Frequently asked questions

In folklore and popular belief, a ghost is the spirit of a dead person (or occasionally an animal) that appears to the living or makes its presence felt. People describe ghosts as full figures, misty shapes, voices, footsteps, cold spots, smells or simply a strong sense of being watched. Almost every culture has its own ghosts, from the white ladies of European castles to Japan’s yūrei and Mexico’s La Llorona.

On this site “haunting” is a broader word: a place or a case where people keep reporting the unexplained. That can mean apparitions, poltergeist activity, phantom ships, ghost lights or legends that move from town to town. Every file sets out what is reported, the real history behind it and the explanations investigators have offered.

The word is German for “noisy spirit”. Poltergeist cases involve knocking, rapping, objects thrown or moved and furniture overturned, usually in a single household. Unlike most hauntings, they tend to centre on one living person – often a child or teenager – and they usually start suddenly and stop within weeks or months. Famous examples include the Bell Witch of Tennessee (1817–21), the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York (1848), and the Enfield poltergeist in north London (1977–79).

Parapsychologists have suggested the person at the centre might be causing the events unconsciously. Skeptics point to a long record of deliberate trickery: Margaret Fox demonstrated in 1888 how she had produced the famous raps by cracking her toe joints, and in 1984 a TV camera left running in Columbus, Ohio, recorded a teenager knocking over a lamp she had said was moved by a spirit. Many investigators now see poltergeist outbreaks as a mix of household stress, misheard noises, attention and pranks.

A residual haunting is one in which the “ghost” seems unaware of the living: the same footsteps on the same stair every night, the sounds of a battle, or a figure walking the same route and vanishing. Believers describe it as a kind of recording replayed by the place, as opposed to an “intelligent” haunting that seems to respond to people. The most famous example is the 1953 account of Harry Martindale, who said he saw Roman soldiers march through the cellar of the Treasurer’s House in York.

The idea is often called the “stone tape” theory, after Nigel Kneale’s 1972 BBC play The Stone Tape. No one has found any way for walls or stones to store sounds or images. Investigators look instead for repeating natural noises – pipes, timbers, wind, traffic, machinery – and at how a famous story shapes what visitors hear.

Plenty of people think so, or have had experiences they can’t explain. In a 2005 Gallup poll, 32 percent of Americans said they believed in ghosts and 37 percent that houses can be haunted. A 2009 Pew Research Center survey found that 18 percent of US adults said they had seen or been in the presence of a ghost, and in a 2023 Pew survey 53 percent said they had been visited by a dead relative in a dream or some other way – though Pew noted that it did not ask how people interpreted those experiences.

Science is another matter. Despite more than a century of investigation, beginning with the Society for Psychical Research in London in the 1880s, there is no reliable, repeatable evidence that the spirits of the dead linger or interact with the living, and the scientific consensus is that ghosts have not been shown to exist. What researchers have found are many well-understood reasons why ordinary people in ordinary places have genuinely strange experiences. That’s why every file on this site gives both the story and the explanations: the experiences are real, even if the ghosts are not proven.

Researchers have identified a range of natural causes that can produce the classic signs of a haunting. Physical ones include low-frequency sound (infrasound), carbon monoxide and other gases, drafts and temperature differences, old wiring, plumbing and settling buildings, and animals in the walls. Physiological ones include sleep paralysis, hallucinations on the edge of sleep, tiredness and some medications and illnesses.

Psychology plays the biggest part. The brain is built to detect faces and people (pareidolia) and to find meaning in noise; peripheral vision is good at movement but poor at detail; and expectation powerfully shapes what we perceive and remember. Experiments in famous haunted places show that knowing a place’s reputation, believing in ghosts and being given suggestions all increase how many unusual experiences people report.

Infrasound is sound below about 20 hertz, too low for most people to hear but sometimes felt as pressure or vibration. In 1998 Vic Tandy, an engineer, and Tony Lawrence published a paper in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research describing a laboratory with a reputation for being haunted, where Tandy had felt cold, anxious and glimpsed a grey shape at the edge of his vision. He traced the cause to a newly installed extractor fan producing a standing wave at about 19 Hz – a frequency he suggested might make the eyeball vibrate. Once the fan was dealt with, the “ghost” disappeared. Tandy later measured a similar 19 Hz signal in a 14th-century cellar in Coventry said to be haunted.

