Columbia’s Haunted Lantern Tour is a non-profit, community theatre with over 50 volunteers. This immersive living history performance is a unique blend of theatrical and historical narration, incorporating an original script annually. Each fall, guests are guided by lantern light through historically significant locations – such as the atmospheric Mount Bethel Cemetery.
History comes alive before your eyes as you encounter costumed actors portraying historical figures who don’t just tell stories – they live them. Each character speaks as if they are experiencing a significant moment in history in real time, drawing you into the drama, triumphs, and turning points that shaped the past. You’ll witness their most personal struggles and monumental victories, emotions, and decisions that shaped their existence. This isn’t just a tour – it’s a visceral journey through human experience, where every step immerses you deeper into the forgotten past.
Proceeds from the tour benefit different areas of the community, such as small businesses, charitable organizations, and other theater and art groups. Our goal is to educate and entertain by bringing Columbia, Pennsylvania’s unique and powerful history to life.
Article in TownLively.com ~
“History Will Glow in Lantern Light” – by Cat Shannon – September 23, 2025
Our 2025 Haunted Lantern Tour
Tour Dates and Times – October 10, 12, 17, 18, and 19. Tours leave every half hour, beginning at 6:30 pm.
Ticket prices – $25.00 each. Special rates for groups of 10 or more are now available!
Location – Tours leave from St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, located at 616 Locust Street, in Columbia, Pennsylvania.
Venue – Mount Bethel Cemetery
Reservations ~ Call Holly at 717-587-5368 or click the button below.
Annual Themes ~
2025 | FATALITY’S LAST STAND
Through grief and grace, this tour explores the cost of epidemics, the stigma of disease, and the quiet strength of human compassion.
Join us for an immersive lantern-lit journey through Mount Bethel Cemetery. This one-hour historic walking tour weaves together fragile threads of life and death, through powerful, poetic monologues. Each character embodies a moment in time shaped by illness, misfortune, or the invisible forces of public health crises, giving voice to the silenced and forgotten.
Hear the stories of souls claimed by typhoid, tuberculosis, diphtheria, Spanish flu, and tragic misfortune – each revealing the heartache, fear, and resilience that shaped their final days.
Part historical reflection, part lyrical lamentation, Fatality’s Last Stand is a poetic reckoning with the past – and a fierce promise to the future. For those who bore witness. For those who endured. And for those brave enough to remember.
This is . . . Fatality’s Last Stand.
2024 | THE AFFLICTED
Exploring the agonies of love, longing, loss, and grief.
2023 | CIVIL WAR
The most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history.
2022 | INDUSTRY ASCENDING
Reveling in the stories of visionaries and entrepreneurs.
2021 | UNFORTUNATE EVENTS
Invoking the spirits left behind by history’s tragedies.
2020 | AUTHENTIC ILLUSIONS
Columbia’s history of bewitching tales, superstitions, and haunting lore.
2019 | URBAN SPIRITS
A showcase of the stimulating night life of the 1920’s.
2018 | MORTALITY WITHIN
Thousands of lives could be swept away in a matter of months.
2017 | SPIRITS RISING
A resurrection of our ancestors and the awakening of their memoirs.
Columbia's Haunted Lantern Tour 