GolfWRX readers, I need to level with you. I have a guilty pleasure beyond golf: the paranormal. Ghost stories, haunted houses, the whole deal. And this month feels like the perfect time to come clean and mash both obsessions together.
What I’ve discovered over my years in the game is that some of the world’s most beautiful golf courses have genuinely dark histories. I’m not talking about clubhouse legends someone made up after their third scotch. These are documented hauntings, some going back centuries. And whether you’re a believer or a total skeptic, there’s something deeply unsettling about these places. That creeping feeling that maybe, just maybe, you’re not playing alone.
Victoria Golf Club: The April Ghost
Golfers at Victoria Golf Club in British Columbia have been seeing the same ghost for almost 90 years. A woman in white at the seventh hole. Her name was Doris Gravlin, and she was murdered there on September 22, 1936.
Doris was 30, a nurse who’d left her husband Victor two years earlier because of his drinking. That September evening, he convinced her to meet him at the golf course. He said he wanted to reconcile. Five days later, when neither of them had been seen, a caddy searching for a lost ball found Doris’s body near the seventh tee. She’d been beaten, strangled, and dragged down to the beach. A few weeks after that, Victor’s body washed up on the same shoreline. One of Doris’s missing white shoes was tucked in his coat pocket. Police ruled it a murder-suicide.
The hauntings started almost immediately. Doris most often shows up at dusk, wearing what appears to be a white wedding dress. She’s especially active in spring (March and April), which is how she got the nickname “The April Ghost.” There’s even a local legend that if you ring the brass bell between the sixth and seventh holes three times, you’ll summon her.
And people have seen her. Walking through cars on the road beside the course. Sometimes rushing toward people with her arms outstretched. In 1977, some high school kids rang the bell and watched a glowing figure float across the grass. Decades later, that image is still “very much ingrained” in their memories, according to interviews.
The club’s made peace with it at this point. Staff joke that “Doris is playing tricks on us” when things go wrong. I mean, what else can you do?
Lincoln Park Golf Course: Playing Over 20,000 Graves
Lincoln Park Golf Course in San Francisco has killer views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific. It also has a deeply disturbing secret: you’re literally playing over the remains of up to 20,000 people who were never properly relocated.
Back in 1868, when this area was still remote, the city established Golden Gate Cemetery here. Immigrants, sailors, Civil War soldiers, the poor: they all ended up buried in this soil. But San Francisco grew fast. The living needed the space the dead were occupying. So in 1901, the city banned burials within city limits and ordered all remains moved to Colma (now known as “the city of the dead”).
Wealthy families could afford to relocate their loved ones. Poor families couldn’t. And the city flat-out refused to move its potter’s field.
Between 1914 and 1917, when they expanded the golf course, workers just built directly over thousands of forgotten graves. Historians now estimate 10,000 to 20,000 people are still down there beneath the fairways. That makes it one of the largest collections of 19th-century skeletal remains in the Western United States. During heavy rain years, bones still surface. When the Legion of Honor museum expanded in the 1990s, workers uncovered the remains of 578 adults and 173 children. They finally got properly exhumed and reburied.
The paranormal stuff here is wild. Golfers report perfectly struck balls just vanishing mid-flight or dropping straight down out of the sky for no reason. Random cold spots on calm days. That persistent feeling of being watched. The 18th hole sits right over the old cemetery and gets the most activity. Some people think the spirits are pissed about having their rest disturbed. Others think they’re just trying to get acknowledgment: proof that they lived and died in San Francisco, even if the city forgot about them.
Baltusrol Golf Club: Where “Old Balty” Still Roams
Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield Township, New Jersey, has hosted nine U.S. Opens. Jack Nicklaus played here. Phil Mickelson. But the club’s named after a murder victim who might still be wandering the fairways.
On February 22, 1831, a farmer named Baltus Roll was dragged from his bed by two men who were convinced he had hidden treasure somewhere on his property. They beat him, tied him up, and threw him into a pool of freezing water. Then they dunked him over and over again, demanding that he tell them where the money was. His wife managed to escape and ran for help. By the time she got back, Roll was dead. Whether he refused to talk or just didn’t have any treasure to give up, nobody knows.
Sixty-four years later, in 1895, some businessmen bought the property and opened a golf club. They named it after the murdered farmer. And pretty soon after that, the hauntings started. Groundskeepers started seeing a figure in old-fashioned farming clothes walking through the morning mist, looking for something. Members began calling him “Old Balty.”
He doesn’t seem dangerous. Just sad. He shows up most often near the first tee of the Lower Course, close to where his farmhouse used to be. When he’s around, people feel this sudden, intense cold. The clubhouse has its own weirdness too: doors opening and closing by themselves, footsteps in empty hallways, occasional full-on apparitions of a guy in 1830s clothes staring out toward the course, looking absolutely heartbroken.
