The evening starts in the small showroom at the Greek Isles hotel and casino, where the host, Robert Allen mixes low-rent special effects (fog, flashing lights) and sideshow carnival type acts (bed of nails anyone?) to get you in the mood for what is promised to be a tour of the most haunted places in Las Vegas. What it really gets you in the mood for is snickering under your breath at the silliness of the whole thing. It lasts about 30 minutes and is about 25 minutes too long.

Next everyone is loaded on a bus and the actual tour part of the program begins. According to Allen, and based on information in Janice Oberding’s book “Haunted Nevada,” there are 21 haunted sites in and around Las Vegas. 16 of them are highlighted on the bus ride including (among others) The Las Vegas Hilton where the ghost of Elvis doesn’t walk on Union Avenue but instead trolls the backstage area where he made his famous comeback specials in the late ‘60s; The Stratosphere Tower, location of several particularly gruesome suicides; Bally’s, formerly the MGM Grand Hotel, where more than 80 people died in a fire in 1980; the street corner where rapper Tupac Shakur was gunned down; and the home of comedian Redd Foxx who, if you’re willing believe stuff like this, doesn’t like the new tenants very much.

All of this is interesting, from a purely historical perspective I suppose, but since none of the current occupants of the buildings involved want to have a group of ghost hunters traipsing through freaking out the gamblers, all you get to see is the view from inside a bus. Granted, gaining access to the kinds of creepy locations themselves is probably next to impossible – the folks that run The Stratosphere, for instance, would prefer you didn’t dwell on the thought of people jumping off their building – but the result is that you don’t see anything you can’t see by walking down the street.

Along the way, Allen tells stories about each of the locations and herein is my biggest problem with the “show.” I’ve done a lot of research into the 1980 MGM Grand fire and I can say unequivocally that some of the details of the stories he tells about the event are not accurate. As an example, he talks about all of the people who died jumping from the upper floors of the hotel as the flames advanced on them. In reality, the fire itself was mostly confined to the ground floor and while a few people did jump to get away from the smoke, according to the official Clark County Coroner’s report, only one person died that way.

In no way am I suggesting that Allen is intentionally making stuff up, it’s just that he doesn’t have his facts straight about this particular event. Because this part of the tour happened relatively early on, it caused me to question the details of the stories that followed. I loved the tales of Redd Foxx and his history with a Las Vegas house but after hearing the MGM Grand stuff I don’t know if any of it was true.

Mind you, this completely sets aside the obvious “do you believe in ghosts” question and gets simply to questions of accurate storytelling.

The only place on the Haunted Vegas Tour that even approaches its promise is when the bus stops in front of a deserted house near Wayne Newton’s estate. According to the tale, it was the scene of some sort of gory murder shortly after it was built and this big million-dollar mansion has never had a tenant because everyone who looks at claims to have otherworldly experiences that send them toward the doors before a check can be signed. Sitting there on that dark street, looking at the big gaping dark windows and the overgrown yard, it’s the moment when you want someone to jump out and yell “Boo!” But it doesn’t happen that way, of course. Instead the bus trundles on to the next location and all you’ve wound up looking at is a big empty house, that just so happens to sit directly under the approach for the main runway of McCarran International Airport.

Do I believe in ghosts? Sure. Why not? I’ve worked in enough old buildings and have had enough hard-to-explain experiences that I can’t rule out such phenomena. But what I really believe in is a good ghost story, be it via a movie, a book, or just a well-spun yarn. There’s a reason that horror flicks gross so much money on opening weekend whether they are any good or not. There’s a reason that Stephen King has sold a bazillion books. There’s a reason you used to jump and scream and laugh when you were sitting around the camp fire talking about the hook on the car or the hitchhiker on the deserted highway. People love to be scared. People want to believe in this kind of stuff, if for no other reason than it makes the day-to-day horrors we face a little more palatable.

That’s what is so disappointing about this tour. I wanted a good ghost story and I just didn’t get one.