Updated October 20th, 2026 by Aaron McFarland

Boise’s best-known haunted places are mostly downtown and mostly still in use: the Egyptian Theatre, the Idanha and Owyhee buildings, the old Turnverein hall at 6th and Main, and the Old Idaho Penitentiary out on Warm Springs Avenue, where the state hanged a convicted killer in 1957 and visitors have been reporting strange things ever since. You can see the inside of nearly all of them for the price of a show ticket, a drink or a $9 museum admission, and a nightly $26 walking tour covers the downtown ones in an hour.

This guide covers 15 reputedly haunted spots in Boise, Nampa and Silver City, the stories told about each one, what the record actually shows, and how to visit. None of it is proven. Boise’s own city historian has said the ghosts refuse to talk to the historians, and we have tried to note where a legend has a documented event behind it and where it doesn’t. For the haunted houses, corn mazes and Halloween events running this month, see our Boise Halloween events guide.

Boise’s 1927 movie palace at Main and Capitol was built by department store owner Leo Falk during the King Tut craze and saved from the wrecking ball in 1977 by Earl Hardy, whose family still owns it. The resident ghost is Joe, a projectionist who, as the story goes, worked here from the late 1920s until he died of a heart attack climbing the stairs to the booth in the 1950s. Staff and performers have described doors opening on their own, lights switching off, a man’s laugh in an empty house and a presence in the last row of the upper balcony. When pieces of ceiling plaster fell onto the stage twice during a Brothers Osborne show in November 2016, Joe got the blame.

A second, quieter spirit, a woman in late-1920s dress thought to be former management, is associated with pleasant scents and light touches. The Travel Channel built a 2009 episode of Ghost Stories around the building, and Boise city historian Brandi Burns has pointed out that none of it appears in any record. The theater is still a working venue, so the way in is a ticket to a concert, film or Opera Idaho performance.

• Where: 700 W Main St, Boise
• How to visit: Shows year-round, including The Rocky Horror Picture Show on October 31st. Also a stop on the nightly ghost walk
• Visit the Egyptian Theatre website

The turreted chateau at 10th and Main opened as the Idanha Hotel on January 3rd, 1901 with Idaho’s first elevator, and put up Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Ethel Barrymore and Will Rogers over the years. It has been apartments since a 1999 conversion. The best-known story is a bellboy shot by a guest, usually placed in the late 1970s, who now rides the elevator by himself, often to the fourth floor, and peers around corners. Residents have also described a woman’s spirit in the basement, grey figures on the third and fourth floors, and moans from the elevator shaft that historian Rick Just suggests may just be the age of the elevator.

The one death on record is less ghostly and more sad: Alexander Palmer Jacobs, son of pioneer merchant Cyrus Jacobs, fell from a fourth-floor window in 1921. The hotel’s old basement bar is still pouring as 10th Street Station, and its owner, who is often alone there in the small hours, says he has never seen a thing.

• Where: 928 W Main St, Boise
• How to visit: 10th Street Station (entrance on 10th St), Bombay Grill and Guru Donuts on the ground floor; the upper floors are private homes
• Visit the Idaho Architecture Project website

Boise’s second grand hotel opened in May 1910 with a rooftop garden, a stained-glass dome over the lobby (now at the Idaho State Museum) and a men-only basement steak room. It closed as a hotel in 2013 and reopened after a $22 million restoration as apartments, offices and the Owyhee Tavern. The ghosts here are consistently described as calm. The most repeated account is from Room 136, where a couple woke to a woman hovering over the bed and the wife felt only a deep sense of peace; they turned down a room change. A longtime housekeeper described voices, objects vanishing and reappearing, a man walking out of a door that never opened, and elevators arriving empty.

No specific death is attached to any of it. The building is also where the nightly US Ghost Adventures walk meets, so it’s the natural starting point for a haunted evening downtown.

• Where: 1109 W Main St, Boise
• How to visit: Owyhee Tavern and the lobby are open to the public; the ghost walk leaves from here at 8pm nightly
• Visit The Owyhee on the Downtown Boise website

The red brick hall at 6th and Main was built in 1906 for the Boise Turnverein, a German gymnastics and social club, with a 600-seat theater, a gym and a billiard room. The club sold it in 1916 as anti-German feeling rose before World War I and sandblasted its name off the entrance; you can still make out the ghost of the lettering. It has since been a church, a federal aviation office, a print shop and a long run of nightclubs, including China Blue, which closed in 2018 when engineers found the original roof beams failing.

