March 14, 2017

Meet Dianna Avena of Roswell Ghost Tour in Historic Roswell

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dianna Avena.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I have been a resident of Roswell, GA since 1989. I grew up an Air Force brat which meant I moved around quite often, never staying in a particular location for longer than three years at a time. I often hear from other military brats who say they thought their experience of moving around a lot was great fun for them. I look back and can appreciate the various places I lived (Wyoming, Arkansas, Greece, Texas, Arizona). Yet throughout my childhood, I yearned to be one of those kids that were still friends with someone they went to preschool with. I vowed to myself that when I grew up and had a say in things, I would pick a great city to live in that I would be happy to plant roots in and stay there. I wanted my kids to have a different experience. I wanted them to love their hometown as much as I would love this “chosen” city, and I wanted them to attend high school with many of the friends they’d known since pre-school.

Well, I have accomplished that. I found the dream city when I became a young adult and had a say in where I called home. Roswell is just twenty miles north of downtown Atlanta and it is currently the sixth largest city in Georgia, having a population at the time of this publication at around 94,000. The Roswell Historic District offers six hundred forty acres of vintage homes, historic sites, museums, monuments, churches and cemeteries, where one hundred twenty two acres are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Roswell is the home of many corporations’ headquarters, booming high-tech and industry businesses, yet manages to keep the small-town, southern hospitality feel, a great sense of community. Roswell boasts a nationally recognized and award winning Parks and Recreation Department and is designated as one of the fifty best places in the nation to raise a family. The city of Roswell has eighteen parks with eight hundred acres of active and passive parkland and facilities. Roswell ranked third in the new book, “Best Places to Raise Your Family: The Top 100 Affordable Communities in the U.S.” Our city received a mention on ABC’s Oprah Winfrey Show as being one of the best small towns in America. Roswell has also been ranked one of the safest cities to live in the U.S. according to city crime rankings.

If I want the big city life, I don’t have far to go to downtown Atlanta. I have culture, great shopping and restaurants all within a short drive, although we also have plenty of it here in our own backyard in Roswell’s city limits too. Our town square is routinely the host of various festivals for the arts, music, food, and storytelling, crafts, entertainment, and health fairs. If I desire hiking, camping and fishing away from it all in the thick of nature, I can have it within a short car’s drive as well. I need to have my beach time on occasion as well, and again, not far away. I can hit Georgia’s coast in four hours. The public school system can’t be beat here and beautiful public parks abound. Roswell’s charm, southern hospitality, and interesting history continue to draw me in. Greek revival architecture combined with a lot of New England influences make this city very unique.

I met my amazing husband here in Roswell. We have three marvelous sons and they were each born in the same hospital in Roswell, GA. We are still in the same school district that my two oldest (now successful adults, still living nearby) began kindergarten in. This is home for me; this is home for my family.

I attended Roswell’s ghost tour in 2000 when it had just begun. At that time it was called Roswell Ghost Talk Ghost Walk and was owned by Jack Richards. Jack is a great friend to us, and is quite an accomplished man. He pioneered the ghost tour industry decades ago in Savannah, GA by creating the very first ghost tour there named Savannah Ghost Talk Ghost Walk. He moved to Roswell at some point where he lived and worked in the historic Roswell Mill Village. As his friends and neighbors learned of the ghost tour he had begun in Savannah, they couldn’t help but to let him in on the ghostly goings on they had experienced in their homes and businesses in Roswell. It didn’t take long for Jack to decide that Roswell was undoubtedly a paranormally active place as well, and it would be a great idea to start a ghost tour in Roswell.

My husband, my sons and I attended the Roswell Ghost Talk Ghost Walk several times before I asked Jack if I could become a guide for him. I couldn’t get enough of the ghostly stories. I was amazed at how the stories were all current ones unlike those I’d heard at other city’s ghost tours. Many of those were decades and decades, even centuries old. At that rate, they most likely get embellished upon over the years and are more “legends” and campfire ghost stories than true paranormal experiences in my opinion. The fact that Roswell Ghost Talk Ghost Walk’s stories were all CURRENT made the tour that much more intriguing to us. Also, there has always been a strong desire to debunk the experiences, find out if there are natural reasons to explain away anything that seemed unexplainable. If there is a way to explain an experience away as having natural reasons for it, then it is explained away and the tour does not incorporate them as ghost stories to share. Also, newer stories are not added, not deemed worthy, unless several different people over several different days or nights experience the same anomaly or paranormal activity. I also recall that I learned much of Roswell’s interesting history solely by attending the ghost tour. I had lived in Roswell for a dozen years before I ever took the ghost tour and I honestly didn’t know a fraction of the history we have here until I took that first tour.

I began as the main guide in 2004 and dove in headfirst into all things paranormal. The timing was right for Jack Richards to move on to other endeavors in late 2005, so we purchased the tour from him and re-named it Roswell Ghost Tour. I have become an avid paranormal investigator; have been featured on television shows and documentaries. I am a frequent guest on radio programs and am a public speaker on the subject of the paranormal as well. I have had the privilege of performing paranormal investigations at most of Roswell’s historic locations. We have experienced first-hand the hauntings at these places and have no doubt that some of Roswell’s past inhabitants haven’t wanted to leave this great city whatsoever.

Welcome to my favorite city in the world. I assure you it’s worth a trip here – and you may never want to leave either.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
We really have had a pretty easy time of things. Every once in a while we would hear of grumblings from someone that has lived in Roswell for many decades who disapproved of “what we were doing.” They worried that our historic city would be viewed by many as simply “haunted.” If anyone has read my book, “Roswell: History, Haunts & Legends,” or taken our tour, they’d know how much we love Roswell, and how much we appreciate its history. We feel perhaps they believe that any place that’s promoted as being “haunted” means that it’s “evil.” One of the things we have always prided ourselves on is the fact that through our tours, we educate about the paranormal. Yes, we tell of Roswell’s history, and of the accounts of unexplainable activity, but nowhere do we do inform and debunk a lot of those “Hollywood” myths that lend towards the attitude that “haunted” means “evil” or “demonic.” The vast majority of time though, we have found that people really embrace the Roswell Ghost Tour as a fun outing, a way to see a historic area of the South, and we see repeat customers all the time. I must also say, that the Roswell Convention and Visitors Bureau/Roswell Visitors Center has been a great supporter of ours, which helps immensely!

Please tell us about Roswell Ghost Tour.
Roswell Ghost Tour has always been year-round. We aren’t a company that pops up every October just for the Halloween lovers. October is definitely our peak month, as it is with all haunted attractions, but we have never viewed ourselves as a Halloween attraction. We come from a place of being paranormal investigators, whose interest in the paranormal certainly is not limited to Halloween. We don’t wear costumes, nor walk the streets with lanterns. We don’t ride in hearses and aren’t the “street theater” kind of ghost tour. Those sorts of tours and attractions certainly have their place, and we enjoy them as well, but that’s not what we are. We are very proud to be in our 18th year as a year-round ghost tour that focuses on promoting education about the paranormal while providing a very enjoyable evening for people of all ages. We have also continued to educate our tour-goers about Roswell’s history, and support many efforts over years to save historic landmarks.

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