Especially the 70s??  ???

Do you mean actual houses reported to have ghosts, or the Halloween haunted houses for fun?

Do you mean actual houses reported to have ghosts, or the Halloween haunted houses for fun?


The first choice.

Like the Amityville house and stories like that? I don't know, but that one was faked.

Whether people believe ghosts exists or not, most haunted house stories I hear are from the 70s. I find that weird. My guess is if the stories are fabricated, though not proven false yet, that haunted houses were the 'in' thing for the 70s and even most of the 80s.

Maybe it was less taboo to talk about by then? Good question because I have no clue!  :-[

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/settled.png

In the 50s and 60s, there was no concept of infotainment, even in print media.  In the 00s and thereafter, everyone has had a camera on hand, and the only people who still believe are the target demographic of the Oprah-owned "reality" TV channels.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/settled.png

In the 50s and 60s, there was no concept of infotainment, even in print media.  In the 00s and thereafter, everyone has had a camera on hand, and the only people who still believe are the target demographic of the Oprah-owned "reality" TV channels.


OPRAH!!!!!

I don't think that the number of haunted houses gone up or down. If a house was haunted in the '70s, I'm sure it would still be haunted today.

Today, you have shows like Ghost Hunters & Ghost Adventures. The closest you had in the '70s and/or '80s is In Search Of.


We were told that this house is haunted and after living here for about 6 months now, we have yet to see any evidence of that, much to our disappointed.  :\'( We wonder if "The Lady" is just waiting for us to get settled, if she likes what we have done to the place, or doesn't like us. We believe if she didn't like us or didn't like what we have done to the place, she would let us know.


Cat

The closest you had in the '70s and/or '80s is In Search Of.


The Internet has birthed a million conspiracy theories, but for every theory it spawns, it debunks a few more.  Going through the episode list is like a walk through the history of urban legends and pop science phenomena.  We know a lot more about most of these phenomena than we did 40-50 years ago when the show just aired. 

Let's get in the mood... I loved this show as a kid.

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In Search Of was a fun TV series.  It featured a mix of science and pseudoscience, and the fun was in trying to tell one from the other. 

Here's 40 years of hindsight coupled with the episode guide. 

What they got wrong:  There were no ancient astronauts.  The Tunguska event has been conclusively established to be an impact of a comet or meteorite fragment.  There are almost certainly no UFOs other than the ones from our military labs.  Firewalking works because coals conduct heat poorly, and because the water in your skin is a big heat sink.  Divining rods don't work.  The Alcor folks are still around but the science hasn't gone their way with respect to cryogenics as a means to immortality (but nobody knew that in 1980).  Faith healing, like psychic detectives, are hoaxes.  Although there are plenty of religious and political debates about these next two, there is no scientific one: there is no longer any scientific controversy between creationism and the theory of evolution (there was enough data to make that statement in 1980, but not enough people wanted to accept it).  Nor is there any remaining scientific controversy about an imminent ice age; the earth is getting hotter (but there really wasn't sufficient data to make that statement in 1980). 

Some things, people are still bickering over.  The Hindenburg may have burned because its skin was at least as flammable as the hydrogen within it, but people are still bickering about the issue.  It looks increasingly like Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but he was a weird one.  The Loch Ness Monster almost certainly doesn't exist, but it doesn't stop people from looking.  We have a pretty good idea where Amelia Earhart's plane landed, and she and her co-pilot probably lived there for a few months/years before they died, but only one group seems to give a damn, and they release the same story every few years.  I've forgotten what their theories were on Jack the Ripper and other famous cases of the day.  We still don't know exactly what happened to D.B. Cooper, and Jimmy Hoffa's body has never been recovered.

But a few things, they got right.  Dive teams have gone down to the Lusitania and confirmed she was carrying ammo.  Solar energy is commercially viable.  A sheep named Dolly was cloned, turning cloning from science fiction to science fact.  We know conclusively that Mars once had liquid water and that its climate changed as its atmosphere was lost to space due to its lack of a magnetosphere, a process completely different from present-day AGW.  And Killer Bees, "A photographic report from Brazil on the behavior of the bees and genetic experiments underway to stop the savage swarms from reaching the U.S." are still out of control and spreading across the US.

On balance, I think that what they got right was more important than what they got wrong.  Being wrong in 1980 just means you didn't have enough data to come to the right answer.  Being wrong in 2014 means exactly the same thing, and maybe someone will point at this post in 2060 and have a little smile about all the things I got wrong.

I blame releases of films such as "The Exorcist", "Amityville Horror" and "Poltergeist", bringing the attentionn of haunted houses to the masses!