Katy Golvala
Beware: With Halloween just around the corner, the chances of running into a supernatural being are at an all-time high.
Ghosts of America, a website that has been collecting people’s stories of ghost encounters since 2005, reveals that Americans have reported over 60,000 ghost encounters across the country over the last thirteen years. The two states with the most ghost sightings by far have been Texas and California, with around 6,000 sightings in each.
Almost 2,000 spooky encounters have been reported in New York, making it the state with the seventh highest number of reported run-ins with ghosts. Across the five boroughs, the Bronx seems to be the most haunted, with over 20 ghost encounters reported on the site, including a bizarre experience someone had in Pelham Bay Park with the ghost of a Civil War soldier. (Unfortunately, Queens had to be omitted from this analysis because encounters were organized by neighborhood and not by borough).
There aren’t currently any reports from Bushwick on the site, but one of the neighborhood’s most famous ghostly experiences took place in 1894, and was originally reported on by the New York Times. In 2008, the Bowery Boys, a podcast that discusses the history of New York, unearthed the article, which explains how the ghost of an attractive woman haunted the neighborhood and required an army of 300 cops to drive her away. The original Times article, which can be viewed here, called the neighborhood “a rocky, bleak, lonesome district” that “offered exceptional advantages to ghosts.”
So that’s your (spooky) fast fact of the week, Bushwick! Have a question about the neighborhood that you want us to try and answer using data? Leave a comment below!
Happy Halloween!
Cover image courtesy of Tertia Van Rensburg
