Jesse Colvin
A cold wind creeps under your scarf, loose roofing bangs in the darkening canyon, and children’s demands for sugary treats rise through the gritty mist as Halloween arrives in the resurrected ghost town of Madrid. This year, that soundtrack will be joined by local voices, spinning ghoulish yarns.
At sundown on Oct. 31, Madrid (pronounced MADrid) will host Ghost Town Ghost Tour, an eerie walking tour accompanied by local ghost tales. Town impresario Andrew Wice presents a haunting self-guided audio tour of the former mining town using stories curated from local residents. Wice, a local novelist and producer of the Madrid Film Festival, invokes the spirits and supernatural occurrences encountered by current inhabitants in an hour-long tour of Madrid’s most haunted buildings. The tour moves southward through the town, linking spectral sightings and ghostly incidents. It ends near the legendary Mineshaft Tavern where you can warm up with refreshments by a crackling fire.
Almost a century after the mines shut down, the revived town is thriving. A 30-minute drive south of Santa Fe out Hwy. 14 delivers a rare glimpse of a booming former ghost town. Today, Madrid’s become a counter-culture outpost—restored miner’s shacks house an arts community of about 280 people with a local foods grocery and non-profit radio station (KMRD-LP-96.9 FM)—but retains its original spookiness and penchant for the inexplicable.
Though the season feels right for a haunted audio tour, Weiss remains agnostic about ghosts.
“I am fully committed to the idea that I just really don’t know. I try to be open-minded—none of these stories are my personal experience. I worked at the Mine Shaft Tavern late at night, and I heard weird things, but I never lingered. It was my job to finish up and get out of there! It’s interesting to see the way certain stories keep cropping up all over town with the same particular figures manifesting themselves. I am a skeptic, but it can be hair-raising, spine tingling and thought provoking when similar stories are related by independent sources.”
The tour is presented in a myriad of authentic voices by the actual residents who experienced these strange, unexplained encounters: the smell of smoke and voices of firefighters seeking buckets of water in the night, the cold touch of a hand on your shoulder, the rustle of a woman’s black lace dress. For those seeking a live, chilling experience this spooky season, this retelling of ghost stories offers an exciting visceral vibe.
“There’s a particular figure we track from the town that a local woman has had dealings with—a kind of dark malevolent figure we call ‘The Croucher.’ Following him creates the arc of the story of these hauntings. The stories make unexpected connections with different versions of things. I have to say it’s enough to keep me in the camp of agnosticism—let’s say humble agnosticism.”
“There’s nothing like this anywhere else in New Mexico. It is unique, it is authentic, these are current hauntings—it isn’t like a history tour. These are eyewitness accounts of what people who live here experience, and you get to hear the story right where it happens—so no refunds if you encounter a ghost and get scared.”
You can set your own time to experience the Ghost Town Tour. Two to four people can listen to the tour on a phone’s speaker so there’s no need to download multiple tours for your group.
The Ghost Town Tour begins at sundown on Halloween at the Old Boarding House in Madrid. The self-guided journey is appropriate for all ages and is available at any time after purchase via a wifi download on voicemap.me for $6.99. The tour is based on GPS, so a cell signal is not needed once you have downloaded the file to your cell phone. Dress warmly, hydrate and prepare yourself for a possible confrontation with the paranormal.
Post-Halloween supernatural excursions are available anytime—perhaps during the Madrid Christmas parade at 4 pm on Dec. 7— because the tour never expires. It can aLso be enjoyed in small pieces or multiple times. Detailed information is available online at ToursNM.com.
Wice reiterates: “My job is to present the accounts in a clear, objective way without any editorializing. Listeners get to decide what they believe, after hearing the firsthand accounts and standing in the spots where things happened.”
For more info, visit toursNM.com.
