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 02A 2005 Gallup poll found that a third of Americans believed in ghosts, but which belief was more common?
Haunted houses
Haunted houses: 37 percent of Americans said houses can be haunted but only 32 percent believed in ghosts, so some accepted the haunting without the ghost; ESP led the list at 41 percent.
Q 03Which Roman writer, famous for letters on the eruption of Vesuvius, also told a ghost story set in Athens?
Pliny the Younger
Pliny the Younger told it in a letter to Sura: a ghost in chains led the philosopher Athenodorus into the courtyard and vanished, and digging there turned up a shackled skeleton, which was given a proper burial.
Q 04In Macbeth, whose ghost takes Macbeth's own seat at the feast, visible only to him?
Banquo
Banquo, murdered on Macbeth's orders, appears at the feast in Act 3; only Macbeth sees him, and as he raves at what looks like an empty stool Lady Macbeth sends the guests home.
Q 05What does the German word poltergeist literally mean?
Noisy ghost
Noisy ghost: German 'poltern' means to make noise or rattle and 'Geist' means ghost, a fit for the knocks, thrown objects and shifted furniture that get blamed on them.
Q 06Which song plays as Sam and Molly sit at the pottery wheel in the 1990 film Ghost?
Unchained Melody
Unchained Melody, in the Righteous Brothers' 1965 recording, plays over the scene; the film sent the 25-year-old single back up the charts, and it reached No. 1 in Britain in late 1990.
Q 07Who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar as con-artist medium Oda Mae Brown in the 1990 film Ghost?
Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg won the 1991 Oscar for Oda Mae Brown, the first Black actress to win since Hattie McDaniel in 1940; she got the part after Patrick Swayze refused to make the film without her.
Q 08Which of Scrooge's ghostly visitors shows him his grave?
Christmas Yet to Come
Christmas Yet to Come, a silent phantom shrouded in black, points Scrooge to a neglected grave bearing his own name; he wakes a changed man, buys the Cratchits the prize turkey and raises Bob's salary.
Q 09In A Christmas Carol, what does Jacob Marley's ghost drag behind him?
Heavy chains and cash boxes
Heavy chains and cash boxes: the chain is made of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers and steel purses, and Marley says he forged it himself in life, link by link, of his own free will.
Q 10In A Christmas Carol, what was Jacob Marley to Scrooge in life?
Partner
Partner: Marley died seven years before the story, yet Scrooge never painted his name off the sign, so the firm still traded as Scrooge and Marley and he answered to either name.
Q 11Which 1999 film introduced the line 'I see dead people'?
The Sixth Sense
The Sixth Sense: young Cole whispers it to child psychologist Malcolm Crowe, played by Bruce Willis, and the film's last twist is that Crowe has himself been one of the dead since its opening scene.
Q 12Which child actor was Oscar-nominated for Shyamalan's 1999 ghost film?
Haley Joel Osment
Haley Joel Osment was 11 when the film earned six nominations and no wins; Michael Caine, who beat him to Best Supporting Actor, told him from the stage, 'When I saw you I thought, well, that's me out of it.'
Q 13Casper the Friendly Ghost first appeared in theatrical cartoons made by which studio?
Paramount's Famous Studios
Q 21What does the Irish banshee's name, bean sí, literally mean?
Woman of the fairy mound
Woman of the fairy mound: 'bean' is Irish for woman and 'sí' names the ancient mounds said to house the fairy folk, so her name marks her as one of them; her wail foretells a death in the family.
Q 22Which ghost light is called ignis fatuus, or 'foolish fire', in Latin?
Will-o'-the-wisp
Will-o'-the-wisp: the flickering marsh light looks like a distant lantern and was said to lead night travellers astray; it is usually put down to burning gas from rotting plants.
Q 23In Quebec's Chasse-galerie legend, what do homesick lumberjacks ride through the night sky after a pact with the devil?
A canoe
Paramount's Famous Studios turned an unpublished children's story by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo into the 1945 short The Friendly Ghost, and kept Casper in cinemas until 1959.
Q 14The 1995 film Casper had the first fully computer-generated lead character, six months before which fully computer-animated feature?
Toy Story
Toy Story opened that November as the first feature made entirely by computer; Casper, out in May, got there first with a digital star, whom ILM animated into about 40 minutes of live-action footage.
Q 15Which house in Essex did the investigator 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 by three fellow researchers concluded Price had faked some of the phenomena himself.
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 at the Tower in 1536 and buried in its chapel, and the 1934 comic song 'With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm', first sung by Stanley Holloway, retells the haunting.
Q 17Which composer's opera The Flying Dutchman has the ghostly captain redeemed by Senta's love?
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner said a stormy 1839 sea voyage from Riga to London, made while fleeing his creditors, inspired The Flying Dutchman; he conducted its Dresden premiere in 1843.
Q 18Which future British king was a teenage sailor on a naval cruise that logged a sighting of the Flying Dutchman in 1881?
George V
George V, then 16-year-old Prince George, was sailing between Melbourne and Sydney when the cruise journal described a glowing red phantom ship; hours later the seaman who first reported it fell from the rigging and died.
Q 19In the opening scene of Hamlet, who sees the dead king's ghost?
Horatio and two sentries
Horatio and two sentries, Marcellus and Barnardo, see it together; the guards had met the armoured ghost on two earlier nights and brought the doubting Horatio along as a witness, and he goes to tell Hamlet.
Q 20Which 1898 novella has a governess who sees two dead servants?
The Turn of the Screw
The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, ran in Collier's Weekly in 1898; when the governess points out a ghost by the lake the housekeeper sees nothing, and the story never settles whether the hauntings are real.
A canoe: in Honoré Beaugrand's 1892 telling the devil flies the loggers home to their sweethearts for New Year's Eve, but takes their souls if they speak God's name or touch a church cross on the way.
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 long did the Lutz family last in their Long Island 'horror' house?
Four weeks
Four weeks: George and Kathy Lutz moved in during December 1975 and fled after 28 days; their story became a 1977 bestseller, though a lawyer involved later said they had created it together 'over many bottles of wine'.
Q 26The stage illusion Pepper's ghost was popularised in 1862 in a production of a work by which author?
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens: a scene from his 1848 tale The Haunted Man introduced the illusion at London's Royal Polytechnic on Christmas Eve 1862; engineer Henry Dircks devised it, but showman John Henry Pepper's name stuck.
Q 27Disneyland's Haunted Mansion claims to house how many 'happy haunts', with room for one more?
999
999 is the Ghost Host's count, with room for a thousand; the waltzing spirits in the ballroom are the ride's Pepper's ghost illusion, reflections of hidden figures in a huge pane of glass.
Q 28The Ouija board was named in 1890 in which US city, where Edgar Allan Poe is buried?
Baltimore
Baltimore: investors in the Kennard Novelty Company named it there in 1890 by asking the board itself, they said; it spelled out 'Ouija' and told medium Helen Peters the word meant 'good luck'.
Q 29What is the heart-shaped pointer on a Ouija board called?
A planchette
A planchette, French for 'little plank', began as a small board on casters holding a pencil for 'automatic writing' at Victorian séances, before Ouija boards turned it into a pointer.
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 'says' what they expect; Michael Faraday built a simple apparatus that showed the same thing behind table-turning.