ghost tour in stockholm

Last Updated on March 15, 2018 by

Stockholm Ghost Walk & Historical Tour

Stockholm Ghost Walk is one of the most popular guided tours in town. It’s a great way to learn more about Stockholms history and its darker past.

✓Ghastly ghosts ✓Old Town legends ✓Unsolved mysteries ✓Gruesome murders ✓Horrifying diseases ✓Interesting history ✓Excellent guides

If you’ll only take one guided tour while in Stockholm, make sure it’s this one. Stockholm Ghost Walk is very popular and the tour has excellent ratings from previous participants.

We recommend that you book in advance . Thanks to our partnership with Viator, you’re guaranteed to get the best possible price.

Stockholm Ghost Walk - book your ticket

Time and duration

The tour starts early in the evening, from Järntorget in the Old Town, and it lasts for about one and a half hour. You’ll find the exact time, together contact information, on the booking confirmation/voucher you get from Viator.

The perfect location for a ghost tour

The Old Town is the historic heart of Stockholm, and it dates all the way back to the 13th century. During the years it’s narrow alleys and cobble stone streets have seen it’s fair share of frightful events.

There’s been the mass executions known as Stockholm Bloodbath, plague epidemics, murderers and, well, a bunch of more or less well known ghosts.

What to bring

Comfortable walking shoes – the streets are old and bumpy – and clothes suitable for the current weather. An umbrella if there’s even the slightest chance of rain. This tours takes place in any weather.

Is it ok for kids?

The tours is actually not too scary, but the organizers advice against bringing children under the ages of eight.

If you have any questions about this tour or about traveling to Stockholm, feel free to send us a message at [email protected].

(If you’ve already made a reservation for this tour and have a question regarding that, please contact Viators customer service.)

Local expert, travel writer (visited 50+ countries), and I've been living in Stockholm for more than 20 years. My mission with this travel guide is to give you the best possible advice for your visit to Stockholm and to share tips on my own personal favorites in this beautiful city.

Stockholm Ghost Walk and Historical Tour

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The original ghost walk and historical tour in Stockholm! Join a walk steeped in history and bring to life stories of legends, diseases, murders, and mysteries.

Järntorget 84

Fans are following Taylor Swift to Europe after finding Eras Tour tickets less costly there

LONDON (AP) — Thousands of ride-or-die  Taylor Swift  fans who  missed out  on her U.S. concert tour last year or didn’t want to buy exorbitantly priced tickets to see her again found an out-of-the-way solution: Fly to Europe.

The pop star is scheduled to kick off the 18-city Europe leg of her  record-setting Eras Tour  in Paris on Thursday, and planeloads of Swifties plan to follow Miss Americana across the pond in the coming weeks. The arena where Swift is appearing said Americans bought 20% of the tickets for her four sold-out shows. Stockholm, the tour’s next stop, expects about 10,000 concertgoers from the U.S.

A concert might sound like an odd raison d’etre for visiting a foreign country, especially when fans can watch the Eras Tour from home via the  documentary now streaming  on Disney+. Yet  online travel company Expedia  says continent-hopping by Swift’s devotees is part of a larger trend it dubbed “tour tourism” while observing a pattern that emerged during Beyoncé's  Renaissance world tour .

Some North American fans who plan to fly overseas for the Eras Tour said they justified the expense after noticing that tighter  restrictions on ticket fees  and resales in Europe made seeing Swift perform abroad no more costly — and potentially cheaper — than catching her  closer to home .

“They said, ‘Wait a minute, I can either spend $1,500 to go see my favorite artist in Miami, or I can take that $1,500 and buy a concert ticket, a round-trip plane ticket, and three nights in a hotel room,” Melanie Fish, an Expedia spokesperson and travel expert, said.

