This story is part of our October 2025 issue. To read the print version, click here.

Shannon McCabe peers out from the Delta King, seeing its bow touched in twilight and gangplank lost in turning shadows. Her friend Wendy Russell leans over the deck’s edge to watch a dead emerald tide gliding out towards the sundown. McCabe is widely known for hosting her eponymous Vampire Ball, a sumptuous spectacle of Gothic pageantry where acrylic fangs, blood-colored wine and live music electrify a nocturnal tribute to immortal wandering.

Her annual fright festival happens this year on Saturday, October 25. But right now, watching dusk draw on the 98-year-old planks of the mighty paddleboat, that is not what’s on McCabe’s mind. Her thoughts are drifting back to when she and Russell led ghost tours through Old Sacramento’s cavernous bones of the frontier.

Back then, the pair organized private walking excursions, though a few times they procured a black hearse that could drive some eight attendees into the darker thoroughfares.

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“I loved the folklore,” McCabe admits, glancing at the ship’s red wheel warming in the floodlights. “I loved the stories. I loved to go around and tell people strange things that have happened to me and my friends as we walked through these darkened hallways of the Delta King, or down into the alleys of Old Sac.”

I’m having a glass of wine with McCabe and Russell outside of the Delta King’s Pilothouse restaurant, the original grand dining room, now a bar and restaurant adorned in intricate stained-glass windows depicting life on the Sacramento River. It’s one of the best vantage points for seasonal festivities along the waterfront, including the Yuletide boat parade. I ask McCabe and Russell why the 280-foot vessel from the days of Prohibition is one of the first hits that comes up whenever Googling “haunted Sacramento.”

“There are two apparitions that show up regularly here on the Delta King,” McCabe says. “One is a girl who’s 8 to 10 years old, with long blond hair and wearing a full-length cotton dress. She’s seen running through the halls and hiding and giggling from guests and workers, usually on the second floor.” Child-size footprints have also been spotted on the ship’s deck in the morning dew.

“The other apparition that’s seen is a middle-aged man in a light button-up shirt with dark pants, who’s wearing a Navy blue cap,” McCabe notes. “He’s seen in the early morning hours wandering the lobby and hallways. Sometimes employees have experienced phantom energy, like hearing a glass break near the mystery theater room, then finding nothing broken anywhere.”

Such reports show why paranormal tourism has been a steady draw for Sacramento’s waterfront over the years. Now that McCabe and Russell are focused on other projects, a newer company called US Ghost Adventures is offering narrated tours of the same neighborhood. Its guides usually have their walking groups stop at the Delta King.   

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Between glasses of chardonnay, McCabe asks our waiter if he’s ever experienced anything bizarre or uncanny at work. The young man responds that his supervisor refuses to go to the bottom of the ship alone. In fact, he adds chattily, if his supervisor has to go anywhere on the Delta King that’s not in its restaurant or within view of people, she makes another employee follow her. He says that’s because employees have heard a little girl talking or singing in parts of the boat that no one has access to.

McCabe and Russell raise their eyebrows at me and smile.

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The streets of Old Sacramento have similar tales after experiencing a steady stream of death. In August of 1850, city officials and a faction of rebellious settlers were involved in back-to-back gunfights that killed nine men, including Sacramento’s first assessor, J.W. Woodward, and its first sheriff, Joseph McKinney. Then, a few months later on Halloween, local newspapers warned that “the Blue Death” — cholera — had arrived on the river docks. More than 800 Sacramentans would die in the next three months.

Real events are entwined in ghost traditions. I’ve learned by taking paranormal-themed tours throughout the country and in Europe that the longer a neighborhood has existed and the more generations have passed through it, the deeper the strata of memory baked into its walls and streets. Ghost tourism is really about treading on the most intense elements of an area’s legacy — conditions so extreme that we can imagine forlorn and poignant echoes reverberating from them.

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McCabe says that one night in 2009, she had her own encounter with the inexplicable. While prepping for her Vampire Ball in an Old Sacramento basement bar, a watering hole now called Honey and the Trapcat, which is at the original street level (Old Sac was raised 15 feet after a catastrophic flood in 1862), she could hear someone following her around, even though she knew she was alone. Others have reported seeing a woman from another time disappear right in front of them at that same bar.

Now, watching McCabe and Russell sip wine at sunset, it’s clear that their love affair with the dim shades bending beyond the boat are cemented by history and possibilities. “All I can think of is what it was before I walked on those grounds,” Russell admits. “For me, it’s the fascination of what’s beyond the present world.”

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