In 2003 a team including the psychologist Richard Wiseman and acoustic scientists from Britain’s National Physical Laboratory tested the idea on concert-goers in London, secretly adding infrasound to some pieces of music. Listeners reported about 22 percent more unusual experiences – unease, chills, sorrow – when infrasound was present. The researchers called their results tentative, but the idea that machinery, wind and traffic can make a building feel wrong is now widely discussed.

Yes – and it can kill, so it’s the first thing to rule out. Carbon monoxide (CO) is an odourless, colourless gas produced by faulty furnaces, boilers, stoves, fireplaces and generators. Low-level poisoning causes headaches, dizziness, fatigue, confusion and depression, and can cause hallucinations. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 400 people die each year from accidental CO poisoning not linked to fires.

The classic case was published in 1921 in the American Journal of Ophthalmology by the eye doctor W. H. Wilmer. A family he called “Mrs. H” and “Mr. H”, who had moved into an old rented house around 1912, began hearing footsteps and other noises, seeing figures and feeling watched; the children grew pale and listless. A relative suspected poisoning, and an inspection found that the furnace was leaking carbon monoxide into the house. Once the family was away from the fumes, the “haunting” ended. If your home seems haunted, check your CO alarms before anything else.

Sleep paralysis happens when the mind wakes up while the body is still in the muscle paralysis of REM sleep. For a few seconds or minutes you can’t move or speak, and dream imagery can mix with the real room. A 2011 review of 35 studies estimated that about 7.6 percent of people experience it at least once, with higher rates among students and people with anxiety or psychiatric conditions.

The most common hallucination is a sensed presence – an “intruder” in the room – that may appear as a dark figure, an old woman or a demon, often with pressure on the chest. Researchers believe this explains many bedroom ghost encounters, shadow people, the “Old Hag” of Newfoundland folklore and Henry Fuseli’s famous painting The Nightmare. Episodes are frightening but harmless, and they’re more likely when you are sleep-deprived, stressed or sleeping on your back. If they happen often, talk to a doctor.

A great deal. In studies published in 2002 and 2003, psychologist Richard Wiseman and colleagues asked hundreds of visitors to walk through the reputedly haunted parts of Hampton Court Palace and Edinburgh’s South Bridge Vaults and mark wherever they had an unusual experience. People reported more experiences in the places with a haunted reputation, even when they didn’t know which those were – and the reports tracked ordinary features such as lighting levels and variations in the magnetic field. At Hampton Court, people who believed in ghosts reported more experiences than skeptics, and telling visitors that activity had recently increased or decreased affected what they reported.

Suggestion also explains talking boards and dowsing rods. The ideomotor effect – tiny, unconscious muscle movements guided by expectation – was described by the physiologist William Carpenter in 1852, and in 1853 Michael Faraday showed that it, not spirits, moved the tables at Victorian séances. Ouija boards, sold from 1890, work the same way: the planchette spells out what the people touching it expect or fear.

An EMF meter measures electromagnetic fields. Popular ghost-hunting models such as the K-II are simple devices designed to detect fields from household wiring and appliances, and they also react to phones, radios and walkie-talkies held nearby. A spike tells you that a field is present, not what is causing it – usually wiring in the walls, an appliance or the investigators’ own equipment. There is no scientific evidence that ghosts produce electromagnetic fields.

A spirit box, or ghost box, is a radio that sweeps rapidly through stations; the first well-known version, “Frank’s Box”, was built in 2002. It produces a stream of fragments of broadcast speech and static in which listeners hear answers. EVP (electronic voice phenomena) recordings go back to the Swedish painter Friedrich Jürgenson, who in 1959 believed he heard voices on tapes of birdsong. Both rely on the brain’s tendency to hear words in noise – auditory pareidolia – especially when someone suggests what to listen for, along with radio interference and audio-processing artefacts. When a researcher ran 81 controlled sessions with a radio tuned to an empty frequency, he found speech-like sounds but no convincing messages.

Choose places that welcome visitors: museums, historic sites, hotels, official ghost tours and parks. Book through the site itself, follow its rules and opening hours, and remember that staff may be weary of being asked about ghosts. Many of the best tours tell real history and support the preservation of the buildings.