That was the experience of Jennifer Warren, 43, who lives in St. Catharines, a city in the Niagara region of Ontario. She and her 11-year-old son love Swift but  had no luck scoring  what she considered as decently priced tickets in the U.S. Undeterred, Warren and her husband decided to plan a European vacation around wherever she managed to get seats. It turned out to be Hamburg, Germany.

“You get out, you get to see the world, and you get to see your favorite artist or performer at the same time, so there are a lot of wins to it,” said Warren, who works as the director of research and innovation for a mutual insurance company.

The three VIP tickets she secured close to the stage — “I would call it brute-force dumb luck” — cost 600 euros ($646) each. Swift subsequently announced six November tour dates in Toronto, within driving distance of Warren’s home. “Absolute nose-bleed seats” already are going for 3,000 Canadian dollars ($2,194) on secondary resale sites like Viagogo, Warren said.

TOUR TOURISM: IS IT REALLY A THING?

Hard-core fans trailing their favorite singer or band on tour is not a new phenomenon. “Groupie” emerged in the late 1960s as a somewhat derogatory word for the ardent followers of rock bands. Deadheads took to the road in the 1970s to pursue the Grateful Dead from city to city.

More recently, music festivals like California’s Coachella and England’s Glastonbury, and concert residencies in Las Vegas by the likes of Elton John, Lady Gaga and Adele, have attracted travelers to places they wouldn’t otherwise visit, Fish noted.

Travel and entertainment analysts have also spoken of a pent-up consumer demand for “experiences” over material objects since the coronavirus pandemic. Some think the  willingness of music lovers  to broaden their fandom horizons is part of the same mass cultural correction.

“It does seem like it’s more than a structural shift, maybe a personality transformation we all went through,” said Natalia Lechmanova, the chief Europe economist for the Mastercard Economics Institute.

As  Swift hopscotches  across Europe, Lechmanova expects restaurants and hotels to see the same boost that Mastercard observed within a 2.5-mile (4-kilometer) radius of concert venues in the U.S. cities she visited in 2023. The U.S. dollar’s strong value against the euro may also increase retail spending on apparel, memorabilia, beauty products and supplies for the friendship bracelets fans exchange as part of the Eras Tour experience, the economist said.

Former college roommates Lizzy Hale, 34, who lives in Los Angeles, and Mitch Goulding, 33, who lives in Austin, Texas, already had tickets to see the Eras Tour in L.A. last summer when they decided to try to get ones for Paris, London or Edinburgh, Scotland, too. They saw a Europe concert trip as a makeup for travel plans they had in May 2020 to celebrate Goulding’s birthday but had to cancel due to the pandemic.

Goulding managed to secure VIP tickets for one of Swift’s three Stockholm shows. He, Hale and two other friends scheduled a 10-day trip that also includes time in Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

“As people who enjoy traveling and enjoy music, if you can find an opportunity to combine the two, it’s really special,” said Hale, who is pregnant with her first child.

FOR STOCKHOLM, 120,000 SWIFTIES CAN’T BE WRONG

The local economic impact of what the zeitgeist has termed “Swiftonomics” and the “Swift lift”  can be considerable . It’s no wonder the exclusive arrangement Singapore’s government made with Swift to make the city-state her only tour stop in Southeast Asia earlier this year aroused  regional jealousy .

No European governments have complained of their countries not being among the dozen selected for the Europe leg of the Eras Tour, although some fans have expressed surprise that Gelsenkirchen, a city with a population of about 264,000 is one of the three cities in Germany that made the cut.

Airbnb reported Tuesday that searches on its platform for the U.K. cities where Swift is performing in June and August — Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cardiff and London — increased an average of 337% when tickets went on sale last summer.

Not to be outdone when it comes to trend-spotting,  the property rentals company  cited the demand as an example of “passion tourism,” or travel “driven by concerts, sports and other cultural events.”

