Ghost Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
Ghost and paranormal trivia in one quiz, 109 free questions with answers deep. It starts with the ghost stories: banshees, will-o'-the-wisps, hungry ghosts, the Flying Dutchman, the Tower of London, Borley Rectory, Amityville, the Bell Witch and the Enfield poltergeist, plus the ghosts of fiction and film from Marley to Casper and The Sixth Sense. Then it widens to the rest of the paranormal: the Patterson–Gimlin Bigfoot film, the surgeon's photograph of Nessie, the Roswell debris and Project Mogul, Project Blue Book's 701 unexplained cases, the CIA's 2013 admission about Area 51, Zener cards and ESP, Uri Geller's disastrous Tonight Show, the Mothman, the chupacabra and the ghost-hunting TV boom. Every answer is checked against a documented source, which is more than most of the phenomena can say. Difficulty runs from easy folklore to hard history, so it works for a Halloween party or a serious skeptic.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The English word 'ghost' comes from an Old English word meaning what?
Breath or spirit
Breath or spirit: Old English 'gast' meant the soul or the breath of life, the sense preserved in 'Holy Ghost' and in 'giving up the ghost' for dying.
Q 02According to a 2005 Gallup poll, roughly what share of Americans said they believe in ghosts?
About 32 percent
About 32 percent of Americans told Gallup in June 2005 that they believed in ghosts, while 37 percent said houses could be haunted; three in four held at least one paranormal belief.
Q 03Which Roman writer recorded the haunted-house story of the philosopher Athenodorus in Athens?
Pliny the Younger
Pliny the Younger told it in a letter to Sura: a chained ghost led Athenodorus to a spot in the garden where a shackled skeleton was dug up and given proper burial.
Q 04In Macbeth, whose ghost appears at the banquet, visible only to Macbeth?
Banquo
Banquo, murdered on Macbeth's orders, takes the king's seat at the feast in Act 3; only Macbeth sees him, and Lady Macbeth hurries the guests out.
Q 05What does the German word poltergeist literally mean?
Noisy or rumbling ghost
Noisy or rumbling ghost: German 'poltern' means to rumble or clatter and 'Geist' means spirit, fitting the tradition of knocks, thrown objects and moved furniture blamed on them.
Q 06Which 1990 film about a murdered man who returns as a spirit was the highest-grossing movie of that year?
Ghost
Ghost, starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, took about $505 million worldwide on a budget near $22 million, beating Home Alone and Pretty Woman to the year's top spot.
Q 07Who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing the con-artist medium Oda Mae Brown?
Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg took the 1991 Academy Award for Oda Mae Brown, the first Black actress to win an Oscar since Hattie McDaniel in 1940; Bruce Joel Rubin won for the screenplay.
Q 08A Christmas Carol was first published in London in which year?
1843
1843: Chapman and Hall published it on 19 December 1843, and the first run of 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve.
Q 09In A Christmas Carol, what does Jacob Marley's ghost drag behind him?
Heavy chains and cash boxes
Heavy chains and cash boxes: Marley's chain is forged from cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers and steel purses, and he warns Scrooge that three spirits will follow.
Q 10How many years before the story opens did Marley die?
Seven
Seven: Marley died on Christmas Eve seven years before the tale begins, and Scrooge, his sole mourner, has never painted out his partner's name on the firm's sign.
Q 11Which 1999 film introduced the line 'I see dead people'?
The Sixth Sense
The Sixth Sense: Haley Joel Osment's Cole whispers it to Bruce Willis's Malcolm Crowe; M. Night Shyamalan's film was 1999's second-biggest US hit, behind The Phantom Menace.
Q 12How many Academy Award nominations did Shyamalan's 1999 ghost film receive?
Six
They included Best Picture and nods for Haley Joel Osment and Toni Collette; it grossed over $672 million.
Q 13Casper the Friendly Ghost first appeared in theatrical cartoons made by which studio?
Paramount's Famous Studios
Paramount's Famous Studios released the first short, The Friendly Ghost, in 1945 and kept Casper on cinema screens in dozens of cartoons through 1959.
Q 21What does the Irish banshee's name, bean sí, literally mean?
Woman of the fairy mound
Woman of the fairy mound: Irish 'bean' means woman and 'sí' the fairy mounds of the otherworld; her wail or keening foretells a death, and she is often pictured combing long hair.
