By Siddhi:  (Updated September 22, 2014)

Who?  Anyone in or near Princeton, New Jersey who is up for for a ghost tour in a town rich with centuries of paranormal activity.

What? The Princeton Cemetery and Ghost Tour offered by the Princeton Tour Company (PTC) that takes you through hundreds of years of supernatural and occult occurrences at both the University and beyond. The experience simply cannot be characterized as a mere tour. It is an interactive exploration that throws you into the heart of an eerily fascinating series of ghost stories that have defined Princeton’s past and continue to shape its present.

How? The Princeton Tour Company offers this specific tour on most saturdays at 8:30 at night. You can either register online at the PTC website or go to the Princeton U-Store (located at 114-116 Nassau St, Princeton, NJ 08540) and purchase your tour passes at the check-out desk. Make sure you arrive at the store at least 15 minutes before the tour begins, as the groups sometimes tend to be crowded depending on the time of the year. The ghost tour costs $20 a person, and is most definitely worth the investment for the enlightening and hair-raising adventure that awaits you.

Why? We live five minutes outside of Princeton, and I have been in the area for almost my entire life. I find myself in Princeton at least once a week to grab coffee or lunch and just roam around one of my favorite and most beautiful places of all time. So whenever I looked at the Princeton Tour Company brochure, I shrugged it off, convinced that paying someone to show me a town I already knew inside out would be a waste of both time and money. And the entire concept of a ghost tour seemed a bit contrived and hokey. But when we found ourselves bored on a summer evening, we decided to head into Princeton and give the experience a shot. After all, there’s nothing we could lose from at least a nice walk through the town on a beautiful day. My expectations going into the tour were low. And those instincts were proven wrong at every level an hour and a half later. From gruesome stories of historic villains like Antoine Le Blanc who sailed into the new world and bludgeoned to death an entire family of farmers before he was skinned and turned into leather wallets to maneuvering around a maze of graves in the Princeton Cemetery, the tour never lost momentum. And what was even more appealing about it was the interactivity. We were taken to a lawn in the center of the University campus and given EMF meters that detect electromagnetic activity and Dowsing Rods that also sense unusual energies to try “communicating” with the paranormal ourselves. It was a tremendously entertaining and simultaneously unnerving exploration. Few tours in today’s commercially dominated scene provide an experience that actually has the potential to reframe the way we think about what we see. But the Princeton Ghost Tour was one that did, providing for a fabulous night in a town we thought we knew inside out but discovered after the tour we had only scraped the surface of.

If you find yourself in Princeton, this tour truly is a must-do.

Find out more about the ghost tour and other Princeton Tour Company offerings here:

http://www.princetontourcompany.com/polCalendarEvent.cfm?Program_Code=94