Nashville Ghost Tour History: A President's Grave, a Buried Bishop, and Printer's Alley's Darkest Night

Most ghost tours start with a fog machine and a cheap scream. Ours started with a stack of library books and a year of arguments about what's actually true. This is the Nashville ghost tour history you don't hear on the walk itself: the long, stubborn story of how we built the thing, and why I'm prouder of it than just about anything else we do. Grab a flashlight. Let me take you behind the curtain.

Nashville Ghost Tour History: How We Built It

Here's the honest version. We rolled out a small ghost walk for a single Halloween season just to see if anybody would come. They came. They came in numbers we did not expect, so we brought it back for good in the spring of 2025, and then we did the unglamorous thing. We spent the better part of a year taking it apart and putting it back together, stop by stop, story by story.

I'm a veteran, and some habits never leave you. I don't like saying a thing out loud on a tour unless I can stand behind it. So every location on this route got the same hard look: chase each claim back to a real source, throw out whatever turned out to be pure internet legend, and keep only the history that survives the scrutiny. The strange truth is that a ghost story hits harder, not softer, when the bones underneath it are real.

How We Decide What Makes the Cut

We cut good stories. That was the painful part. A few tales were too juicy to be true, and out they went, no matter how much a crowd would have loved them. Then we walked the route at night, over and over, timing each stop, learning where the streetlights buzz and where the dark settles in, figuring out which corner makes a story land. Our guides don't read off a script. They know the history cold, because that's the only way to tell it like you mean it.

That's how we do things. No actors leaping out of doorways. No invented nonsense. Just true Nashville history, told on the actual ground where it happened. It took a long time to get here. I would not trade a minute of it.

Stop One: A President in the Ground

Let me ask you something. How many walking tours can say they take you to the grave of an actual President of the United States? I can count them on one hand.

Ours does. James K. Polk, the 11th president, the man who pushed this country's borders clear to the Pacific, lies buried right here in Nashville beside his wife Sarah on the grounds of the Tennessee State Capitol. And here's the detail that gets me every single time. Polk cannot seem to stay buried.

He died of cholera in 1849, only three months after leaving the White House. They put him in the ground fast, out on the edge of town, because of the disease. Less than a year later they moved him to the yard of his mansion. Then in 1893 they moved him a third time, up the hill to the Capitol. For years now there's been a running fight in the state legislature about exhuming him yet again and carrying him off to Columbia. The state historian says leave him be. His own descendants are split down the middle.

Stand at that tomb after dark and tell me a man moved three times, with a fourth always hanging over him, has found any peace. That's not a campfire tale I dreamed up. That's the public record, and it's stranger than fiction.

Stop Two: The Bishop Who Would Not Decay

A short walk away stands St. Mary of the Seven Sorrows, the oldest standing church of any kind in Nashville. It was finished in the 1840s, a graceful Greek Revival building designed by Adolphus Heiman, the same architect behind Belmont Mansion and the old state asylum. It's still a living, working parish. People file in for noon Mass on an ordinary Tuesday, surrounded by more than a century and a half of stone and shadow.

And there's a man buried inside it.

Richard Pius Miles was the first Catholic Bishop of Nashville. He showed up in 1838 as the only Catholic priest in the entire state of Tennessee, built this church out of next to nothing, opened its doors as a hospital during the Civil War, and when he died in 1860 they laid him to rest beneath the altar. That much was ordinary for the time. Here's what was not.

In 1972, more than a hundred years after they buried him, the church was being renovated and the bishop's cast-iron casket was opened. His body had not decayed. His skin was reportedly still soft, his face at rest, as though he had only just drifted off to sleep. The church took it as a sign of saintliness and petitioned Rome to make him a saint. They moved him to a side chapel, where he lies to this day. We tell that one standing outside those walls with downtown glowing behind us, and it stops people cold.

Stop Three: The Mayor of Printer's Alley

If you want the full, unsettling account, we wrote the whole thing up right here.

We finish the night where Nashville has always kept its secrets, down in Printer's Alley. Two narrow blocks of neon and old printing-house shadow that have hidden speakeasies, burlesque stages, and plenty of trouble for the better part of a century.

This is where I tell folks about David "Skull" Schulman.

Skull ran the Rainbow Room in the Alley for about fifty years. The whole city loved the man so much they more or less crowned him "The Mayor of Printer's Alley." He walked his poodles down the bricks on rhinestone leashes. Elvis sent him one of those dogs. Andy Griffith cracked jokes on his stage back in the day, and Skull himself turned up on Hee Haw in his overalls. He was one of the good ones.

On January 21, 1998, two men came in to rob him. Skull was 80 years old, and he wouldn't give up his cash. They killed him for it. A vendor found him the next morning, and one of his little dogs was still wandering the empty bar. The club went dark for years. When it finally reopened as Skull's Rainbow Room in 2015, the new owners kept his old checkerboard stage and framed his jackets on the wall, and to this day plenty of people swear Skull never really left.

There's More Than We Can Fit Here

Polk, the bishop, and Skull are only three stops. There are more, and there are a couple we hold back for the walk itself, because some stories simply land better when you're standing in the cold with the lights buzzing overhead.

That's the whole idea behind the Nashville Adventures Ghost Tour. It's veteran-owned, it's built on real history, and it's the result of a long, stubborn year of work I'm proud of. We gather at Church Street Park, and we wind through downtown until the Alley swallows us whole.

So next time you're in Music City and the sun goes down, come walk with us. Bring your skeptics. Out here, the history does the haunting all by itself.