• Yolanda Williams, 46, bought 3 acres in Arkansas and moved there with her daughter.
• She invited another single mom she met online to live on the property with her two kids.
• They now share expenses, childcare, and emotional support in what they call a "mommune."

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Yolanda Williams, 46, who lives in central Arkansas with her 9-year-old daughter on a farm with another single mom and her two kids. They help each other with childcare, mental support, and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2021, after my daughter Gia and I got COVID, we decided to take a drive one day. I came across this one little road that I fell in love with.

We kept coming back, driving around this neighborhood in Arkansas, and it became our Sunday thing. We'd get in the car and get ourselves a sweet treat — me a coffee and her a cinnamon roll — and drive around for an hour looking at all the different farms and houses and really just visualizing the life we wanted.

We did that for two years before I found our 3.19-acre land in rural Arkansas. After visiting it, I purchased the land in 2023 on Facebook Marketplace, For-Sale-By-Owner. It cost $40,000 to buy, and I put down $12,000.

It was fully forested raw land, so I could only see part of it, but I used a real estate agent for the process. At the end of 2024, I secured a grant to help pay for the infrastructure, and I spent 2025 getting the land ready to move into. We didn't move until March 2026 because the land needed clearing and practical things such as a driveway and utilities.

The process was expensive because I didn't have much money left to build anything on the land. We got an RV as a place to stay, stash money, and build in the next five years.

Before I'm 50, I would like to have a permanent home built on the land

I'm from Southern California, and when I left in 2017, I was paying $600 to rent a guest room from my friend. Now, I pay $485 for my land mortgage and $400 for my RV payment a month. So, all in all, for me to be on this land, it's around $885 per month. Utilities run about $150 to $200 a month in the summer, and then $100 for water. It's exponentially cheaper to live like this, especially in Arkansas.

Here we have the freedom to roam and to be outside. I'm always in the garden. I've actually lost 30lbs since March because I move so much, and I didn't even realize it. I'm getting a lot more sun and exercise — so is my daughter. I feel more content, I feel more at peace.

However, this move has turned into so much more than that for us. I've been a single mom since my daughter Gia was born. She's 9 now, and I've never truly felt what it's like to have support, to have someone around all the time. By chance, that all changed this year.

I'm not sure who followed who first, but I met a single mom called Sunnie on Threads

She posted on the social media app Threads about wanting to buy land, and I commented back that she should consider Arkansas. I explained to her that land is cheap out here, and I gave her a bunch of information.

A few months later, I randomly saw her posting on Threads that she was in Arkansas with her two kids, who were 11 and 5 years old, looking for land, so I slipped into her DMs, and we exchanged numbers. I texted her to arrange a meet-up and to show her my land. Mind you, this was before I had actually moved onto the property.

The first time we met, we had pizza with the kids. They had a look around, and the kids played really well together. Gia likes the pizza crust but not the actual pizza, and one of Sunnie's kids likes the pizza but not the crust, so it worked out perfectly.

They helped me around the property as I was in the main stretch of getting everything ready for me to move on to. That's when we got to talking about her potentially living here while she searched for her own land.

Sunnie lived in a different city about an hour from me, and she didn't know anyone in Arkansas. I offered her the chance to stay with us to avoid spending money on hotels and Ubers. Although she wanted to buy her own land, I made it clear that she was welcome to stay with me as long as she wanted to. We now split the mortgage and utility costs in half.

That's how our "mommune" started.

Although we didn't know each other for long, I felt a strong connection and vibe

I loved that she was very much like, "I want to put my gloves on, and I want to help you," when it came to laying the foundations around the property, such as weeding, spraying for ticks, building planters, and sowing seeds. Now we garden together and grow as much as we can — like comfrey, lemon balm, mint, and basil. We even make our own fertilizer.

And you know, that's what's missing. A lot of people want this life, but they don't want to actually roll their sleeves up and get dirty to help one another.

Sunnie was essentially a complete stranger. But what I've been trying to do is listen to myself and trust myself. I really felt a great vibe from Sunnie, and my daughter really took to her. We got along, and it just felt right.

Yes, it's hard to build trust because you can't really trust anyone until you start to be around them all the time, but the whole thing with Sunnie is she came, and we sat, and we had a discussion about money and about expectations and about childcare. You just have to be willing to have the hard conversations in order to build a community, and I want to be around people who understand me.

We're now growing food together and raising wildlings.

This is our matriarchal community

What I always try to tell people is we need to decenter and deprioritize romantic relationships and just focus on relationships in general, whatever that support looks like.

Whether that's friendship or family, focus on building that community, and we will get the support we're looking for, but if you're only focused on needing a man or a husband or partner to have security to feel supported, then a lot of people will miss out on invaluable support with friends or other women.

