GALVESTON, Texas — There’s a feud happening in Galveston this Friday the 13th among the island’s tour guides.
Some of Galveston’s local independent tour guides are accusing their competitors with the national tour companies of some serious allegations.
They say they’ve been telling made-up histories to tour groups and even stealing some of their own ghost stories.
Inside of the League-Kempner home on Broadway, local guides are giving ghost tours of the haunted mansion. The mansion, which's getting a complete restoration, is allegedly haunted by ghosts.
For more than a decade, Gin Keel, the owner of Spooky Galveston and Galveston Ghost Tours has guided groups through the world of the paranormal and the island’s history. But now, she and a handful of other independent Galveston tour guides, say there’s a problem with the island’s other tour guides.
“What happens is the national tour chains send out scouts that take all of the local ghost tours, and once they take the ghost stories, they cherry-pick the best stories that they’ve heard and then they put in some different things to make them not exactly right, so we can’t get them for copyright infringement,” Keel said.
And that’s not all.
Keel and other local guides say their competitors are giving their customers fake history.
Keel says she heard a guide tell a group that there are 3,000 bodies buried beneath Sangerfest Park.
“To tell people that that’s the story, it’s not true,” she said. “It’s terrible to tell people that that’s a true story because it’s not.”
Keel says mass graves throughout the island are inaccurate.
“I’m a historian by nature, that’s what my books are, history books, so I take offense to it when they fabricate history because the real history is interesting enough,” author and independent tour guide Kathleen Maca said.
Maca has written two books about Galveston and its ghosts.
She says she’s heard tour guides sharing tales that are too tall to be called historically accurate.
“There are some groups that are talking about a guillotine that used to be on the strand that beheaded all these people who are all buried under Galveston Square,” Maca said. “Which is entirely fabricated, it was the wrong continent, the wrong century, it never happened, so where it even came from I don’t even know.”
We reached out to two of the companies operating in Galveston that have guided tours in cities throughout the country.
In a lengthy response from the CEO of Ghost City Tours, – Timothy Nealon calls the claims made by the local tour operators “ludacris” and slander.
"All of our tours are historically accurate. We’re the only Ghost Tour company in Galveston that can say that," Nealon said. "Ghost City Tours has never ‘scouted’ our competitors. In addition, this idea of ‘stealing stories’ is ludicrous. While Tour Companies of all varieties try to make their tours as unique as possible, some cross over happens - after all, unless each tour company writes its own version of true and accurate history, different tour companies are inevitably going to say the same facts as others who are also talking about real historical events and people. For some people, this amounts to ‘they stole my story’, which can only happen if they own history."
Gin Keel says one solution might be to require the island’s tour guides to be certified.
Whether that could happen is still a question.
But one thing is for sure, nobody would’ve ever thought the competition among Galveston Island’s ghost tours would be this scary.