Boston Ghost Tour Cost: How Much To Pay For Each Format

Nine bookable tours cover the whole haunted-tour market in Boston proper, and their listed prices fall into a strikingly narrow band: from $22 at the low end to $46 at the top. That is the entire spread. There is no premium experience hiding in this lineup and no cut-rate walk either, which makes the cost question less about budgeting and more about matching the format to the night you want. This page walks through every listed price, format by format, so you know what to expect before you book, then looks at per-hour value, discount timing and how to weigh reviews against price before you book anything.

How Much Does A Boston Ghost Tour Cost?

A Boston ghost tour costs between $22 and $46 per person, depending entirely on format. Five walking tours are listed from $22 to $35, the single trolley tour is $46, and three haunted pub crawls run $29 to $36. Every figure in that range is a listed starting price from a live operator listing, not an estimate or an average, and all nine tours sit in the same downtown core.

The full price map looks like this. The "Common And Beacon Hill Route" walk is the cheapest ticket at $22, and the "2-Hour Ghosts and Gravestones Trolley" is the most expensive at $46. Between those poles, the walking tours cluster in a tight $26 to $35 band and the crawls sit in a $29 to $36 band. What shifts with the price is not the quality of the ghosts, it is the format: seat versus street, one hour versus two and a half, sober storytelling versus a 21-plus crawl with drink stops along the way.

A few things jump out of that table. The $24 spread from cheapest walk to trolley seat is smaller than a single entree and a drink at most downtown restaurants. The two most expensive walking tickets, at $34 and $35, cost more than the cheapest crawl. And the trolley, at $46, is only $10 above the priciest walk while covering the city on wheels instead of on foot. Format, not price, is the real decision, and the rest of this guide breaks each format down.

What Do Walking Ghost Tours Cost In Boston?

Boston's five walking ghost tours are listed from $22 to $35 per person, running 1 to 1.5 hours each. The $22 "Common And Beacon Hill Route" is the roster's cheapest ticket, the $26 "1-Hour Underground Ghost Walk" is the shortest, and the $35 "Death-And-Dying Theme Ghost Walk" is the priciest, with its exact duration shown on the live listing.

Walking is the budget tier of this market, and it is also the deepest: five of the nine tours on the roster are walks. They differ mainly in route, theme and the size of the review pool behind them. The "1-Hour Underground Ghost Walk" meets at 139 Tremont Street by the Boston Common Visitors Center and packs gravestones and gunpowder stories into a single hour, which makes it the shortest and second-cheapest option at $26. The "1.5-Hour Night-Time Ghost Walk" starts outside King's Chapel Burying Ground at 58 Tremont Street and carries the largest walking-review pool at 313 reviews with a 4.5 rating, still only $30.

At the top of the walking band, the "1.5-Mile Haunted Streets Walk" from ExperienceFirst is $34 and covers about a mile and a half of haunted ground in 1.5 hours, meeting at the Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Memorial on Boston Common. The "Death-And-Dying Theme Ghost Walk" is $35 and leans hardest into mortality as its theme rather than general spookiness, meeting in front of the Massachusetts State House at 24 Beacon Street. And the budget pick, the "Common And Beacon Hill Route" from Tours by Foot, is $22 for 1.5 hours from the corner of Boylston and Tremont Streets, though its review pool is small at 12 reviews, which matters and is covered further down this page.

The cheapest walk on the roster deserves its own sentence because it anchors everything else. The Common And Beacon Hill Route at $22 holds a 5.0 rating from 12 reviews, the smallest review pool on the roster but from a substantial pool, and it packs a full guided hour of graveyard and gunpowder storytelling into a price under thirty dollars. For a traveler whose only question is "what is the least I can pay for a real, guided, well-reviewed ghost tour in Boston," that is the answer on this lineup.

One price detail separates the walking tier from everything else on this roster: cancellation. Every listing on the roster carries free cancellation except one, the "1.5-Mile Haunted Streets Walk," whose listing does not offer it. That single exception is worth checking on the live listing before booking, especially in a city where October weather can flip a pleasant evening walk into a soggy one. On every other walking tour, a booking can be cancelled without penalty, so the risk of booking early is essentially zero.