For example, I was having a really hard time this Mother's Day — it's just a hard day for me. Sunnie saw that I wasn't in a good space, so she took the kids and left so I could get some alone time. Having that support and knowing that I can say "hey, I'm having a hard time with motherhood right now" and someone will not only understand but will help me through that by watching my kid for me, taking her to the park, or giving me some space — it has been life-changing. It's the support that I need.

We really just help each other out. When I have to leave and go somewhere, I'll ask her to come inside the RV or to watch Gia play outside, and she does. Vice versa — if she needs me to watch her children, it's really not a big deal. We just ask each other for favors like: "If you're out at the store, can you get me this?"

We communicate really well with each other, and we help each other out any way we need to, and that includes having dinner together sometimes, watching TV together, and I will let her kids come over here so she can have a break and be able to be in her RV by herself, or we'll go to the park so she can be by herself sometimes.

Ever since I met Sunnie, I can just tell there's a change in my nervous system. Having someone here means I can tap out. I'm 46 this year, and I wouldn't trade this mommune we've built for the world.

As a child, you may have sung along to Toys R Us' iconic jingle about not wanting to grow up. Decades later, many millennial and Gen Z adults are taking that motto seriously.

Adults are rediscovering how Lego, stuffed animals, and other toys brought them joy. Now that they're earning their own money, they can afford the things they once played with or circled in catalogs. Hobby spending — which includes hobby shops, arts and crafts stores, and outdoor recreation providers — rose 7.9% year over year in August, according to an analysis by the Bank of America Institute.

Devin Byron, 25, had a collection of American Girl dolls growing up, but her interest in playing with them fizzled out around middle school. However, her love for them never really went away. And now, working an office job, she can buy her own.

In February, she and her friend went to the American Girl store in New York. Byron purchased the historical doll representing the '60s, Melody, which cost $135 with the book, plus $34 for accessories.

"I feel like a lot of collectors now are, I would say, healing their inner child because some people couldn't get maybe American Girl dolls growing up, but now they can," Byron said. "And it's an adrenaline rush too."

She's not the only adult contributing to the toy economy. Market research company Circana found that adult-only households made up over half of toy sales in the first half of this year, and that overall toy sales for adults increased 25%. Some adults may buy toys to bring nostalgia back into their lives or to avoid doomscrolling. For others, it's to make a profit.

"We're seeing toys increasingly function as hobbies, fandom ecosystems, and social experiences rather than traditional children's products," said Kristen McLean, vice president of client insights for Circana's Entertainment Knowledge Group. "That's expanding the consumer base and creating new opportunities for manufacturers and retailers that understand how to engage collectors, enthusiasts, gifters, and self-purchasers."

The rise of 'kidulting'

Jay Berino, store manager at the Lowry Town Center Timbuk Toys in Denver, pointed to "kidulting," the trend in which adults engage with childlike toys and hobbies, as coming from adults seeking distractions and nostalgia — from buying Pokémon cards to lava lamps.

"As much as we're a toy store and people hear toy store and think of kids, we sell to a lot to full-blown adults, and that drives a huge chunk of our business," he said.

Syls Farmer, 32, runs a vintage online store specializing in toys marketed to girls. Her store, Mema's Doll Shop, was inspired by her grandmother, who ran a couple of toy stores back in the day. Farmer said adults buy from her for themselves or for their kids so they can experience their past.

"A lot of people are dealing with a lot of pressure in this general economy and the world in general," Farmer said. "And I think that these items of childhood are bringing back feelings of comfort and peace that I think a lot of us need right now."

Farmer also buys toys for herself, including her first American Girl doll through Facebook Marketplace — Nicki, one of the '90s-inspired dolls.

Even crafters are getting in on the toy craze: Abby Glassenberg, the president of the Craft Industry Alliance, said that homemade Labubu-esque bag charms have taken off, with crafters making their own customizable charms from crochet or felt.

"People are definitely still spending. I think craft in some ways is resistant to market up and down," Glassenberg said. When the market is up, people pour more money into their hobbies, whether that's getting premium materials or even traveling to somewhere catered to their favorite crafts.

"When the market is down, and people's budgets are tighter, they want to make something for a gift rather than buy it," Glassenberg said.

Collecting toys

Emma Wynn, 28, has 120 Jellycat items, a popular stuffed-toy brand that includes animals, food, and more. Wynn's collection began when she bought a scuba diver egg while browsing at a garden center with her family, sparking a feeling of childlike happiness.

Prices range on the Jellycat site; for instance, a heart dragon is priced at $80, a carrot cake is priced at $45, and bear winter decorations are priced at $28. Wynn funds her collection with money she earns from content creation, rather than from her corporate job.

Wynn thinks adults buy toys because they bring back happy childhood memories, can provide a dopamine hit when someone finds something they've been searching for a while, and can connect them with others who are building similar collections.

"It feels very empowering to be unapologetic about the things that bring us joy and happiness, whereas before maybe I would've been embarrassed about it," she said.

It can also be a tangible way to remember a memory. For instance, Wynn's soon-to-be mother-in-law bought her a Jellycat flower bouquet to celebrate her new engagement.

