To celebrate the spooky season, NASA has released a bone-chilling photo of a creepy "skull" that appears to glower up toward space from the heart of an enormous volcanic pit in Chad. 

The uncanny image was captured Feb. 12 by an unnamed astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS), as the spacecraft passed above the Tibesti Massif — a mountain range that stretches across the center of the Sahara Desert through Chad and Libya. The image was released on Oct. 31 by NASA's Earth Observatory.

The skull-shaped feature is located on the floor of Trou au Natron, also known as Doon Orei — a 3,300-foot-wide (1,000 meters) volcanic caldera, or crater, that was left behind by a massive volcanic eruption hundreds of thousands of years ago. The geological indentation is located just to the south of Tarso Toussidé, an even larger volcanic feature that is home to a potentially active stratovolcano. (Trou au Natron translates to "natron hole" in French, while Doon Orei means "big hole" in Teda.)

The white color of the skull's mouth, nose and left cheek is given off by natron, a naturally occurring salty mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride and sodium sulfate. The eyes and nose hole areas are cinder cones — steep conical hills built around volcanic vents that tower above the rest of the caldera floor. The darker area to the left of the face is the shadow cast by the tall rim of the crater, which helps give the skull its distinctive shape.

Related: Deformed skulls and ritual beheadings found at Maya pyramid in Mexico

Trou au Natron is barren and lifeless today, but experts believe it was a thriving glacial lake until around 14,000 years ago. 

In the 1960s, researchers discovered fossils of sea snails and plankton beneath the pit's natron-covered floor, according to Earth Observatory. And in 2015, a follow-up expedition found algal fossils that date back 120,000 years. 

Despite being at least as old as the fossils within the dried-up lake, Trou au Natron is actually one of the youngest volcanic features in the Tibesti Massif, according to Earth Observatory. The surrounding volcanoes are likely much older.

This is not the first time that a skull-shaped feature has been spotted from space. In 2016, a weather satellite image of Hurricane Matthew — a category 5 tropical storm that killed more than 600 people across the Caribbean — captured the swirling vortex cosplaying as a sinister shadowy face with a bright red eye and distinct teeth as it made landfall in Haiti.

A newly discovered, "potentially hazardous" asteroid almost the size of the world's tallest skyscraper is set to tumble past Earth just in time for Halloween, according to NASA.

The asteroid, called 2022 RM4, has an estimated diameter of between 1,083 and 2,428 feet (330 and 740 meters) — just under the height of Dubai's 2,716-foot-tall (828 m) Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. It will zoom past our planet at around 52,500 mph (84,500 km/h), or roughly 68 times the speed of sound.

At its closest approach on Nov. 1, the asteroid will come within about 1.43 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) of Earth, around six times the average distance between Earth and the moon. By cosmic standards, this is a very slender margin.

Related: Why are asteroids and comets such weird shapes?

NASA flags any space object that comes within 120 million miles (193 million km) of Earth as a "near-Earth object" and classifies any large body within 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) of our planet as "potentially hazardous." Once flagged, these potential threats are closely watched by astronomers, who study them with radar for signs of any deviation from their predicted trajectories that could put them on a devastating collision course with Earth. 

NASA tracks the locations and orbits of roughly 28,000 asteroids, pinpointing them with the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) — an array of four telescopes able to perform a total scan of the entire night sky every 24 hours.

Since ATLAS was brought online in 2017, it has spotted more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets. Two of the asteroids detected by ATLAS, 2019 MO and 2018 LA, actually hit Earth, the former exploding off the southern coast of Puerto Rico and the latter crash-landing near the border of Botswana and South Africa. Fortunately, those asteroids were small and didn't cause any damage.

NASA has estimated the trajectories of all the near-Earth objects beyond the end of the century. The good news is that Earth faces no known danger from an apocalyptic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years, according to NASA.

But this doesn't mean that astronomers think they should stop looking. Though the majority of near-Earth objects may not be civilization-ending, such as the planet-busting comet in the 2021 satirical disaster movie "Don't Look Up," there are plenty of devastating asteroid impacts in recent history to justify the continued vigilance.

For instance, in March 2021, a bowling ball-size meteor exploded over Vermont with the force of 440 pounds (200 kilograms) of TNT. In 2013, a meteor that exploded in the atmosphere above the central Russian city of Chelyabinsk generated a blast roughly equal to around 400 to 500 kilotons of TNT, or 26 to 33 times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb. During the 2013 explosion, fireballs rained down over the city and its environs, damaging buildings, smashing windows and injuring approximately 1,500 people.

If astronomers were to ever spy a dangerous asteroid headed our way, space agencies around the world are already working on possible ways to deflect it. On Sept. 26, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft redirected the non-hazardous asteroid Dimorphos by ramming it off course, altering the asteroid's orbit by 32 minutes in the first test of Earth's planetary defense system.

China has also suggested it is in the early planning stages of an asteroid-redirect mission. By slamming 23 Long March 5 rockets into the asteroid Bennu, which is set to swing within 4.6 million miles (7.4 million km) of Earth's orbit between the years 2175 and 2199, the country hopes to divert the space rock from a potentially catastrophic impact with our planet.

In All About History issue 121, on sale now, you can explore the rise of the Aztec Empire, from its simple origins to the massive Central American superpower that it became. Learn about how its society was structured, how its military dominated the region and how people lived their daily lives.

Learn about the way Eagle and Jaguar warriors earned their ranks and what that meant to the hierarchy of their society. Why was it so important to the Aztecs to capture rather than kill their opponents on the battlefield? And did they stand a chance against the Spanish invasion of Hernán Cortés?

All About History looks to answer all of these questions and more with its cover feature this issue.

Also in All About History 121, read about the history of the Pride movement, from Stonewall to modern marches. You can also learn about Queen Zenobia, the woman who challenged Rome and conquered Egypt. And discover the origins of popular Halloween traditions.

Related: Read a free issues of All About History

Plus, leading historians tell All About History what they think the future of history will look like. How will we be remembered by the generations to come? What events of the last decade will dominate historical debates? Find out in the latest issue. 

Rise of the Aztec Empire

At their height, around A.D. 1500, the Aztecs controlled a large amount of territory in central Mexico. They grew their empire through military conquest. "According to their own histories, military power [was] the main advantage they had," Davide Domenici, an anthropology professor at the University of Bologna, told All About History. 

Scholars use a wide variety of sources to reconstruct Aztec warfare, including texts written by the Aztecs and Spanish, archaeological discoveries and experiments such as testing out the effects of different Aztec weapons.

Defining who exactly the Aztecs were can be complicated. The word "Aztec" comes from the Nahuatl language and means "people from Aztlan". David Carrasco, author of "The Aztecs: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford University Press, 2011), describes Aztlan as the "revered place of origin of the various ethnic groups who eventually dominated central Mexico in the century before the arrival of Europeans." Where exactly Aztlan is and whether it should be considered a real or mythical place is a source of debate among scholars. 

The people whom we call Aztecs didn't use that word to describe themselves. They would sometimes use words linked to various ethnic groups that they belonged to such as the Mexica, who were based around the city of Tenochtitlán and became the most powerful Aztec group.

Scholars often use the term Aztec Empire to describe the entity that came to control much of central Mexico. At the heart of the Aztec Empire was the "Triple Alliance" of the cities of Tenochtitlán, Tetzcoco and Tlacopa who, around A.D. 1428, agreed to work together to grow their influence and share the spoils of war. This happened after they overthrew the Tepanecs, who had been one of the most powerful groups in the region and had exercised power over Tenochtitlán and other cities. As time went on Domenici describes how the Mexica based at Tenochtitlán "gained a position of prominence within the so-called Triple Alliance."

Read more in All About History 121.

Halloween history

As the autumn leaves begin to fall and the nights grow longer, you may already have noticed a chill in the air. It's the season when costumed creatures walk the streets and carved Jack O’Lanterns illuminate the fields. That’s right, Halloween is nearly upon us once again. According to Statista, around $10.1bn is spent by Americans on Halloween every year, with the average consumer spending at least $100 to $30 of this going on candy alone. 

Yet despite Halloween now being a multi-billion dollar industry with annual scare events and huge festivals such as Universal Studios’ theme park horror nights, its history is equally as rich and as spook-tacular as the modern interpretation. From ancient Celtic festivals to Irish legends of pumpkin-headed spirits wandering the Earth, the most terrifying night of the year has an equally spine-chilling past. 

Learn more about the history of Halloween in All About History 121.  

Zenobia: Warrior queen

Born in around A.D. 240  to an aristocratic Palmyrene family, Zenobia (her name may have been Bat-Zabbai or Na’ilah in her own language) married Septimius Odenathus at the age of 17 or 18. He was an important local aristocrat, an experienced general and the military commander of Palmyra. Odenathus was already a widower and had a son, Septimius Hairan (or Haeranes) Herodianus, by his first marriage. Zenobia would also give Odenathus a son, Septimius Vaballathus, born between A.D. 258 and 260; there may also have been more sons, Septimius Antiochus, Herennianus, Timolaus and possibly another Hairan. We are also told of two daughters. 

Although no known statue or likeness of Zenobia can be identified with confidence, her portrait survives on coins and she was renowned for her beauty, wit and education. Despite the fact she became an enemy of Rome, the sources, especially the historian Zosimus and the Historia Augusta, record a complex and nuanced picture of her life.

Read more about Zenobia in All About History 121.

Ghosts are both everywhere and nowhere, stories would have us believe. Their existence is constantly being investigated, but highly doubted, yet despite that healthy scepticism ghosts feature prominently in our culture. They are in television and film, from "Harry Potter" to "The Sixth Sense." Ghost stories are told around campfires and found on bookstore shelves, in both fiction and nonfiction sections. Around Halloween, pop-culture images of ghosts haunt nearly every store, and hang as decoration in homes.

Ghosts even influence some of our everyday customs, in ways we may not recognize. "People used to believe a sneeze caused someone to expel their soul out of their body, and so 'God bless you' or 'Bless you' was used as a protection against the devil snatching your soul," according to MIT. Here are some of the most famous ghosts of all time.

King Hamlet

Though ghosts appear in several of Shakespeare's plays (such as "Macbeth" and "Julius Caesar"), King Hamlet, often referred to simply as 'Ghost', is among the better known of the Bard's ghosts and plays an integral part in "Hamlet." His son, Prince Hamlet may be the central character in the play named after him, but without his father's ghost, there would be no story.

King Hamlet appears three times in the play, each time during the night. The ghost tells Hamlet that he was murdered by his treacherous brother Claudius, and asks Hamlet to avenge his death.

"The Ghost himself says he is on a visit from Purgatory (1.5.9–13), returning to the world of the living in order to right a wrong; that the Catholic position on ghosts," wrote Tzachi Zamir, philosopher and literary critic, in his book "Shakespeare's Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives" (Oxford University Press, 2017).

The Flying Dutchman

The Flying Dutchman, the world's best-known non-human ghost, is a seventeenth-century merchant ship said to haunt the high seas. According to sea lore, the ship, which often appears as a hazy image or a strange light, is said to be a portent of bad luck and doom.

The story has been adapted many times, but one of the more common versions tells of a Dutch captain, named van der Decken, refusing to take safe harbor during a storm while traversing the Cape of Good Hope despite pleas from the crew and passengers. Instead the impudent captain challenged God to take them down. The ship was promptly cursed and in its ghost form is damned to never find port again. The "ghost ship" has been reported on the ocean from time to time, including appearing off the coast of South Africa in 1923. The Flying Dutchman most recently appeared in movie theaters across the country in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films, captained by Davy Jones.

"The tale of the doomed Dutch ghost ship stems from a British literary tradition (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries)," wrote Theo Meder in "The Flying Dutchman and Other Folktales from the Netherlands" (Libraries Unlimited, 2007) and is likely tied up in the trading company competition between Dutch and British businesses in that era.

The Bell Witch

The events that allegedly happened at John Bell's Tennessee farm between 1817 and 1821 are said to be one of the classic American ghost tales. Bell shot at a strange animal on his farm, but the creature disappeared before it could be harmed. Several weeks later, the Bell family was tormented by a ghost that made terrifying sounds, shook the house, and physically attacked Bell's daughter Betsy. The spectral assaults continued for several years, and at one point Andrew Jackson is said to have dabbled in ghost hunting and did his own investigation.

