Haunted House

Reportedly haunted locations: A haunted house, spook house or ghost house in ghostlore is a house or other building often perceived as being inhabited by disembodied spirits of the deceased who may have been former residents or were otherwise connected with the property. Parapsychologists often attribute haunting to the spirits of the dead who have suffered from violent or tragic events in the building's past such as murder, accidental death, or suicide. In a majority of cases, upon scientific investigation, alternative causes to supernatural phenomenon are found to be at fault, such as hoaxes, environmental effects, hallucinations or confirmation biases. If there is an expectation of a preternatural encounter, it is more likely that one will be perceived or reported. According to Owen Davies, a paranormal historian, hauntings in the British Isles were usually attributed to fairies, but today hauntings are usually associated with ghostly or supernatural encounters. Davies explains that "if people were to fail to occupy a human space, then external forces would move in." Haunting is one of the most common paranormal beliefs around the world, according to Benjamin Radford in his book Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits. He says that almost every town and city has at least one "haunted" place; and that, despite over 100 years of investigation, there has not been a "single verifiable fact about ghosts having been established." In the first century A.D., the great Roman author and statesman Pliny the Younger recorded one of the first notable ghost stories in his letters, which became famous for their vivid account of life during the heyday of the Roman Empire. Pliny reported that the specter of an old man with a long beard, and rattling chains, was haunting his house in Athens. People go to ghost houses to listen to frightening stories or seek elaborate decorations and costumes to experience shivers as a way to feel cooler in the hot summer temperatures. The Shanghai Disneyland Park planners decided against building The Haunted Mansion because of the local cultural beliefs about ghosts and hauntings. Building the house would have been considered a mockery of their fear. In Wuhan, China, the police have built a haunted house to train their police force by testing their nerves. The house is also open to the public. During the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020, Indonesian lawmakers of the Sragen region on the island of Java decided to lock people who did not follow quarantine guidelines in abandoned and supposedly haunted houses. It was an attempt to motivate a superstitious population when science failed to do so. According to Owen Davies's book, The Haunted: a Social History of Ghosts, "ven the most devout believers in ghosts over the centuries recognized that many hauntings were frauds." In an interview with USA Today, Davies states that "or skeptics in the past and present, the house was obviously the center of hauntings because it was where people slept and dreamed of the dead, or where people lay drunk, drugged or hallucinating in their sickbeds." Such basic poltergeist phenomena as rapping or knocking were very easy to orchestrate with the help of accomplices or a variety of ploys.