Fueling an income

Harrison Woodward, 28, said building and playing with Lego sets was a large part of his childhood. For one birthday in his early 20s, his aunt bought him a Lego Porsche car model, reigniting his passion for Lego sets. He put on a streaming show after a long day of work and started to build the over 1,000-piece product.

"It was just the most therapeutic, peaceful activity," he said. "You could sit there for a few hours, a few days in a row, and complete a set and see it come together and marvel at all the different engineering things that they put into these sets now."

He left his job in insurance to focus on content creation full time. He posts about his Lego collection and passion for cars; he recently started collecting Hot Wheels, another childhood favorite. He has spent thousands on Lego and is running out of space in a room that's filled with his collections. He still tries to find a balance so that building isn't just for content, such as taking his time to build a CaDA car set in the evening.

Woodward thinks adults might be purchasing toys to invest some time in their hobbies and take care of their mental health.

"I think the stigma has kind of lifted over collecting and everything," he said. "I think that for a long time people thought any of this stuff was strictly for kids, but as the years have gone on and adults have continued to adopt it, the stigma continues to go further and further away."

Trading cards have also become a major area of interest for some adults. Kian Golshan previously told Business Insider that Pokémon is a lucrative side hustle. For instance, he sold a Japanese-edition Charmander for $750 that he bought for $59.26. As Business Insider's Samuel O'Brient previously reported, Golshan was able to put the analytical skills that he developed while working in finance to work.

"It helps me kind of think through the risks and when to take profits, when to sell, what to hold, what's my like risk profile, what's tracking the market," Golshan said.

Byron, the Gen Zer who bought an American doll, still has her collection of dolls from her childhood. Plus, she has her most recent addition displayed in her room.

"I'm actually thinking about going back to the store again," she said. "Maybe I'll walk out with another doll. I guess we'll see."

• Compass Pathways wants to use psilocybin to help people with treatment-resistant depression.
• Its psilocybin pill, COMP360, could finally be coming to market as soon as next year.
• For its CEO, Kabir Nath, it's been a long, strange trip to get to this point.

In 2022, Kabir Nath had a cushy executive job at a pharmaceutical firm that developed anti-psychotic medication.

Then he got a call from a scrappy upstart with a patent on a synthetic version of psilocybin — the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. It hoped to use the compound to help those with treatment-resistant depression.

They wanted him to join as CEO. Nath, whose father died by suicide, bit on their second pitch.

"A number of people have said to me in the last couple of years: 'You do realize what a risk that was,'" Nath told Business Insider about eventually jumping ship for what was, and still is, a drug company without FDA approval for its product.

"I was probably the first really senior executive from traditional pharma to make the move to psychedelics," he added. "But, you know, it was the right thing to do."

Nath's personal risk is now magnified as Compass Pathways finishes filing its final forms ahead of what could be FDA approval as soon as next year, and then a public rollout of its psilocybin pill, called COMP360.

Compass has recently added 150 new hires to its payroll, expanded its marketing division, and moved into new office space in Jersey City in the hope it all works out. "The company is growing rapidly," Nath said.

Though a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson attained FDA approval with a version of ketamine for depression patients in 2019, it is by no means guaranteed that Compass, leveraging a more traditional psychedelic, will get the same approval.

Should the FDA deny Compass' bid, investors would rush to dump their shares, likely sending the company into bankruptcy. The Jersey City office, which just received a new lime green paint job, would be untenable.

If you ask Nath, it would also be bad news for 4 million patients with depression in the US, for whom more traditional antidepressants like SSRIs don't work.

"These are people who have been suffering from depression, and nothing's really working," he said.

Like other drug companies — especially those with a single product — Compass' stock has "been on quite the adventure," Nath said, as the company progressed through various human trials.

When markets closed on Friday, the share price hovered around $11, up $5 from last year. In 2020, when the company went public, shares went for $17.

From Haight Ashbury to Wall Street

Psilocybin's journey to the forefront of medical research didn't begin with Compass, and it hasn't exactly gone in a straight line.

Few did more to publicize the drug than Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor turned acid dropout. In a speech at Harvard's Cambridge campus in 1962, he told students that taking psilocybin allows people to experience an "internal rebirth," according to the Harvard Crimson.

In time, Leary would be fired from Harvard as he, along with a measurable portion of the US population, began to experiment more heavily with psychedelic drugs. Come 1966, the Grateful Dead were spiking their Kool-Aid with acid, and a definitive subculture of long-haired, psychedelic-taking hippies had emerged.

Meanwhile, researchers were experimenting too. Studies involving LSD and psilocybin flourished during the 1960s before hitting a brick wall in 1970, when psilocybin was classified as a Schedule I substance, rendering possession illegal, even for research purposes.

Work on the drug languished for years, until 2000, when the FDA gave scientists at Johns Hopkins University permission to conduct research on psilocybin.

And more recently, psychedelics have become trendy with the tech crowd.