How Much Is The Ghosts And Gravestones Trolley?

The "2-Hour Ghosts and Gravestones Trolley" is $46 per person for a two-hour ride, the highest listed price on the roster and the only trolley format in Boston's haunted lineup. It holds a 4.5 rating from 2,645 reviews, by far the largest review pool of any tour listed here, roughly eight times the size of the most-reviewed walking tour's pool.

That review count is the single most striking number in this entire market. The runner-up pool is far smaller: 313 reviews, on the Ghosts of Boston night-time walk. The trolley's 2,645 reviews exceed the combined walking tour and crawl review pools, which tells you where the volume of Boston's haunted tourism actually flows: onto the wheeled, sit-down, two-hour experience. The trolley is the flagship product of this lineup, run by Historic Tours of America, whose Ghosts & Gravestones brand has operated frightseeing tours since 1998, per the operator's own history page. You can read that history at the Ghosts and Gravestones operator page.

The $46 buys a different experience geometry than any walk. You board at Old Town Trolley stop #1 at 200 Atlantic Avenue, at the end of the Marriott Long Wharf Hotel, and you cover ground between sites by vehicle rather than on foot. Two hours of riding covers more of the city than 1.5 hours of walking, and the format suits travelers who cannot or would rather not stand and stroll for the length of an evening. The trade is immersion: you are behind glass between stops, hearing the stories through a vehicle speaker rather than standing at the gate of a burying ground while the guide tells them.

Price per hour, the trolley works out to $23 for every hour on board, against roughly $14.67 an hour for the $22 walk's 1.5-hour route, so you pay a premium of about fifty percent per hour for the seat, the range and the operator with the deepest history in this niche. Whether that premium is worth it depends on your group, and the full head-to-head, including who each format suits best, is laid out in the walking tour versus trolley comparison. For families with small children or anyone with mobility limits, the premium often pays for itself. For a duo on a mild night who enjoy walking, the walks usually win on atmosphere per dollar.

What Do Haunted Pub Crawls Cost?

Boston's three haunted pub crawls are listed from $29 to $36 per person, all 21-plus, with durations of 2 to 2.5 hours. The $29 "2-Hour Boos and Brews Crawl" is the cheapest, the $35 "Historic Pubs and Taverns Crawl" sits in the middle, and the $36 "2.5-Hour Booze and Boos Crawl" is the longest and priciest at two and a half hours.

Two of those three names sound almost identical, and they are genuinely different products with different operators, prices and meeting points, so this is where a price shopper most easily books the wrong thing. The "2-Hour Boos and Brews Crawl" is $29, run by US Ghost Adventures, meeting at 139 Tremont Street, holding a 4.5 rating from 123 reviews. The "2.5-Hour Booze and Boos Crawl" is $36, run by Nightly Spirits, meeting inside the Omni Parker House at 60 School Street, holding a 4.5 from 162 reviews. Seven dollars and an hour apart, and the two rosters of taverns do not overlap into one product. Never merge them when comparing, because a "the crawl is about $32" average describes a tour that does not exist.

The third option, the "Historic Pubs and Taverns Crawl" from Ghost City Tours, is $35 and carries a 4.4 rating from 149 reviews, the lowest rating among the crawls though only marginally. It meets at the Samuel Adams Statue by Faneuil Hall, and its duration is shown on the live listing rather than fixed in the roster. Its pitch is the historic-tavern angle: Boston's drinking establishments are older than the country, and the Omni Parker House, the meeting point of one rival crawl, opened in 1855 and counts Charles Dickens among its documented guests, per the hotel's own history page.

