Photo by Tyler Nelson
With outdoor activities slowly reopening around the city, it’s getting easier to feel like things are going back to normal. It’s still important to maintain social distancing, but there are opportunities to be entertained and educated safely.
Anna Lardinois of Gothic Milwaukee hosts haunted historical walking tours for small groups downtown. She is the author of Milwaukee Ghosts and Legends and the upcoming Storied & Scandalous Wisconsin: A History of Mischief and Menace, Heroes and Heartbreak.
“I just really dig exploring the city with people,” says Lardinois. “I love our city so much, and it’s so fun for me to show people cool stuff that they might not know about.”
Her entertaining and educational tours had a great season last year and she was just getting ready to gear-up and start again, until Friday, March 13, when the coronavirus started to become a serious threat to group activities. Funny how it happened to be Friday the 13th when everything shut down, even ghost tours.
Lardinois plans on bringing her tours back by appointment only and limited to groups of eight or fewer. She also requests that guests not only wear masks for their safety but come from the same household and have been quarantining together.
“Maybe we’re just not feeling spooky at a time when life is pretty scary,” says Lardinois. “The only fear I want you to have is fear of the ghosts, nothing else.”
When she was little, Lardinois slept with books in her bed and always had an interest in stories. She thinks she’s had a few “ghostly” experiences. She was an English teacher in her last profession and got the idea to start guiding ghost tours after taking road trips in her summers off and exploring empty streets at night.
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Lardinois has been giving ghost tours around Milwaukee since 2012. She’s added a couple tours in addition to the Classic tour that starts in Cathedral Square and goes to the Pfister Hotel, City Hall and the river. Her Yankee Hill Tour is off the beaten path and is a perfect sequel to her original tour. Wicked West Town goes through the Marquette University campus and touches a little bit on Jeffrey Dahmer.
Another offering by Lardinois is called Walking Milwaukee. Nothing spooky about these! Walking Milwaukee comes in two versions. One for Downtown and one about Wauwatosa. These are guides for people to conduct their own walking tours and learn a little about the architecture of some of the landmarks featured.
To learn more about Lardinois and Gothic Milwaukee, visit her website. She’s already had interesting careers, including a stint at the Pfister Hotel as the 11th Narrator in Residence, which explains why she has so many ghostly encounters included in her walks around the notoriously haunted hotel.
