The lantern light flickers across a century-old log cabin wall, an EMF meter clicks softly in the dark, and somewhere in the silence between questions, something answers back.
This is not a haunted house attraction. It is a real, hands-on paranormal investigation held inside one of the Kawarthas’ most storied historic sites, and for one night, you are not just a visitor watching from behind a velvet rope. You are part of the team.
The Public Paranormal Investigation, presented by Kawartha Settlers’ Village and The Paranormal Seekers, has quietly become one of the most talked-about experiential events in the Kawartha Lakes region, and for good reason: it blends genuine Ontario pioneer history with a guided, evidence-based ghost hunt led by a team that has been doing this professionally for over two decades. If you have ever wondered what it would feel like to walk through a 19th-century settlement after dark with a spirit box in hand, this is the event that turns that curiosity into an actual itinerary.
What Is the Public Paranormal Investigation at Kawartha Settlers’ Village?
The Public Paranormal Investigation is a guided, after-hours paranormal research event held inside the historic buildings of Kawartha Settlers’ Village in Bobcaygeon, Ontario.
Small groups of up to ten guests are led by The Paranormal Seekers, a professional investigation team, through the Village’s preserved 1830s-to-1930s structures, using real ghost-hunting equipment and investigative techniques to search for evidence of unexplained activity.
The event runs from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., with doors opening at 6:45 p.m., and is restricted to guests aged 16 and older.
Unlike a scripted haunted attraction where actors jump out from behind corners, this is closer to a working paranormal field investigation that the public gets to participate in directly. Guests are not simply spectators trailing behind a costumed guide reciting ghost stories. They are handed a role in the process itself, whether that means holding an EMF detector as it spikes near a doorway, listening to a spirit box for a response to a direct question, or simply sitting quietly in a darkened log home while the group waits to see what happens next.
This is exactly what has made this event resonate so strongly with both lifelong ghost-hunting enthusiasts and total newcomers who have only ever watched paranormal shows on television.
The event takes place across multiple dates throughout the 2026 season, including May 16, July 17 and 18, and August 28 and 29. Each date operates as its own self-contained investigation night, meaning you do not need to attend every session to get the full experience; a single evening at the Village delivers a complete, structured tour of the site’s most reportedly active buildings.
The Ghosts of Kawartha Settlers’ Village: A Brief History of the Hauntings
To understand why Kawartha Settlers’ Village makes such a compelling paranormal investigation site, it helps to understand what the Village actually is.
Established in 1990 and now operated by the Kawartha Region Arts and Heritage Society, the site was once a working family farm before it was transformed into a heritage village preserving more than 20 historic homes and buildings relocated from across the region.
Together, these structures tell the story of pioneer life in the Kawarthas between 1830 and 1935, complete with original furnishings, tools, and household artifacts donated by local families over the decades.
That relocation history is, according to The Paranormal Seekers, part of what makes the Village so paranormally active. Pioneer villages like this one are assembled by physically moving log cabins, schoolhouses, and homesteads from their original locations to a central heritage site, a preservation method used at similar living-history museums across Ontario, including Black Creek Pioneer Village and Lang Pioneer Village.
The team’s own investigation notes for Kawartha Settlers’ Village observe that it is not only the buildings that appear to have made the journey; visitors and staff have reported the sensation of being watched, unexplained noises, and unaccounted-for movement scattered throughout the property, activity the team attributes to former occupants who may have travelled along with their childhood homes.
This theory, sometimes called “residual haunting through relocation” in paranormal research circles, is a recurring theme at heritage villages across the province, and it is one reason The Paranormal Seekers specialize specifically in historic locations rather than modern buildings. A structure with 150-plus years of continuous domestic use, family loss, hardship, and daily ritual simply carries more documented human history than a building built in the last few decades, and that density of lived experience is precisely what paranormal investigators look for when selecting a site.
With more than 20 individual buildings on the property, each with its own construction date, family history, and relocation story, Kawartha Settlers’ Village effectively offers investigators more than 20 separate potential hot spots within a single evening, which is part of why the event structures its format around exploring several buildings rather than parking the group in just one.
Meet The Paranormal Seekers: Two Decades of Investigating Ontario’s Most Haunted Places
Credibility matters in the paranormal investigation space, where the line between genuine research and theatrical entertainment can blur quickly.
