Santa Fe's night life can be a little dead. One way to kill some time is to try riding around in a hearse.

The proprietor of a new tour service said she started a new late-night business because it fills a void. Just in time for Halloween, a woman who goes by the name Dee Ann bought a hearse from an Albuquerque funeral home and got to work creating what she hopes will keep drawing tourists and locals alike — ghost-themed driving tours.

The tour guide isn't what you might expect from someone making part of her living with stories about the undead. Although she dresses in black, she's hardly Goth — sporting both pink eyeshadow and a pink cell phone. Dee Ann depends more on smiles and jokes than serious spooking.

The white hearse from which she offers the tours is modified to hold eight passengers. They sit in swiveling plastic chairs mounted to the bed where some 2,000 corpses took their final journey to a graveyard or crematorium.

That detail is part of the script that got passengers giggling on a recent tour.

"This time you are sitting up. But guess what? You'll be laying down next time," Dee Ann said, her voice projected into the back of the hearse through a guitar amplifier.

Hearse guests that night included two family groups.

"We thought it sounded like a lot of fun," said Erin Schmidt of Dallas, whose mother and sister were also visiting from Texas and Colorado.

Although they had never done it from a hearse, the Schmidts have been on ghost tours in other cities, including New Orleans and Charleston.

It's not just hearse-riders who are getting a kick out of the vehicle's new presence downtown. Passers-by do double takes and burst into their own ghost sounds as the hearse creeps by, fake blood on its windows and a rubber skeleton bobbing on top.

The tour first cruises streets around the Plaza, stopping in front of the former territorial courthouse on Palace Avenue, Marian Hall and the Old St. Vincent Hospital, and other buildings with reputations for ghost sightings, including a stop at La Posada to tell the story of the city's most-talked about ghost, Julia Staab — a woman who immigrated to Santa Fe in the 1880s from Germany, and is purported never to have left her former home on East Palace Avenue.

The trip is capped off by a journey to Staab's grave at Fairview Cemetery, a place where Dee Ann encourages visitors to take pictures in front of the headstones.

Sisters Pat Treffy and Wendy Jacques of Denver got out their digital cameras for the event, capturing images they later inspected for unexplained spots of light. Red lights from one the vehicle's Halloween decorations flashed in the dark cemetery.

"I feel like this is not very respectful," Jacques said, shrugging her shoulders as she climbed back into the hearse.

Although the accuracy of ghost stories such as Staab's hotel haunting are difficult to verify, some of the information visitors learned on the tour was certainly false. For example, Dee Ann said the last execution occurred in New Mexico in 1960. Tell that to Terry Clark, a child murderer who waived his rights to final appeal and was lethally injected here in 2001.

Another blunder happened when Dee Ann said there are plans to tear down the old hospital. In reality, a hotel chain has purchased the hospital site and wants to renovate the building.

Dee Ann said she's continually researching her collection of local ghost lore and history books to improve the tour each night. She's also planning to meet soon with a local historian to continue that effort. Tours began last month, she said, and will continue as long as there is interest. The hearse is also available for rent and will appear as some sort of political float soon.

Contact Julie Ann Grimm at 986-3017 or jgrimm@sfnewmexican.com.

HEARSE GHOST TOURS

Cost is $15 per person; tours are available seven days a week by reservation at 920-5284. Tours last about one hour and 15 minutes.