Though some authors recount the Bell Witch tale as a true account, there is little evidence that it is anything other than a ghost story. Jackson, for example, never mentioned the Bell Witch case at all; it seems that the future president's role was created from thin air, possibly to lend the appearance of reality to the fictional tale. "From the late 1810s until the 1830s, Jackson's every move is fairly well documented," wrote KyL T. Cobb, Jr. in his book "Ghosts and Demons: The Truth of the Bell Witch" (Lulu.com, 2016). This casts further doubt on his involvement.

Casper

While Bloody Mary spends her time in the ghostly realms waiting to be summoned to dark bathrooms so she can scare kids, Casper, who is best known as "The Friendly Ghost", is the white-outlined, smiling ghost who tries not to scare people.

Casper was created by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo in the 1930s, later gaining fame in the Harvey comic book series. Casper was often joined by friends such as Wendy the Good Little Witch and Hot Stuff the Little Devil. The characters were made benign and kid-friendly with the addition of "good," "friendly," and "little" to their names. Even so, the topic of death in a property aimed at children has been questioned, even when Casper enjoyed a revival with a self-titled 1995 film, starring Bill Pullman and Christina Ricci.. "Critics questioned how appropriate it was to run moments of comedy and slapstick alongside issues of death and the afterlife," wrote Zachary Graves in "Ghosts: The Complete Guide to the Supernatural" (Canary Press, 2011).

Bloody Mary

"Bloody Mary...Bloody Mary...Bloody Mary..." With those words, many schoolchildren had their first experience with a ghost. According to folklore, Bloody Mary is a ghost of a woman who murdered her children long ago. If you want to see her, go into a bathroom (usually at school), turn the lights off, stand in front of a mirror, and repeat her name three times.

The 'game' of summoning Bloody Mary is particularly associated with teenagers. "Three functions of the ritual are identified: to actively challenge and conquer fears; to allow opportunities to increase peer group status; and to develop a mechanism for coping with the supernatural," wrote Gail de Vos in "What Happens Next? Contemporary Urban Legends and Popular Culture" (Libraries Unlimited, 2012).. Many either stare at their scared reflection in the dark mirror or lose their nerve after saying the second "Bloody Mary" and run from the bathroom. "Numerous students related their experiences, both positive and negative, with great glee while others hid their heads in terror at the very thought of calling her."

An updated version of the Bloody Mary legend was made into a horror film series "Candyman," recently remade in 2021, who is similarly summoned by repeating his name three times.

The Drury Lane Ghost

There are many theaters in the Covent Gardens district in London's West End. Plays have been produced in that area for over 300 years, and some of the world's greatest actors have appeared there. Yet one theater is better known more for its ghost than its productions.

There is actually more than one ghost said to haunt Drury Lane's halls and wings, including those of several actors. The most famous, however, is a "Man in Grey" seen as a nobleman carrying a sword. It's not uncommon for a theater to claim a resident ghost treading the boards, and the Drury Lane ghosts carry on their part of theater tradition.

"Everyone in the theatre had some kind of experience. They think they saw the Man in Grey, or they heard a door slam when there was no one in the building. Roger [Clarke, professional ghost hunter] took those stories more seriously than the ghosts: he did think the building had something going on, although it was difficult to say what," said actor Nigel Planer to journalist Andrew Dickson, writing for "The Guardian" in 2015.

The Vanishing Hitchhiker

A classic example of modern folklore, often associated with the United States, but with parallel tales elsewhere in the world, the Vanishing Hitchhiker is often depicted standing by the roadside and disappearing without a trace not long after being picked up. One classic version points to the hitchhiker being the ghost of a local resident, killed not far from their home, but it has likely changed over the decades.

"It acquired the newer automobile motif by the period of the Great Depression, and thereafter spawned a number of subtypes with greatly varied and oddly interlocking details, some of which themselves stemmed from earlier folk legends," wrote Jan Harold Brunvand in "The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings" (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003).

Sometimes the hitchhiker is imbued with the power of prophecy or is on an endless quest, not unlike the crew of the Flying Dutchman. "Updated and localized treatments of the legend continue to flourish in modern folklore, suggesting that the old ghost tale must have some important appeal to contemporary folk," wrote Brunvand.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

In Charles Dickens' famous novel "A Christmas Carol," cold-hearted miser Ebenezer Scrooge has a change of heart after being visited by several ghosts representing different eras of his life's Christmases (Past, Present, and Yet to Come).

Ghosts are often associated with life lessons and morality tales, and these spooks are no exception. The Ghost of Christmas Past sets Scrooge out on the road to rehabilitation by showing him visions of his past Christmases. 

Dickens is credited with helping to establish the concept of a Christmas spirit and may have been drawing on his own past and feelings about children and Christmas for this character. "Dickens had warm memories of his own childhood Christmases and, now the father of a young family […] made the annual event a merry holiday. Feasting, games, and domestic dramas were the order of the ‘twelve days of Christmas’ in the 1840s Dickens household," wrote John Sutherland, professor of Modern English Literature at University College London for The British Library in 2014.

The Murdered Peddler

One day, in the early 1840s in Hydesville, New York, a young peddler arrived at the home of a Mr. and Mrs. Bell to sell his housewares. He was invited into the home by the Bells' housekeeper and in fact stayed for some days. The maid was shortly dismissed from service but abruptly rehired a week later. The peddler was gone, but many of his items were now in use in the Bells' kitchen. The maid thought little of it until she began experiencing strange, ghostly phenomenon, only to find out from the peddler's ghost that he had in fact been murdered in her absence.

At least that was the story told by two sisters named Maggie and Katie Fox, who claimed to communicate with the ghost. Years later, the sisters admitted it had all been a hoax; there was no murdered peddler, and the spirit communications had been faked. Still, the sisters had inadvertently founded a religion called Spiritualism, which is still practiced today. The Murdered Peddler is the only fake ghost whose presence started a real religion.

"When Spiritualism began, with its murdered peddler and its poltergeists, it had fed on an older fascination with occult powers. But Spiritualism as shaped by and in response to the Fox sisters had emerged as something sunnier, more democratic," wrote Barbara Weisberg in "Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism" (HarperOne, 2005). "One gathered a group of friends or hired a large hall to welcome the immortal beings. While benign spirit guides weren't necessarily unknown in other parts of the world, they descended like uninvited but cheery guests on nineteenth-century Christian America."

Slimer

Slimer is the grotesque green ghost featured in the "Ghostbuster" films and cartoons. He's characterised by his bright green appearance, obnoxious and slovenly behaviour, and his ability to spew slime. Slimer proved to be so popular with kids that he got a starring role in the spin-off cartoon series "The Real Ghostbusters." A reformed evil ghost that joined the Ghostbusters team, Slimer's voracious appetite and guttural burps make him among the most memorable cartoon ghosts.

Originally referred to as 'Onionhead' in production of the original movie, Slimer was likened to an actor known well by the film's writers and stars Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis. "Ivan [Reitman, director] remarked that the character was sort of like Bluto in Animal House – like the ghost of John Belushi, in a way, Danny, who was obviously a good friend of John's, never argued with that. Even so, we never officially said that and we never mentioned it in the script. It was just one way to look at the character because Onionhead's grossness is like Bluto's in Animal House," said Joe Medjuck, producer of Ghostbusters, in "Making Ghostbusters" (New York Zoetrope, 1985), edited by Don Shay.

Additional resources and reading

If you would like to learn about some 'real' ghost ships that have risen from the ocean you should read about these WWII ships that arose after a volcanic eruption.

And you'll find out that telling ghost stories really is something that goes back to the earliest human settlements as shown by this Babylonian exorcism tablet, identified in 2021.

Bibliography

"Why Americans say “Bless you!” when they hear someone sneeze," MIT
"Shakespeare's Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives" by Tzachi Zamir (Oxford University Press, 2017)
"The Flying Dutchman and Other Folktales from the Netherlands" by Theo Meder (Libraries Unlimited, 2007)
"Ghosts and Demons: The Truth of the Bell Witch" by KyL T. Cobb, Jr. (Lulu.com, 2016)
"Ghosts: The Complete Guide to the Supernatural" by Zachary Graves (Canary Press, 2011)
"What Happens Next? Contemporary Urban Legends and Popular Culture" by Gail de Vos (Libraries Unlimited, 2012)
"Inside the world's most haunted theatre," by Andrew Dickson, "The Guardian"
"The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings" by Jan Harold Brunvand (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003)
"The origins of A Christmas Carol," by John Sutherland, The British Library
"Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism" by Barbara Weisberg (HarperOne, 2005)
"Making Ghostbusters" (New York Zoetrope, 1985), edited by Don Shay

The sun belched up a large flare of charged particles on Oct. 28, and now that electric wind is barreling toward Earth as a strong geomagnetic storm.

The storm — which ranks as a category G3 on the Space Weather Prediction Center's (SWPC) 5-tier scale — is expected to reach Earth late on Saturday (Oct. 30), with effects continuing into Halloween (Oct. 31), according to a SWPC statement.

"Impacts to our technology from a G3 storm are generally nominal. However, a G3 storm has the potential to drive the aurora further away from its normal polar residence," the SWPC wrote. "The aurora might be seen over the far Northeast, to the upper Midwest and over the state of Washington."

Large solar flares, or coronal mass ejections (CMEs), are a routine type of space weather that occur when enormous blobs of plasma (electrically charged gases that make up all the stars in the universe) escape the sun's atmosphere and ooze through space at hundreds to thousands of miles a second. (The current G3 storm is traveling at about 600 miles, or 970 kilometers, per second, according to SWPC.)

It typically takes a CME about 15 to 18 hours to reach Earth, where the blob slams into our planet's magnetic shield, compressing the shield slightly. Charged solar particles then shoot down the magnetic field lines, heading toward the North and South Poles and bumping into atmospheric molecules along the way. The agitated molecules release energy as colorful light, creating auroras.

CMEs can also disrupt power systems and communications technology, depending on a given storm's strength. For G3 storms, "intermittent satellite navigation and low-frequency radio navigation problems may occur," according to SWPC.

Larger storms can pack a bigger punch, such as the infamous 1859 storm known as the Carrington Event, which disrupted Earth's magnetosphere so severely that telegraph wires burst into flames. Future storms of this caliber could cripple the global internet, Live Science previously reported.

The sun is currently approaching a period known as the solar maximum — the most active part of its 11-year cycle. During this period, the sun's magnetic field, which controls CMEs and other solar weather, is at its strongest, resulting in more and stronger solar storms. Other recent solar outbursts include a G2 storm that hit Earth on Oct. 11, and another series of G2 storms that reached the planet on Sept. 27.

Originally published on Live Science.

In any relationship, there's usually one partner that does the heavy lifting.

In the case of one alien-looking parasitic isopod, that's the female, who has the tough job of gobbling up a fish's tongue and replacing it with her own body. The male, meanwhile, takes the easy route and simply hangs out in a fish's gills, eating mucus all day.

A recent photo captured this disturbing parasitic relationship in the mouth of an Atlantic croaker (Micropogonias undulatus) caught in Galveston Island State Park in Texas. The fish's tongue had been completely replaced by this so-called tongue-eating louse.

Though unsettling, such parasitic encounters are far from rare. These creepy creatures routinely feed on fish in warm waters worldwide, including the Gulf of Mexico, as several commenters noted on Galveston Island State Park's Facebook post. As members of the order Isopoda, they are nightmarish cousins of the roly-poly pill bugs found in many backyards, Mark Fisher, science director at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, told Texas news outlet KSAT.

Related: 8 awful parasite infections that will make your skin crawl

There are several species of tongue-eating lice, the most well-known of which (Cymothoa exigua) inspired the 2012 horror flick The Bay, according to AAAS. Many species target one particular type of fish, the same way tropical moths have evolved to feed on specific orchids, according to research published in 2014 in the International Journal for Parasitology. Fisher told members of the press that he had never seen one in an Atlantic croaker before, NPR reported. 

