could only view them from afar, which in my opinion severely limited the opportunity of catching anything paranormal.

As you have likely already guessed we didn't see anything paranormal. However, it is downtown Tucson, so you better believe we saw our fair share of odd occurrences. At one point in front of The Hotel Congress a few “thugs” on the street offered to do to harm to us for supposedly taking their picture. In reality, we were photographing the hotel. This prompted our guide to be 100% certain that we were witnessing a drug deal. However, I am more along the lines of thinking that it was just a group of inhebriated “tough guys” trying to prove their worth. So, we headed off to the rear of the hotel to avoid the conflict. At this point we were approached by a guy in a wheel chair asking for donations, to which our guide promptly provided some tour information pamphlets. Needles to say, he seemed displeased with his “catch”. Finally, in front of the old Pioneer Hotel we got to bear witness to a guy seemingly molesting a pole with his skateboard, or something along those lines.

With our mysterious tour over we all headed to Gentle Ben's for some drinks, appetizers and fun. We migrated from their to Dublin's, at which point Veronica, Kelly, Andrew and Sarah departed. So Glenn, Erica, Andy and I sat and enjoyed some curry fries and a few drinks while listening to some REALLY good live renditions of popular songs from today and yesteryear. All in all it was just a really fun night with a really good group of people. It was one of those nights that could have easily been spoiled by stick in the mud type folks, but was made even better by the crowd itself.