The most haunted cities in the US — where it’s always spooky season
Oh, what a boo-tiful city.
No need to search for a haunted house this Halloween if you find yourself in America’s most blood-curdling burgs — the whole place is haunted, experts say.
A new survey has uncovered the most haunted population centers from coast to coast — and it comes as no surprise that New Orleans landed in the #1 spot.
The Big Easy, where the 79 cemeteries within municipal boundaries are some of the most popular tourist attractions in town, is in love with its colorful and spooky past, according to Tarotoo, an online tarot reading platform that crunched the creepy numbers to suss out the scary list.
Besides those renowned crypt collections, the City That Care Forgot is home to 44 psychics, 2.6 reported ghost sightings per 100,000 souls and an average building age of 51 years.
In second place came Louisville, known for its historic old town and cemetery population of 529,632, residing in a whopping 152 memorial parks.
But that’s nothing compared to Cleveland, with 780,519 graves — nearly double the living population of 359,606, according to the latest census estimate.
By all accounts, however, they’re resting comfortably — ghost sightings in the Mistake By The Lake were a relatively low 0.34 per 100,000 population.
Quite the opposite in Tucson, Ariz., the city on the list with the highest rate of supernatural encounters, at 5.3 per 100,000.
Other historic cities like Baltimore found their places comfortably on the list — the diminutive Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum here is just one of many unsettling experiences available to visitors.
The “Telltale Heart” author is said to have died under mysterious circumstances in Charm City in 1849.
Meanwhile, New Orleans is used to receiving an outsized share of attention at this time of year — tourists can stay in any number of hotels that are said to be some of the most haunted in the country.
A recent report declaring the most haunted hotels in the US — based on guests recounted tales of seeing, hearing, and even feeling so-called ghosts and other freakish phenomena — put the city’s Bourbon Orleans Hotel in first place.
Guests have alleged numerous encounters — including with the spirit of a little girl, supposedly friendly, who checked in and never left.
“Book 305 and maybe you will see the little girl my husband woke up to see,” one guest claimed in a Hotels.com review. “[He] woke up to getting poked on his feet and saw a little girl standing by the bed.”
The 10 spookiest cities in the US, just in time for Halloween
- New Orleans
- Louisville
- Pittsburgh
- Cleveland
- Milwaukee
- Tucson
- Providence
- Oklahoma City
- Nashville
- Baltimore
Researchers looked at the number of cemeteries per city, the number of graves and ghost sightings per 100,000, the number of psychics and the median age of the city’s buildings to determine the winners.
