Chickamauga is a quaint little city in northwest Georgia. Visitors will be treated to lush green pastures, vintage homes, and a walkable downtown area with antique stores, eateries and retail stores.
At the end of the historic district sits the grand Gordon Lee Mansion, which serves as a museum today. As with many historic cities there are also ties to a darker side of history, which seems to linger as a haunting reminder of a lurid past.
Courtney McInvale is excited and ready to teach visitors about all the history and mysteries the city has to offer. She opened Southern Shadows offering ghost walking tours to guests who want to venture into the haunted realm of Chickamauga.
Guests will learn about Crawfish springs where the Trail of Tears began. They’ll hear about the cryptid called Ole’ Green Eyes, described as a supernatural being lurking the local Civil War battlegrounds.
Courtney said it’s more than just a ghost tour. “We are really big on teaching history and honoring history,” Courtney said with enthusiasm. It’s hard not to notice just how passionate she is about history and her work.
“We're trying to embrace quite a few different parts of the past but a lot of it's from the 1800s,” she continued. “We will talk about some Cherokee legends and history, and what the city was like before the Civil War. We will talk about Civil War history. The soldiers, they seem to be the ghosts that people have seen or felt most. Thousands of them died here, so it makes sense that they're wandering all around.”
Pointing to a building one block behind the outdoor patio by her store, Courtney spoke about the old hospital where guests will learn about the typhoid outbreak from the Spanish- American War. She said they’ll also hear some true crime stories and the ghostly criminals that tend to haunt the Cherokee Courthouse.
Courtney is originally from Connecticut where she owns and operates Seaside Shadows, a walking ghost tour in Mystic, Connecticut. It was voted the number three best ghost walking tour in 2024 by USA Today.
Her knowledge and familiarity with ghosts and spirituality goes way back. First, she is a direct descendant of an accused witch. Secondly, her childhood home was reportedly active with lots of paranormal activity.
“Which you hear a lot about now, but it used to be something we didn’t talk about,” she said. “My mother was Irish Catholic and that has its own superstitions and beliefs. She called a priest, and the priest was unable to help, or he got scared and left.”
Her mother managed to contact Ed and Lorraine Warren who even back then were world renown paranormal experts. The couple known for the Amityville Horror investigations and whose lives are depicted in the Conjuring movie series lived in Connecticut. They went to her house to try and cleanse away the problematic spirits.
“I remember at the time I was so embarrassed,” Courtney said. “I lived in a small town, and I didn’t want people to know we lived in a haunted house. We kept things quiet about the paranormal but having that experience, meeting Lorraine, learning about her psychic abilities, was influential to me. It made an impact.”
Courtney eventually finished school and went to college. After college she worked as an analyst for the FBI, but she said she found the job boring. After leaving the FBI she moved to Vermont. It was there where she met a woman who owned and operated a ghost walking tour in Burlington.
“She wrote haunted history stories,” she said with excitement. “That was my dream. I've always had this fascination with the paranormal. I grew up with that history and I also told myself when I was a little girl that I was going to be a writer one day and I thought maybe I can do it.”
Courtney was brave enough to ask the woman for some advice on how to start her own ghost tours. The woman offered some information, and Courtney was not only ready she pounced at the opportunity.
“I went back home, and with the support of my mother and father, who was from Georgia and a history major at UGA, I left my government position. I decided I was going to start a ghost tour and I'm going to write books, and I'll just freelance until that takes off,” she said. “A dream with no plan.”
Fueled by her love of history, her compassion, empathy and nurturing commitment to honor the spirits, especially those of soldiers, her dreams not only came true, but they also flourished.
She opened Seaside Shadows in 2013. She’s authored five books, Haunted Mystic, Civil War Ghosts of Connecticut, Civil War Ghosts of Georgia Volumes 1 and 2, and Revolutionary War Ghosts of Connecticut.
Her extensive knowledge of history, the paranormal realm and cryptids created opportunities as a guest or keynote speaker on several paranormal podcasts, speaking circuits and popular paranormal TV programs on Travel Channel.
And now she is expanding her treasured gifts with her new storefront at 110 A Gordon Street in the heart of the historic downtown section of Chickamauga.
“I wanted another location, and I wanted it to be in Georgia because I've fallen in love with the ghosts in this town,” she said. “There is so much history here and the battlefields are here. It’s tangible.”
In addition to walking tours, Courtney said she plans to offer special events, hosting guest investigators and authors, scavenger hunts, cemetery tours, full moon rituals and events and she’s hoping to develop a trolley tour in the future. She also plans to have investigative equipment visitors can rent or buy to use during the tours.
Bookings for her tours can be done safely and easily online. The tour covers roughly half a mile and is 90 minutes.
Southern Shadows
- 110-A Gordon Street, Chickamauga, GA
- Visit: www.southernshadows.com