When a group of juvenile isopods finds a fish, the critters swim into the fish's gills and latch on with their spiky, clawed legs. At this point in their life cycle, all of the isopods are male — but one louse will grow larger than the rest, make its way into the fish's mouth and become female. There, she will attach herself to the blood vessels at the base of the tongue and feed until the tongue rots away. 

Fortunately, the parasites have no interest in human tongues. And despite the ick factor, they don't seem to substantially harm the fish they call home, according to PBS' NOVA. Instead, the fish simply uses its parasite like a prosthetic tongue, and fish can live with these parasitic interlopers for years, Live Science previously reported. Meanwhile, the female isopod continues to chow down on its host's blood and mouth mucus, while the males stay in the gills, occasionally sneaking into the fish's mouth to mate with its new faux tongue. 

So, if you're looking for a fright this Halloween, consider fishing. "It can be a surprise to peer into a fish's mouth and have another set of eyes looking back at you," Fisher said.

Originally published on Live Science.

As families tuck into their couches to watch Charlie Brown help his friend Linus await the Great Pumpkin this Halloween, they may be surprised to hear that NASA has already discovered a "greater pumpkin." 

Images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show what looks remarkably like a giant jack-o'-lantern in the sky. The "pumpkin" is actually a picture of the early stages of a collision between two galaxies. 

The pumpkin's face consists of two aging red stars, which form the eyes and gives the region an orange-ish glow, and a crooked, blue smile made up of newborn star clusters. With a scattering of blue stars in the foreground, it looks as though the pumpkin dressed up in glitter for Halloween. 

Related: These space pumpkins from NASA JPL's 2019 carving contest are just EPIC!

This "greater pumpkin" is, of course, much larger than Charlie Brown's pumpkin. The entire view stretches nearly 109,000 light-years across, which is about the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy, according to NASA. 

Although the region currently looks to our eyes like a Halloween pumpkin, the shape will soon dissipate as the pair of colliding galaxies become more intertwined. NASA predicts this pair, which is 120 million light-years away in the constellation Canis Major, might become a giant spiral galaxy. The "smile" may be the beginning of the process to rebuild that spiral, researchers said in a NASA image description. The arm of the smile embraces both galaxies and was most likely formed when interstellar gas was compressed as the galaxies started to merge. 

Most of the time, when two galaxies collide, they lose their typical flattened disk shape and the stars within each galaxy get scrambled into a new football-shaped space, NASA said. Eventually, they form an elliptical galaxy. 

If the "greater pumpkin" becomes a giant spiral galaxy, it will be a rare feat. There are only a handful of other examples in the universe, including Rubin's Galaxy, astronomers said in NASA's statement. 

The mystery and intrigue surrounding what type of galaxy these two colliding galaxies will turn out to be fits its reputation as "the greater pumpkin." In "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," poor Linus never did catch a glimpse of the mysterious great pumpkin he was so excited to see. 

Follow Kasandra Brabaw on Twitter @KassieBrabaw. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

If anyone is trying to wake some dark spirits, tonight's the night.

Halloween is here (Oct. 31), along with a full "blue moon" — meaning the second full moon in a single month. All Hallow's Eve full moons are rare enough, occurring about once every 19 years. But this is the first time since 1944 that trick-or-treating has lined up with a blue moon, according to the Farmer's Almanac. 

The spooky lightshow in the sky should begin soon enough for even the earliest candy-hunters. Moonrise should happen between 5:50 and 6:40 p.m. local time across most of the United States, with some variance between different latitudes and positions within time zones. Right after moonrise, the moon should be visible at the horizon. As the night wears on, it will rise higher and shine brighter — illuminating any tricksters out egging houses (no, don't do that!).

Related: Gallery: The fantastic full moon

Much of the U.S. should have clear enough night skies to spot the blue moon while out trick-or-treating, though clouds are in the forecast for New Jersey, New York and part of New England, as well as the Pacific Northwest and central Minnesota, according to the National Weather Service.

The first full moon this October, which rose on the first of the month, also had a special name: the "Harvest Moon," referring to the first full moon after the September equinox. (The second full moon of autumn, this blue moon, sometimes takes the name "Beaver Moon," according to NASA.)

The blue moon (or Beaver Moon) occurs thanks to a routine coincidence of the Gregorian calendar months and the regular moon phases. It's a term that seems to have originated in the 1940s, according to Sky and Telescope.

There are some special things going on with the moon right now though.

For one thing, it's at the farthest point in its orbit from Earth, about 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) more distant than its 239,000 mile (385,000 km) average. That makes this full blue moon also a "Micro Moon," though it should look just barely smaller than a "Super Moon" (that's Luna at its closest to Earth in its orbit). 

More spectacularly, NASA researchers confirmed this month the presence of expansive deposits of frozen water on the moon. Some of it is sandwiched between grains of moon dust. But more of it may exist as vast frozen lakes, hidden in the darkest parts of deep craters, as Chelsea Gohd reported for Live Science sister site Space.com. And just a few months ago, researchers showed that tunnels likely exist under the lunar surface, big enough to house whole cities.

One final thing to look for in the sky Halloween night sky: Mars. The Red Planet is at its closest to Earth right now, even as humans reach out ever more intently with probes and plans for human missions toward its surface. Right now, no human being has ever been up there. But some Halloween sooner or later, there might be visitors playing dress-up on (or under) the Martian crust.

Originally published on Live Science.

Moonrise on Halloween night will be just a little more spooktacular than usual this year. The sky will be illuminated by a full moon —  a rare Hallows' Eve treat that happens only about once every 19 years.

Something else makes this full moon, known as a "Hunter's Moon," even more special: It's the second one to occur in October. That means it's a "Blue Moon," and the only double-full-moon event in 2020, according to NASA. 

However, as the full moon comes at a time when the moon is at its farthest from Earth, it will also be a "Micro Moon," the opposite of a "Super Moon," meaning it looks a little smaller than the usual full moon. And if that still isn't enough names for you, its status as the second full moon of autumn makes it a "Beaver Moon," according to NASA.

Related: Gallery: The fantastic full moon

This will be the first time since 1944 that a Halloween full moon will be visible at night (weather permitting) in all time zones in the United States, according to the Farmer's Almanac. The full moon phase — determined by the moon's position in its orbit, rather than its visibility in the sky — kicks off on Oct. 31 at 10:49 a.m. E.D.T., the Almanac reports.

October began with a full moon — a "Harvest Moon" — which rose on Oct. 1. The Harvest Moon is the first full moon to follow the September equinox, and it typically falls in October once every few years, according to NASA. 

A Blue Moon isn't literally blue, despite the colorful name. In the 1940s, contributors to the astronomy magazine Sky and Telescope began applying the term "Blue Moon" to the so-called "extra" full moon in a seasonal cycle, and over time, the name stuck, Sky and Telescope reported in 2006. Like all full moons, the Blue Moon rises in the east around sunset and sets in the west around sunrise. It is highest overhead in the late night and very early morning hours, according to NASA. 

The term Beaver Moon (which is also used for the November full moon, according to the Farmer's Almanac), is a traditional name that may have been inspired by beavers' seasonal flurry of activity as they prepare for winter. But it could also refer to the autumn practice of setting beaver traps before the winter's deep freeze, NASA says.

On average, the moon orbits at around 239,000 miles (385,000 kilometers) from Earth. During a full Micro Moon, such as this year's Halloween event, the moon is about 31,000 miles (50,000 km) farther from Earth than it would be during a full Super Moon during perigee — the moon's closest point to Earth in its orbit, according to NASA.

And the moon isn't the only cosmic superstar shining brightly right now. Skygazers this month have also been treated to exceptional views of Mars, which is currently in opposition — when Earth lies between Mars and the sun, an event that takes place about every two years. Earth and Mars are also currently closest together in their orbital paths, further enhancing Mars's brightness in the night sky. The Red Planet has been visible all night throughout October, appearing brightest at midnight, NASA says.

Originally published on Live Science.

Real-life Halloween horrors

Halloween is a ghoulish time of year, when people tell ghost stories about werewolves, black cats, zombies and vampires.

Some of these creepy tales have leaped from the realm of the mythical into real life: humans who felt as though they were transforming into wolves, a man who not only drank his blood but also the blood of complete strangers, and a woman who got an exorcism after she saw disturbing faces circling her.

Here's the science behind 10 particularly disturbing Halloween horrors that have come to life.

1. Tears of blood

It sounds like a scary Halloween costume: A man with bloody tears pouring down his face. But for one man in Italy, such tears were the real thing; the result of a rare condition that causes people to cry blood.

The 52-year-old man went to an emergency room after bloody tears fell from both his eyes, something that had never happened to him before, according to a report of the case, published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Although the tears looked dramatic, they were not painful, and the man had not experienced any facial trauma.

He also had normal vision and was able to move both of his eyes without problems, Live Science previously reported.

2. Gargantuan spiders

Deep in the rainforests of Guyana live the most enormous spiders you've ever seen — bigger than what you're imagining. 

Known as the South American Goliath birdeater (Theraphosa blondi), the colossal arachnid is the world's largest spider, according to Guinness World Records. Its leg span can reach up to a foot (30 centimeters), or about the size of "a child's forearm," with a body the size of "a large fist," Piotr Naskrecki, an entomologist and photographer at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, previously told Live Science. And the spider can weigh more than 6 oz. (170 grams) — about as much as a young puppy, the scientist wrote on his blog. 

Despite its name, the birdeater doesn't usually eat birds, although it is certainly capable of killing small mammals. "They will essentially attack anything that they encounter," Naskrecki said.

Related: See photos of the goliath birdeater spider

3. Wriggling worms beneath the skin

A woman in Russia noticed a migrating lump in her face that she couldn't explain. She eventually visited an eye doctor, who also witnessed a "superficial moving oblong nodule at the left upper eyelid" — in other words, a lump — according to a  report of the case published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The woman was infected with a type of parasitic worm called Dirofilaria repens. These thread-like worms naturally infect dogs, cats, foxes and other wild mammals, and typically live in the tissue under the skin, Live Science previously reported. Humans are "accidental" hosts — in other words, not where the worms want to end up — and once a worm gets into a human, it typically can't reproduce. 

Related: 8 Awful Parasite Infections That Will Make Your Skin Crawl

In a similar, but even more-rare case, a woman visiting the central California coast contracted a horrifying infection with a rare parasitic eye worm when she went on a trail run, Live Science previously reported.

The woman is only the second person known to have contracted this particular worm, which typically infects cows, according to a report of the case, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The woman said she felt irritation in her right eye and so flushed the eye with tap water. That's when a 0.5-inch (1.3 centimeters), wriggly roundworm came out. After this discovery, she looked more closely at her eye and saw a second roundworm, which she also removed, the report said.

4. Werewolf transformation

Lycanthropy, or people transforming into werewolves, is a common staple of horror movies (and music videos, thanks to Michael Jackson's "Thriller"). Most people know this transformation is fantastical, but that's not the case for people with clinical lycanthropy, a delusional condition that leads the patient to believe that it is happening for real.

Since 1850, there have been 13 reported cases of lycanthropy in human patients, according to a 2014 research article in the journal History of Psychiatry. The condition usually occurs in people diagnosed with schizophrenia, psychotic depression or bipolar disorder, according to the study.

The first case, from 1852, documents how a man in France was convinced he had become a wolf. To prove his case, the man "parted his lips with his fingers to show his alleged wolf's teeth, and complained that he had cloven feet and a body covered with long hair. He said that he only wanted to eat raw meat, but when it was given to him, he refused it because it was not rotten enough," Live Science previously reported.

5. Sleep paralysis

Imagine seeing a monster but being unable to move a muscle after waking up from a deep sleep. This scary scene can be a reality for people with sleep paralysis who also hallucinate.

Sleep paralysis happens when a person wakes up during a stage of sleep called rapid eye movement (REM), when they are typically dreaming, but paralyzed, Live Science previously reported. This inability to move might be an adaption to keep people from acting out their dreams.

It's less clear why a subset of people with sleep paralysis also hallucinate. But one idea is that the brain is trying to make sense of the paralysis and projects an image of the person's own body onto a hallucination, according to a 2014 article in the journal Medical Hypotheses, Live Science previously reported.

