Frequently Asked Questions

PastPort is a self-guided AR walking tour app that lets you meet more than 50 life-size historical figures at the real Boston locations where history happened. Point your iPhone at the world around you and John Hancock, Abigail Adams, or Paul Revere appears in front of you and tells their story.

Tours include Boston's Revolutionaries (30+ stops) and Boston's Abolitionists (20+ stops), with GPS-guided routes, offline maps, and audio storytelling, with no guide, group, or schedule required.

No special equipment is needed, just your iPhone. PastPort uses your phone's camera and GPS: when you arrive at an experience stop, tap to open the camera view and a life-size historical figure appears in the scene in augmented reality, standing in the actual place they lived and worked.

There are no headsets to rent, no scheduled times, and nothing to set up. If you can take a photo, you can meet Sameul Adams.

PastPort is free to download, and you can start exploring with free episodes before deciding to unlock a full experiences. Full Experiences, like Boston's Revolutionaries with all 30+stops, are available as in-app purchases.

You can also purchase short-term (1 or 3 day) experience subscriptions on the PastPort.live website for $25 or less. Compare that to a $40 for a 2 hour AR headset tour, a $40 for a trolley tour, a $50 for a duck boat ride, or a $26 for a 90 minute costumed guide tour.

PastPort's experiences are yours to walk at your own pace, pause for a break, or focus on people or things that interest you most.

PastPort is available for iPhone on the App Store. It runs on any iPhone 11 or SE or later running a recent version of the iOS. In the future, it will also be available for Android users.

Yes. Experiences can be downloaded for offline use, so your maps, routes, and stories keep working even with spotty cell coverage downtown. If you're an international visitor without a data plan or any user without unlimited data, you can download the experiences on hotel or other Wi-Fi and walk worry-free.

Yes. PastPort turns a history walk into something kids actually want to do: historical figures appearing life-size on their screen, at their own pace, with no tour group for them to have to to keep up with. It's a favorite for family trips, school-break visits, and homeschool field trips to Boston.

Audio tour apps tell you about history; PastPort shows you the people who made it. Guided tours run on fixed schedules at $15 to $30 per person; PastPort is self-guided, so you start anytime and set your own pace. PastPort is committed to historical accuracy -- it doesn't offer "alternative facts" to make things more "entertaining." To date, PastPort is the only self-guided AR historical figure experience in the cities where it operates.

PastPort currently offers two self-guided Boston walking experiences: Boston's Revolutionaries, a 30+-stop experience through the Revolutionary era, and Boston's Abolitionists, a 23-stop experience of the city's anti-slavery history. Together they feature 60 or more historical figures you can meet in AR.

On Boston's Revolutionaries: John Hancock, Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, Abigail Adams, John Adams, Phillis Wheatley, Dr. Joseph Warren, and at least 26 more (we keep adding!). On Boston's Abolitionists: abolitionist leaders like Lewis Hayden, William Cooper Nell, Senator Charles Sumner, Lucy Stone, Harriet Bell Hayden, and Louisa May Alcott are among its 25+ stops.

Each figure introduces themselves and tells their story in a place where they actually made history.

Yes. PastPort turns a history walk into something kids actually want to do: historical figures appearing life-size on their screen, at their own pace, with no tour group for them to have to to keep up with. It's a favorite for family trips, school-break visits, and homeschool field trips to Boston.

PastPort is the only self-guided AR historical figure experience in Boston. Audio tour apps tell you about history; PastPort shows you the people who made it. Guided tours run on fixed schedules at $15 to $30 per person; PastPort is self-guided, so you start anytime and set your own pace.

The full experience is designed for Boston's streets, where figures appear at the real locations where history happened. But you can browse experiences, preview episodes/stops, and plan your route from anywhere, making PastPort very useful while planning your trip as well as during it.

Yes, walking the Freedom Trail is completely free. The red-brick path through downtown Boston is public, and most exterior sites cost nothing to see. Some sites charge admission (like the Old State House museum), and guided tours cost $15 to $30 per person.

A self-guided app like PastPort lets you keep the free-to-walk flexibility while still getting stories at every stop.

The Freedom Trail is 2.5 miles and takes about 2 hours to walk straight through, but plan on a half day so you can stop to explore the sites and meet historical figures through a PastPort experience, and a full day to do it justice. Self-guided experiences like PastPort let you split your exploration across multiple days.

Absolutely. The trail's red-brick line makes it one of America's easiest self-guided walks: just follow the bricks. A self-guided app adds what the bricks can't: stories, context, and with PastPort, the historical figures themselves appearing at each stop in AR.

Walking the Freedom Trail costs nothing, and 12 of the 16 official sites are free to visit. Only five charge admission (King's Chapel, the Old State House, Old South Meeting House, Paul Revere House, and Old North Church) — and every one of them is a building you go inside. A fifth stop, the USS Constitution Museum, asks for a donation on a sliding scale.