The legend is a traveling actress murdered here in the theater’s early years, in some tellings at the request of a jealous understudy, whose apparition rides the elevator and moves carts and bottles around to rattle the staff. Other versions have a woman falling down the elevator shaft in the 1920s or a girl dying in the elevator. None of it shows up in the historical record, and by the 1920s the building was a church school, not a theater. What is documented is a fatal stabbing inside China Blue in January 2017. Both current clubs are 21 and over and open weekend nights.

• Where: 100 S 6th St, Boise
• How to visit: StrangeLove Fridays and Saturdays, 9pm-2am; Dirty Little Roddy’s Thursdays through Saturdays, 8pm-2am
• Visit the StrangeLove website
• Visit the Dirty Little Roddy’s website

For 111 years the corner of 11th and Main was Hannifin’s, a cigar, beer and magazine shop that closed in 2019 and is now Belmont Barbershop, with the old Hannifin’s sign hanging inside. Its place in Boise ghost lore comes from the night of September 22nd, 1956, when Raymond Snowden killed Cora Dean in Garden City, came downtown, dropped his pocketknife in the gutter in front of the store and went inside to wash up. Police found the knife, and Snowden was hanged at the Old Pen the next year.

Hannifin’s staff talked for decades about footsteps heading toward the bathroom when nobody was there and a man-shaped shadow pacing the floor, and the legend is that Snowden still stops by. It’s a regular stop on the downtown ghost walk, and the easiest haunted building in town to walk into on a Tuesday.

• Where: 1024 W Main St, Boise
• How to visit: Open seven days for haircuts, or just look in from the sidewalk
• Visit Belmont Barbershop on the Downtown Boise website

The 1902 Romanesque corner building at Idaho Street and Capitol Boulevard, with its stepped German brickwork and later pagoda turret, was built for miner and Civil War veteran Richard Adelmann. The story passed between its restaurant tenants is that the basement once housed a brothel and that a working girl was killed there by a drunk customer. A waitress reportedly came in one morning to find the dining room rearranged overnight, and the ghost walk sells the basement for its whispers and growls. It is the thinnest story on this list, told mostly on tours, but the building is handsome and you’ll walk past it anyway.

• Where: 204 N Capitol Blvd, Boise
• How to visit: Ground-floor shops and restaurants during business hours; a stop on the ghost walk
• Visit the Idaho Architecture Project website

Boise’s oldest surviving brick house, built in 1864 on what is now the Basque Block, was home to merchant and mayor Cyrus Jacobs for more than 40 years and then a Basque boarding house from 1910 to 1969. It is now part of the Basque Museum. Museum staff have described hearing someone walking and talking upstairs and downstairs when the house is empty, and the consensus is a friendly presence that doesn’t bother visitors. The Jacobs family connects to the Idanha too: it was Cyrus’s son Alexander who died in the 1921 fall there.

• Where: 607 W Grove St, Boise
• How to visit: Self-guided tours on Saturdays from 11am, included with Basque Museum admission ($7 adults)
• Visit the Basque Museum website

Boise’s oldest ghost story has no building left to haunt. In the first days of January 1916, four men in what was then Chinatown reported a woman in a blue dress, long hair and a white scarf emerging from the alley at 7th and Main around midnight and vanishing. Attorney General Joe Peterson’s St. Bernard, Rover, howled every time she appeared, and an Idaho Statesman reporter who staked out the corner watched the wind whirl snow into a figure. The sightings stopped when Rover was sent to a farm. Rick Just has written it up from the original newspaper coverage, and it opens the 2023 book Haunted Boise. Today the corner is offices and a bank.

• Where: 7th and Main St, downtown Boise
• How to visit: Any time; it’s a street corner
• Read Rick Just’s Blue Lady story

Construction started on July 4th, 1870, the first inmates arrived in 1872 and quarried the sandstone for most of what followed, and the prison closed in December 1973 after a third riot burned several buildings. More than 13,000 people did time here, ten were executed and roughly 129 died on the grounds. The ghost everyone names is Raymond Snowden, called Idaho’s Jack the Ripper by the press for the brutality of the 1956 Cora Dean murder. He was hanged on October 18th, 1957 in the Gallows Room of 5 House, the only execution ever carried out there, and according to the Idaho State Historical Society’s own site manager an improperly tied knot meant it took about 15 minutes. He is buried in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery.

Visitors to 5 House report gurgling and gasping sounds, scratching, cell doors moving, cold spots and hair being pulled. The solitary block called Siberia is known for a heavy sense of dread, and the Rose Garden, where the earlier gallows stood, for headaches and figures tending the roses. Ghost Adventures filmed here in 2008. The Historical Society’s position is that there is no conclusive evidence of ghosts, and that many visitors see and hear things they can’t explain. It is, either way, one of the best historic sites in the state and well worth two or three hours in daylight.

