This Halloween, Bike Durham organized the first-ever Ghost Stories Tour, a group ride in which we visited seven haunted locations around Durham. These included Duke’s Parapsychology Lab, where we learned of the poltergeist that haunted Carl Jung, the old Durham County Jail, where the ghost of a drowned boy lingers, and the North Carolina School of Science and Math (formerly Watts Hospital), where a security guard spotted the ghost of a murdered nurse one rainy evening. This ride was special in many ways, not the least of which is that it was our first group ride since the pandemic began.
After lengthy conversations about how to make this event as safe as possible in the midst of a pandemic, the event organizers decided to cap each ride at 15 participants and require masks and social distancing while on the ride. Although we were taking precautions, we wondered whether anyone would show up given the legitimate concerns about the spread of covid.
We were thrilled when we discovered that each ride had reached the cap, although we were disappointed that we couldn’t include everyone who wanted to go on the ride. Ride leaders Danielle King, Shaun King, Alison Klein, Seth LeJacq, Marc Maximov, and John Tallmadge led the groups on a 10-mile trip around the city at dusk: one group on Saturday, October 24, and two groups on Saturday, October 31. We gave away candy and lights, and we were delighted at the costumes that bikers wore: a clown and a haunting, two llamas, Amelia Earhart, and a witch, among others.
We set up the route in Ride with GPS, a route planning app that allows planners to add stops, information, and even photos (Bike Durham membership comes with a free account on Ride with GPS). We were therefore able to include archival pictures for each stop, as well as additional information about the story of that location, which riders could look at when we reached a stop or browse later at their convenience.
Last year, we created a pumpkin-protected bike lane along one block of the route, Broad Street between Perry and Markham, it was featured in Streetsblog USA and we made a short video about it. We recreated it again for 2020 with dozens of carved pumpkins standing in the gap between riders and vehicles, drawing attention to the need for physical barriers on bike lanes throughout the city in order to protect bikers.
At each stop, we played snippets of horror movie music, and participants guessed which movie the piece came from; winners were rewarded with Reese’s peanut butter cups. Darkness fell as we completed the route, which made the stop at the old railroad tracks on Washington even spookier, and the giant lawn decorations in the shape of Beetlejuice sandworms even more impressive. At the end of the October 31 ride, bikers stood and chatted in CCB Plaza for 20 minutes, and some new friends even went off to an art exhibit together.
We hope to make this ride an annual tradition! We want to thank librarians Valerie Gillespie, Kelley Lawton, and Elizabeth Shulman for their help in uncovering these ghost stories; Open Durham for their excellent archival photographs and historical information; Kyle Sullivan for sharing his professional-level photographs with us; and everyone who participated. We hope you had as much fun on the ride as we had planning it.
