These Are the Most Haunted States in the U.S.
Need a fright? It's time to head to California.
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The spooky season is well upon us, making it the perfect time to lean all the way into ghost stories and ghastly lore. And if you’re someone who’s particularly a fan of a good fright, now is the perfect time to plan a visit to California and Utah, which were just ranked as the spookiest states in America.
SmokyMountains.com, a website dedicated to the famed national park, pulled together data on the spookiest destinations from coast to coast. To discover which state could be named the spookiest of all, it parsed through each state’s most haunted locations, haunted houses, and Halloween stores, to then rank each one on its “Halloween spirit and place them on our Spookymeter.”
After tallying the numbers, it determined that the two western states were indeed the spookiest.
“When it comes to all things haunted, California has a good handle on it,” the findings revealed.
California ranked highly thanks to its number of Spirit Halloween stores (172) and for having the most haunted location, Alcatraz, which has, on average, 2,240,000 search results on Google. It also came in second for the highest number of haunted houses.
Jasmin Diaz/Courtesy of smokymountains.com
Utah tied for first, thanks to the allegedly haunted Union Station.
“Union Station is known to be haunted by paranormal activity,” the findings shared. “So much so that it has 1,044,000 search results on average via Google talking about how haunted and scary this Utah location is, as well as the stories of the woman and children who roam about this old railroad station.” Additionally, Utah ranked highly on the list as it’s home to 23 Spirit Halloween stores and nearly 30 haunted houses.
And if you really want to give yourself a scare, you can always book a night at The Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, which the results named the “most haunted hotel” in America, which boasts “800,000 search results on how haunted and scary it is.” But maybe you can go by yourself for this one, and just tell us all about it later.
Related: 35 Most Haunted Places in the World
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