From Burning Man to luxury retreats, experimenting with psychedelics is now common among tech founders and executives like Elon Musk and Sam Altman, who credit the drugs with quieting their nerves, boosting productivity, and allowing them to better harness their creativity.

Research, too, has flourished.

"There was actually a biotech boom from 2018 through to about 2022," Nath said. "In that boom, literally hundreds of psychedelic companies went public."

In 2018, Compass' proprietary psilocybin formulation received breakthrough therapy designation from the FDA. A few years later, it started testing the drug on people.

Nath was an executive in 2018 at Japanese pharmaceutical giant Otsuka, where he said he assembled a team to investigate whether psychedelics could become viable medicines after reading Michael Pollan's book "How to Change Your Mind," which explores the history and therapeutic potential of psychedelics.

COMP360

Compass isn't selling an experience analogous to a spiritual awakening at Burning Man, though.

The drug-taking process for a patient enrolled in one of Compass' trials is a bit different. First, a patient has to have treatment-resistant depression, which is clinically defined as depression that two or more standard drugs have failed to treat.

Then, a clinician explains the details of the process that is about to unfold. After that, they're given the psilocybin in pill form.

"It's a quiet room with a couch," Nath said. "They're offered a blindfold, which most patients do actually wear."

As the patient begins to trip, a playlist of music, including classical and new age, plays softly in the background. The clinician, who Nath said could be a nurse, doctor, or therapist, sits silently in the room if the patient wants to talk, and for safety reasons.

Most of the time, though, there isn't any talking.

"This is not psychotherapy," Nath said. "We are not directing the patient's experience."

Six hours later, after some crying, laughing, and everything in between, the patient goes home.

In Compass's most recent trial, results for which were published in September, just under half of participants who took the drug experienced at least a 50% reduction in depressive symptoms within six weeks of treatment.

Next steps

After a decade of slogging through tests, first on animals and then on humans, Compass has completed all the necessary prerequisites and is busily working to get its last papers in order.

In a statement provided to Business Insider, an FDA spokesperson was noncommittal, though.

"The FDA evaluates experimental medications, including psychedelic drugs like psilocybin, through a rigorous, evidence-based process designed to ensure that any approved treatment is safe and effective for the indicated use," the spokesperson said.

Compass isn't the only psychedelic drug company wading through the lengthy process of trialing a drug.

AtaiBeckley, another psychedelic drug company trading on the Nasdaq whose product is not yet approved by the FDA, is developing a version of DMT administered via nasal spray. It received breakthrough status in 2025, years behind Compass.

For Compass, though, it could face the music as soon as the first half of next year, when it expects the FDA to render its decision. The company is already getting ready.

In addition to adding 150 new hires, Nath said the company is preparing its sales force to go online and is in frequent communication with doctors and healthcare providers about operating in clinics where therapists can administer the drug to patients.

"This has the potential to be radically different, and again, the rapidity is something that they're very excited about, and the durability," Nath said, referring to psychiatrists.

The king of ghosts lives in a haunted $4.3 million dollar mansion in the heart of New Orleans' French quarter. The dozens of paranormal tour guides who lead tourists through the neighborhood are sure to know of him and have an opinion of him. Lance Zaal is the most controversial man in America's booming ghost business, CEO of what competitors have dubbed "The Walmart of Ghost Tours."

Over the past half-decade, Zaal, 42, and his company, US Ghost Adventures, have opened ghost tours in more than 250 cities and towns, employing more than 1,000 guides, according to his company's website. He's also been buying up the country's haunted landmarks like it's the first trip around the Monopoly board — the Lizzie Borden House in Massachusetts, the Villisca Axe Murder House in Iowa, the McInteer Villa in Kansas, and two historic houses in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. "Lance has said he wants to build an empire, and that's what he's doing," says Diane Student, who hosts the industry podcast History Goes Bump.

USGA also sells ghost detection gear through the brand Ghost Daddy — products with names like the Sinister Speaker, Medusa's Net, and Devil's Marble MK2. An Ultimate Ghost Hunt Kit For Two sells for $629.99. The whole operation has made Zaal wealthy enough to buy the Lalaurie Mansion, his primary residence, which stands on the site of an infamous slaveowner's torture chamber. Previous guests have reported unexplained moaning and groaning inside, along with the sudden, putrid smell of burning flesh, and, according to New Orleans tour guide Catie Santos, passing guides stand on the opposite side of the street because of the house's dark energy. On tours, Santos, who was briefly employed by Zaal as a content creator, also warns her guests "about the real life Marvel supervillain living in that house," she says.

In assembling his dominion of the undead, Zaal has made a host of enemies among the living. I spoke with more than a dozen competitors and insiders in the industry who described him as "vindictive," "predatory," a "bully," and a "hemorrhoid." He has been accused of borrowing content from local tours, ripping off merchandise designs, redirecting negative reviews to competitors, misclassifying workers as contractors, and using names similar to local companies to confuse tourists. The allegations have resulted in a mounting pile of lawsuits against USGA. Zaal, who did not respond to repeated inquiries for this story, has consistently denied any predatory behavior and emphasizes his commitment to historic preservation.

