Just can’t get enough of Halloween? You and your family may want to extend the chills and thrills of All Hallow’s Eve into a long weekend or a haunting family vacation. It seems like ghosts abound throughout the year.

Here are my top five haunted vacation destinations:

1. Savannah, Georgia. Savannah was voted America’s most haunted city in 2002 by the American Institute of Parapsychology and offers 30 ghostly tours of homes and cemeteries. The town’s history of the Revolutionary and Civil wars, lynchings, voodoo and murders make for a perfectly chilling place to visit.
2. Alcatraz Island, San Francisco. Many tour companies offer night tours of Alcatraz prison. Even if you don’t see a ghost, the prison is creepy enough in the daytime, let alone on a dark, damp, windy San Francisco evening. Dress warm, the night tour will be chilly and a bit unnerving.
3. Somewhere in your neighborhood. RealHaunts.com lists 46 states with eerie houses, castles, streets, bridges and cemeteries. Pick your state and find a ghostly locale near your home. A search on Washington, my home state, revealed six places where a ghostly presence has been seen or felt. Ghosts seem to inhabit interesting sites, each place usually has its own story to tell, even if no ghosts are found.
4. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Sleepy Hollow was voted the #1 ghostly tour by Haunted America tours. New Orleans tops their list and Galveston, Texas comes in at number two. I prefer to visit their third choice, Gettysburg to see if I can spot a soldier’s uneasy spirit wandering the battlefields and maybe learn a bit more about the bloodiest battle during the Civil War.
5. Stull Cemetery. I think it is worth a trip because of its other name, the Gates of Hell. The site, zerotime.com features a total of thirteen haunted cemeteries around the U.S. Why not create your own tour and visit each of them on a long drive trip around the U.S. this summer?

With just a bit of searching, it is possible to find spine tingling destinations throughout the year. If you do actually experience the paranormal at any of these places, please let me know.

SFMOMA from Martin Luther King Memorial

San Francisco has many wonderful museums, some within walking distance of each other. The mother of them all is the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), a architecturally fascinating building across from Yerba Buena Gardens. Interestingly enough, my kids enjoy the building almost more than the exhibits. Last time we went, we spent a long time on the suspension bridge on the 4th floor, running back and forth, looking down to the lobby below.

Around the corner, on Howard Street, is the California Academy of Sciences in temporary digs while their Golden Gate Park home is being retrofitted. The Steinhardt Aquarium is fascinating all by itself, but my 5 year old thinks the Nature Nest was created just for her!

Across town, near the Palace of Fine Arts, is probably our favorite family adventure in San Francisco, the Exploratorium. We can go and spend the entire day here! My favorite has always been the cow eyeball dissecting exhibit. When the kids were little, I could hardly pull them away from the giant bubble maker; nowadays, my son is fascinated with the science of sports, especially skateboarding, while my daughter likes to spend all her time in the tactile dome. As I said, an entire day’s worth of activities!

Photo courtesy of David Paul Ohmer.