Never trespass. Abandoned buildings, closed hospitals, private land and cemeteries after hours are off limits without permission, and ghost hunting is no defence in court. Treat cemeteries as the working burial grounds they are: stay on paths, don’t touch or move headstones, don’t leave litter or “offerings” that damage graves, and never take anything. Private homes made famous by a ghost story – including some of the most famous in the world – are someone’s home: view them from the street, don’t knock, and don’t share the address. Places sacred to Indigenous peoples should be visited only as their communities allow.

No. Derelict buildings are dangerous in ways that have nothing to do with ghosts: rotten floors and stairs, collapsing roofs, open lift shafts and drops, broken glass, exposed wiring, asbestos, mould, bird and rat droppings, and sometimes people who don’t want company. Emergency services may not know you are there, phones often lose signal, and help can be a long way off.

Entering without permission is also trespassing, and often illegal in other ways too. If you want to experience an old asylum, prison or factory, go with an organisation that has the owner’s permission and proper safety measures – many famous sites run daytime tours or supervised overnight events. Our files say when a place is closed to the public, and we never give directions into abandoned buildings.

Start with the practical checks, because some of the causes are dangerous. Make sure you have working carbon monoxide alarms near every sleeping area, test them, and have fuel-burning appliances such as furnaces, boilers, stoves and fireplaces inspected – headaches, dizziness, low mood and hallucinations can all be signs of CO poisoning. Get an electrician to look at flickering lights, buzzing or tripping circuits. Look for pests: mice, rats, squirrels, bats and insects make scratching, tapping and footstep-like noises in walls and attics. Drafts, water hammer in pipes, timbers expanding and contracting, and neighbours’ sounds explain many night noises.

Then look at sleep and health. Experiences that happen as you fall asleep or wake up – a figure by the bed, being unable to move, a voice calling your name – are very often sleep paralysis or hypnagogic hallucinations, which are common and harmless. Stress, grief, some medications and lack of sleep make them more likely. If the experiences are frequent, frightening or affecting your daily life, talk to a doctor; there’s no shame in it, and it may help more than any ghost hunter could. If the feeling is spiritual for you, a trusted faith leader may also be a comfort.

Ghost photos have been faked since the 1860s, when the Boston photographer William Mumler sold portraits showing customers with the faint figures of dead relatives. He was tried for fraud in New York in 1869; witnesses showed how easily the effect could be made with double exposures, and P. T. Barnum had a photographer make a fake “spirit photograph” of Barnum with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Mumler was acquitted, but the techniques never went away.

Today, look for the classic tricks and accidents: long exposures, in which anyone who moves becomes transparent; double exposures and composites; “orbs”, which are almost always dust, pollen, insects or rain caught by the flash; camera straps and hair in front of the lens; and faces seen in patterns of light and shadow (pareidolia). Ghost-photo apps add figures at the tap of a button, and AI tools can now create convincing images and video from scratch. Ask where the original file came from and who took it, run a reverse image search, check whether the image appeared years earlier elsewhere, and be most suspicious of the clearest pictures shared without a name, date or place.

Every haunting on Haunting Map is researched from published sources – newspapers, museums and historic sites, historical societies, academic papers, books, government records and, as one source among several, Wikipedia – and the sources are listed at the bottom of each file. We check names, dates and places against the record, and we write in our own words rather than copying.

We report claims as claims. Each file gives the real history of the place and the people connected to it, what witnesses report, and the skeptical and scientific explanations. When a famous ghost story doesn’t match the records – an invented murder, a person who never existed, a death toll inflated for tours – we say so plainly. We treat the victims of real tragedies with dignity, give only the town for private homes, and never encourage trespassing. Photos come from Wikimedia Commons with their licences credited, and videos are embedded only from the Internet Archive or the official channels of news outlets, museums, historic sites and original creators.

We’d love to hear from you. If you spot a mistake, know a source we’ve missed, or can tell us about a haunted place or local legend we haven’t covered, email contact@mosthauntedplaces.com (the address is also on our About & contact page, linked at the bottom of every page). Please include the page you’re writing about and, if you can, a link to a source such as a newspaper article, archive record or official site.

Corrections are checked against the record and made as quickly as we can, with credit if you’d like it. If you’re sending a personal experience, tell us when and where it happened; we may not be able to publish individual accounts, but they help us understand what people report. Please don’t send us addresses of private homes, and never trespass to get a photo for us.