The Paranormal Seekers were founded in 2004 by Rachel, alongside co-founder Jay and a handful of early members, with the stated goal of investigating the paranormal, making local history more engaging, and driving tourism back into the communities surrounding their home base in Durham Region.
Their very first major investigation took place at the historic Parkwood Estate in Oshawa, one of Canada’s last remaining grand early-20th-century estates, and the team has spent the two decades since building a reputation as one of Ontario’s more established and media-recognized paranormal groups.
Over the years, the team’s portfolio has grown to include investigations of cemeteries, museums, theatres, courthouses, jails, inns, and dozens of heritage villages stretching from Niagara Falls to Kingston to Prince Edward County and beyond, with several cross-border trips to notably active locations in New York State as well.
Their public profile has included appearances on the Marilyn Denis Show in both 2019 and 2022, and ongoing educational presentations for public libraries and seniors’ centres throughout Durham Region, the Kawartha Lakes, and Peterborough. That combination of field experience, media scrutiny, and public-facing education is a meaningfully different résumé than a pop-up ghost tour operator that formed for a single Halloween season.
What separates a group like The Paranormal Seekers from a purely entertainment-driven haunted attraction is the approach: they describe themselves as a scientifically grounded research and investigation team, meaning the emphasis stays on documentation, technology, and technique rather than staged scares.
That approach carries directly into how the Kawartha Settlers’ Village event is run, with real investigative equipment deployed in every building on the tour rather than a handful of props scattered around for atmosphere. For guests, this translates into an event that feels less like a haunted maze and more like being deputized, for one evening, into an actual working investigation team.
What to Expect During Your Investigation Night
Arrival and structure matter a great deal at an event like this, and the organizers have built a format designed to keep the experience organized without sacrificing the sense of exploration.
Guests are asked to arrive 15 minutes before the official start time, meaning a 6:45 p.m. arrival for the 7:00 p.m. start, which gives the team time to check guests in, go over safety and equipment basics, and split the evening’s attendees into their assigned group.
Because each session is capped at a maximum of 10 guests, everyone gets meaningful hands-on time with equipment rather than watching a single microphone get passed around a crowd of forty people.
Once the investigation begins, your group stays together as a single unit for the full three hours, moving from building to building rather than splitting off independently, which keeps the night cohesive and ensures a Paranormal Seekers investigator is present with your group at every stage.
Each building on the route receives roughly 25 minutes of dedicated investigation time, long enough to set up equipment, run a session, and actually sit with the silence rather than rushing through. Midway through the evening, the group takes a scheduled 10-minute break, a practical touch that keeps energy and focus high across the full three-hour window rather than letting the experience drag by the final building.
Equipment is used inside every building along the route, and guests are actively encouraged to participate rather than simply observe from the sidelines. Depending on the location and the investigators leading that session, this can include EMF meters that detect fluctuations in electromagnetic fields, spirit boxes that rapidly scan radio frequencies in search of vocal responses, digital recorders used to capture electronic voice phenomena (EVP) that are inaudible in the moment but sometimes appear on playback, and simple question-and-response sessions conducted quietly in the dark.
Because the buildings at Kawartha Settlers’ Village range from small pioneer cabins to larger communal structures like schoolhouses and churches, the acoustics, temperature, and atmosphere shift noticeably from stop to stop, which keeps each 25-minute segment feeling distinct rather than repetitive.
Across North America, Paranormal Tourism Events Are Booming
If it feels like ghost hunting and haunted history tours have moved from niche hobby to mainstream weekend activity, the data backs it up.
According to market research firm Grand View Research, the broader dark tourism sector, which includes paranormal and haunted-history travel, was valued at roughly $31.8 billion in 2023 and continues climbing steadily as travelers seek more experiential, story-driven outings over passive sightseeing.
Within that larger category, ghost tourism specifically has become one of the fastest-growing segments; industry analysts at Growth Market Reports placed the global ghost tourism market at approximately $2.1 billion in 2024, with projections showing it could more than double by the early 2030s as interest in immersive, participatory experiences continues to accelerate.