When passing Zaal's mansion, Catie Santos warns tourists of "the real life Marvel supervillain living in that house," she says.

He has gone after his rivals, filing copyright and defamation suits and frequently threatening legal action. "This gang of competitors are the bullies. So desperate to restore their monopolies or do whatever they can to eliminate their competition," USGA wrote in the comments section of "Exposing US Ghost Adventures Corrupt and Unethical Business Practices Part 1," a recent video from the YouTube channel The Paranormal Engineer.

When Walmart surged through the country in the 1980s, it sparked fierce resistance from the mom and pop stores threatened by their expansion. Today, the rise of the Walmart of Ghost Tours has ignited a war in the ghost industry.

In the biography published on his website — which has a slapdash, early-2000s blog design — Zaal describes a hardscrabble childhood in Southern California. After his parents divorced when he was 6, he was often homeless, sometimes sleeping in the family van. He was bullied in school, he writes, and threw himself into little entrepreneurship projects like a lemonade stand, where he bumped his margins by charging extra for a "Lemon Special," which involved adding a Lemonhead candy to the drink. He says his youth was also marked by eerie experiences — mysterious footsteps, doors opening and closing without explanation — that inspired a lifelong fascination with the supernatural. "I've experienced odd things I can't explain," he said in a recent interview with Business Insider.

After 9/11, Zaal enlisted in the Marine Corps at age 17. He completed three tours, including two in Iraq, where he was stationed for a time at President Saddam Hussein's palace. Then he got an MBA at William and Mary, and worked briefly at Booz Allen Hamilton and Mythics Inc., until he was laid off in 2012. He set out on his own, developing a GPS-guided audio ghost tour app called ItourMobile. It was good timing. America was in the midst of a ghost renaissance.

In a 1978 Gallup poll, 11% of Americans said they believed in ghosts. By 2025, that number soared to 39%. Some attribute the trend to a decline in traditional religion, with non-religious people becoming more inclined to seek other supernatural answers to life's big questions. And as paranormal beliefs have risen, there has been an influx of people trying to profit from them. Reality TV shows "Ghost Hunters" and "Ghost Adventures" took off in the 2000s. By 2023, "dark tourism" — which ranges from the sites of atrocities to haunted houses — was valued at $32 billion and projected to reach $39 billion by the decade's end, according to Grand View Research.

Years after US Ghost Adventures took off, an interviewer at Authority Magazine asked Zaal what advice he wished he could give his younger self. "You're on your own," Zaal said, in a quote displayed under a photo of him in a vest, arms crossed, blue-steeling the camera. "You have no friends. The market is God."

Ting Rappa, an EMT and firefighter who runs an Orlando-based ghost tour called American Ghost Adventures met Zaal in 2015, when he was managing a tour called Colonial Ghosts in Williamsburg, Virginia. Zaal approached Rappa after she attended one of his tours with a proposal to team up. "He was a little off," Rappa says. Something about his energy made her apprehensive. "But he was a very intelligent person. I could tell he had a drive." Zaal said he would help finance her company in exchange for a share of the operation. But the deal didn't seem like an even partnership, so she turned him down.

You're on your own. You have no friends. The market is God.Lance Zaal

Three years later, she discovered that Zaal had a new name for his company that resembled hers: US Ghost Adventures. When she tried to trademark American Ghost Adventures years later, the application was denied because Zaal had registered his first. In 2024, she filed a suit asking for the USGA trademark to be cancelled, still working its way through the courts. "There's just no ethics to it," she says of Zaal's expansion. "Competition is good, but play nice. Right now, you're just being a big bully."

In the Authority Magazine story, Zaal was asked how he researches whether someone else has already had one of his ideas, a question that would become more significant as his business continued to grow.

"It's not relevant," Zaal said. "Who cares who else thought of an idea? This is fear at first thinking. What matters is creating a sustainable, strong business. Just because there are others in your market, doesn't mean you can't succeed in it, or even redefine it. What is important is ensuring you don't break the law, whether that be a trademark, patent, or whatever."

A ghost tour is a pretty simple business to set up. Most are walking tours through public spaces that require little overhead. At USGA, guides are generally contractors paid a flat rate of $40 to $50 per tour, plus tips, per its website. With a tour drawing dozens of customers paying $20 to $40 for a ticket, the money can quickly pile up.

USGA wasn't the only company to pursue ghost tours on a national scale — the rival Ghost City Tours operates 60 tours — but it was the most aggressive. During the pandemic in 2020, as other tour companies were shuttering, Zaal expanded to dozens of cities and towns, ready to put guides on the pavement once restrictions were lifted. That year, he unsuccessfully sued to reverse a COVID ban on walking tours in Massachusetts. By 2021, USGA had operations in 33 cities, each under a local name.

