It’s almost Halloween, and that got us thinking. Where are the most haunted cities in America located? There are some obvious answers here. Of course, Salem, Massachusetts, home of the of the witch trials in the 1600’s, probably jumps to the front of your mind. Or even New Orleans, home of voodoo. But what if we had confirmation from a trusted source proving that some areas really are haunted by ghosts?
If you have been a longtime reader of Profile and our blog posts, you will know that after the first release of data from the 2020 Census, our data team found some interesting side effects of the differential privacy policy, which introduced intentional errors to help keep citizen’s information private. Among those areas was an interesting set of block groups that we called “ghost blocks”—block groups with a population greater than zero in a household but no households in the block group. All this time we thought that it was a part of these intentional errors, but perhaps they were just surveying the local ghost population and including them in the Census. The map below shows these areas where ghosts live, and as you can see, they are concentrated in major metropolitan areas, with a heavy presence in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, New Jersey and Delaware. Spooky!
Even though the Census Bureau might believe in ghosts, we at AGS do not. We’ve done the hard work for you and found them homes, correcting the intentional errors woven into the 2020 Census which created these ghost blocks.
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