Haunted, or Just Old? Britain and Ireland's Reportedly Haunted Places against Its Oldest Notable Buildings

Britain is often called the most haunted country on earth, and the usual explanation for a haunting is that a place is old. I test that idea with the 260 reportedly haunted places in Britain and Ireland recorded by English Wikipedia, set against the 40,409 Grade I, Grade II* and Category A listed buildings in Wikidata, 37,982 pubs from OpenStreetMap and the castles and tower houses in Wikidata. Each haunted place was placed on the map with a recorded method, given a kind and, where possible, a date, and its text was searched for fourteen stock figures of ghost lore, with every match checked by hand. Kind matters far more than age. Among 199 haunted buildings in Great Britain, castles are 9.0 times and inns 8.5 times as common as among listed buildings, while churches, 35% of listed buildings, are 4% of haunted ones. Dated haunted buildings sit at the 45th percentile of listed buildings of their kind (95% interval 33 to 51), only slightly older than typical; haunted houses are older than listed houses, haunted castles are not. Haunted inns are old inns: 60% stand within 50 metres of a top-listed building, against 7% of all pubs. Scotland has 2.9 times England's rate of haunted places per listed building, carried by its tower houses. The ghosts follow the buildings: coloured ladies in castles and houses, monks and nuns at abbeys, green ladies and drummers in Scottish castles. The record is of stories written down, shaped by notability and editors. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/ghosts/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/ghosts. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/27/ghosts/.