Georgetown's cobblestone blocks predate the District of Columbia itself. When Congress carved the federal city from Maryland farmland in 1790, this Potomac port had already logged six decades as a tobacco and flour depot. Warehouses lined the waterfront. Merchants built Federal townhouses three stories tall, their brick facades flush to the sidewalk. By the 1820s the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal sliced through the neighborhood, and with it came tavern brawls, cholera outbreaks, and enough sudden death to populate two centuries of ghost stories. Today Georgetown functions as Washington's most intact colonial quarter, a rare 18th-century streetscape preserved inside a modern capital. The thirty-five blocks bounded by Rock Creek and Georgetown University carry more than three hundred contributing structures on the National Register. M Street and Wisconsin Avenue form the commercial spine, but the side streets—Prospect, N, O—remain residential, their gas lanterns and wrought-iron fences unchanged since the Civil War. It is this layering, the old geometry beneath contemporary life, that makes a Georgetown ghost walking tour so effective: the past is not reconstructed here; it simply persists. The Exorcist Steps, a steep cascade of stone linking Prospect Street to M Street below, anchor most evening ghost walks. William Friedkin filmed the climactic fall here in 1973, but the steps themselves date to the 1890s, a utilitarian connector that has outlived the streetcar line it once served. Guides also pause at the Old Stone House on M Street, built in 1765, the oldest standing structure in the District. Its pre-Revolutionary walls saw smallpox quarantines and military occupation. A few blocks west, the former home of Alexander Graham Bell on 35th Street adds another layer—Bell experimented with early recording devices here in the 1880s, capturing voices that, in the logic of ghost tours, never quite left. Evening walks typically span ninety minutes and cover twelve to fifteen blocks, threading between the university gates, the canal towpath, and the bluff above the river. Guides draw on maritime accidents, epidemic burials, and espionage history—Georgetown hosted safe houses during the Civil War and Cold War alike. The neighborhood's Federal architecture, with its deep window wells and half-submerged basements, provides the visual grammar. No actors, no staged effects: the tour relies on the streets themselves, which after dark retain the scale and shadow of an earlier century.