When the haunted was built

The shape of the record

The archive's construction curve is really a map of American building booms — railroad hotels of the 1850s–90s, institutional sprawl of the early 1900s, theatres of the 1910s–20s. Hauntings follow the buildings that outlived their purpose: when the economy moved on and the walls stayed, the stories moved in.

Everything before 1800 is colonial ground and older still — missions, cemeteries, indigenous sites where the record predates the country recording it. The thin tail after 1950 is honest too: legends need time, and a building usually has to be abandoned before anyone files it as haunted.