Q 22What is the Latin name for the will-o'-the-wisp, the ghost light seen over bogs?
Ignis fatuus, 'foolish flame'
Ignis fatuus, 'foolish flame', is the Medieval Latin name; the lights are usually blamed on marsh gas, and British folk names include jack-o'-lantern, friar's lantern and hinkypunk.
Q 23What is the Chasse-galerie of Quebec folklore?
Q 14What distinction did Casper achieve in his 1995 live-action film?
First computer-generated character to star in a movie
First computer-generated character to star in a movie: the 1995 Amblin feature was the first with a fully computer-animated lead, acting alongside Christina Ricci and Bill Pullman; ILM built the ghosts.
Q 15Which house in Essex did psychic researcher Harry Price call 'the most haunted house in England'?
Borley Rectory
Borley Rectory, built in 1862 and gutted by fire in 1939, became famous after a 1929 Daily Mirror story; a 1956 study concluded Price had exaggerated or faked much of the evidence.
Q 16Anne Boleyn's ghost is said to walk the Tower of London carrying what?
Her head under her arm
Her head under her arm: Boleyn was beheaded on Tower Green in 1536 and buried in the Tower's chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, where her headless ghost is also said to walk.
Q 17Which composer's opera The Flying Dutchman has the ghostly captain redeemed by Senta's love?
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman premiered in Dresden in the early 1840s; he said a stormy North Sea crossing in 1839 inspired it, and Senta's devotion breaks the captain's curse.
Q 18Which future British king recorded a sighting of the Flying Dutchman as a young naval cadet?
George V
George V, then Prince George, was a 16-year-old midshipman on HMS Bacchante when the 1881 log recorded a glowing phantom ship off Australia's east coast; the lookout who saw it fell to his death soon after.
Q 19In Hamlet, who first witnesses the ghost of the dead king on the battlements?
Horatio and two sentries
Horatio and two sentries, Marcellus and Bernardo, watch the armoured ghost on the Elsinore battlements in the opening scene, then fetch Hamlet, who hears from it that Claudius murdered him.
Q 20Henry James's ghost novella The Turn of the Screw was first serialised in which magazine in 1898?
Collier's Weekly
Collier's Weekly ran it in twelve weekly instalments from January to April 1898, before it appeared in book form that October in the volume The Two Magics.
A haunted flying canoe
A haunted flying canoe: in Honoré Beaugrand's 1892 telling, lumberjacks sell their souls so the devil will fly their canoe home for a New Year's Eve dance; Chile's Caleuche is a ghost-ship cousin.
Q 24The Bell Witch legend centres on a family in which US state?
Tennessee
Tennessee: from 1817 to 1821 the Bells of Robertson County, near Adams, were said to be tormented by an invisible, talking entity that some blamed for John Bell's death in 1820.
Q 25How many days did the Lutz family last in the Amityville house before fleeing?
28
28: George and Kathy Lutz moved into 112 Ocean Avenue on 18 December 1975 and left on 14 January 1976; Jay Anson's 1977 book The Amityville Horror told their story.
Q 26The stage illusion Pepper's ghost was popularised in 1862 in a production of a work by which author?
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens: the illusion first wowed London in December 1862 in a Royal Polytechnic Institution staging of his 1848 story The Haunted Man, with Henry Dircks's design refined by John Henry Pepper.
Q 27Which Disneyland attraction uses Pepper's ghost for its ballroom of dancing spirits?
The Haunted Mansion
The Haunted Mansion's Grand Hall seats waltzing ghosts produced by Pepper's ghost: Audio-Animatronic figures below and above the riders are reflected in a huge pane of glass.
Q 28The Ouija board was named in 1890 in which US city?
Baltimore
Baltimore: the Kennard Novelty Company named the board there in 1890, medium Helen Peters supposedly asking the board itself, which spelled out 'Ouija'; Elijah Bond's patent followed in 1891.
Q 29What is the heart-shaped pointer on a Ouija board called?
A planchette
A planchette, French for 'little plank', is the heart-shaped pointer on felt-tipped legs or a glass window; the word was used for automatic-writing devices before Ouija boards existed.
Q 30What psychological phenomenon best explains how a Ouija pointer moves?
The ideomotor effect
The ideomotor effect: people touching the pointer make tiny unconscious muscle movements, so the board 'speaks' only what they expect; Michael Faraday showed the same mechanism behind table-turning in 1853.