What the crawl price does and does not cover matters more here than in the walking tier. The listed price buys the guided crawl itself, the haunted storytelling between stops, and entry to the venues. Drinks are generally sold separately, so a realistic night on any crawl is the ticket plus whatever you spend at the bar, and drink prices in downtown Boston are not shy. Planning-wise, treat the crawl budget as the ticket plus a drinks allowance you set yourself, and check whether the specific listing you are reading includes any drinks before assuming either way. For readers weighing a crawl against a straight walk for the same evening, the ghost tour versus pub crawl comparison breaks the trade-offs by group type and occasion.

The crawl tier is also the one where age verification changes the purchase. All three are 21-plus, so a family or a group with a younger member is choosing between the walking tier and the trolley only, and the crawl prices are irrelevant to them. For an adults' night out, the $29 "2-Hour Boos and Brews Crawl" is the entry point, and the $36 "2.5-Hour Booze and Boos Crawl" is the splurge with the longest runtime of any product on the roster.

Which Format Gives The Most Value Per Dollar?

By duration for the dollars, the longest-running tickets win: the "2.5-Hour Booze and Boos Crawl" covers the most time per ticket at $36, and the "2-Hour Boos and Brews Crawl" matches it nearly hour for hour at $29. The "1-Hour Underground Ghost Walk" packs its $26 into a single hour, the shortest runtime on the roster, but its low total price still makes it the cheapest single ticket to a guided haunted evening in Boston.

Cost per hour is a useful lens but a blunt one, and the exact division is arithmetic this page will not present as a roster figure, so treat the comparisons below as reasoning, not quoted numbers. The two unpriced durations, on the "Death-And-Dying Theme Ghost Walk" and the "Historic Pubs and Taverns Crawl," are left blank because the roster does not record them and this page does not guess. The full index of guides sits on Boston Ghost Tours.

Two honest readings of that table. First, the cheap tickets are not the only efficient tickets: the $22 walk and both long crawls deliver the longest runtimes for their prices, while the $26 underground walk concentrates its spend into one hour, yet the underground walk remains the lowest total outlay for a complete guided experience. Second, value per dollar is not only runtime. The trolley's two seated hours buy the widest route; the Haunted Streets walk's 1.5 hours buy a 5.0-rated guide at a small 49-review scale. What you are buying per hour differs tour to tour, which is why the format sections above, not this table alone, should drive the pick.

A budget note that belongs on a cost page: the burying grounds these tours visit are free to enter on your own during the day. The City of Boston manages all four historic burying grounds, Granary, King's Chapel, Central and Copp's Hill, and keeps them open daily from roughly 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at no charge, per the City of Boston cemeteries index. What the tour price buys is the after-dark access, the guide and the storytelling, not admission to ground that is publicly free by daylight. That distinction is exactly why haunted tours charge what they charge and why a self-walk is not a substitute for one.

When Is The Best Time To Book For The Best Price?

Listed prices on this roster do not visibly swing by season, but demand does: Boston's ghost-tour market peaks in October, and October nights are when tours sell out and last-minute options thin out. Booking early costs nothing extra because every listing except the Haunted Streets walk carries free cancellation, so the cheap move is to book ahead and rebook if plans change.

The timing question is really an availability question dressed as a price question. The listed starting prices on the roster are the listed starting prices; there is no recorded peak-season surcharge in this data, and this page will not invent one. What is documented is the crowd pattern in the wider region: Salem alone reported 1.1 million unique visitors across October, with 96,000 in the downtown on Halloween Day itself, and Boston's ghost tours draw from the same autumn wave of visitors. A sold-out October Saturday in Boston is a realistic outcome for the trolley in particular, given its enormous review pool signals heavy volume.

For timing strategy, book the moment the date is firm, especially for October weekends and anything in the final week of the month. If the weather turns or the plan changes, the free-cancellation terms on eight of the nine listings make rebooking painless, and the one exception, the "1.5-Mile Haunted Streets Walk," is the single tour where a wait-until-certain approach makes sense instead. A fuller month-by-month breakdown of crowds, weather and seasonal programming is in the best time for a Boston ghost tour guide, which pairs naturally with this page when you are planning rather than just pricing.

