If you’re a longtime reader of this blog, you know that during the holidays, we like to have a little fun around here. While nothing will ever top our Demographic Guide to the Best Trick-or-Treating, we set out this year to identify the spookiest towns in America. Does your city make the list?
Our first idea was to identify cities with high levels of Wiccans. It started with an innocent Teams message to Gary: “We don’t have data on Wiccans, do we? Obviously for Halloween.” After all, a city full of witches must be very spooky. Sadly, our religious affiliation data doesn’t break out Wiccans—and we’d never be able to tell how many of the “other non-Christian” population are actually witches, wizards, or simply black cat enthusiasts.
Our second thought was to look at pumpkin production—because nothing says Halloween like a field full of gourds. According to the USDA, Illinois easily takes the crown, harvesting more than twice as many pumpkin acres as any other state. Illinois farmers cultivated a whopping 15,400 acres of pumpkins last year. California, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington each followed behind with between 2,800 and 6,500 acres apiece. Plenty of raw material there for jack-o’-lanterns, pies, and seasonal lattes alike.
Then we turned to something a bit more literal: spooky town names. America has no shortage of chillingly named places. You can visit Salem, Massachusetts, where history and hauntings intertwine; Sleepy Hollow, New York, home of the Headless Horseman; or Tombstone, Arizona, where the Wild West never quite died. If you’d rather face your fears head-on, try Hell, Michigan, or Boo, Missouri (yes, that’s real). For an especially eerie road trip, Pennsylvania alone offers Scary and Grimville—two names that make you think twice about turning down a dark country road.
Finally, we decided to measure spookiness in the demographer way: by counting Spirit Halloween stores. After all, few sights are more haunting than a Spirit store suddenly appearing in your local strip mall. We reached out to our friends at Sites USA, who shared their point-of-interest data for Spirit locations nationwide and even mapped the metropolitan based maps for us using REGIS online. Our national map shows store locations scattered across the country, while the second map highlights the distance to the nearest Spirit store—revealing just how close you are to your next fog machine or oversized skeleton. On a state level, we measured the number of stores in relation to the population size, and Pennsylvania leads the pack with 5.4 stores per million residents. Following behind them are California, Texas, Florida and New York.
When you break down the data for the metropolitan area, you see an interesting pattern. The Southwest puts up a strong showing—San Antonio, Los Angeles, and Phoenix all feature enough Spirit stores to outfit an entire undead army. San Antonio alone has 4.3 stores per million residents, the highest in the country.
We do want to point out here that Pennsylvania deserves a special mention. With robust pumpkin production, multiple ominously named towns, and a generous helping of Spirit Halloween stores, the Keystone State makes a compelling case as America’s spookiest state.
Whether your town made the list or not, there’s no denying that geography and data can make Halloween a little more fun. So, as you carve your pumpkins, stock up on candy, and maybe check how close you really are to a Spirit store… remember: the data never lies—it just haunts you with the truth.
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