6. Real-life vampire

After experiencing several traumatic events, a man in Turkey began drinking blood, just like a mythical vampire.

The man started by cutting himself and drinking his own blood. But soon, his compulsion drove him to attack other people with sharp objects so he could drink their blood, too.

Doctors diagnosed the man with dissociative identity disorder (commonly known as multiple personality disorder), post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic depression and alcohol abuse, Live Science previously reported.

7. Toothy tumor

Some Halloween monsters have teeth growing in unexpected places. This horrifying condition became a reality for a 4-month-old infant in Maryland, whose brain had several teeth growing in it.

The child had a tumor known as craniopharyngioma, which can grow to the size of a golf ball. Doctors removed it during a successful surgery, Live Science previously reported.

Other tumors, known as teratomas, are known to grow teeth. But this was the first reported case of a craniopharyngioma tumor sprouting teeth, the doctors said.

8. Zombie stoner outbreak

A "zombie" outbreak struck a New York neighborhood after people there started taking a type of synthetic marijuana known as AK-47 24 Karat Gold.

People who took the drug developed zombie-like symptoms, including a slow response time to questions and staring blankly into space, Roy Gerona, a clinical chemist at the University of California, San Francisco, who studied the drug, previously told Live Science.

Synthetic marijuana can be dangerous, sometimes causing seizures and kidney damage, Gerona said. But, in this case, the drug appeared to cause depressant symptoms that had a "zombie-like" effect, he said.

9. Sweating blood

A young woman in Italy sweats blood, and her case has baffled doctors.

The woman told doctors that for the past three years, she had periodically bled from her face and palms, even though she didn't have any cuts there. These episodes lasted between 1 and 5 minutes, she said.

Historical documents dating to hundreds of years ago show that this condition isn't new in people, but its origins are unclear. It's possible that increased pressure in blood vessels causes blood cells to leak into the ducts of sweat glands, but it's hard to say for sure, Live Science previously reported.

10. Terrifying hallucinations

After a 67-year-old woman told her family that she was seeing odd-looking faces hovering around her, her concerned relatives asked a priest whether he would perform an exorcism.

But the woman wasn't being haunted by wispy demons. Rather, she had Charles Bonnet syndrome, a condition in which a person with declining vision sees complex hallucinations, Live Science previously reported.

The woman had macular degeneration, meaning that the central part of the retinal tissue in her eyes was deteriorating. Sometimes, when the brain experiences a decline from a sensory input, such as vision, it invents its own input, which can lead to visual hallucinations, Dr. Bharat Kumar, an internal medicine resident at the University of Kentucky who treated the woman, previously told Live Science.

11. Vampire bats

In a nightmare case, a man in Brazil was bitten by a vampire bat and died of rabies.

Vampire bats don't usually prey on humans, but one species of the bat (Diphylla ecaudata) does, according to new research.

Rabies can be stopped if it's caught and treated early enough. But tragically, this man didn't get treatment in time, Live Science previously reported.

Related: How rabies inspired folktales of werewolves and vampires

12. Zombie fungus

Male cicadas infected by a particularly gruesome parasitic fungus become zombies with an undercover mission: They broadcast a female's sexy come-hither message to other male cicadas, luring their unsuspecting victims to join the zombie cicada horde.

As the parasitic fungus called Massospora eats away at a cicada's abdomen, replacing it with a mass of yellow spores, the fungus also compels males to flick their wings in movements that are typically performed by females to attract mates, Live Science previously reported.

Healthy males hurry over for what they think is some female company, then try to mate with the infected male, which passes along the Massospora infection. This and other new discoveries are helping scientists to piece together how Massospora turns cicadas into mind-controlled zombies, according to a study published in the journal PLOS Pathogens. 

Related: Mind control: See photos of zombie ants 

13. Cat ladies (horrifying!) 

Black cats are a mainstay of Halloween. But research shows that a parasite carried by all types of cats (not just black) is linked to increased suicide attempts in women.

Women infected with the cat parasite Toxoplasma gondii were 1.5 times more likely to attempt suicide than women who do not have the parasite, according to a 2012 study published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry. The parasite causes a common condition known as toxoplasmosis. 

It's unclear why T. gondii would lead to more suicide attempts, but the researchers did control for mental health problems, meaning that the finding was independently linked to the parasite, not just to mental disorders, Live Science previously reported.

Originally published on LiveScience. This article was originally published on Oct. 26, 2017 and was last updated on Oct. 28, 2020. 

Editor's note: The COVID-19 pandemic is still in full swing, meaning that Halloween 2020 must be celebrated differently compared to previous years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has published helpful guidelines for celebrating Halloween and other fall holidays in ways that will keep you safe and healthy. 

Parents and kids alike are gearing up for Halloween, scrambling to put the final touches on costumes and Jack-o'-lanterns, not to mention stocking up on candy for Trick or Treaters. But before you rush out on Oct. 31, for what some consider the spookiest day of the year, here’s a look back at the origins of Halloween and all of its odd traditions. 

Samhain

Halloween, also known as All Hallows' Eve, can be traced back about 2,000 years to a pre-Christian Celtic festival held around Nov. 1 called Samhain (pronounced "sah-win"), loosely translates to "summer's end" in Gaelic, according to the Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries. [13 Halloween Superstitions & Traditions Explained]

Because ancient records are sparse and fragmentary, the exact nature of Samhain is not fully understood; but it was an annual communal meeting at the end of the harvest year, a time to gather resources for the winter months and bring animals back from the pastures. Samhain is also thought to have been a time of communing with the dead, according to folklorist John Santino.

"There was a belief that it was a day when spirits of the dead would cross over into the other world," Santino told Live Science. Such moments of transition in the year have always been thought to be special and supernatural, he added.

Halloween provides a safe way to play with the concept of death, Santino said. People dress up as the living dead, and fake gravestones adorn front lawns — activities that wouldn't be tolerated at other times of the year, he said.

But according to Nicholas Rogers, a history professor at York University in Toronto and author of "Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night" (Oxford University Press, 2003), "there is no hard evidence that Samhain was specifically devoted to the dead or to ancestor worship. 

"According to the ancient sagas, Samhain was the time when tribal peoples paid tribute to their conquerors and when the sidh [ancient mounds] might reveal the magnificent palaces of the gods of the underworld," Rogers wrote. Samhain was less about death or evil than about the changing of seasons and preparing for the dormancy (and rebirth) of nature as summer turned to winter, he said.

Though a direct connection between Halloween and Samhain has never been proven, many scholars believe that because All Saints' Day (or All Hallows' Mass, celebrated on Nov. 1) and Samhain, are so close together on the calendar that they influenced each other and later combined into the celebration now called Halloween. 

Costumes and trick-or-treating

The tradition of dressing in costumes and trick-or-treating may go back to the practice of "mumming" and "guising," in which people would disguise themselves and go door-to-door, asking for food, Santino said. Early costumes were usually disguises, often woven out of straw, he said, and sometimes people wore costumes to perform in plays or skits.

The practice may also be related to the medieval custom of "souling" in Britain and Ireland, when poor people would knock on doors on Hallowmas (Nov. 1), asking for food in exchange for prayers for the dead.

Trick-or-treating didn't start in the United States until World War II, but American kids were known to go out on Thanksgiving and ask for food — a practice known as Thanksgiving begging, Santino said.

"Mass solicitation rituals are pretty common, and are usually associated with winter holidays," Santino said. While one tradition didn't necessarily cause the others, they were "similar and parallel," he said.

Tricks and games

These days, the "trick" part of the phrase "trick or treat" is mostly an empty threat, but pranks have long been a part of the holiday.

By the late 1800s, the tradition of playing tricks on Halloween was well established. In the United States and Canada, the pranks included tipping over outhouses, opening farmers' gates and egging houses. But by the 1920s and 1930s, the celebrations more closely resembled an unruly block party, and the acts of vandalism got more serious.

Some people believe that because pranking was starting to get dangerous and out of hand, parents and town leaders began to encourage dressing up and trick-or-treating as a safe alternative to doing pranks, Santino said. 

However, Halloween was as much a time for festivities and games as it was for playing tricks or asking for treats. Apples are associated with Halloween, both as a treat and in the game of bobbing for apples, a game that since the colonial era in America was used for fortune-telling. Legend has it that the first person to pluck an apple from the water-filled bucket without using his or her hands would be the first to marry, according to the book "Halloween and Commemorations of the Dead" (Chelsea House, 2009) by Roseanne Montillo.

Apples were also part of another form of marriage prophecy. According to legend, on Halloween (sometimes at the stroke of midnight), young women would peel an apple into one continuous strip and throw it over her shoulder. The apple skin would supposedly land in the shape of the first letter of her future husband's name.

Another Halloween ritual involved looking in a mirror at midnight by candlelight, for a future husband's face was said to appear. (A scary variation of this later became the "Bloody Mary" ritual familiar to many school kids.) Like many such childhood games, it was likely done in fun, though at least some people took it seriously. 

Christian/Irish Influence

Some evangelical Christians have expressed concern that Halloween is somehow satanic because of its roots in pagan ritual. However, ancient Celts did not worship anything resembling the Christian devil and had no concept of it. In fact, the Samhain festival had long since vanished by the time the Catholic Church began persecuting witches in its search for satanic cabals. And, of course, black cats do not need to have any association with witchcraft to be considered evil — simply crossing their path is considered bad luck any time of year.

As for modern Halloween, Santino, writing in "American Folklore: An Encyclopedia" (Garland, 1996), noted that "Halloween beliefs and customs were brought to North America with the earliest Irish immigrants, then by the great waves of Irish immigrants fleeing the famines of the first half of the nineteenth century. Known in the North American continent since colonial days, by the middle of the twentieth century Halloween had become largely a children's holiday." 

Since that time, the holiday's popularity increased dramatically as adults, communities and institutions (such as schools, campuses and commercial haunted houses) have embraced the event.

Through the ages, various supernatural entities — including fairies and witches — came to be associated with Halloween, and more than a century ago in Ireland, the event was said to be a time when spirits of the dead could return to their old haunting grounds. Dressing up as ghosts or witches became fashionable, though as the holiday became more widespread and more commercialized (and with the arrival of mass-manufactured costumes), the selection of disguises for kids and adults greatly expanded beyond monsters to include everything from superheroes to princesses to politicians. 

This article was originally published in 2014 and has been updated by Alina Bradford, Tanya Lewis and Jeanna Bryner.

Additional resources

Read more about Halloween in this CNN report on creepy clowns; on History.com; and in this National Geographic video on YouTube.

Chills tickle the back of your neck and spine, your heart thuds faster and faster in your chest, you open your eyes wide as you clutch your arms to your center and enter the eerie darkness of the haunted house. 

Haunted houses, horror movies and creepy costumes are hallmarks of Halloween, and for most folks, those fun but terrifying activities come and go with the season. But some people will continue to chase after similar heart-pumping, fear-inducing thrills year-round. 

Those types of thrill-seeking people who thrive in scary situations have a specific sensation-seeking personality trait, said Kenneth Carter, a clinical psychologist and professor at Oxford College of Emory University in Georgia. This trait determines how much we enjoy activities like watching horror movies, climbing the steepest sides of mountains, driving race cars around harrowing, hairpin turns or jumping out of airplanes.

Related: What Really Scares People: Top 10 Phobias

The idea of a sensation-seeking trait was originally developed in the 1970s by Martin Zuckerman, an American psychologist. The trait is defined by four components, according to the National Library of Medicine:

• Boredom susceptibility: The need for external stimuli.
• Disinhibition: The willingness to be spontaneous.
• Experience-seeking: The desire to be exposed to new things.
• Thrill- and adventure-seeking: The drive to participate in exciting and risky physical activities.

To identify the trait, psychologists administered tests that traditionally had a forced answer choice (e.g., would you prefer X or Y?) but those tests are now typically answered using a 4- or 5-point scale (e.g., strongly disagree to strongly agree). People who score higher on the tests tend to seek and even crave chaotic and frightening experiences, while lower scorers tend to stick with safe, predictable experiences.

Those high-scoring test-takers typically have lower levels of the hormones adrenaline and cortisol and higher levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in their body than do people who score lower, Carter said. So, when put into scary situations, such as a dark, creepy haunted house, thrill-seekers experience more pleasure and less stress.

