What’s the deal with the new $5 ‘Dark History’ tour in uptown Charlotte?
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The new one-hour “Dark History” tour uptown shares Charlotte’s dark, strange and sometimes supernatural history. Clad in a homemade costume, tour guide Marie Boucher takes you through tales from the city’s first days to modern times.
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Topics include:
- The Crime of the Century
- Captain James Jack and the Meck Dec
- Charlotte’s secret gold mines
- Settlers Cemetery’s Gray Lady
- Charlotte’s speakeasies
- The ghost of the Carolina Theatre
- Charlotte’s mortgage scams…of the 1770s (mortgages have always been a problem)
- The 1997 Charlotte Bank Robbery
- The Bodysnatching Business in Charlotte
- Headless Louise
Your tour guide, Marie Boucher
Boucher answers questions at each stop and her tidbits make the city’s history come alive. Her stories are fun, engaging and come at you quickly.
She founded RaconTours Charlotte earlier this year after attending a similar tour on a trip to the Florida Keys last year. She gives tours every other weekend and a schedule can be found on the RaconTours Facebook page.
Marie works in data forecasting for a major financial company and also works part-time at the cheese shop in 7th Street Public Market.
She said she’s always been a storyteller with a passion for history and has been combining the two since her early days as a tour guide while an undergrad in Washington D.C., and then later as a park ranger in North Carolina.
Side note: It turns out she and her husband are also building a tiny house, which she hopes to be living in next year.
My Dark Tour experience
We had 10 people in our tour, which Marie said is typical. To be honest, I thought the smaller size made for a better atmosphere.
Tours costs $5 and begin and end at the corner of Trade and Tryon. The best part? Boucher invites attendees to swap stories with her at one of the pubs nearby following the tour.
A city as old as Charlotte has plenty of colorful stories in its past. Thankfully we have a guide like Marie Boucher to tell those tales and make us laugh along the way.