Every October, Phoenix tells its ghost stories again. Some begin with a real loss, some with an eccentric builder, and one with a sack of gold that has never been traced. Here are four of the city's best, and the history behind each.

The best known begins downtown. When the Hotel San Carlos opened at Central Avenue and Monroe Street in 1928, it was the city's first high-rise hotel with air-conditioning, built in just 10 months. Hollywood came to stay. Mae West, Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe are remembered with terrazzo stars on the sidewalk outside.

In May 1928, seven weeks after the opening, a 22-year-old guest named Leone Jensen died at the hotel. The Arizona Republic reported her death, and her story has been retold ever since. Guests describe a young woman in white who appears at the foot of the bed, says nothing and walks toward the door. Others report children's voices in the halls at night, tied to a legend about an old well beneath the building. The hotel's owners are now planning an $80 million restoration.

South of downtown, below South Mountain, Mystery Castle tells a different kind of story. Boyce Luther Gulley left Seattle for Arizona after a tuberculosis diagnosis and spent the 1930s building a castle for his daughter, Mary Lou, out of whatever he could find: stone, adobe, rail track from a mine, telephone poles and car parts. It grew to 18 rooms and 13 fireplaces. When Gulley died in 1945, his wife and daughter learned from a lawyer that they had inherited it.

Mary Lou began giving tours in 1948, the year Life magazine photographed her on the castle's staircase, and she led them for decades. She died in 2010. The castle closed to visitors in 2022 after vandalism, and its owner later asked the city for permission to tear it down. This spring it was sold to the Harrell Family of Companies, which has promised to preserve it as an event venue. For now it waits behind its gate.

On the other side of town, Tovrea Castle rises from its hill like a wedding cake. Italian immigrant Alessio Carraro built it between 1928 and 1930 as the centerpiece of a desert resort and housing development. Then meatpacker Edward Tovrea bought land next door and put in sheep pens, and the smell ended Carraro's plans. He sold in 1931 to a buyer who turned out to be Della Tovrea, Edward's wife. She lived there until her death in 1969. No ghost is required; the story is strange enough. Volunteers now lead tours of the castle and its cactus gardens.

And then there is the gold. In the 1870s, a German immigrant named Jacob Waltz began turning up in Phoenix with gold he said came from the Superstition Mountains, east of the city. He never said exactly where. Waltz was German, not Dutch, but the name stuck. He died in Phoenix on October 25, 1891, and is buried downtown in the Pioneer and Military Memorial Park.

Some versions of the story add a Mexican mining family, the Peraltas, who are said to have worked the mine before him. None of it has been proved, and searchers have died in those mountains, which are rugged and dangerous in the heat. The safest way to see the Superstitions is from Lost Dutchman State Park in Apache Junction, where trails climb toward the cliffs that started the legend.

We can't tell you any of these places is haunted. We can tell you why people think so: real lives, strange buildings, a fortune never found, and a city that likes a good story once the nights turn cool.

If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time of day.

Arizona became a state on February 14, 1912. Its fair is older. In 1884, residents of the Arizona Territory organized a Territorial Fair near the banks of the Salt River, just west of Central Avenue, to give families in a young farm town something to look forward to.

The exhibits were what a farm town cared about: crops, dairy and beef cattle, and home economics. The entertainment ran from pony and mule races to a remarkable parade of animals. Over the years the fair's attractions have included elephants, zebras, giraffes, camels, lions and even a hippopotamus.

In 1905 the fair moved north of town, to land at what is now 19th Avenue, McDowell Road and Grand Avenue. The new grounds had a wooden grandstand and a one-mile track for horse racing, and the first fair there opened on Christmas Day 1905, after rainstorms pushed it back from early December.

It hasn't run every year. Cotton crop failures, the Great Depression and both world wars interrupted it, and the COVID-19 pandemic canceled it in 2020. Since 1946, 2020 is the only year it has missed.

That wooden grandstand later burned, and a concrete one replaced it in the 1930s. Car racing on the track ended in the 1960s, when part of it gave way to the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Some of the fairgrounds' buildings are historic in their own right, and the fair has opened a heritage museum to tell its own long story.

This year's theme is "A State of Wonder." The fair runs October 1 through November 1, Thursdays through Sundays, with gates opening at noon. Adult tickets are $20, children 5 to 12 are $12, and children under 4 get in free. The carnival, the fair says, closes when the lights on the La Grande XL Wheel go dark for the night.

Go on a cool Thursday, eat something fried and ride the wheel at dusk. Phoenix families have been doing some version of that for more than a century.

Every morning across Arizona, the familiar red CVS heart welcomes neighbors looking for everything from morning wellness routines to vital prescriptions. But behind the store shelves, a massive transformation is happening in the retail space.

As the digital landscape alters how we shop, CVS is doubling down on a human-first concept: turning the traditional corner store into a localized, tech-enabled community health destination. With a footprint designed around proximity (the company says about 85% of Americans live within 10 miles of a CVS Pharmacy), the focus has shifted heavily toward face-to-face trust, regional community needs and local investment.

From its CVS Health-brand wellness products to community grants, like the $2.1 million the CVS Health Foundation has put into diabetes care in Phoenix, the goal is clear: making health personal again. In a fast-moving digital world, CVS is betting that the true heart of healthcare will always remain profoundly local.

Walk a canal path this month and you're following an idea more than a thousand years old. Beginning around A.D. 200, the Hohokam dug about 250 miles of canals from the Salt River by hand, the largest prehistoric irrigation system in the Americas.

Salt River Project archaeologist Dan Garcia has said much of SRP's early canal system follows the ancient routes, and some canals are the originals, rebuilt.

See what's left of them at Mesa's Park of the Canals, on Horne south of McKellips Road. Then see the modern version: October is when the canal-side patios come back to life.