One of the first cities targeted was Baltimore, where Melissa Rowell had operated Baltimore Ghost Tours since 2001. Zaal came on her radar when she began receiving phone calls from irate customers. "We are trying to find out where this ghost tour is," one man complained in a voicemail shared with Business Insider. "Nobody's answering the goddamn phone … after we spent almost $100."

The man was looking for Zaal's new local affiliate of USGA, which had begun operating under the name Baltimore Ghosts. Rowell sent Zaal a letter asking him to change the name to something more distinct. Soon after, Rowell says, USGA started using the name Baltimore Ghost Tour in some materials. "Instead of trying to cause less confusion, they seemed to be trying to cause more," she says.

Rowell and Zaal have since been in a cold war, volleying terse emails and cease-and-desist letters. "I understand you actively collaborate with a confederation of other companies to disparage and damage both the company and my personal reputation," Zaal wrote Rowell in 2024. "Let us honor the spirit of Halloween this season and cease this animosity. There's enough customers for all of us."

Rowell denies that she is part of a confederation, but local tour guides have collaborated in dealing with their ascendant rival. There's a private Facebook group where guides across the country share information about USGA. Mike Carter, a tour guide from Annapolis, Maryland, bought the domain name USAghostadventures.com to build a site that urged customers to choose local ghost tours instead of Zaal's outfit. (Zaal got the site taken down and sued Carter for defamation.) Some paranormal companies, like Central New York Ghost Hunters, have rejected partnerships with USGA out of solidarity with local guides.

In Austin, Texas, USGA was sued by the owners of a local Booze and Boos Tour after Zaal opened a Boos And Booze tour. In Savannah, Georgia, the national company Ghost City Tours, which operated a Dead of Night Tour, sued USGA for opening the Savannah Terrors Ultimate Dead of Night Haunted Ghost Tour. In Charlotte, North Carolina, the local Queen City Tours sued Zaal's Queen City Ghosts. USGA generally argues in court papers and public statements that the names are too generic to own. The Austin suit was settled in 2024; the latter two lawsuits are currently making their way through the courts.

USGA was sued by the owners of the Booze and Boos Tour after it opened a Boos And Booze tour; the Dead of Night Tour for opening the Savannah Terrors Ultimate Dead of Night Haunted Ghost Tour; and Queen City Tours for opening Queen City Ghosts.

In one instance, a guide alleges that Zaal uses these similar names to trick tourists into leaving negative reviews on his competitors' tours. Angela Taverniti, who runs Colonial Ghosts of Williamsburg, said a USGA customer, Samantha Butler, accidentally left a negative review on Taverniti's tour. When she pointed out the mixup, Butler pulled up the link she got from USGA asking her to review the tour and tested it. A screen recording Butler shared with Business Insider shows that when she submitted a four-star ranking, she was directed to the Google review page of the USGA tour she took. But when she submitted a two-star rating, she was directed to the Google page for Taverniti's tour. Spooky. Reviews are a big deal for tour operators. "98 percent of our business comes from Google," Taverniti tells me. "It's a game that you have to play constantly. And he knows how to play it."

Other paranormal guides say Zaal borrows the content of the tours along with the names. Laine Johnson, a former park ranger, spent the last decade developing a tour of the supernatural happenings in Durango, Colorado, drawing from firsthand accounts of locals, newspaper archives, and out-of-print books. When a new tour called Durango Ghosts set up shop there in early 2023, Johnson took it to check out the competition. She says she was startled that they followed her exact route and told the same stories, sometimes with the same phrasing.

When she got home and did some research, she formulated a theory of what had happened. During the pandemic, she had uploaded her materials to a site called Junket, which allowed her to host virtual tours. Junket and Durango Ghosts were owned by Lance Zaal. Her content, she's convinced, had been snatched from the Junket website and co-opted by her new competitor.

USGA has meaningfully eaten into her bottom line, she says. "This is a really small town. It's ridiculous that there's now three ghost tours going here," she says.

By 2021, USGA purchased the crown jewel in its collection of haunted property, a three-story Greek Revival House in Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie Borden was accused of axe-murdering her parents in 1892. It's famous for paranormal activity, and Zaal mentioned in an interview shortly after the purchase that he felt as if "someone, or something, was in the room with him," when he spent the night there alone.

This is a really small town. It's ridiculous that there's now three ghost tours going here.Laine Johnson, a ghost tour owner in Durango, Colorado

In 2023, a small cafe called Miss Lizzie's opened nearby, and Zaal sued, arguing that the name and logo — a blood-stained hatchet — infringed on his trademark. "She's a historical figure," cafe owner Joe Pereira counters. "I don't think anyone can own her." It was a strange reversal of the trademark suits that had been filed against him, and local competitors followed the case closely.

