On an October evening, when the storefronts along Fairfield Avenue go dim and the streetlights take over, a small crowd will gather in front of a building at 119 Fairfield Avenue in Bellevue, Kentucky. They will not be there for dinner or a drink. They will be there to hear about the dead.
Boo in the Vue, the city's free guided ghost walk, returns on Friday, October 16, 2026, from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. The tour begins promptly at 119 Fairfield Avenue, and there is no ticket, no reservation, and no fee. Participants are asked to arrive before the start time, wear comfortable walking shoes, and dress for an outdoor October night. From there, historians Jim and Bev McPhail lead the group through the Fairfield Avenue historic district, stopping at spots that residents pass every day without ever knowing what supposedly happened there.
The walk is the work of two people who never set out to become the keepers of Bellevue's ghost stories. Jim and Bev McPhail are Navy retirees who moved from Connecticut to Bellevue in 2017 and bought an old house in the Fairfield Avenue Historic District. Curious about what they had purchased, they began digging into the property's history. That research turned into a habit, then a pursuit, and eventually into helping friends and neighbors trace the histories of their own old houses.
That instinct, the willingness to comb through old records and newspaper clippings until a building gives up its past, is what makes the ghost walk more than a Halloween novelty. The McPhails are not actors in costume. They are the people who did the reading.
The event itself has become a small Bellevue tradition. Local coverage shows it running in late October in 2024 and again in 2025, each time as a free, open-to-the-public tour of roughly ten stops, each time starting from the same address on Fairfield Avenue. The 2025 version was billed as a ten-stop walk through ghost stories and urban legends, with the added invitation to grab a BED cup, the open-container cup tied to Bellevue's Entertainment District, and stroll the avenue with a drink in hand before the tour began. The format has stayed consistent: a free evening walk, led by locals, built on stories that belong to the town.
Fairfield Avenue is a fitting stage for it. The street is the commercial spine of a city incorporated in 1870, sitting about three miles from Cincinnati across the Ohio River, and it remains the main business thoroughfare for a town of roughly 6,000 people. The Fairfield Avenue Historic District runs along that spine from 201 Fairfield Avenue to O'Fallon Avenue, covering about twenty acres built out mostly between 1920 and 1955, according to local real estate and preservation writing. Bellevue holds two historic districts in all, and the concentration of old architecture, combined with a wave of renovation and preservation, is a large part of why Southern Living named Bellevue the most charming small town in Kentucky. The magazine described it as blending city convenience with the yesteryear charm of historic Kentucky river towns.
After dark, that charm reads differently. The same facades that look quaint in daylight become the backdrop for stories about what may or may not still be walking the halls behind them. The McPhails' tour leans into that shift, mixing hauntings and chilling events with the urban legends that have attached themselves to specific addresses over the decades.
Among the stories the walk is known to include is the case of Pearl Bryan, and it is the darkest thread in the tour. Bryan was a young pregnant woman from Greencastle, Indiana, whose decapitated body was found on a farm in the Highlands near Fort Thomas, Kentucky, on February 1, 1896. The killing became a national sensation, covered in daily newspapers across the country through that winter and spring and, for a time, rivaled the Lizzie Borden murders for the label of crime of the century. Her head was never found, and the case inspired multiple folk ballads that carried her name well beyond the Ohio Valley. More than a century later, the story remains largely a Northern Kentucky memory, which is precisely why it belongs on a walk like this one: it is local history that has faded almost everywhere except here.
That is the quiet argument the McPhails make simply by leading the tour. Bellevue's past is not confined to plaques or museum cases. It is in the buildings people eat in, the storefronts they shop, the blocks they drive through without a second glance. A ghost walk is an excuse to look again, and to hear the parts of the record that never made it into the official version.
The organizers frame the evening as something for everyone, longtime residents and first-time visitors alike, history enthusiasts and people who just want a good ghost story. The pitch is hard to argue with. It costs nothing, requires no planning beyond showing up on time, and ends within the hour. What it offers in return is a version of a familiar street that most people have never been given.
Anyone planning to attend should arrive at 119 Fairfield Avenue before 7:30 p.m. on October 16. The walk steps off promptly, and the guides will be waiting out front.