Does a Country’s Age Have Anything to Do with It’s Ghosts?

A few months back, Jessica from Ghost Stories and Haunted Places left a comment on Top Five Countries with the Best Paranormal Tourism:

It is interesting that the country with one of the shorter histories made number one. You’d think the UK or Ireland with their long dark histories would be #1, but I guess it isn’t the history, but what you do with it that counts.

I got to thinking about her comment again after my husband asked the other day, “What about dinosaurs? How come you never hear of any dinosaur ghosts? They were here too. Don’t you think they can haunt places?”

He has a point. How do we know some of the unexplained activity people report in various places isn’t the spirit of a dinosaur? It could perhaps explain some things.

All I know is I had two criteria for picking the countries I did and ranking them in the order I did. I based it on countries that:

1. Most actively promote their paranormal tourism (meaning which individual haunted places promote their activities as well as which CVBs promote a city or region’s haunted happenings), and
2. Have the highest concentration of paranormal activities, such as ghost tours, haunted historical walks, and other such paranormal events, including Halloween festivities.

The United States ended up as number one. This was mainly because we just have so many more places here. It became a matter of quantity.

No, we certainly don’t have the longest history as far as a country goes. However, people of the land go back centuries. In fact, some of them date back to prehistoric times.

For instance, when we were in Fort Walton Beach a couple of years back, there was a Heritage Park and Cultural Center I wanted to visit. Exhibits in the Indian Temple Mound Museum reflect the 12,000 years worth of history of the Native Americans who inhabited the area.

Granted, Europeans estimate their first human settlements being between 45,000 B.C. and 25,000 B.C. They do have more history on us in that respect. Perhaps some of their prehistoric predecessors even account for some of their unexplained paranormal activity.

But we, too, have predecessors that pre-date the official founding of our country. The Native Americans to whom this land once belonged had families and friendships. They worked, loved, fought, died, and worshiped, even if their histories were not officially recorded and their individual memories are long forgotten.

Many of their tribes believed in ghosts and that the spirits of their dead could come back and haunt the living. Some of those spirits may still roam about today. They may be responsible for some of the tales to which no name can be placed. You know the kind. The stories of odd things happening for no apparent reason. Research doesn’t reveal any significant event that should have left an imprint, yet bizarre things occur nonetheless.

Perhaps some of these instances can be attributed to a people who lived here long before the U.S. was even a gleam in our country’s founding fathers’ eyes. Perhaps.

So I guess my answer to “Does a country’s age have anything to do with it’s ghosts?” is both yes and no. Of course it does.

But we must also remember countries change, merge, grow, divide, but the land on which they’re founded has a history, and ghosts, of its own.

Courtney Mroch

Courtney Mroch is a globe-trotting restless spirit who’s both possessed by wanderlust and the spirit of adventure, and obsessed with true crime, horror, the paranormal, and weird days. Perhaps it has something to do with her genes? She is related to occult royalty, after all. Marie Laveau, the famous Voodoo practitioner of New Orleans, is one of her ancestors. (Yes, really! As explained here.) That could also explain her infatuation with skeletons.

Speaking of mystical, to learn how Courtney channeled her battle with cancer to conjure up this site, check out HJ’s Origin Story.