"The historian owes the dead nothing but the truth." -- Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre
This is not just a quote that I admire, it is the standard that I live by. Every book that I have written and every piece of research I have conducted over the course of my writing career, has been guided by this single uncompromising principle.
I write to shed light on the truth — to honor and respect the dead, for those who can no longer speak for themselves, people whose stories deserve to be told accurately and with dignity. This philosophy is the foundation of everything I do with my writing, and it is what compels me to speak out when I see history being fabricated, distorted, or sensationalized for someone else’s gain.
I have spent many years seeking out stories, digging up vital & census records, scouring through probate files, searching old microfilm of century-old newspapers, and cross-referencing land deeds.
I have published six books specializing in various stories within California and North American history, with a particular
focus on uncovering and preserving the authentic stories of people and places
that have been overlooked, misrepresented, or forgotten. I do this work because
these people matter and the truth of those lives matters.
Sadly though we live in a time when the word “haunted” has become trendy, and somewhere in the surge to capitalize on the paranormal, real people are being erased and replaced with fiction.
The Rise of Haunted
Tourism
According to the website Grand View Research, the dark tourism market — the broader industry encompassing travel to sites associated with death, tragedy, and all things macabre — was valued at approximately $31.89 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach nearly $39 billion by 2030. Haunted locations, ghost hunting events, lodgings that advertise as "haunted," and haunted historical tours at various structures and cemeteries represent a rapidly growing segment of that market. This is not a fringe hobby anymore --- This is a multi-billion-dollar global industry.
(https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/dark-tourism-market-report)
Television shows like Ghost Adventures, Ghost Hunters, and many others have spent decades fueling public fascination with “haunted” locations. The Travel Channel effectively reinvented itself around October of 2018, prioritizing their focus on paranormal programming, and social media has only accelerated the trend. Surveys consistently show that somewhere between 40 and 65 percent of Americans believe in ghosts or spirits and a 2023 Pew Research Center study found that 42 percent of U.S. adults believe the dead can communicate with the living.
(https://www.pewresearch.org/?p=69591)
Other types of businesses such as Airbnb have monetized this demand, actively curating and promoting “haunted
stays” where property owners market their homes as paranormal destinations.
Every October, Airbnb releases lists of its “most haunted” listings, generating
massive media coverage and bookings. The paranormal has become a category of
hospitality.
( https://www.travelpulse.com/news/features/here-are-airbnbs-10-spookiest-ghostliest-rentals )
And here is where I want to draw a very important line. There are legitimate historical sites with well-documented, long-established histories — places like Eastern State Penitentiary, the Whaley House, the Missions of California, the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Gettysburg. These are locations where history comes first and the “haunted” element is layered on top of genuine, thoroughly researched narratives. The historical record is respected. The stories told are grounded in documented fact. For some, the paranormal element enhances interest in the real history rather than replacing it.
The problem arises when
someone realizes that “haunted” sells — and decides to manufacture a haunted
history based on conjecture, not facts.
When History Becomes a Marketing Tool
I have seen this pattern
repeat itself enough times to describe it with depressing precision. It works
like this:
A property is purchased with commercial intent. The new owner looks at the building, looks at the market, and realizes that a “haunted” property commands higher nightly rates, more media attention, and a built-in audience of paranormal enthusiasts. A haunted history is fabricated or dramatically embellished and claims are suddenly made about the property’s past that cannot be verified in any historical archive. More damningly, these are claims that can often be disproven with thorough research.
The details that get invented or overembellished are always the same kind: murders, suicides, prostitution, speakeasies, tragic accidents (and at times even witchcraft, especially when you are looking at properties on the east coast).
These details are chosen not because they are true, but because they are salacious!
Then comes the media amplification of this evolving narrative with a local news outlet picking up the story, then comes the podcasters, the radio interviews, travel bloggers write about it, and voila -- the story is set. If the marketing is aggressive enough, a major national publication may include the property on a list. Once a publication like Forbes or Travel + Leisure runs the story, it becomes self-reinforcing. “As featured in Forbes” becomes the proof itself. The circular logic is breathtaking: the fabricated history gets media coverage, the media coverage becomes the evidence for the fabricated history, and the actual historical record is buried under layers of marketing copy.
This is not a theoretical problem. This is happening right now and its been happening for quite some time. This actually happened at a house here in the foothills of the Gold Country not that long ago. Within barely a year of the new owner purchasing the home, this property was included on an exclusive “Most Haunted Places in America” list. Mind you, this is a property that had been a private home with no haunted reputation just sixteen months earlier, now suddenly according to a major magazine is one of the most haunted places in America.
The property owner now markets the business as “one of the most haunted places in America," a credential used to sell overnight stays, paranormal investigation events, and ghost-hunting experiences. The business has expanded from Airbnb stays to ticketed paranormal events. All the while, the reputations and legacies of real people who lived and worked in that house are being distorted for commercial gain.
A woman who ran a small laundry business out of the home nearly 150 years ago, has been turned into a prostitute or madam. A respectable family enterprise (a boarding house) has been turned into a brothel. Real, documented lives have been overwritten with fiction — and that fiction is now the version of history that the public encounters.
I want to return to where I started, because this is the part that matters most to me — not as a researcher, not as an author, but as a human being who has spent her career trying to do right by people who can no longer do it for themselves.
The people who lived in
that particular house in the foothills were real people. The
family who ran the boarding house inside that home woke up every morning and worked. They fed the local miners and laborers. They cleaned the rooms and cooked meals for the workers for a living. These people raised their family in the Mother Lode, where
nothing was easy and nothing was guaranteed. They contributed to the community. The original owner, who was certainly not a madam, deserved better than to have her
life rewritten by a stranger who bought her house a century and a half later.
When someone rewrites
those stories — turning a respectable person into a madam,
inventing suicides and deaths that either never occurred or occurred elsewhere — they are not just
engaging in creative marketing. They are erasing real people by taking a
life that was lived with dignity and replacing it with a caricature designed to
sell overnight stays. They are treating the dead as raw material for a business
plan.
And when major media
outlets amplify those fabrications without verification, they make it
exponentially harder for the truth to be heard. Every time someone searches for
the history of that property, they will find the fabricated version first. The lie will be louder than
the truth, and that is the real damage, and it is damage that compounds over time.
This is why historians exist. Not to be the gatekeepers or to spoil anyone’s fun. We are here to speak for the people who cannot speak for themselves. To ensure that the historical record remains intact. To insist, stubbornly and without apology, that the truth matters more than their marketed narrative.
"The historian owes the dead nothing but the truth." -— Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre
That is the standard. That
is what the dead deserve. And that is what I will continue to fight for — one
archive, one record, one forgotten story at a time.
(Copyright 2026 - J'aime Rubio, www.jaimerubiowriter.com)
J’aime Rubio is a
historical nonfiction author and researcher who has published six books
specializing in California and histories throughout North America. Her work
focuses on uncovering and preserving the authentic stories of people and places
that have been overlooked, misrepresented, or forgotten. She is the creator
of the Stories of the Forgotten series.
