NOTE: Phrases in this article which appear in BLUE serve as external hyperlinks for further reading on this subject and for citation purposes.

A featured article from the American business journal Fast Company certainly made rounds in October 2025, being posted, shared, and re-shared by local ghost tour agencies and respected paranormal television celebrities alike.  While the subject wasn't necessarily a new one — especially to those of us already working in the field — the attention it garnered definitely helped to shake things up for patrons and tourists nationwide.

Just as other forms of smaller businesses continue to be overtaken, shut down, or bought out by national or international conglomerates, the same is now occurring within the paranormal tourism industry.  However, the masterminds behind these attempted takeovers are, at last, getting called out for their cagey practices, facing lawsuits in multiple states from long-established regional vendors who have discovered that their customers are being misled by name mimickry — a recurring situation so consistently underhanded that even within the last month (18 Nov 2025) one of the two largest syndicates announced that they were suing the other syndicate over this very issue! — while former employees of the larger entities are also lawyering up, citing situations in which they were unfairly treated or in which they had their wages unlawfully withheld.

And these are just the unresolved legal proceedings that have been making the headlines!

IMAGE: Fast Company

In addition to pressuring local ghost tour companies into merger situations, the same syndicates have been caught actively contacting the regional companies' local business partners, openly offering monetary compensation should the partner organizations agree to replace links for the regional groups on their websites with those representing the larger national chains.

This ploy was openly documented by Annapolis Ghost Tours & Crawls (founded 2002) on their social media page (05 Feb 2025), their group having been previously harassed by the same larger entities over the last two years, watching as the former name of their company was taken and reused by syndicates to generate a false "local ghost tour" billing.  As Annapolis Ghost Tours owner Mike Carter is quoted in the Free Company article, “I get calls almost daily from somebody who’s confused or wants to verify which company it is." Local groups nationally are now dealing with similar confusion . . . including here in Central Florida!

For guides in the streets, still working in the field, easily one of the hardest difficulties is hearing the factual slander and literal rewriting of local history.  In a realm where a guide's job is be to preserve and protect the spirits' stories, these self-same national syndicates have been caught stealing uniquely personal accounts gathered by regionally-operating investigators, then incorporating their previously unreleased content into mass-produced and distributed frameworks . . . or worse, embellishing heavily upon them, with no consideration for actual fact-checking, preying on the impartial ignorance of guests.

In Orlando, for example, the localized syndicate employees are regularly overheard by AGA guides in passing, sharing sensational stories of fantastical suicides, transdimensional alien portals, serial killer quack physicians, and a non-existent "secret society" whose architect supposedly poisoned his family to protect his cult's practices . . . none of which actually exist in any reliable archives or in the two decades' worth of collected firsthand interviews or direct spiritual communications which we are able to reference. Instead, these scandalous "penny dreadful"-like anecdotes exist only in the imaginations of the unscrupulous companies who have provided the fictional materials to their employees in scripted form.

Sadly, thanks to immense profits drawn from hundreds of infiltrated venues, these national entities have managed to acquire some of the most iconic haunted buildings in America, including the Lizzie Borden House (Massachusetts), the Villisca Axe Murder House (Iowa), and the LaLaurie Mansion (Louisiana), and have then proceeded to strip some of them of architectural elements and/or interior features, before staking copyright claims to the history and names of historical persons associated with these properties . . . despite leadership stating on the record that "no one owns history" when directly questioned about their own revisional scripting choices and infringement of personal data.  Worse, and adding insult to injury, the new corporate owners of these well-documented properties are now also attempting to stake legal claim over any further evidence captured.

Image: dbking/Wikipedia

RESEARCH YOUR DESTINATION!
Learn more about the venues and/or companies hosting your experience before making reservations. The cheapest deals may be the cheapest for a very good reason!

READ LOCAL GUIDE REVIEWS!
Compare consumer reports, as you would with any other product or service. In the modern age, it's so easy to falsify reviews, especially when home agencies quite literally own and operate large, all-purpose tourism websites!