For 2026 the Old Pen’s October lineup, billed as Locktober, is the overnight Sleepless in Stripes (October 10th to 11th, $125, sold out), Behind the Scenes Tours of normally closed buildings on Saturday, October 17th from 6pm to 10pm ($15, free for members, recommended 13 and up), a Paranormal Investigation with Big River Paranormal on October 24th ($45, sold out), and Fright Nights, the Halloween party formerly known as Frightened Felons, with the Terror on Cell Block 4 haunted cell house and a Haunted Infirmary: an all-ages night on Friday, October 30th (recommended 13 and up) and an 18-and-over night on Saturday, October 31st, both 7pm to 11pm and $30. Big River Paranormal’s public investigations run several times a year, not just in October, and sell out within days of going on sale about a month ahead.

• Where: 2445 Old Penitentiary Rd, Boise
• Parking: On-site lot, with overflow at the Table Rock trailhead behind the Warden’s House
• Hours: Daily 12pm-5pm September through May (last entry 4pm); 10am-5pm Memorial Day through Labor Day
• Cost: $9 adults, $7 seniors 60+, $5 kids 6-12, under 6 free; guided tours $2 extra
• Visit the Old Idaho Penitentiary website
• See the Old Pen’s Locktober events

Idaho’s longest-running all-volunteer community theater lost its first home at Gowen Field to a fire in 1956, during a run of The Fifth Season, and two company members died going back inside. The round domed theater on Fort Street, designed by Arthur Troutner, opened the following year, and the company says three spirits came with it, two of them the fire victims. Volunteers leave a light on and a book out in the wardrobe room for one of them. The reports are gentle: lights that turn themselves back on, sound going muffled in one spot, faces in windows and shadows in doorways. The stage manager has called them really super nice ghosts, and Western Idaho Paranormal came away from an investigation with shadows and unexplained sounds.

• Where: 100 E Fort St, Boise
• How to visit: Buy a ticket. The 39 Steps runs October 9th through 24th, 2026, and A Little Princess opens in late November; tickets from $33
• Visit the Boise Little Theater website

The Army established Fort Boise in 1863, and its small cemetery in the foothills above today’s VA campus holds 247 soldiers and family members, most of them moved uphill in 1906 when the original plot flooded. Burials ended in 1913. A KTVB crew visiting with a paranormal investigator recorded a voice saying Jerry within half an hour, and regulars describe a child seen and heard among the graves, a soldier standing guard near the flagpole, and the odd tug on a ponytail. It is quiet, free and open in daylight, with the Military Reserve trails right there.

• Where: 1101 Mountain Cove Rd, Boise
• How to visit: Sunrise to sunset, free. Park at the Military Reserve trailheads
• Visit the City of Boise cemeteries website

The 1942 neo-Gothic building that started life as Boise Junior College’s student union, where Friday night dances were held, is home to the campus’s best-known legend. The story, documented in the student paper as far back as 1975, is that a 1940s student named Dinah was stood up at a dance and took her own life in a second-floor restroom. Since then students and staff have reported crying in the stairwell, a piano playing by itself, the name scrawled on chalkboards and mirrors, and lights and computers switching on and off. KTVB first aired the story in 2003, a paranormal group has investigated for KIVI, and in 2025 students turned the building into a Dinah-hosted haunted house that drew 300 people. There is no record that any such death happened.

• Where: Boise State campus, off University Dr near the Morrison Center
• How to visit: An academic building, so the halls are open during the school day; it is not a tourist site
• Read the KTVB story

Boise’s big concert hall is only 40 years old, which hasn’t stopped it. In the Center’s own 2022 Halloween post, the director of production described standing alone on the main stage and hearing an upstairs door open, footsteps cross the catwalk and a second door slam with nobody up there. Longtime staff say the stage lights flickering is Harry Morrison, the late namesake, fussing with the lighting board. It is one source and it is the venue’s own, so take it in the spirit it was offered.

• Where: 2201 W Cesar Chavez Ln, Boise
• How to visit: Attend a show; the Broadway and concert calendar runs all season
• Visit the Morrison Center website

The 1889 brick building on 12th Avenue South has been a butcher shop, a Chinese laundry and a Prohibition speakeasy, and has been Pete’s since 1945. Its basement connects to the tunnels under downtown Nampa. KTVB devoted an Idaho Afterlife segment to it: regulars touched by nobody, voices in empty rooms, ashtrays sliding, the TV changing channels on its own, a mylar balloon that kept drifting back to the owner’s face, and a woman in a long dress seen by the side door. Four men who tried to spend a night in the back room called the Cave gave up before morning. Psychics who have been through claim four spirits, some of them tied to the tunnels. It is a working neighborhood bar, so go for a beer and ask.

