“Like American ghosts, they have an attachment to the human realm which keeps them haunting and helping humans.” “ can be asked for help in healing humans, winning the lottery and protecting one while traveling or while pregnant,” he says. It seems that belief in ghosts is even more widespread in much of Asia, where ghosts are characterized as neutral and can be appeased through rituals or angered if provoked (as opposed to our scarier depictions of ghosts in the West), according to Justin McDaniel, a professor of religious studies and director of the Penn Ghost Project at the University of Pennsylvania. Underwood’s classification of ghosts includes elementals, poltergeists, historical ghosts, mental imprint manifestations, death-survival ghosts, apparitions, time slips, ghosts of the living, and haunted inanimate objects. In A Natural History of Ghosts, Roger Clarke discusses nine varieties of ghosts identified by Peter Underwood, who has studied ghost stories for decades. While the terms spirit and ghost are related and even interchangeable in some languages, the word ghost in English tends to refer to the soul or spirit of a deceased person that can appear to the living. In the U.S., residents of places like Ellicott City in Howard County, Maryland, pride themselves on their haunted heritage. according to the country’s tourist board, and sites like .uk list dozens of allegedly haunted hotels where curious visitors can stay. Though it’s tough to estimate how large the paranormal tourism industry is-tours of sites that are supposedly haunted (rather than staged haunted houses)-there are 10,000 haunted locations in the U.K. The percentage is similar in the United Kingdom, where 52 percent of respondents indicated that they believed in ghosts in a recent poll. A Harris poll from last year found that 42 percent of Americans say they believe in ghosts. Recent surveys have shown that a significant portion of the population believes in ghosts, leading some scholars to conclude that we are witnessing a revival of paranormal beliefs in Western society.
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