Almost half of the population of Canada, The United States and the UK believe in ghosts, according to studies done in the last decade or so.
The reasons behind this rise may not be shocking, but some the results might surprise some people, especially those skeptical of the paranormal.
Starting with the United States, according to a poll conducted by the Huffington Post, forty-five percent of those polled believed in ghosts or life after death.
This is similar to a CBS poll conducted in 2009, where on the subject of life after death, a whopping seventy-eight percent they believed in the concept.
Rising numbers in believers in ghosts is not just limited to the States. Their neighbors to the north in Canada also seemed to favor a belief in the after life and the echoes of the dead.
Besides the raw number of the forty-seven percent of Canada that does indeed believe in spirits, the 2006 survey done by Canada Speaks survey and released by Sympatico / MSN, goes into detail as well.
Some of the more interesting findings are that those with children seemed more likely to believe in ghosts then those without kids and as the household income went up, beliefs in the paranormal seemed to decline.
More interesting data from the 2006 study:
Forty-seven percent of Canadians indicate that they believe in ghosts – 31% say they “think such things are likely” and 16% say they “know such things exist”. Further:
* One in five Canadians (18%) say they have been in the presence of a ghost;
* 12% have had an “out-of-body experience”;
* 9% have “visited with the ghost of a dead relative”; and
* The same proportion (9%) says they have “lived in a haunted house”.Fortunately, for ghost-believers, more (32%) feel that ghosts are usually “forces of good” rather than “forces of evil” (8%).
They also had a little look see on how Canadians feel about the Halloween holiday:
Approximately one-third of Canadians agree with the statement that “I don’t like Halloween” (31%), while just 29% say they “will likely put on a costume this year for Halloween”. And, 32% agree that they “don’t really understand what we’re celebrating on Halloween”.
Finally, we leave the continent and head East to the UK, where a recently conducted study conducted by the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena found that fifty-two percent of those polled believed in ghosts up from around forty percent from results from similar polls done in 2005 and 2009.
Among the interesting bits from that study were the fact that women were more likely to be believers then men and there was an increase in beliefs in ghosts in people aged eighteen to Twenty-four.
The study also found that the belief in UFOs has declined remarkably.
Many explanations are possible for the sudden recent rise in paranormal beliefs. Shows like Ghost Hunters, Most Haunted and Ghost Adventures are very popular programs in the areas mentioned in the studies.
It would not take much to think that shows like this and popular films like Paranormal Activity and the Conjuring have not ‘ramped up’ our acceptance of the supernatural.
Whatever the reason, it seems that more and more people are willing to believe that there are ghosts among us or at the very least, a possibility of something beyond this lifetime.
-Thomas Spychalski
(Via E-Canada Now)
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