Weekday nights tell a different story. Spring and early-fall weekdays are the quiet end of this market, tours run with more headcount slack, and last-minute booking is realistic across all three formats. Midweek in late September, before the October wave builds, is arguably the best value window in the whole year for a Boston ghost tour: full tour availability, milder walking weather, and the same listed prices as a humid July Friday.

How Much Should Reviews Weigh Against Price?

Reviews should be read with their pool sizes attached, never as bare ratings. On this roster, a 4.5 from 313 reviews and a 4.5 from 2,645 reviews are both strong signals, while a 5.0 from 12 or 49 reviews is a perfect score from a small pool. Price and rating are not correlated on this lineup: the cheapest walk is not the worst-rated, and the priciest ticket is not the best-rated.

This matters because the reflex when comparing tours is to sort by rating, and sorting by rating alone misleads on a roster shaped like this one. The "Common And Beacon Hill Route" carries a flawless 5.0, but from 12 reviews. The "1.5-Mile Haunted Streets Walk" also carries a 5.0, from 49 reviews, still a small pool. The trolley's 4.5 from 2,645 reviews is a far stronger statistical statement about consistency than either perfect score, because two and a half thousand people have now priced in their disappointment if there was any to find. The honest read: small-pool 5.0s mean "no one has complained yet at scale," not "the best tour in Boston."

The one 4.0 on the roster belongs to the "1-Hour Underground Ghost Walk," from 274 reviews, a real pool and the lowest rating on the lineup. Paired with its $26 price and one-hour runtime, that rating is the cost of the budget ticket: it is the cheapest complete option and it shows. Guests paying $26 for one hour are apparently a touch harder to impress than guests paying $30 for ninety minutes, which is a pattern worth noticing rather than a reason to skip it, since $26 remains the lowest total outlay for a guided haunted evening in Boston proper.

The crawl tier shows the same principle with less spread. The "Historic Pubs and Taverns Crawl" at 4.4 from 149 reviews is the lowest-rated crawl, but the gap to its rivals' 4.5s is a rounding error across pools of 123, 149 and 162 reviews. Among crawls, price and meeting point should drive the choice more than a tenth of a rating point. The broader question of whether these tours are worth the money at all, with the review evidence laid out format by format, gets its own treatment in the are Boston ghost tours worth it write-up, which this cost page complements rather than repeats.

What Does A Full Ghost-Tour Night Out Cost?

Budget the ticket plus dinner plus drinks plus transport, and the tour ticket itself is rarely the biggest line item of the night: a $22 to $35 walk plus a modest meal keeps the evening lean, while the $46 trolley or a $36 crawl with a drinks allowance makes for a fuller night out. What the total runs to is mostly a function of dinner and bar spending, not the tour price.

The table below is a planning allowance, not a promise about any venue or operator. Tour prices are the listed figures from the roster; the surrounding lines are typical downtown-Boston spending allowances that readers should treat as budgeting ranges and adjust to their own habits, since actual dinner and bar prices vary widely and this site does not verify them.

Two structural savings are worth stating plainly. First, every tour on this roster meets in the downtown core, within a short walk of the T, so transport cost is trivial if you use transit: the meeting points on Tremont, Beacon, Boylston and School Streets are all clustered within blocks of one another. Second, the burying-ground grounds are free by day as noted above, so travelers on a tight budget can pair a free daytime wander past Granary or King's Chapel with a single paid night tour and get the two-sided experience for the price of one ticket. The free haunted Boston budget guide builds that approach out in full for anyone counting dollars.

For the format chooser who has read this far, the full ranked rundown of all nine tours, with the reasoning behind each pick rather than just the price tags, lives in the best Boston ghost tours guide. Use this page to set the budget and that one to spend it. And if the evening is a couple's night rather than a family one, the date-night angle changes which format earns its price most convincingly.

The one-sentence summary of the whole market: Boston ghost tours cost $22 to $46, the price of a main course, and the only genuinely bad purchase available is booking the wrong format for your group or conflating the two similarly named crawls. Pick the format, verify the meeting point and cancellation term on the live listing, and the price question answers itself.

Common Questions About Boston Ghost Tour Cost