“When I was little, I was fascinated with the Loch Ness Monster and strange things like that, and I wanted to turn it into a career,” Stewart said.

He calls himself a folklorist and tradition bearer, as well as a curator of what he calls the Original Provo Ghost Tour.

Stewart says he spent years collecting over 400 pieces of folklore and stories and — some centuries old — from all over Utah.

As opposed to doing traditional research online or spending hours combing through books to gather tales of the great beyond, Stewart said he prefers to get information by talking to humans who may or may have experienced a ghost encounter.

Courtesy Danny Stewart

“I want their own personal narratives, and I want to talk to the people who claim to have these experiences. Say you’re dealing with one specific ghost in one specific location, each employee may have a different relationship with that ghost,” Stewart explained.

Around 2011 during his time as an adjunct instructor of humanities through the arts at Utah Valley University, Stewart started doing a ghost tour for his students, who would follow him around areas of downtown Provo as he narrated a backstory filled with haunting encounters.

“I would have like 190 people — their families, their boyfriends, girlfriends, their children — coming on this tour. I felt like Moses dragging all these people around downtown Provo,” Stewart said.

Since then, he’s polished it into a two-hour walk along a 1-mile stretch of Provo’s Center Street, where he’s gathered tales about several well-known landmarks and businesses along the thoroughfare.

“So people at these businesses, they may or may not believe in their ghost, but the stories exist,” said Stewart, who gave the example of employees working at a Provo pharmacy who claim to have encountered “something strange.”

But though his tours deal with supernatural subject matter, Stewart wants to make it clear that he is by no means a paranormal investigator.

The tour looks to educate and entertain — or, as Stewart says, “edutain” — those who dare go along for the spooky stroll by blending storytelling with community engagement.

Stewart said the tour isn’t necessarily about proving the existence of ghosts, though he hopes to create awareness with participants about the stories in their own communities — or, in some cases, right in their backyards.

“Think of it like this … these stories, ghost stories, monster stories, whatever, they’ve been around for centuries,” Stewart explained. “And are we to assume all of this is untrue, that there’s no such thing as ghosts? Are all of our ancestors imbeciles?”

Stewart said attendees will come away from the tour enlightened on the spooky history lurking around Provo, though his approach is different than what people may expect, because he’s not trying to inject fear into anyone with his stories.

“These tours are meant to educate people, and it’s not supposed to scare people,” Stewart told the Daily Herald. “I’ve spent my whole life digging into this because I felt an instinctual need to seek this stuff out as a historian, as a folklorist, but most importantly, as a community member, because people enjoy this stuff.”

Ghost tour tickets can be purchased for $20 at https://tinyurl.com/huvz3scp.

Tour dates are set for the remainder of October.