A 2018 study published in the journal Anxiety, Stress & Coping found that sensation-seekers also tend to be less stressed and perform better in high-risk sports, which makes them well-suited for high-stress professions, such as serving with the special forces. People in this group also thrive in other high-stress occupations, such as serving as emergency room doctors or nurses, Carter said.

Sensation-seeking is a trait that develops in early childhood, as soon as age 3, according to a 2019 study published in the journal BMC Pediatrics. That study reported that sensation-seeking in children ages 3 to 6 was generally less than in older children, indicating that the trait likely becomes stronger with time until ages 16 to 19. Sensation-seeking typically peaks during the later teenage years, Carter said, and may explain why many scary stories and slasher horror movies are marketed toward people in that age group.

Related: 10 Halloween Horrors Come to Life

The study also found that boys had stronger sensation-seeking tendencies than girls, which the researchers hypothesized could be a result of cultural influence. It may also reflect differences in courage, they said. However, the boys and girls in the study expressed an equal desire for new and varying experiences. 

Sensations-seekers thrive anytime they're given the opportunity for a new experience, even something as simple as trying new food, Carter said — and the more bizarre, the better. 

"One person I interviewed said that he loved to collect tastes and experiences for the museum of his mind, which I thought was a beautiful way to think about it," Carter said. "Even if you don't like the way it tastes, just [having] a little bit would be a way to collect the experience." 

Studies have shown that in adult sensation-seekers, men are drawn more toward action and adventure, while women are drawn more toward new experiences, Carter said. The difference is likely due to cultural factors that include education and socialization, he said. The differences in sensation-seeking between men and women have been been diminishing, indicating that this gap is probably not caused by biological differences. 

"Both women and men have wild stories of sensation-seeing adventures," Carter said.  

• Spooky Sites: 7 of the Most Haunted Places in the United States
• Halloween's Top 10 Scary Creatures
• 13 Bizarre Mythical Monsters to Haunt Your Halloween

Originally published on Live Science.

A ghastly face with glowing eyes glares in deep space in a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The piercing "eyes" of this creepy space face are the bright cores of two distant galaxies in the middle of a head-on collision, and they're surrounded by a mishmash of stars from their respective galactic disks. 

A ring of young blue stars contours the shape of the eerie face, while dense clumps of stars have come together to form its nose and mouth. 

Video: See a Creepy New Hubble Image Just in Time for Halloween
Related:  These Scary Things in Space Will Haunt Your Dreams

This spooky mug won't be staring off into space forever. The ring structure that outlines the face will last for only about 100 million years, while the merging of the two galaxies is expected to take about 1 billion to 2 billion years, NASA officials said in a statement. 

While galaxy collisions are quite common in the universe, head-on collisions like this one are relatively rare, and the particularly violent nature of this type of collision gives rise to the peculiar ring shape. "The galaxies have to collide at just the right orientation to create the ring," NASA officials said. "The crash pulled and stretched the galaxies' disks of gas, dust, and stars outward. This action formed the ring of intense star formation that shapes the nose and face." 

But that rare galactic ring isn't the only thing that makes this pair of merging galaxies special. While most galaxy collisions involve a larger galaxy gobbling up a smaller neighbor — even our own Milky Way galaxy is guilty of galactic cannibalism — the two galaxies merging here appear to be roughly the same size. In other words, there aren't many pairs of symmetric "eyeballs" ogling through the cosmos. 

Video: Zoom into Creepy-Looking Twin Galaxies for Halloween

This galaxy merger is known as Arp-Madore 2026-424, a designation that combines the names of the two astronomers that described it in their book "A Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations" (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Halton Arp and Barry Madore. Arp-Madore 2026-424 is about 704 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Microscopium.

Hubble scientists captured this image on June 19 as part of a "snapshot" program that's investigating unusual interacting galaxies. These observations will help NASA choose targets for its James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble's successor, which is scheduled to launch in 2021.

• Haunting Photos: The Spookiest Nebulas in Space 
• This Double-Ringed Galaxy Is One of the Rarest Types Ever Seen 
• Galaxy Punches Through Neighbor to Spawn Giant Ring of Black Holes

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Have you ever been home alone and felt certain — certain — that someone was watching you? Afraid to turn around, lest you catch a ghostly visage out of the corner of your eye? 

You aren't alone. In fact, for some people, this feeling translates into a full-blown phobia that makes it difficult or impossible to live or sleep alone. This fear of ghosts may be much more common than usually believed, said Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, a psychiatrist at The D'Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR) in Rio de Janeiro. 

"It is possibly as common as the common phobias that we meet with every day, such as fear of heights or certain insects," Oliveira-Souza told Live Science. 

Related: What Really Scares People: Top 10 Most Common Phobias

Ghostly fears

Shame and embarrassment, according to Oliveira-Souza, probably prevent many people from mentioning their fears to medical professionals. Oliveira-Souza became interested in the phenomenon after a patient he treated for depression happened to mention that the depression treatment had also cured him of his lifelong fear of ghosts, which had once made him frightened to sleep alone. To Oliveira-Souza, the patient's description matched the criteria for a phobia, a term in psychology used to describe overwhelming fears triggered by a certain situation — in this case, being alone or thinking of horror movies or other supernatural scares. He began to ask around and found that many friends, patients and relatives also reported getting spooked by the notion of ghosts. 

In a paper published in November 2018 in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, Oliveira-Souza highlighted a few of those cases. In one case, a 46-year-old hotel attendant who lived with her parents her whole life was bereft after her father died and her mother decided to move away; the woman was terrified to stay alone in the family apartment. When her mother left for a weekend trip before the planned move, the woman lurked in a nearby nightclub and wandered the streets of her neighborhood rather than face sleeping alone. Intrusive memories of her father's funeral haunted the woman when she did try to sleep. 

In another case, a 54-year-old lawyer was hesitant to leave a bad marriage because he was afraid to live alone; he'd slept in the same room as his older brother as a youth and had married hastily after his brother left home because his supernatural fear made him terrified of sleeping alone. The lawyer reported that even when alone in his office, he felt like someone was watching him, or that something would materialize out of nowhere in front of him. This feeling of being watched is also known as "Anwesenheit," a German word that means "presence." 

Related: Top 11 Spooky Sleep Disorders

Being alone, especially at night, triggered fears for all of Oliveira-Souza's patients. One 19-year-old college student slept with her parents out of fears of spirits breaking through her bedroom window. A 63-year-old widow was so terrified that someone or something was in her living room at night that she sometimes wet the bed rather than get up and walk to the bathroom. An 11-year-old girl reported fears that hands would drag her under her bed if she dangled her legs over the floor or that a terrifying apparition would appear in front of her in the darkness. 

Supernatural phobia

The 11-year-old outgrew her fears after puberty, as many people do. Most of the adults, on the other hand, responded well to treatment with antidepressants or benzodiazepines, the most common drugs used to treat specific phobias. 

"Regardless of the content of the phobic symptom in each case, these drugs relieve the anxiety that lies at the core of the dread," Oliveira-Souza explained.

Some patients were concurrently treated with cognitive behavioral therapy, a talk therapy method that works by untangling the specific fear (in this case, ghosts), from the physical and emotional experience of anxiety.

It's also likely that fear of ghosts occurs on a spectrum. A person without full-blown claustrophobia may still feel quite uncomfortable on a malfunctioning elevator after treatment, Oliveira-Souza said. In the same way, a person without a full supernatural phobia can still struggle to banish memories of horror films or Stephen King novels while alone on a dark and stormy night. 

• Spooky Sites: 7 of the Most Haunted Places in the United States
• 13 Bizarre Mythical Monsters to Haunt Your Halloween
• The 27 Oddest Medical Case Reports

Originally published on Live Science.

In 1855, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported on the gruesome murder of a bride by her new husband. The story came from the French countryside, where the woman's parents had initially prevented the couple's engagement "on account of the strangeness of conduct sometimes observed in the young man," although he "otherwise was a most eli[g]ible match."

The parents eventually consented, and the marriage took place. Shortly after the newlyweds withdrew to consummate their bond, "fearful shrieks" came from their quarters. People quickly arrived to find "the poor girl… in the agonies of death — her bosom torn open and lacerated in a most horrible manner, and the wretched husband in a fit of raving madness and covered with blood, having actually devoured a portion of the unfortunate girl's breast."

The bride died a short time later. Her husband, after "a most violent resistance," also expired.

What could have caused this horrifying incident? "It was then recollected, in answer to searching questions by a physician," that the groom had previously "been bitten by a strange dog." The passage of madness from dog to human seemed like the only possible reason for the grisly turn of events.

Related: Werewolves: Lore, Legend & Lycanthropy

The Eagle described the episode matter-of-factly as "a sad and distressing case of hydrophobia," or, in today's parlance, rabies.

But the account read like a Gothic horror story. It was essentially a werewolf narrative: The mad dog's bite caused a hideous metamorphosis, which transformed its human victim into a nefarious monster whose vicious sexual impulses led to obscene and loathsome violence.

My new book, "Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840-1920," explores the hidden meanings behind the ways people talked about rabies. Variants of the rabid groom story had been told and retold in English language newspapers in North America since at least the beginning of the 18th century, and they continued to appear as late as the 1890s.

The Eagle's account was, in essence, a folk tale about mad dogs and the thin dividing line between human and animal. Rabies created fear because it was a disease that seemed able to turn people into raging beasts.

A terrifying and fatal disease

The historian Eugen Weber once observed that French peasants in the 19th century feared "above all wolves, mad dogs, and fire." Canine madness — or the disease that we know today as rabies — conjured up the canine terrors that have formed the stuff of nightmares for centuries.

Other infectious diseases — including cholera, typhoid and diphtheria — killed far more people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The cry of "Mad dog!" nonetheless sparked an immediate sense of terror, because a simple dog bite could mean a protracted ordeal of grueling symptoms, followed by certain death.

Modern medicine knows that rabies is caused by a virus. Once it enters the body, it travels to the brain via the nervous system. The typical lag time of weeks or months between initial exposure and onset of symptoms means that rabies is no longer a death sentence if a patient quickly receives injections of immune antibodies and vaccine, in order to build immunity soon after encountering a suspect animal. Though it's rare for people to die of rabies in the U.S., the disease still kills tens of thousands of people globally every year.

According to 19th-century sources, after an incubation period of between four and 12 weeks, symptoms might start with a vague sense of agitation or restlessness. They then progressed to the wracking spasmodic episodes characteristic of rabies, along with sleeplessness, excitability, feverishness, rapid pulse, drooling and labored breathing. Victims not infrequently exhibited hallucinations or other mental disruptions as well.

Efforts to mitigate violent outbursts with drugs often failed, and physicians could then do little more than stand by and bear witness. Final release came only after the disease ran its inevitably fatal course, usually over a period of two to four days. Even today, rabies remains essentially incurable once clinical signs appear.

Centuries ago, the loss of bodily control and rationality triggered by rabies seemed like an assault on victims' basic humanity. From a real dreaded disease transmitted by animals emerged spine-tingling visions of supernatural forces that transferred malevolent animals' powers and turned people into monsters.

Bites that transform people into animals

Nineteenth-century American accounts never invoked the supernatural directly. But descriptions of symptoms indicated unspoken assumptions about how the disease transmitted the biting animal's essence to the suffering human.

Newspapers frequently described those who contracted rabies from dog bites as barking and snarling like dogs, while cat-bite victims scratched and spat. Hallucinations, respiratory spasms and out-of-control convulsions produced fearful impressions of the rabid animal's evil imprint.

Traditional preventive measures also showed how Americans quietly assumed a blurred boundary between humanity and animality. Folk remedies held that dog-bite victims could protect themselves from rabies by killing the dog that had already bitten them, or applying the offending dog's hair to the wound, or cutting off its tail.

Such preventatives implied a need to cut an invisible, supernatural tie between a dangerous animal and its human prey.

Sometimes the disease left eerie traces. When a Brooklynite died from rabies in 1886, the New York Herald recorded a freakish occurence: Within minutes after the man's last breath, "the bluish ring on his hand — the mark of the Newfoundland's fatal bite…disappeared." Only death broke the mad dog's pernicious hold.

