Leipzig Haunted Ghost Stories Walking Tour

Augustusplatz and the University

The Leipzig ghost tour begins on Augustusplatz under the massive main entrance of the University, where the words ALMA MATER LIPSIENSIS are carved above the doors. The square has its own dark chapter: in 1968 the intact university church of St. Paul, which had stood here since the thirteenth century, was blown up on government orders, and the glass Paulinum of 2017 now traces its outline. Beside it rise the Opera House, the Gewandhaus concert hall and the City-Hochhaus tower.

Your guide uses the square to set the scene: the Grimma Gate that once closed the city here, the dead buried beneath the former monastery grounds and the professors who, in the 1870s, invited spirit mediums into their laboratories and made Leipzig famous among believers in the supernatural. About fifteen minutes pass here before the group turns into the lanes of the Old Town.

Nikolaikirchhof and the old churchyard

A few minutes away lies Nikolaikirchhof, the quiet square around St. Nicholas Church, the oldest church in Leipzig. Today it is known for the peaceful revolution of 1989, but for centuries it was a burial ground, and the ground beneath the paving still holds the dead of the medieval town. The Old St. Nicholas School of 1512 stands on one side with its stepped gable, and at night the lanterns leave most of the square in shadow.

This is where the gravedigger stories belong: the fear of being buried alive that gripped the city in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the waiting mortuaries built so the dead could prove they were really dead, and the sextons who were said to work faster than they should. The guide tells which of these tales appear in the city archives and which grew in the telling. Allow around fifteen minutes on the square.

Market Square and the Old Town Hall by night

The Market Square is the heart of Leipzig and, after dark, the setting for its grimmest history. The Renaissance Old Town Hall of 1556 is floodlit, but the guide points to the places you do not see by day: where the pillory stood, where sentences were read from the balcony and where the condemned were led out towards the execution ground beyond the walls.

Here you hear about the executioner's family, shunned by the town yet indispensable to it, about the market police who kept order among thousands of fair visitors and about the night a visitor with a sinister reputation left a mark on the city that locals still talk about. The square is also the best point of the walk for photographs of the lit town hall. Plan about fifteen minutes here before the tour enters the passages.

The passages, courtyards and dark corners of the Old Town

Leipzig's covered passages and trade-fair courtyards are bright with shops by day, but at night they become long, echoing corridors with locked gates and pools of shadow. The guide leads you through some of them and into small courtyards that most visitors never notice, explaining how merchants, servants and night workers lived behind the fair houses and why so many stories cling to these walls.

The final stretch brings the demons of the night: legends of restless spirits in the arcades, of a cellar where no one wanted to work and of the figures said to appear in the lanes when the fairs had emptied the city of its visitors. Everything is told outdoors on a flat, step-free route, which is why the walk suits wheelchair users and most ages, though the subject matter is why it is not recommended for pregnant visitors. The tour ends in the city centre around 10 pm, within a few minutes of the tram stops and the main station.