October 27, 2024: Heard About Any Good Hauntings Lately?

Quick question: Which house in your hometown is haunted?

 

It doesn't have to be a house, necessarily. Maybe it's a warehouse or an old theater. Maybe it's a barn. It could also be an old hospital or an orphanage, or maybe just an empty field. No matter the location, it seems like every town has a place that's supposedly stalked by spirits. Why is that?

 

Now, I'm perfectly willing to admit that this may just be an Ohio thing. The Buckeye State is apparently the third most haunted in the nation, just behind Texas and California. Maybe I was just fortunate(?) to grow up in a place where more shadows lurk around the corner than normal. I'm not sure why ghosts would choose to linger here as opposed to, say, Iowa, but who am I to question the motives of the dearly departed? Maybe they stay because of their love for their surroundings, or because of the amount of quartz in our soil. (What – you've never heard the theory that quartz crystals have a unique vibration that allows ghosts, cryptids, and other strange entities to exist for brief moments in our dimension? Clearly someone didn't spend their childhood watching every paranormal TV show they could get their hands on.)

 

Of course, there may be a more mundane explanation for our ghostly residents – boredom. While I'll be the first to argue that Ohio has more going for it than most people think, I also have to admit that our fair state isn't as exciting as New York or Florida. Sometimes you have to make your own fun, and people can't resist a good ghost story. Maybe our tales of otherworldly entities are more fiction than fact. No matter where you fall on the believer/skeptic scale, you can't deny that a good collection of spooky stories is a fun read. And if that terrifying tome involves a place near you, so much the better.

 

As we descend further into the traditional season for high strangeness, I'll be keeping my eyes and ears open for any reports of odd phenomena in my neck of the woods. Perhaps you should do the same. After all, maybe every town does have a haunted location . . . it's just waiting to be discovered.

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