Vampires' roots in rabid dogs

It's possible that, along with werewolves, vampire stories also originated from rabies.

Physician Juan Gómez-Alonso has pointed out a resonance between vampirism and rabies in the hair-raising symptoms of the disease — the distorted sounds, exaggerated facial appearances, restlessness and sometimes wild and aggressive behaviors that made sufferers seem more monstrous than human.

Extreme oversensitivity to stimuli, which set off the tortuous spasmodic episodes associated with rabies, could have a particularly strange effect. A glance at a mirror might set off a violent response, in a chilling parallel with the living-dead vampire's inability to cast a reflection.

Moreover, in different eastern European folkloric traditions, vampires turned themselves not into bats, but into wolves or dogs, the key vectors of rabies.

So as aspiring werewolves, vampires and other haunts take to the streets for Halloween, remember that beneath the annual ritual of candy and costumed fun lie the darker recesses of the imagination. Here animals, disease and fear intermingle, and monsters materialize at the crossover point between animality and humanity.

Cave canem — beware the dog.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

• Vampires, Zombies & Werewolves, Oh My! The Origins of Halloween Monsters
• 13 Bizarre Mythical Monsters to Haunt Your Halloween
• Halloween's 10 Scariest Monsters

A 5-year-old boy has a rare brain condition that could cause him to be literally scared to death, according to news reports.

Reed Havlik, who lives in Iowa, has a condition called vanishing white matter disease, a disorder that's been reported in only about 200 people worldwide, according to South West News Service (SWNS). Vanishing white matter disease is a genetic condition that mainly affects the brain and spinal cord, and causes deterioration of nerve fibers known as "white matter," according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine's Genetics Home Reference (GHR).

People with the condition are particularly vulnerable to stresses, including infections, head trauma or even "extreme fright," GHR says. These stresses could worsen symptoms, and lead to coma or even death. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

That means that Reed and his family need to be particularly vigilant around Halloween.

"We have got to be really careful what we expose him to because he could be frightened to death," Reed's mother, Erika Havlik, told SWNS. "The stress of it all can speed it [the disease] up. We do celebrate Halloween but only on a really small scale."

People with the condition have a genetic mutation that prevents the body from producing enough myelin, a fatty substance that insulates and protects nerves, according to the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. It's this lack of myelin that leads to deterioration of the nerves.

Symptoms can include muscle stiffness and problems with coordination. The disease is progressive, meaning that symptoms get worse over time, and there is currently no cure.

Reed was diagnosed in 2015, at age 2, and his family has been told that he could die from the disease in three to seven years, SWNS reported.

"We are trying to give him as many opportunities in life and try to soak up every second we have with him," Havlik said. "Our world has been altered completely. It's been life-changing. Everyone has been showering him with as much love as they can to ensure he's as happy as possible."

Reed's family is raising money for research into this disease through a GoFundMe campaign.

Originally published on Live Science.

Beethoven's death mask

Whatever happened to Albert Einstein's brain? Or Louis XIV's heart? These body parts, and countless other pieces of famous dead people, are not buried in places you'd expect. And in some cases, they weren't buried at all, but ended up on somebody's dinner plate (sorry, Louis XIV) or in a museum (our bad, Einstein).

Read on to learn what happened to the body parts of famous folk — including German composer Ludwig van Beethoven (his death mask is shown here) — according to the book, "They Lost Their Heads!: What Happened to Washington's Teeth, Einstein's Brain, and Other Famous Body Parts" (Bloomsbury Children's Books, 2018), by Carlyn Beccia.

Lenin

The body of communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) was never buried. Rather, it was embalmed and put on display in a sarcophagus in the middle of Moscow's Red Square. To keep Lenin looking fresh, his body is kept at 61 degrees Fahrenheit (16 degrees Celsius) and given weekly bleach baths.

Evita

The Argentine actress and former first lady Eva Perón (1919-1952) didn't get an immediate burial. After her death, she was embalmed (just like Lenin) and put on display for mourners before being shipped off to Rome for burial, The New York Times reported. A few years later, the body of Evita, as people called her, was exhumed and eventually returned to Buenos Aires, where she was buried in the Recoleta cemetery.

But she wasn't buried immediately. For a while, her husband, Juan Perón, an army general and three-time leader of Argentina, kept his wife's corpse in the dining room where he ate, Beccia wrote.

Galileo

The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) isn't buried with all of his bones. After he famously defied the Catholic Church by saying that the planets revolved around the sun, not the Earth, Galileo was put on trial and promptly recanted his views to avoid torture.

When Galileo died, his body was unceremoniously dumped in the back of the Santa Croce chapel in Florence. But in 1737, the church had a change of heart, and had him reburied in the chapel itself (the photo above shows his fab tomb). During the exhumation, three workers couldn't resist stealing a few pieces from Galileo's skeleton, Beccia wrote.

These bones were passed down through the generations, until they were auctioned off in 2009. Now, Galileo's molar, thumb and finger are on display at the Museo Galileo in Florence, where his middle finger is eternally pointed toward the heavens.

Louis XIV

When the Sun King Louis XIV died, his heart was removed from his body and embalmed, so it could lie next to the heart of his father, King Louis XIII. But it didn't stay there for long; the English nobleman Lord Harcourt was such a fan, that he acquired the heart and placed it in a silver casket, which he occasionally showed to guests.

One of these guests was the British theologian William Buckland, who famously described and named the first-known dinosaur Megalosaurus. (Buckland didn't, however, know it was a dinosaur. He thought it was a giant lizard). Buckland had made it his life's mission to taste every animal he could, so when Harcourt showed him the embalmed heart of Louis XIV, Buckland went right ahead and gobbled it up.

"William Buckland died shortly after eating Louis XIV's heart and was buried in St. Nicholas's churchyard in Oxfordshire, England," Beccia wrote. "Louis XIV is buried in the Saint-Denis basilica, minus his heart."

Haydn

The Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn literally lost his head when two crooks dug up his grave and stole his skull in 1809, just eight days after his death. One of the robbers, Joseph Rosenbaum, wanted to study the musician's head for phrenology, a hot new brain "science" that involved looking at the bumps on people's heads to learn about their personalities. (For the record, phrenology is largely nonsense.)

Rosenbaum gave the skull to phrenologists at Vienna General Hospital, where it was boiled, bleached and scraped so doctors could see the "bump of music" on his temple. Then, Rosenbaum took the skull home, where he put it in a display case. But authorities got wind of Rosenbaum's theft and paid him a visit. Rosenbaum wasn't about to part with Haydn's head, though, so he lied and gave them another skull, which was buried in Haydn's grave.

Rosenbaum confessed on his death bed, only to have his doctor swipe the skull and sell it to an Austrian professor. This professor bequeathed it to the Natural History Museum of Vienna, which was sued by the Society of the Friends of Music, who said Rosenbaum had willed it to them. Finally, in 1954, the society agreed to rebury the skull, but didn't have the heart to remove the unidentified skull that Rosenbaum had fibbed about a century earlier. So now, Haydn is buried with two skulls: his own and a stranger's, Beccia wrote.

Beethoven

The famously deaf Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) composed some of the world's greatest music, but he was plagued by bad health (terrible stomach aches, eye infections and kidney stones) and mood swings, Beccia wrote. And now, we may know why.

Just before the German composer died, a teenager named Ferdinand Hiller got a lock of his hair. The lock of hair was passed down until 1994, when it was auctioned off and studied … and found to contain A LOT of lead. It had 42 times the amount of lead found in typical hair, Beccia wrote. Lead is toxic and can cause abdominal pains, mood swings and even hearing loss.

The lock of hair is now at the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C.

Mozart

When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in 1791, his body was dumped in a corpse-filled pit. (The above illustration shows Mozart's funeral.) But an admirer took action, wrapping a piece of wire around the composure's neck so that Mozart could be identified later.

That chance came in 1801, when the graveyard was cleared. The admirer plucked Mozart's skull out of the grave, and it was passed it down until 2006, when scientists did tests to compare the skull's DNA with DNA from Mozart's grandmother and niece.

"Not only did the skull's DNA not match Mozart's DNA, but the grandmother and niece also did not match each other," Beccia wrote. "This means that Mozart's relatives have some explaining to do."

Goya

The Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) is missing his head. Goya died and was buried in Bordeaux, France, but the Spanish government received permission to relocate his body to his native Spain in 1901. But instead of one body, they found two skeletons and one skull.

Scientists concluded that the skull belonged to the other body, whose identity is still unknown, Beccia wrote. As for Goya, his headless remains were given a plush burial at the Chapel of St. Anthony of Florida in Madrid. It's anyone's guess where his skull resides.

Einstein

Before he died, Albert Einstein told his biographer "I want to be cremated so people don't come to worship my bones." Alas, his wishes were not completely followed.

After Einstein died of a ruptured abdominal aneurysm in 1955, his ashes were scattered at a secret location along the Delaware River. But several organs were not cremated, including Einstein's brain, which was stolen by the pathologist Dr. Thomas Harvey.

Harvey studied Einstein's brain and even had it painted by an artist, Beccia wrote. Then, Harvey chopped up the brain, stored the pieces in mason jars and stashed them in a beer cooler. Later, a 2011 study found that Einstein had a huge corpus callosum, the fibers that connect the right to the left brain. The public can catch a glimpse of this famous brain nowadays at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland, and at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. The above photo shows a microscopic section of Einstein's brain tissue.

Riveria

As a bonus, Diego Rivera — whose body parts are all accounted for — did some pretty horrifying stuff to other's bodies. The Mexican muralist had a thing for fresh cadavers, especially when it came to lunch. As part of a cannibalistic experiment, he snacked on the newly dead.

"Best of all, however, I relished women's brains in vinaigrette," he wrote in his book "My Art, My Life: An Autobiography."

(Inside Science) — While most people think of stage makeup as big eyelashes and pancake foundation, Shannon Higgins specializes in a different sort of entertainment wizardry. "I make little teardrop-shaped baggies of fake blood and hide them around the stage for different productions," said Higgins, a hair, makeup and wardrobe supervisor at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. Actors then pocket the blood packets for use during the production.

In a recent show called The Doppleganger, actor Rainn Wilson wore a mechanized blood suit that squirted blood, and other actors had squeeze bottles full of blood. The stage, said Higgins, became a bloody mess.

There are lots of considerations when it comes to fake blood, which has come a long way since the days of chocolate syrup (used in Hitchhock's Psycho) or the classic combo of corn syrup and red dye. For blood that's in an actor's mouth, some new formulations taste like mint and are safe for ingestion. Other blood is washable — something that matters a lot when a show is onstage for six to eight weeks, Higgins said.

One stage blood formula created by British company Pigs Might Fly South was used in the Harry Potter films. "It's a good density," for movie and television blood said Higgins, adding that theater sometimes requires special sleight of hand. She has to bend the rules of normal blood behavior a bit to account for stage lighting and people who may be seated in the back of the theater. Wounds that would gush out quickly have to be slowed down it order to make them more visible for the whole audience.

The audience view is also a major consideration for Anna Fleiner and Kelsey Boutte, who work on makeup and effects for the CBS show S.W.A.T. For gory crime scene inspiration, they scour the internet for photos of gore — and then they adjust for the camera. "Sometimes what may look really real actually looks differently on camera, because of high-def cameras," said Boutte. "A red color that looks correct in person may be too bright on camera."

Blood also changes characteristics depending on how new a wound is. Older blood is darker and more congealed than fresh blood, which is runnier and more flowing. There are many blood varieties on the market, Fleiner said — there are formulations of eye blood, mouth blood, lung blood, old dried blood, and even blood for different skin tones. "We can just buy whatever works well."

For those looking to create blood at home rather than buy it, there are some tricks to the process. A simple starting goo could be a mix of chocolate syrup, peanut butter and red food coloring -- a sticky, less drippy formula good for something like a zombie costume. The Kennedy Center has recipes for blood based on soap and corn syrup, as well as gels that can mimic organs.

More Halloween stories from Inside Science:

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Blood looks red, but it's actually a reddish brown, because of an iron molecule bound to it, said Jennifer Fishovitz, a chemistry professor at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. "So red food coloring on its own is not the best; you'd need to add a green to make it a little more brown -- or use chocolate syrup to achieve a viscosity closer to blood."

