Every fall road trip list points you toward the same postcard-pretty foliage drives. This one’s different. These five small towns earned their spooky reputations honestly—real history, real haunted hotels, and in a couple of cases, facts so strange they sound made up. Add in food you can only get in that one specific town, and you’ve got a road trip worth the detour.

1. Salem, Massachusetts

The original, for a reason. Salem doesn’t just lean into the 1692 witch trials—it dedicates the entire month of October to “Haunted Happenings,” a city-wide festival of parades, psychic fairs, and walking tours through centuries-old cemeteries. It’s the rare town where the whole place transforms for the season, not just one street.

Eat this: Salem sits right on the water, so lean into classic New England seafood—chowder, lobster rolls, fried clams—and stop into one of the old-fashioned candy shops downtown for witch-themed treats you won’t find anywhere else in October.

Local Tip: Go earlier in the month if you can. By the last weekend before Halloween, downtown Salem is shoulder-to-shoulder and hard to move through—a mid-October weekday gets you the same haunted atmosphere with a fraction of the crowds.

2. St. Augustine, Florida

America’s oldest city has four centuries of ghost stories to show for it. Founded by the Spanish in 1565, St. Augustine is the oldest continuously inhabited European-founded city in the United States—which means its narrow colonial streets have had a very long time to collect hauntings. It’s also home to the Fountain of Youth, the legendary spring Ponce de León supposedly went looking for.

Eat this: Don’t leave without trying anything made with datil pepper—a fiery, fruity chile that’s a genuine St. Augustine specialty you won’t find on menus almost anywhere else, a legacy of the city’s Minorcan settlers. It shows up in everything from hot sauce to chowder.

Local Tip: Book ghost tours for a weeknight if your schedule allows—weekends in the historic district get packed with both out-of-town tourists and cruise-ship day-trippers.

3. Eureka Springs, Arkansas

A Victorian town with no straight streets—and one of the most haunted hotels in the country. Built into the Ozark hillside, Eureka Springs has no traffic lights and barely a level block; the whole town winds up and around the mountain. Its centerpiece, the Crescent Hotel, is often billed as “America’s Most Haunted Hotel”—built in the 1880s as a luxury resort, later reopened in the 1930s as a fraudulent “cancer hospital” run by a con man posing as a doctor. The stories from that era are exactly as unsettling as they sound.

Eat this: Eureka Springs has quietly become an Ozark food and craft beer destination—look for farm-to-table menus built around local produce and a strong lineup of small breweries downtown.

Local Tip: Don’t bother trying to drive and park downtown—the streets are narrow, steep, and mostly one-way. Park once at the edge of town (or at your hotel) and walk, or hop the local trolley that loops through downtown all day.

4. Jerome, Arizona

A ghost town that’s literally sliding down a mountain. Once a booming copper-mining town of 15,000, Jerome is built on Cleopatra Hill at a dramatic grade—so steep that decades of dynamite blasting in the mines actually shifted buildings off their foundations. The old jailhouse has slid roughly 225 feet downhill from where it was originally built. Today the population is under 500, and most of downtown is antique shops, art galleries, and ghost tours through buildings that have been abandoned since the mines closed.

Eat this: Jerome has become an unlikely wine destination, with tasting rooms tucked into old saloons and mining-era buildings overlooking the Verde Valley—order a flight and watch the sunset over the valley below.

Local Tip: This is a town of a few hundred people, so shop and tasting-room hours are limited and shift with the season—call ahead or check online before you make the drive up the mountain.

5. Jefferson, Texas

Self-proclaimed, and proud of it. Jefferson calls itself the most haunted small town in Texas, and the preserved 19th-century steamboat port backs it up—most of downtown looks almost exactly like it did 150 years ago, which makes the ghost stories attached to its historic inns and homes feel a lot closer to the surface.

Eat this: Lean into old-fashioned Southern comfort food and stop by one of the town’s historic tea rooms or candy kitchens for something you’d be hard-pressed to find at home.

Local Tip: Many of the ghost tours and candlelight inn tours only run on certain nights of the week—check the schedule before you lock in your travel dates, not after.

Planning Tips

  • Book ahead: Ghost tours and haunted hotel rooms sell out well before Halloween week—reserve at least a month out.
  • Go on a weekday if you can: Salem and Eureka Springs both get genuinely crowded on October weekends.
  • Pack comfortable shoes: Most of these towns are best explored on foot, and Eureka Springs and Jerome both involve real hills.

You don’t have to travel to get a little spooky this October—if you’re staying put and hosting instead, our Family-Friendly Halloween Party guide (or the grown-up, cocktail-forward Haunted Cocktail Party version) will get you there. And if fall travel in general is calling, our Fall Travel Destinations for Food Lovers has plenty more where this came from.