The following sites are free: Boston Common · Massachusetts State House (free guided tours) · Park Street Church · Granary Burying Ground · King’s Chapel Burying Ground · Boston Latin School Site and Benjamin Franklin Statue · Old Corner Bookstore (exterior) · Boston Massacre Site · Faneuil Hall · Copp’s Hill Burying Ground · USS Constitution (photo ID required for visitors 18 and over) · Bunker Hill Monument and Museum

Paid admission at all four charging sites, at adult rates, totals roughly $39 — less than a single museum ticket in most American cities.

The Black Heritage Trail is a walking trail through Beacon Hill exploring the history of Boston's free Black community, including stops like the Lewis Hayden House and the African Meeting House.

PastPort's Boston's Abolitionists experience brings this history to life with more than 20 AR figures, including Lewis Hayden himself.

Tucked into a courtyard on Beacon Hill, the African Meeting House was built in 1806 by Boston’s free Black community and is the oldest surviving Black church building in the country. This was a room where people worshipped, educated their children, and organized against slavery — where William Lloyd Garrison launched the New England Anti-Slavery Society and Frederick Douglass recruited soldiers for the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Standing inside the restored meeting house brings you close to the people who pushed America to live up to its promises of freedom. Next door, the Abiel Smith School, opened in 1835 to educate Black children, houses the museum’s exhibitions and tells another part of that struggle: the fight for equal schooling in Boston.

WHAT IT COSTS

Adults, including a meeting house talk: $15

Adults, self-guided museum visit without meeting house access: $10

Seniors 62+ and youth 5–17: $8

Military personnel and veterans: $10

Museum members: free

Admission rates listed by the National Park Service.

Located at 46 Joy Street, the museum anchors the Black Heritage Trail on Beacon Hill. General admission is Thursday–Sunday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.; reserve a timed ticket through the museum’s website and confirm current prices when booking.

This was the Crown’s Anglican outpost planted in the middle of Puritan Boston, and its Georgian interior — high white box pews, a canopied pulpit, a reserved governor’s pew — is widely regarded as the finest colonial church interior in the country. Five dollars gets you into the room with an educator who will actually talk with you rather than hand you a brochure, and the Bells & Bones tour climbs to a bell cast at Paul Revere’s own foundry then descends into a crypt holding roughly a thousand burials under the floor.

WHAT IT COSTS

The adjoining King’s Chapel Burying Ground — Boston’s oldest — is free and open to all.

On the rainy evening of December 16, 1773, more than 5,000 colonists — close to a third of the population of Boston — packed into this hall to decide what to do about three ships full of taxed tea, and when Samuel Adams gave the word they poured out the door and threw 342 chests into the harbor. The galleries and pews they filled are still here, and standing under that ceiling gives you the scale of the crowd and the nerve it took in a way that no plaque on the sidewalk ever will. Old South also has Ruckus!, a 25-minute immersive, multi-sensory digital show that uses projection mapping, lighting, and surround sound to bring the American Revolution to life. Ruckus! is included in the general admission cost.

WHAT IT COSTS

Groups of 10 or more receive a discount; contact booking@RevolutionarySpaces.org.

From the balcony of this building the Declaration of Independence was read aloud to Bostonians for the first time on July 18, 1776, and the cobblestone circle just outside the door marks where five men were shot dead in the Boston Massacre six years earlier. Inside, you stand in the Council Chamber where royal governors ruled Massachusetts and in the room where the colony argued itself toward independence, surrounded by the actual objects — including a glass vial of tea salvaged from Boston Harbor the morning after the Tea Party and the cane used to bludgeon Senator Charles Sumner.

WHAT IT COSTS

One ticket covers both the Old State House and the Old South Meeting House, and includes all exhibits, tours, and the Ruckus! show.

Built around 1680, this is the oldest building still standing in downtown Boston and the actual house Paul Revere walked out of on the night of his midnight ride. Six dollars buys you a walk through rooms so small and so crowded — Revere lived here, married twice, and fathered sixteen children — that he stops being a statue on a horse and becomes a working silversmith with a full house and bills to pay.

WHAT IT COSTS

Cash, credit card ($10 minimum), or the PayPal mobile app. The neighboring Pierce/Hichborn House is closed until further notice.

Two lanterns hung briefly in this steeple on the night of April 18, 1775 to warn that British troops were crossing the Charles River by water — the signal that launched Paul Revere’s ride and, within hours, the Revolutionary War. Inside you will find the original high box pews that Boston families rented and furnished to their own taste, a crypt holding more than a thousand burials directly beneath the floorboards, and, with the Bell Chamber ticket, the room where a teenaged Paul Revere pulled the ropes on the oldest church bells in North America.

WHAT IT COSTS

Specialty experiences — the VIP 250 tour, Bones & Burials, and Meet Paul Revere — are priced separately and cost considerably more.

The ship herself is free to board and sailors give free tours of her. Cross the yard to the museum where you can haul on a line to set a sail, try sleeping in a hammock slung eighteen inches from your neighbor’s, and eat your way through a sailor’s daily ration. Admission is a suggested donation on a sliding scale precisely so that no one is turned away, which makes it the easiest yes on the entire trail.

WHAT IT COSTS

The museum is a nonprofit and is not one of the 16 official Freedom Trail sites, but it sits beside the ship in the Charlestown Navy Yard and nearly every visitor stops in.