Fishovitz leads students through a fake crime scene every semester. While she has never used fake blood, she instead puts hemoglobin, one of the proteins found in blood, into water for her students to test.

Jennifer Schwartz Poehlmann, a chemistry lecturer at Stanford University in California, uses a different trick in her chemistry classes. She teaches her students how a classic reaction -- mixing ferric chloride with potassium thiocyanate to make iron thiocyanate — can create the illusion of a fresh, bleeding cut.

You begin by coating an area of skin with the clear potassium thiocyanate solution. Then, dip a butter knife blade (or fake knife) in the ferric chloride solution and gently draw across the skin with the dampened blade. A deep, red liquid resembling blood appears where the two solutions mix. Leaving the skin damp after the first application produces a dripping blood effect, although the color from the reaction will still appear even if you let the area dry.

"The coordinated iron compound gives a deep red color that nearly perfectly mimics blood," Poehlmann said. "It's slightly different from the heme iron in our blood but similar concept."

So, from professional theaters to chemistry labs filled with budding scientists, there will be no shortage of stages on which fake blood can impress this Halloween.

Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics. Charles Q. Choi is a freelance science writer based in New York City who has written for The New York Times, Scientific American, Wired, Science, Nature, and many other news outlets.

Spooky, scary skeletons

Are x-rays of animals gorgeous or creepy? Maybe a little of both. The Oregon Zoo recently captured a series of Halloween-ready X-rays showcasing some of their animals. Here, a three-banded armadillo displays its built-in suit of armor.

Ball python

For animals at the Oregon Zoo, X-rays are part of their annual checkup with the zoo veterinarian. The flexible spine inside a sinuous adult ball python can include around 200 vertebrae and 400 ribs.

Bearded dragon

Digital X-rays help zookeepers monitor animal health. This bearded dragon has a normal skeleton, but lack of light and certain nutrients can lead to a thinning of bone density in these reptiles, a condition known as metabolic bone disease.

Bufflehead duck

Though it's hard to tell from its skeleton, bufflehead ducks have a fluffy covering of feathers that makes them look endearingly pudgy.

Cape porcupine

Do those pointy incisors look like the teeth of a fearsome carnivore? They're not. They belong to the Cape porcupine, an omnivorous mammal that is the largest rodent in Africa. These porcupines mostly dine on plants, though they are also known to eat carrion and gnaw on bones.

Dwarf mongoose

Though this X-ray appears to have captured a dwarf mongoose mid-leap, the anesthetized animal is merely lying on a table. Digital X-ray technology is faster than traditional X-ray techniques, enabling veterinarians to shorten the time that their X-ray subjects must spend under anesthesia.

Rodrigues flying fox

The Rodrigues flying fox is a type of large fruit bat native to the island of Rodrigues, east of Madagascar. Its fur, invisible in this X-ray, is typically chestnut brown, with a mantle of golden fur covering its shoulders, neck and head.

American beaver

The wide, flat tail of a beaver is mostly fleshy padding, as this X-ray reveals.

Golden eagle

While this view of a golden eagle's butt and legs isn't very dignified, it does highlight the impressive claws that this predatory bird uses to snatch its prey. While its feathers are invisible in the image, golden eagles are known for having long tail feathers that extend farther behind the bird than its head extends up front.

Meller' chameleon

One of this chameleon's most distinctive traits — a "horn" sticking out over its nose — is almost invisible in the X-ray. These large chameleons can grow up to 2 feet long (0.6 meters) and weigh over a pound (0.5 kilogram).

Amur tiger

"How do you X-ray a 320-pound Amur tiger? Very carefully, of course," representatives of the Oregon Zoo wrote in a blog post. Amur tigers were once common in the Korean Peninsula, northern China and eastern Russia, but today only about 540 individuals remain in the wild.

Toco toucan

Also known as the common toucan, the Toco toucan is the biggest and best-known of all the toucans — a group that includes more than 40 species.

Fat-tailed gecko

An X-ray of a fat-tailed gecko makes it easy to see how the animal got its name, with a thin chain of tail bones cushioned by plenty of flesh.

Flamingo

The digital X-ray system used by the Oregon Zoo "produces images with great detail and clarity. It helps ensure excellent health care for the animals, and it also provides a unique glimpse inside the world of wildlife," zoo representatives said in a statement.

Hedgehog

Veterinarians use X-rays to monitor the health of zoo animals. While a dark blob inside the gut of this hedgehog may look alarming, it is actually just a harmless ball of gas.

Halloween is a time when ghosts and spooky decorations are on public display, reminding us of the realm of the dead. But could they also be instructing us in important lessons on how to lead moral lives?

Roots of Halloween

The origins of modern-day Halloween go back to "samhain," a Celtic celebration for the beginning of the dark half of the year when, it was widely believed, the realm between the living and the dead overlapped and ghosts could be commonly encountered.

In 601 A.D., to help his drive to Christianize northern Europe, Pope Gregory I directed missionaries not to stop pagan celebrations, but rather to Christianize them.

Accordingly, over time, the celebrations of samhain became All Souls' Day and All Saint's Day, when speaking with the dead was considered religiously appropriate. All Saint's Day was also known as All Hallows' Day and the night before became All Hallows' Evening, or "Hallowe'en."

Christian ghosts

Not only did the pagan beliefs around spirits of the dead continue, but they also became part of many of early church practices.

Pope Gregory I himself suggested that people seeing ghosts should say masses for them. The dead, in this view, might require help from the living to make their journey towards Heaven.

During the Middle Ages, beliefs around souls trapped in purgatory led to the church's increasing practice of selling indulgences – payments to the church to reduce penalties for sins. The widespread belief in ghosts turned the sale of indulgences into a lucrative practice for the church.

It was such beliefs that contributed to the Reformation, the division of Christianity into Protestantism and Catholicism led by German theologian Martin Luther. Indeed, Luther's "95 Theses," that he nailed to the All Saints Church in Wittenburg on Oct. 31, 1517, was largely a protest against the selling of indulgences.

Subsequently, ghosts became identified with "Catholic superstitions" in Protestant countries.

Debates, however, continued about the existence of ghosts and people increasingly turned to science to deal with the issue. By the 19th century, Spiritualism, a new movement which claimed that the dead could converse with the living, was fast becoming mainstream, and featured popular techniques such as seances, the ouija board, spirit photography and the like.

Although Spiritualism faded in cultural importance after World War I, many of its approaches can be seen in the "ghost hunters" of today, who often seek to prove the existence of ghosts using scientific techniques.

A wide, wide world of ghosts

These beliefs are not just part of the Christian world. Most, although not all, societies have a concept of "ghosts." In Taiwan, for example, about 90 percent people report seeing ghosts.

Along with many Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam, Taiwan celebrates a "Ghost Month," which includes a central "Ghost Day," when ghosts are believed to freely roam the world of the living. These festivals and beliefs are often tied to the Buddhist story of the Urabon Sutra, where Buddha instructs a young priest on how to help his mother whom he sees suffering as a "hungry ghost."

As in many traditions, Taiwanese ghosts are seen either as "friendly" or "unfriendly." The "friendly" ghosts are commonly ancestral or familial and welcomed into the home during the ghost festival. The "unfriendly" ghosts are those angry or "hungry" ghosts that haunt the living.

Role of ghosts in our lives

As a scholar who has studied and taught ghost stories for many years, I have found that ghosts generally haunt for good reasons. These could range from unsolved murders, lack of proper funerals, forced suicides, preventable tragedies and other ethical failures.

Ghosts, in this light, are often found seeking justice from beyond the grave. They could make such demands from individuals, or from societies as a whole. For example, in the U.S., sightings have been reported of African-American slaves and murdered Native Americans. Scholar Elizabeth Tucker details many of these reported sightings on university campuses, often tied in with sordid aspects of the campus's past.

In this way, ghosts reveal the shadow side of ethics. Their sightings are often a reminder that ethics and morality transcend our lives and that ethical lapses can carry a heavy spiritual burden.

Yet ghost stories are also hopeful. In suggesting a life after death, they offer a chance to be in contact with those that have passed and therefore a chance for redemption – a way to atone for past wrongs.

This Halloween, along with the shrieks and shtick, you may want to take a few minutes to appreciate the role of ghosts in our haunted pasts and how they guide us to lead moral and ethical lives.

Tok Thompson, Associate Professor of Teaching, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Laughter can be heartwarming, contagious, lovely … and at times, very, very unsettling. There's something about a cackling clown or a chuckling robot that can convince us of imminent doom

So, why does laughter sometimes frighten us?

"A lot of fear stems from dissonance or violation of our expectation," said Margee Kerr, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in the study of fear and who wrote the book "Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear" (Public Affairs, 2015). In other words, we get scared when something goes against our expectations. That's why we can find it terrifying to see children — who usually act cute and happy — behaving in weird ways as if "possessed," as happens in movies like "The Exorcist" and "Children of the Corn," Kerr said.

Laughter in an unusual setting prompts a similar response. "Whenever we take something that's supposed to be linked to positive emotions, feelings of innocence or joy, and then flip it in some way, by either making it a little bit sinister or out of context, it sends a red flag" or an error message, Kerr told Live Science. "People shouldn't be happy about doing bad things, so when they are … that's a cue that something's not right and we can't trust them." [Why Are People Afraid of Clowns?]

So, no, the Joker shouldn't laugh (a sign of a positive emotion) about the destruction of others (a negative situation). And no, Cruella de Vil shouldn't laugh after saying, "Well, if we make this coat, it would be as if I were wearing your dog." (This was scary, OK?)

But at the physiological level, "laughter and fear are very similar," Kerr said. They are both "high-arousal states," or times when we are feeling intense emotions, she said. That's why it's not uncommon for a startled person to first scream and then laugh. All of that energy is there, and once people realize they aren't in danger, they can quickly turn that scream into a laugh, Kerr said.

Culture also plays a role in how we perceive laughter.

In Western society, because we learn to associate laughter with positive feelings, "when it's in the context of evilness or hurting people, then it doesn’t make sense," Kerr said. In some cultures that aren't necessarily globally connected, the sound of any kind of laughter can prompt a similar uneasiness. "If you go into cultures that haven't had a lot of exposure to mainstream media, laughter can be very strange just in general," she added.

Though we typically associate laughter with positive thoughts, sometimes the very meaning of laughter can be unclear. Indeed, there's a  big difference between "laugh[ing] at someone" and "laugh[ing] with someone," said Dr. Israel Liberzon, the psychiatry department head at Texas A&M College of Medicine.

And if that laughing person isn't a person at all — if it's, say, a robot or a doll, something that's supposed to be free from the tangle of human emotions— there's an added layer of creepiness, Kerr said.

For example, a few months ago, Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant randomly broke out laughing, unprompted, in people's homes, according to CNBC. And people were terrified. Amazon explained that the reason for the assistant's hilarity was that Alexa sometimes mistakenly thought someone was saying, "Alexa, laugh."

"When we hear our GPS or Alexa or Siri respond affectionately, they're always doing so in response to something we've done," Kerr said. "They have no independently motivated expressions of emotions." But when Alexa randomly laughs on its own, "it introduces this problem of 'Why is Alexa laughing?' [when] it's supposed to be something that is detached from sentiment."

It made people think that Alexa had reached a level of consciousness that only humans have been known to possess, Kerr said. That would be kind of funny, right?

Originally published on Live Science.

Chicken-costume enthusiasts may have been alarmed earlier this week, when headlines proclaimed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was "ruining Halloween" by, …telling people not to put chickens in costumes?

The problem is, the CDC never said this.

"Recent media stories erroneously reported that the [CDC] warned people against dressing chickens in Halloween costumes. The CDC hasn't given this advice," Benjamin Haynes, a spokesperson for the agency, told Live Science in an email. [Tiny & Nasty: Images of Things That Make Us Sick]

That said, handling chickens comes with risks. Indeed, the CDC does "advise people with backyard chickens to handle them carefully to keep their family and their chickens safe and healthy," Haynes said.  

