“I think it’s just a good time, walking and chatting and finding out what this town used to be,” Jones told SFGATE. “It’s a different way to walk through town. They’re walking around and thinking, ‘Oh, this is where so-and-so got shot,’ or ‘Oh, I never knew that happened here.’”

The walking tour began in 2009 as a fundraising event to support various charitable organizations around town. But in 2014, the event founder gifted the fundraiser to Trails & Vistas, a nonprofit that facilitates opportunities for Tahoe communities to experience visual and performing arts in nature. Each tour lasts approximately 90 minutes, during which guests visit six to eight businesses and buildings around Truckee to hear tales of Truckee’s early days or, in many cases, watch costumed reenactments celebrating some of Truckee’s more nefarious characters. 

That includes gangster George Nelson — better known as “Baby Face” Nelson — and frontierswoman Carrie Pryor — whom the Truckee-Donner Historical Society refers to as a “lady of the night” — said to haunt some of downtown Truckee’s older buildings. According to local historical societies, Nelson lived at the infamous CalNeva for a short time in 1932. Soon after, Nelson’s mugshot was released to the public, and he went on the lam, driving through Truckee on the way out of town. Supposedly, a good Samaritan sheriff unaware of Nelson’s fugitive status offered him a warm place to sleep, which just so happened to be the Truckee jail.

As for Pryor, a woman with as much of a devil-may-care attitude as any of Truckee’s outlaws, there’s no record of her sleeping in Truckee’s jail. But there are reports of her appearing occasionally within the walls on Jibboom Street, the former site of Truckee’s brothels and the location where she escaped unharmed from a vigilante shootout. 

Tours are led by docent volunteers. But if someone is up for a challenge, Jones welcomes them to learn all about a Truckee historical figure and then guide the tour as that figure; one of the Trails & Vistas board members usually leads groups as dancer Lola Montez of California’s Gold Rush era. “During guide training, we tell them they can just make up a character, someone who would have lived here, and create a history,” Jones says. “But if you’re going to be a person out of real history, you better get to know that history. ‘Cause some people that come, they know Truckee history, and they’re going to drill you.” 

“Most of the writing is more humorous, entertaining — but for me, I also want it to be historically correct,” Jones says. “You can throw in a little bit of fun stuff to enhance the story, but basically, we tell the history.”

Each stop on the tour features a 10-minute (or so) vignette at a local business. Jones has a writer she returns to year after year to create the scripts based on either historical characters or the physical location of the stop, if it’s a historical site. She says they’ll always try to base the story on a real-life event that happened near the business. During past tours, residents have stopped at Truckee’s first doctor’s office, as well as a historic home used as a flophouse during the Great Depression.

Organizers search old newspaper archives to find a name or interesting historical detail connected to the site and then create a script from there. While Jones describes most of the scripts as “entertaining and humorous,” she always tries to find one or two tied to history or with an extra scare factor. The first thing Trails & Vistas asks potential hosts on the tour is whether they know of any unearthly or hair-raising happenings within the walls — or, better yet, if they’ve experienced any inexplicable phenomena themselves. 

That’s led to a variety of stops over the years in buildings that may be legitimately haunted, including the tiny “Squeeze Inn,” housed in a building more than a century old. The popular brunch restaurant is supposedly haunted by the ghost of Toby, a spectral forever guest with a penchant for adjusting the lights; staff have reported the feeling of being watched after closing time. 

Guests have also stopped at an old railroad loading dock in downtown Truckee, near the current-day “Drink Coffee, Do Stuff” storefront. Though it looks fairly nondescript by day, the old alley was a storage space to pile goods being shipped west — including the bodies of men who fell victim to both workplace accidents and workplace “accidents” while toiling in the Sierra’s lawless mining and logging camps. 

Stories told on the tour are designed to bring guests back to Truckee’s early days, back when gunslingers would fight behind alleys and locals and shopkeepers would watch from wooden porches and storefronts. Lawmen were just as likely to commit crimes as to prevent them, and the whiskey and “Tarantula Juice” — a mix of wood-grain alcohol and watered-down strychnine poison with a methamphetamine-esque effect — never stopped flowing. Jones knows it’s this rough-and-rowdy history that appeals to ticket-buyers anxious to hear some of the town’s more over-the-top stories. 

In the late 1800s, Truckee had a reputation for being a popular whistle stop along the transcontinental railroad, serving as a pit stop for men working in nearby mining or logging operations to rest for a few days between jobs. With a convenient mix of saloons, hotels and probably a few opium dens, Truckee became the 19th-century version of a Sin City for nearby company towns like Hobart Mills, which had banned both alcohol and saloons. And it didn’t hurt that the frequent trains chugging through town made it easy to get out of Truckee in a jiffy, should someone need to outrun the law. It stayed like that for decades to come. 

“Prohibition pretty much didn’t exist in Truckee, for the most part,” Jones says of Truckee in the 1920s. “There was one man, Dave Cabona. He was known as ‘the Godfather.’ He would know the Prohis were coming and give everybody a heads-up.” 

View of the New Whitney House hotel in Truckee between 1904 and 1918; the Whitney building, which serves as the starting point for the historical tour and current-day site of Moody’s Bistro Bar & Beats and the Truckee Hotel in 2023. (California State Library/Suzie Dundas/SFGATE)
View of the New Whitney House hotel in Truckee between 1904 and 1918; the Whitney building, which serves as the starting point for the historical tour and current-day site of Moody’s Bistro Bar & Beats and the Truckee Hotel in 2023. (California State Library/Suzie Dundas/SFGATE)

Given that several of Truckee’s downtown buildings were likely speakeasies, stories about Cabona and his ilk can take place at almost any location. But Jones says despite having only a handful of stops, finding the right businesses to serve as stops can be tricky. A business isn’t a good candidate for a stop just because it’s in the downtown area, she says. It has to have some tie to history or a notable Truckee character and, potentially, a tie to the year’s theme. In the past, the tour has focused on stories around the railroad or legends about the Freemasons, a centuries-old historical order tied to everything from politics to the occult. The building also has to have enough space for visitors and actors. 

“Sometimes we may only be able to fit two actors in the space,” Jones says on casting the volunteer actors. “So it has to be the right people, the right actors. Some people can play any role — they can be a quirky salesman or a doctor. And some people, I look at ‘em, and I can tell, ‘Oh, you get to be Machine Gun Kelly. You’ve just got that aura.’”

There are roughly 20 actors per year, spaced between the different historical stops, and occasionally a barbershop quartet or local beer tasting thrown in for good measure. The hot-ticket event starts and ends at Moody’s Bistro Bar & Beats, which also happens to have a historical connection — the building is the old Whitney House stagecoach hotel from the 1890s. Moody’s also hosts a silent auction and raffles. Combined with the tours themselves, Trails & Vistas has raised anywhere between $16,000 and $31,000 from the event, which primarily funds the organization’s art-in-nature field trips for local students.  

However, the tours are 21 and over — and not just because Alibi Ale Works is often a generous event supporter. It’s not unusual for stops to be in basements or other dark areas, and while most of the stories have a humorous twist, there’s always one that will make attendees think twice the next time they hear a floorboard creek or tree branch tap against a window. Jones says that’s on purpose, and she has one longtime actor who writes his own scenes and will always ensure the night isn’t without one or two unexpected moments. 

“He puts the ‘haunted’ in haunted tour,” she says.