The next year, a judge sided with Pereira, saying the logos were substantially different. "Miss Lizzie's hatchet has a handle and smooth axe blade that spews blood," the judge wrote in his decision. "Ghost Adventures' hatchet is bereft of either handle or blood and features a notch halfway along the blade." But the lawsuit, which dragged on for years afterwards, has taken a financial toll on Pereira. Though a judge affirmed the initial ruling this month, Pereira was also ordered to pay $31,207 in legal fees after missing various filing deadlines.

Amid the acrimony, USGA has continued to grow. From 2019 to 2023, Zaal told Entrepreneur Magazine, USGA's revenue increased by 2,600%. To service the expansion, he contracted with writers and creators to develop tours and other content about new cities in the USGA empire.

Some guides, like Sabrina Velandry, a psychic medium who conducts tours for USGA in Salem, have had broadly positive experiences with the company. It's more professionalized than some of the local tours, she says. "It is corporate, but it's just really really well-run and organized." Others have butted heads with management, and two lawsuits have alleged misclassifying workers as independent contractors and failure to pay overtime wages. USGA has denied these claims, and one suit was settled while another is still in the courts.

In 2023, Ronald Murphy, a high school teacher outside of Pittsburgh, began picking up some extra work for USGA as an independent contractor, where he would crank out a new tour for $200, or make $40 for a 300 word blurb on the USGA website. All told, he says, he wrote tours for about 18 cities.

He says he wasn't given time for deep research and didn't like the idea of using content posted by competing local tours, so for a tour about Fort Worth, Texas, he decided to get creative. "I was going to simply make up the ghosts," he says. He thought the local Cowboy Museum was the sort of place that a ghost might frequent and wrote this fiction for the website: "Of course, no cowboy can hold a candle to The Duke himself, Mr. John Wayne. Visit the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame where it's said the apparition of the 6 foot 4 actor has been seen admiring the cowboy memorabilia on display." The work eventually dried up. Today, USGA is recruiting an AI Creative Specialist, at $42,000 a year, "to draft, edit, and refine engaging tour scripts, website copy, and compelling marketing collateral." Even ghost jobs aren't safe from the AI revolution.

Trevor Foster didn't have much interest in ghost tours until he was ripped off, he tells me. He's a ceramics artist who specializes in dark pieces like bones, pistols, and mystical eyes. This January, he received a message informing him that USGA may have stolen one of his designs to sell on its Ghost Daddy website — an intricate skull-shaped mug with a handle like a curved bone. From initial casting to final glazing, it took Foster about about 100 hours to complete.

The skull on Ghost Daddy looked like one Foster designed in a slightly different color. Foster says the fact that it had the same sutures on the top — "almost like a fingerprint" — made it clear it was a ripoff. He also found that Zaal had recently purchased the same skull mug from him. "For someone to buy it and make a direct mold just seems kinda brazen," Foster says.

Foster sent a cease-and-desist letter, and Zaal responded that he planned to remove the item within six months. "My understanding in looking at your website is that you have your initials on the bottom (ours doesn't), each one is hand crafted and unique (ours are consistent and the same which is why yours looks better), ours is of a lighter color, and our logo is on the back," Zaal added. To Foster, it seemed Zaal was implying that replacing his initials with the USGA logo was enough to make the knockoff legal.

An Instagram video Foster posted went viral in the ghost tour community, and Zaal agreed in an email shared with Business Insider to discontinue the item immediately. He attributed the similar design to a mistake made by an overseas supplier who was given multiple examples to draw inspiration from. That wasn't good enough for Foster, who sued and settled with Zaal in September.

Foster was surprised to have found something of a community as a result of the whole debacle. After he'd posted about the situation, he was inundated with dozens of messages from people with their own grievances with US Ghost Adventures, commiserating with him. "It's just kind of incredible how many people they've angered," Foster says.

And — if you fall into the 39% of the country that believes in ghosts — you might believe that it isn't just corporeal beings that have been angered. This summer, a group of part-time ghost hunters visited Zaal's newly purchased McInteer Villa and set up K-2 meters, REM pods, and a ghost box.

But the group's leaders Dawn Lorenzen and Amy Osborn found the ghosts to be surprisingly uncommunicative. When they'd visited before Zaal's purchase, the ghost hunting had been good.

They Facetimed a medium to figure out what was going on. The ghosts were irritated, she told them, and it seemed to be related to the new ownership. "They made a circus of the place," the ghosts kept repeating, she said. "And now we are a spectacle."

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Siobhan MacDermott, a 56-year-old tech founder based in Menlo Park, California. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I've never been underqualified for any job that I've applied to.

I was vice chair at Bank of America and principal at EY. I held senior roles in cybersecurity at AVG and McAfee. I've sat in boardrooms with Fortune 500 CEOs, advised governments, and built practices from scratch.

Then, in early 2024, when I was 54, I had to relocate from New York City to California for family reasons, leaving the management consulting job I'd held as a partner at The Consello Group. I didn't anticipate what could happen when someone tries to re-enter the institutional world in their 50s — particularly as a woman in a career space that doesn't fit neatly into a job description.

