The Chattanooga area is rich with grim history, making it a hotbed of reported paranormal activity with a lot of lore.
“I think when you talk about hauntings, you have to look at the history of a place,” storyteller and Chattanooga Ghost Tours guide Jason Tinney said in an interview. “I love history and I love a good ghost story, and you really cannot have one without the other.”
There are different beliefs and stories from Native Americans, Africans and other groups that collided in this region, Tinney said.
“And from these stories start superstitions because you need to come up with some kind of protector against whatever is in that darkness that you don’t understand,” he said.
There was also death, flooding, slavery and war, Tinney said, so there is a heaviness about the area’s history.