• Where: 11 12th Ave S, Nampa
• How to visit: Open daily, 21 and over. The building was listed for sale in 2024, so call ahead
• Read the KTVB Idaho Afterlife story

The day trip on this list. Idaho’s oldest hotel was built in Ruby City in 1863, hauled by oxen to Silver City in 1866, closed in the 1940s and slowly restored starting in 1972. The owners talk openly about cold spots, orbs in the hallways, a well-dressed man in tails, children playing marbles out front and Screaming Alice, a woman in white who fell down the third-floor stairs. Guests in Room 27, where a former owner died, report odd sensations, and two men were shot on the front steps in an 1868 gunfight. TripAdvisor has named it one of the most haunted hotels in the country. Silver City sits about 70 miles southwest of Boise in the Owyhee Mountains, the last 20-plus miles on gravel, and the hotel is open roughly Memorial Day through mid-October, so this is a summer and early fall trip. Rooms, meals and the saloon are all available; rates are by phone.

• Where: Jordan St, Silver City, Owyhee County
• How to visit: Seasonally, late May to mid-October. Reservations at (208) 583-4104
• Visit the Idaho Hotel website

US Ghost Adventures runs the one tour that goes year-round: a one-hour, one-mile walk leaving The Owyhee at 8pm nightly, rain or shine, with stops at the Idanha, the Egyptian, the Adelmann Building, Belmont Barbershop and the Basque Block. All ages, $26, EMF meter rentals if you want to play along. Photos are fine, video isn’t, and the route isn’t great for strollers.

• Where: Meets at The Owyhee, 1109 W Main St, Boise
• Cost: $26
• Visit the US Ghost Adventures website

The trolley’s 90-minute Halloween route runs select October nights at 7pm, with stops that have included the Old Pen and Pioneer Cemetery. It’s all ages, recommended for 12 and up, and sold out in 2024, so book early.

• When: Select nights through October 2026, 7pm
• Cost: $22
• Visit the Boise Trolley Tours website

The Nampa Downtown Association’s 90-minute guided walk through the city’s grim early years, from murders and disasters to the Chinese tunnels, with a stop at the site of Nampa’s first mortuary. It’s 18 and over and meets at Lloyd Square.

• When: October 29th at 7pm and 7:30pm; October 30th and 31st at 7pm, 7:30pm and 9pm
• Where: Lloyd Square, 13th Ave S, Nampa
• Cost: $20, online only
• Visit the Downtown Nampa website

Historian Mark Iverson, co-author of Haunted Boise, leads a two-hour adult-themed walk through the city’s murders, hauntings and misfortunes, meeting at the old Assay Office on Main Street. Dates are scattered through the year rather than clustered in October, and he also does a Haunted Places and Tales of Idaho talk at Voodoo Cellar each fall.

• Where: Meets at 210 W Main St, Boise
• Cost: $25 to $30
• Visit the Idahistory website

Voodoo Cellar’s theatrical ghost-story night, 65 seats per show, with admission, three cocktails and a charcuterie board bundled in.

• When: October 29th at 6:30pm; October 30th at 3pm, 6pm and 9pm
• Where: 200 N Capitol Blvd, Boise
• Cost: $99
• Visit the Voodoo Cellar website

The Historical Society’s longtime partner runs overnight investigations at the penitentiary several times a year, rotating small teams through five to seven buildings from about 9pm to 2am. They are $45, 18 and over, capped at 50 people and sell out fast; tickets open roughly 30 days before each date. The 2026 October date is gone, so watch the Old Pen events page for the next one.

• Where: Old Idaho Penitentiary, 2445 Old Penitentiary Rd, Boise
• Cost: $45
• Visit the Old Pen paranormal investigations page

Let’s Roam sells an app-guided downtown ghost tour for about $13 that you can walk any time. The City of Boise publishes free walking-tour PDFs for Pioneer Cemetery on Warm Springs Avenue and Morris Hill Cemetery on Latah Street, both open sunrise to sunset. And if you want the stories with their newspaper sources, pick up Haunted Boise by Mark Iverson and Jeff Wade (The History Press, 2023) or, for kids, The Ghostly Tales of Boise by Anna Lardinois.

• Visit the Pioneer Cemetery walking tour page
• Visit the Morris Hill Cemetery walking tour page