Walking tours of the haunted downtown Cape Girardeau are offered by the Office of Extended and Continuing Education at Southeast Missouri State University.
The tours started at the beginning of October but more dates are scheduled from October 27 until October 30. For a $20 fee ($30 for couples), instructors will take you through historic downtown Cape Girardeau for a guided visit sprinkled with “true” ghost stories.
Office of Extended and Continuing Education assistant director Christy Mershon helps organize the tours.
“It’s about a mile and a half of walking and within that we talk about Cape from its original settlement by Louis Lorimier all the way up to some of the new construction like our River Campus project and the old seminary property,” Mershon said.
The walking tours start at 7 p.m. and last about two hours. The route they follow leaves from the Boardman pavillion in Hutson’s parking lot and follows the river. It goes through Spanish and Lorimier streets and goes back to the downtown corridor.
Several homes and places in Cape Girardeau are associated with ghost stories including the Glenn House, the Sherwood Minton-House and the old Lorimier cemetery, and the tours try to involve all those stories.
“We do the best we can to explain the stories and the possible historical roots of some of those stories and we leave it up to the person on the tour to decide whether they believe or not,” Mershon said.
Each tour requires a minimum of six participants and can accommodate up to 40 participants. The Haunted Downtown Walking Tours run all year upon request. It is most popular during the Halloween season when around 300 people take the ghost tours.
The Office of Extended and Continuing Education offer non credit classes to the community. Their for fun or for professional development workshops are offered throughout the year. The idea of giving haunted history tours came from a desire to find a type of programming popular enough to keep the division running. It turned out that Cape Girardeau has a lot of ghost stories.
To register for the tour, people can either call the Office of Extended and Continuing Education at 573-968-6879 or visit their website.