In Stockholm , 120,000 out-of-towners from 130 countries -- among them 10,000 from the U.S. — are expected to swarm Sweden’s capital this month, Stockholm Chamber of Commerce Chief Economist Carl Bergqvist said. Stockholm is the only Scandinavian city on Swift’s tour, and airlines added extra flights from nearby Denmark, Finland and Norway to bring people to the May 17-19 shows, he said.

The city’s 40,000 hotel rooms are sold out even though prices skyrocketed for the tour dates, Bergqvist said. Concert visitors are expected to pump around 500 million Swedish kroner, or over $46 million, into the local economy over the course of their stays, an estimate that does not include what they paid for Swift tickets or to get to Sweden, he said.

“So this is going to be huge for the tourism sector in Sweden and Stockholm in particular,” Bergqvist said.

Nightclubs, restaurants and  bars  are seizing the opportunity to cater to fans with Taylor Swift-themed events, such as karaoke, quizzes and after-concert dance parties.

Houston resident Caroline Matlock, 29, saw Swift more than a year ago when the Eras Tour came to the Texas city. Now she’s making more friendship bracelets and trying to learn a few words of Swedish as she prepares to see the 3 1/2-hour show in Stockholm. The idea of seeing Swift in Europe was her friend’s, and Matlock needed some persuading at first.

“I was like, ‘I only want to go if it’s a country I haven’t been to. I’ve seen Taylor Swift,’” she said.

Visiting the Scandinavian cities of Oslo and Gothenburg is on their itinerary. The concert is the last night of the trip and Matlock looks forward to interacting with Swifties from other countries: “Americans tend to have a very obsessive culture, especially Taylor Swift-related, so I’m curious if the crowd will be more toned-down.”

WILL TOUR TOURISM ENDURE AFTER ERAS?

It remains to be seen if the music tourism trend has legs as long and strong as Swift’s and Beyoncé's, and if it will carry over to Billie Eilish, Usher and other artists with world tours scheduled next year. Expedia’s Fish thinks other big-name artists in Europe this summer will prove that booking a foreign trip around a concert is catching on.

Kat Morga, a travel consultant based in Nashville, isn’t so sure. Morga saw Swift perform in Nashville last year and helped two clients with school-aged children book European family vacations this summer that include seeing Swift in concert. But she thinks the difficulty of navigating ticket purchases through language barriers, currency conversions, international banking regulations and the risk of cancellations will limit the appeal of regular gig getaways.

“I think this is an anomaly,” Morga said. “People aren’t typically going to build their $20,000 huge family vacation only because Taylor Swift is there. She’s the one-off. She’s special.”

Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel, whose company operates Booking.com , priceline.com , agoda.com , Kayak and OpenTable, is even less enthusiastic about concert tours as a tourism instigator. The Swift Effect causes a “little blip” when the superstar goes to smaller destinations, but for the worldwide travel industry, “one star touring around does not make a difference,” he said.

“It may just shift it a little bit. A person was going to go to the Caribbean for a week vacation. Instead that person (says), ‘Let’s travel to the Taylor Swift thing,’” Fogel said. “It doesn’t increase it. It just moves it from here to there.”

AP journalists Colleen Barry in Milan, Chisato Tanaka in Stockholm, Anne D’Innocenzio in New York, David Koenig in Dallas, Thomas Adamson in Paris and Brian Melley in London contributed reporting.

Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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Book a private Ghost Guide

Book your own guide (or guides) for an historical ghost tour in the old town, on Södermalm or the island Riddarholmen. We can also come to your birthday, grand opening, mingle party or hen party and tell you stories about our scary and gruesome history.

Murder on the Menu (will hopefully start in 2022 again)

Join us on a murder mystery night. During a 3 course dinner you have to solve a murder. Who did it, why and how? You will work in small groups and the group who solves the mystery first wins a price.

Murder On Board

Same as Murder on the Menu but this time you will be out on the sea.

Ghost Walk and wine tasting

Combine an historical ghost walk with wine tasting in the German church old tomb.

Children´s birthday party

Why not scare your children with a 60 minutes historical ghost tour?

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