The activity ramps up around February 22nd, the anniversary of the murder. And because the whole tragedy is so well-documented in court records and old newspapers, Baltusrol is one of the most verifiable haunted golf courses in America.
Pasatiempo Golf Club: Where Alister Mackenzie Rests
Most golf course ghosts are tragic figures. Not this one. At Pasatiempo Golf Club in Santa Cruz, California, the ghost is someone who actively chose to spend eternity there: legendary architect Alister Mackenzie.
Dr. Mackenzie designed some of the most iconic courses in golf. Augusta National. Cypress Point. Royal Melbourne. But he considered Pasatiempo his masterpiece. When it opened in 1929, the course had these dramatic elevation changes winding through rolling hills with breathtaking views of Monterey Bay. Mackenzie loved it so much that he built his American home right along the sixth fairway.
When he died on January 6, 1934, Mackenzie had one request: scatter his ashes over the sixteenth green at Pasatiempo. He wanted to be part of his greatest creation forever. And he got his wish. More literally than anyone expected.
Within months, greenkeepers were reporting sightings of this distinguished older gentleman in old-fashioned clothing walking the course. He’d examine the contours of the sixteenth green, then just fade away. Members kept spotting someone matching Mackenzie’s description: a tall guy with a distinctive mustache, wearing knickers and a flat cap. But here’s the thing: unlike scary ghost encounters, people feel honored when they see him. Like they’ve been visited by golfing royalty.
There’s this detailed account from the 1980s about a member putting on the sixteenth green who noticed a man in vintage golf clothes watching him intently. “He was smiling, like he approved of how I was reading the break,” the golfer said. After sinking the putt, he looked up to say something. Gone. The pro shop later confirmed, based on old photographs, that it was Mackenzie.
His ghost seems totally peaceful, just checking on his course. Some people think he’s making sure renovations respect his original vision. During one major project, equipment kept breaking down on the sixteenth green. Finally, the project manager jokingly apologized out loud to “Dr. Mackenzie” and promised to honor the design. The problems stopped.
City Park Golf Course: Echoes of Tragedy
New Orleans is hands down America’s most haunted city, so, of course, its golf courses have terrifying stories, too. City Park Golf Course, one of the nation’s oldest public courses, has a haunting so vivid that golfers keep calling 911.
The legend centers on the 18th green. The details are fuzzy, but supposedly, back in the 1960s, a man shot and killed a woman while she was putting out. And the echoes of that moment have never really faded. Dozens of golfers report hearing a gunshot followed immediately by a woman’s blood-curdling scream. The sounds are so realistic that people literally abandon their rounds and call the cops, totally convinced they just witnessed a murder.
When police show up, there’s nothing. After this happened multiple times, local police started recognizing City Park calls as ghostly phenomena rather than actual emergencies. One golfer described it like this: “We heard a sharp crack like a gunshot, then this scream. Not a startled yelp, but a full-throated scream of terror and pain. It sounded maybe thirty yards away. We all just froze. There was nothing there. The ranger told us we weren’t the first people to report it. I’ve never gone back.”
Some golfers also report seeing a ghostly figure behind the eighteenth green. A woman in old-fashioned clothes, translucent or misty, appearing for a second before she fades. Theories vary. Maybe she’s the murdered woman, trapped replaying her final moments. Or maybe she’s a witness who can’t move on.
Despite all this (or maybe because of it), City Park stays popular. The course is legitimately excellent and affordable, with beautiful tree-lined fairways and challenging water hazards. But when you approach the eighteenth green, the vibe changes. People report feeling watched or sensing this unexplained tension in the air. Some golfers rush their final putts, desperate to get out of there. Others pause and pay silent respect to whoever might’ve died on that spot.
Local ghost tour companies now include City Park in their routes, especially around Halloween. They actually encourage people to stand near the eighteenth green at dusk and listen for the ghostly gunshot and scream echoing across the years.
Look, I can’t tell you whether these hauntings are real paranormal activity, psychological suggestion, or just weird natural phenomena nobody can explain. But here’s what I know for sure: these golf courses offer way more than birdies and bogeys. They’re reminders that beautiful landscapes often hide forgotten tragedies and restless spirits.
So next time you’re lining up a putt and feel this inexplicable chill, or catch movement from the corner of your eye on an empty fairway? Maybe don’t dismiss it so quickly. You might not be playing alone.
PGA Professional Brendon Elliott is an award-winning coach and golf writer. You can check out his writing work and learn more about him by visiting BEAGOLFER.golf and OneMoreRollGolf.com. Each Thursday, check out his regular column “Playing Through” on R.org.
Editor’s note: “My Take” is where Brendon shares his thoughts and opinions on various aspects of the game and industry. These are Brendon’s opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of GolfWRX, its staff, and its affiliates.
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