The most surprising barrier has been the gap between what I've actually done and what the market knows how to categorize. I'm worried because I'm not sure where the economy is heading, but I'm an absolute eternal optimist.

I'm not going to accept anything other than staying hopeful.

I felt like my job application was going into the ether

It's been frustrating to watch organizations that desperately need exactly what I've built not hire me.

When I started my job search, I reached out to my network to try to figure out what I could do, who'd vouch for me, and where open positions were. A lot of senior roles were being downsized, but I had a lot of people who initially wanted to help me find something.

The strategies that were a complete waste of time were LinkedIn Easy Apply, recruiter calls that went nowhere, and any process that involved a 45-minute competency-based interview with someone who'd never heard of the big companies I've worked for.

I spent the better portion of every day for over a year applying and looking for jobs. I obsessively searched on LinkedIn for new positions, applying over and over again on the site, company websites, emails, and more, but getting nowhere.

I sent out countless résumés and barely got any responses. These are jobs that I know I'm qualified or overqualified to do, but sometimes I didn't even get the courtesy of the automated "thank you for applying" response.

It was like my application went into the ether. I'd try to find the head of HR for these companies on LinkedIn and reach out to them because I wanted the feedback.

I started trying to think of interesting ways to get attention

The strategy that worked the best during my job search was bypassing HR entirely and using direct outreach to CEOs and board members.

I'd send them letters not even related to a job, but more of an observation of their company to get their attention. I tried to be crafty, saying, "Based on my external assessment of your company, here are some things that I think you should be doing as you think through your next quarter."

Reaching out to CEOs got me in the door, but then they'd send me down to somebody who was pretty junior who'd say, "You're overqualified for this job." They'd courtesy interview me because they'd been told to, but it didn't go beyond that.

Sometimes a CEO would send me to HR, and HR would look at my skill set and say, "It doesn't quite match."

That happened quite a few times.

I adjusted my LinkedIn profile to get a better response, and that helped

I changed my gender to male and back to female a bunch of times to see if it made a difference — I didn't change my pronouns, just my actual gender. I felt like I had more responses on LinkedIn being thought to be male than female.

I also think being in Silicon Valley, you age out a lot faster than you do in other parts of the US, and it's definitely a highly male- dominated space. I had those two things working against me from the get-go.

So I removed the first six years of my career from my work experience on LinkedIn, and I took the dates off of my degrees so that people couldn't tell my age. This made me seem seven to 10 years younger, potentially. Once I took those dates off, I felt like I got more engagement on the site.

My job search in Silicon Valley went nowhere, so I decided to pivot and launch my own venture

I started my company out of necessity, and also out of intellectual boredom. I felt like my brain was starting to rot.

It happened about a year into job searching, when I started feeling financial pressure and frustration. I didn't want my full-time job to be looking for a job. My search wasn't looking like it was going anywhere in the foreseeable future, especially out in Silicon Valley. If you're a computer scientist or an engineer, there are jobs available, but I couldn't find a lot out here not in that space.

I started thinking, what am I good at? What do I know? What are all the pieces that I could put together? What problem can I identify that needs to be solved? That came together pretty quickly, and I launched two companies — Khaos Holdings, a strategic risk-intelligence company, and TeenAegis, a child-safety intelligence business, in January.

We're raising capital, and if the capital comes in, that will be the end of my job search. If the capital doesn't come in, then I'll keep searching — but I've decided that whatever I do will be adjacent to the problem I'm trying to solve now.

One good thing came out of the 2 years since my last job

Being out of work for two years shifted my retirement timeline eight to 10 years from digging into savings. However, since my job search started, I've really homed in on what I want to do with the rest of my career.

The journey I went on was a little bit of a midlife crisis. I asked myself, "What's my purpose in life?" as opposed to "What job do I want to have?" and then identified what skill set could bring me to that.

What led me to where I am was really thinking through questions like: What are all the issues that matter to me? What legacy do I want to leave? How do I want to think about my future for the next 10 or 15 years? How do I want to show up every day?

In the beginning, I was going to apply to anything that I could qualify for that would get me some money. Now I'm not going to do that because I don't think that's going to actually be fulfilling or make me happy. My sense of stability has required a deliberate reframe — from "security comes from a salary" to "security comes from what I've built and what I know."

I'm determined to make this work, but I also realize it may not

The hardest thing is maintaining a positive attitude day after day. If my company doesn't work out, then it's not like I can stop trying.

Taking mental health breaks is important because it's overwhelming, lonely, and hard. You lose your sense of self-worth when you're in this position; people look at you like, "Oh, you're the person who's still looking for a job." So it's hard to continue to put yourself out there.

Still, I do believe there's light at the end of the tunnel. It's just the question of how long the tunnel is.

Do you have a story to share about navigating your career in your 50s? If so, please reach out to the editor, Manseen Logan, at mlogan@businessinsider.com.