Public appetite for the supernatural is a major driver behind those numbers. A 2024 RealClear Opinion Research survey found that a notable majority of Americans, 61.4%, said they believe in ghosts, and even more conservative polling from Ipsos put belief in the range of roughly four in ten adults. Whatever the exact figure, the underlying trend is consistent across nearly every recent survey: belief in and curiosity about the paranormal is widespread, not fringe, and it spans age groups, genders, and regions far more evenly than most people assume.
Streaming platforms have amplified this further, with paranormal investigation shows keeping ghost-hunting techniques like EVP sessions, spirit boxes, and EMF readings in the cultural mainstream well beyond their original cable-television audience.
That cultural momentum is translating directly into ticket sales for heritage sites willing to pair their historic buildings with a genuine investigative experience. Communities built around dark and paranormal tourism, such as Salem, Massachusetts, and Savannah, Georgia, now see ghost tours and paranormal events contributing up to 20% of local tourism revenue in some seasons.
For a heritage village like Kawartha Settlers’ Village, which typically operates as a family-friendly daytime museum from May through September, an evening paranormal event represents both a meaningful revenue stream that helps fund ongoing preservation work and an entirely new audience segment that might never have visited during regular museum hours.
It is a model more heritage sites across Ontario are beginning to adopt, and Kawartha Settlers’ Village, working alongside an established investigation team, is doing it with more structure and credibility than most.
Tickets, Dates, and Everything You Need to Know Before You Go
Tickets for the Public Paranormal Investigation are priced at $45 per person, and the event is strictly limited to guests aged 16 and older, a restriction common to after-dark investigation events given both the mature subject matter and the need for participants who can remain quiet and focused during sensitive listening sessions.
Because each date caps attendance at just 10 guests, spots fill up quickly once a date is announced, and the organizers are direct about this scarcity: this is not a mass-attraction event built to process hundreds of visitors a night, it is a genuinely small-group experience.
The 2026 season includes five dates in total: May 16, July 17, July 18, August 28, and August 29. The August 28 date and its companion evening on August 29 round out the summer season, giving guests two back-to-back opportunities in late August if one date does not fit your schedule or happens to sell out first.
Because availability shifts constantly for a capped-attendance event like this, it is worth checking the official ticket listing directly or joining the waiting list if a specific date shows as temporarily unavailable, since spots do periodically open up as the event date approaches.
The Village itself is located at 85 Dunn Street in Bobcaygeon, Ontario, roughly a two-hour drive northeast of Toronto and well within reach of visitors from Peterborough, Lindsay, and the broader Kawartha Lakes cottage region. For anyone planning to make a weekend of it, Bobcaygeon sits at the heart of the Trent-Severn Waterway and offers no shortage of nearby accommodations, restaurants, and daytime attractions to pair with an evening investigation.
Guests coming from farther away may want to consider booking nearby lodging in advance, particularly during peak cottage season in late August when accommodation in the Kawarthas tends to fill up well ahead of the weekend.
Why A Ticket to the Public Paranormal Investigations at Kawartha Settlers Village Is Worth It
There is a meaningful difference between paying for a haunted attraction designed purely to startle you and paying to take part in an actual paranormal field investigation guided by a team with two decades of documented experience.
The Public Paranormal Investigation at Kawartha Settlers’ Village offers something increasingly rare in the entertainment landscape: a genuinely small-group, hands-on experience where you are not a passive audience member but an active participant handed real equipment inside a genuinely historic setting.
This is closer in spirit to a private tour than a typical ticketed attraction, and that intimacy is exactly what allows for the kind of quiet, focused investigation that produces the most compelling moments.
For history lovers, the appeal works on two levels at once. You get an after-hours walk through a preserved 19th-century settlement that most visitors only ever see in daylight, paired with the layered storytelling of a professional investigation team who has spent years researching the people who once lived in these exact buildings.
For paranormal enthusiasts, it offers a rare chance to use real investigative tools inside a site with a documented history of reported activity, guided by a team credentialed enough to have appeared on national television and in print media.
Few events manage to satisfy both audiences at once, but pairing a heritage museum with an established investigation team does exactly that.
Given the limited number of dates remaining in the 2026 season and the hard 10-guest cap per evening, waiting to decide is the biggest risk to actually getting a spot. Checking the official ticket page for current availability, or exploring the full Public Paranormal Investigations series listing for all remaining 2026 dates, is the fastest way to see what is left before the season wraps.
