Strolling Through the Past
Stephanie Chandler’s walking tours take locals and visitors on a journey through Tallahassee’s rich—and haunted—past
As a child, Stephanie Chandler never groaned in disgust when her parents booked family vacations at historical sites. As far as she was concerned, stories about Revolutionary-era Boston, Amish Country, and other locales held as many exciting twists and turns as the average theme park rollercoaster. Now, as founder of Storied Paths, a historical walking tours business, Chandler shares riveting stories about Tallahassee’s little-known past with locals and tourists alike.
“I think what resonates with people is when a building that they pass by all the time and don’t know anything about suddenly comes alive,” Chandler says. “So, when you connect the daily and mundane to something new and exciting, that’s what people like. I have a lot of people at the end of my tours telling me, ‘Oh gosh, I’ll never drive through here and look at that building the same way again,’ or, ‘I’ll be sure to keep looking for that ghost,’ and things like that. When we hear stories like these and make connections with other people or places, then they suddenly become important to us, and we want to take care of them.”
Chandler credits her parents for giving her a passion for the past. Chandler spent the first decade of her life in Michigan, before her parents moved her and her younger sister to the Jupiter area for high school. After graduation, Chandler pursued a bachelor’s degree in religion at Florida State University because she was curious about the interplay between cultures and faith. Degree in hand, she returned to Jupiter to work at Burt Reynolds’ Backstage Restaurant. It was fun at first, she says, and very fast-paced, but it was no place to indulge her growing interest in apocalyptic movements and millennialism. She returned to FSU earning a master’s degree and completing doctoral coursework. However, once she married and became a mother of two, she noticed that her interests began to change.
“I completed the doctoral program but chose not to finish my dissertation,” she says of her decision to stay at home with her children. “I know a lot of women can make that work, but it was too much for me. I thought I would go back and finish at some point, but I had been doing all this work in ancient history and on ancient groups and found that I was becoming more interested in American history.”
Life doesn’t always work out the way you think it will, she says. But she has no regrets about the way things have unfolded for her. As her children became teenagers, Chandler began thinking about what her own next steps might be, the closer she got to empty-nesterdom. During the height of the COVID pandemic, Chandler reflected on her longstanding love of history tours and realized that Tallahassee had plenty of overlooked history worth sharing. She had put together informal trips for friends who had visited her over the years (“I put stuff together because I’m kind of a nerd, and that’s okay,” she laughs), so she had the framework there for something more formal. She just needed a little bit of encouragement.
“Our backyard became the gathering place for some of our friends during the pandemic,” she recalls. “We’d sit around the fire pit, six feet apart, talking about how life was going and wondering when things would get back to normal again. There we were around the fire pit, and I asked, ‘What about a ghost tour in Tallahassee? We don’t have one, and I really miss that.’ My friends got really excited about it, and it made me want to move in that direction.”
And move she did. In December 2022, she approached the Tallahassee Downtown Improvement Authority about her ghost tour idea, and they were so enthusiastic about it, they asked her whether she could start the very next day. Chandler wasn’t quite ready yet. She researched starting a business of her own and gave her first tour as founder of Storied Paths in February 2023. Chandler began with three different types of tours: Ghosts and Grim Tales, Tallahassee Black History, and Historic District Homes—and added a Downtown Tallahassee Food Tour in February 2025. But she says more offerings are on the horizon.
“I feel like our history has not gotten the recognition that it deserves, and the importance of Florida in American history has often been overlooked,” she says. “There are just so many characters in Florida history.”
Tallahassee began as a pretty rough town, she says, so it’s likely she’ll tell you a story or two about duels on one of her tours. Chandler loves a good duel story or a haunted tale, like the one about the ghosts of Westcott Fountain at FSU. The fountain rests on ground where the town’s most notorious criminals were hung in the 1830s.
“That story isn’t on the FSU tour, so it’s a fun one to tell to kind of shock people,” she says, with no shortage of delight. “Probably the scariest ghost story I tell is about the student who was struck by lightning at Cawthon Hall. The campus rumor is that on a stormy night, she’ll show up at your window, screaming to be let in.”
Not all her stories are this chilling. Chandler loves delving into the city’s civil rights history. One of her favorite tales is about Florida A&M students Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, who started a local bus boycott in 1956.
“Frankly, Tallahassee had a very deep civil rights movement, and yet we don’t do a lot as a city to celebrate it or tell those stories,” she says. “I mean, why don’t we have a Civil Rights Museum here? We’re a state capital, and so much legislation came through here.”
It’s a valid question. And, as Chandler’s business continues to grow, she hopes to partner with area history students for help in expanding her repertoire and the types of tours she gives. Little by little, she’s making her mark.
“What I’m really trying to do is just teach history in a way that’s fun and accessible and not intimidating,” she says. “Because I really do think, at our core, we all want to feel like we are connected to something that’s bigger and deeper.”
To learn more, visit: storied-paths.com