The concern with handling chickens is, of course, Salmonella. Chickens carry the bacteria, which can make people sick. Infection with Salmonella bacteria can cause diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps anywhere from 12 to 72 hours after exposure to the germs. And although most people recover on their own within a week, some people may need to be hospitalized. The infection is particularly dangerous for people with weakened immune systems and young children, whose immune systems are still developing. (The CDC notes that children under 5 should never touch or hold chickens.)  

So, how can you and your costume-clad chicken safely celebrate Halloween? The CDC said in the email that the agency recommends washing the chicken costume in the washing machine in hot water after it's been worn by the bird. You should also wash your hands after handling the costume. (In fact, you should wash your hands after handling chickens or anything chicken-related, no matter the time of year.)  

And lest you think that the CDC cares about only your health and not the health of your festively costumed flock, the email included a bit of advice: "Make sure your chicken can breathe and walk normally while wearing the costume."

Happy Halloween, chickens!

(Please note that the CDC's recommendation about not kissing your chickens still stands.)

Originally published on Live Science.

John Carpenter's iconic horror film "Halloween" celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Few horror movies have achieved similar notoriety, and it's credited with kicking off the steady stream of slasher flicks that followed.

Audiences flocked to theaters to witness the seemingly random murder and mayhem a masked man brought to a small suburban town, reminding them that picket fences and manicured lawns cannot protect us from the unjust, the unknown or the uncertainty that awaits us all in both life and death. The film offers no justice for the victims in the end, no rebalancing of good and evil.

Why, then, would anyone want to spend their time and money to watch such macabre scenes filled with depressing reminders of just how unfair and scary our world can be?

I've spent the past 10 years investigating just this question, finding the typical answer of "Because I like it! It's fun!"incredibly unsatisfying. I've long been convinced there's more to it than the "natural high" or adrenaline rush many describe – and indeed, the body does kick into "go" mode when you're startled or scared, amping up not only adrenaline but a multitude of chemicals that ensure your body is fueled and ready to respond. This "fight or flight" response to threat has helped keep humans alive for millennia.

That still doesn't explain why people would want to intentionally scare themselves, though. As a sociologist, I've kept asking "But, why?" After two years collecting data in a haunted attraction with my colleague Greg Siegle, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, we've found the gains from thrills and chills can go further than the natural high.

Studying fear at a terrifying attraction

To capture in real time what makes fear fun, what motivates people to pay to be scared out of their skin and what they experience when engaging with this material, we needed to gather data in the field. In this case, that meant setting up a mobile lab in the basement of an extreme haunted attraction outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

This adults-only extreme attraction went beyond the typical startling lights and sounds and animated characters found in a family-friendly haunted house. Over the course of about 35 minutes, visitors experienced a series of intense scenarios where, in addition to unsettling characters and special effects, they were touched by the actors, restrained and exposed to electricity. It was not for the faint of heart.

For our study, we recruited 262 guests who had already purchased tickets. Before they entered the attraction, each completed a survey about their expectations and how they were feeling. We had them answer questions again about how they were feeling once they had gone through the attraction.

We also used mobile EEG technology to compare 100 participants' brainwave activity as they sat through 15 minutes of various cognitive and emotional tasks before and after the attraction.

Guests reported significantly higher mood, and felt less anxious and tired, directly after their trip through the haunted attraction. The more terrifying the better: Feeling happy afterward was related to rating the experience as highly intense and scary. This set of volunteers also reported feeling that they'd challenged their personal fears and learned about themselves.

Analysis of the EEG data revealed widespread decreases in brain reactivity from before to after among those whose mood improved. In other words, highly intense and scary activities – at least in a controlled environment like this haunted attraction – may "shut down" the brain to an extent, and that in turn is associated with feeling better. Studies of those who practice mindfulness meditation have made a similar observation.

Coming out stronger on the other side

Together our findings suggest that going through an extreme haunted attraction provides gains similar to choosing to run a 5K race or tackling a difficult climbing wall. There's a sense of uncertainty, physical exertion, a challenge to push yourself – and eventually achievement when it's over and done with.

Fun-scary experiences could serve as an in-the-moment recalibration of what registers as stressful and even provide a kind of confidence boost. After watching a scary movie or going through a haunted attraction, maybe everything else seems like no big deal in comparison. You rationally understand that the actors in a haunted house aren't real, but when you suspend your disbelief and allow yourself to become immersed in the experience, the fear certainly can feel real, as does the satisfaction and sense of accomplishment when you make it through. As I experienced myself after all kinds of scary adventures in Japan, Colombia and all over the U.S., confronting a horde of zombies can actually make you feel pretty invincible.

Movies like "Halloween" allow people to tackle the big, existential fears we all have, like why bad things happen without reason, through the protective frame of entertainment. Choosing to do fun, scary activities may also serve as a way to practice being scared, building greater self-knowledge and resilience, similar to rough-and-tumble play. It;s an opportunity to engage with fear on your own terms, in environments where you can push your boundaries, safely. Because you're not in real danger, and thus not occupied with survival, you can choose to observe your reactions and how your body changes, gaining greater insight to yourself.

What it takes to be safely scared

While there are countless differences in the nature, content, intensity and overall quality of haunted attractions, horror movies and other forms of scary entertainment, they all share a few critical components that help pave the way for a fun scary time.

First and foremost, you have to make the choice to engage – don't drag your best friend with you unless she is also on board. But do try to gather some friends when you're ready. When you engage in activities with other people, even just watching a movie, your own emotional experience is intensified. Doing intense, exciting and thrilling things together can make them more fun and help create rewarding social bonds. Emotions can be contagious, so when you see your friend scream and laugh, you may feel compelled to do the same.

No matter the potential benefits, horror movies and scary entertainment are not for everyone, and that's OK. While the fight-or-flight response is universal, there are important differences between individuals – for example, in genetic expressions, environment and personal history – that help explain why some loathe and others love thrills and chills.

Regardless of your taste (or distaste) for all things horror or thrill-related, an adventurous and curious mindset can benefit everyone. After all, we're the descendants of those who were adventurous and curious enough to explore the new and novel, but also quick and smart enough to run or fight when danger appeared. This Halloween, maybe challenge yourself to at least one fun scary experience and prepare to unleash your inner superhero.

Margee Kerr, Adjunct Professor of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a message for candy lovers: "As it turns out, you really can overdose on candy — or, more precisely, black licorice."

The FDA is warning licorice lovers to avoid eating too much of this sweet treat, according to a statement released by the agency yesterday (Oct. 30).

This is because licorice contains a compound called glycyrrhizin, which, in high doses, can be harmful to the heart. Glycyrrhizin can cause potassium levels in the body to fall, which can lead to an abnormal heartbeat, high blood pressure, swelling, lethargy and congestive heart failure, the FDA says. [5 Surprising Halloween Health Hazards]

The compound can be particularly harmful for people ages 40 and older: For people in this age group, eating 2 ounces (56 grams) of black licorice a day for at least two weeks could lead to an irregular heartbeat, according to the FDA. (Black licorice is often sold in 2-ounce bags, the FDA says.)

Dr. Linda Katz, director of the Office of Cosmetics and Colors at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the FDA, noted that the health problems caused by black licorice are not permanent. A person's potassium levels usually return to normal after that person stops eating the food, she said in the statement.

The FDA has the following advice for black-licorice lovers:

• Don't eat large amounts of the candy at once, no matter your age.
• If you have eaten a large amount of black licorice and have an irregular heartbeat or muscle weakness, stop eating the candy, and contact a health care provider.
• Black licorice can interact with some medications, herbs and supplements. Ask a health care professional any questions you may have about possible interactions. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Night terrors

Traditional Halloween creatures — vampires, werewolves and killer clowns — may give you the shivers, but these mythic horrors from around the world are truly nightmare fuel.

From grotesque human/animal hybrids to sentient and vengeful flying body parts, here are just a few of the lesser-known things that go bump in the night that might make you lock your doors and hide under your covers with a flashlight.

Adlet (Inuit)

Inuit folklore tells of the Adlet, human-dog hybrids with dogs' legs and a human body, who were born to a woman that mated with a dog, according to a collection of Inuit tales and songs published in 1889 in the Journal of American Folklore.

The Adlet had human bodies with hairy dogs' legs, and they killed and ate their grandfather after he murdered their canine father, according to the legend.

Acheri (India)

The unnerving childlike phantom known as the acheri originated in Hindu folklore in northern India, though it also appears as a Native American myth among the Chippewa people, according to the Encyclopedia of Spirits and Ghosts in World Mythology (McFarland, 2016). The acheri is the ghost of a young girl who died under tragic circumstances. She returns from beyond the grave, descending from the mountains after dark to bring sickness to children and the elderly. Pictured here as a character in the PlayStation role-playing video game "Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner," the acheri typically appears as a pale and sickly looking young girl, and when its shadow falls upon its victims they fall ill with a deadly respiratory disease.

Nuckelavee (Scotland)

The Scottish Nuckelavee is a "skinless centaur" with a snout like a pig's that expels gusts of steam, a single enormous eye, and arms that drag upon the ground, according to the "Encyclopedia of Fairies in World Folklore and Mythology" (McFarland, 2013). It lives in the ocean and can kill people by breathing on them, leading them to waste away and eventually die.

Gulon

A description of Sweden's Gulon, a fearsome legendary animal with the head and ears of a cat, a body like a lion's and the tail of a fox, appeared in "A Description of the Northern People," an exhaustive account of the folklore and history of Nordic countries, published in 1555 by Swedish writer Olaus Magnus. The Gulon gorges itself on carrion until it is grossly distended, then squeezes itself between two trees to make room for more, according to "Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth" (W.W. Norton & Co., 2001).

Futakuchi-onna

This eerie creature looks like an ordinary woman, but has a ravenous second mouth on the back of her head, hidden by her hair. The mouth is insatiable; it gorges on any food it can find, fed by animated strands of the woman's hair, and usually appears as a punishment afflicting people who are extremely greedy or stingy, according to Yokai.com, an online database of Japanese ghosts and monsters.

Rompo

The scavenging rompo survives by eating human corpses, according to legends that originated in India and across Africa. It is relatively small, measuring approximately 3 feet (1 meter) long, with the front legs of a badger, the back legs and rear of a bear, the head of a hare and the ears of a person, topped with a luxurious horse's mane, according to the "Encyclopedia of Beasts and Monsters in Myth, Legend and Folklore" (McFarland, 2016).

Finfolk

In the Orkney Islands, an archipelago off the northeastern coast of Scotland, people once whispered of the Finfolk, a tribe of sorcerers and shapeshifters who were skilled at boating and who could bend the ocean to their will. Finfolk could live underwater or on land, though their permanent home was usually described as a marvelous city at the bottom of the ocean, and they would venture into towns and villages to steal humans as husbands or wives, according to Orkneyjar, a nonprofit website describing Orkney history and folklore.

Bokkenrijders

Little is known about these figures from Dutch folklore, who called the name of the devil to summon flying goats that they would ride through the air, to practice untold acts of mischief. The name — "goat riders" in Dutch — was applied in the 18th century to bands of robbers that wild rumors described as the terrifying, flying goat riders of legend. Men suspected of being bokkenrijders were tortured and executed, with accusations condemning 31 people from a single municipality in Belgium between 1744 and 1776, the Belgian website Flanders Today reported.

Bunyip

Swamps, rivers, and shallow inland waters across Australia are rumored to be the home of the bunyip, a lanky, green-furred, razor-clawed creature "about twice the size of the average man," with webbed hands and feet like a duck, the news agency ABC Riverland reported in 2007. Children were warned against playing too close to the water's edge, lest the bunyip catch them and drag them under to drown.

Kumiho

In Korean mythology, the kumiho — a malevolent demon fox-woman with nine tails — is a man-eater, both literally and figuratively. She is a killer with a voracious sexual appetite and she often consumes her conquests, according to EsoterX, a website that explores the anthropological sources of monsters in folklore from around the world.

Leyak

Is that strange woman who lives next door to you actually a vampiric witch? In Bali, the mythical, blood-drinking leyak looks and acts like an ordinary person — during the day. At night, however, it visits the graveyards to search for entrails, and if it can't find any there, it steals them from one of its sleeping neighbors. With the entrails, it makes a special potion that enables it to transform into a variety of terrifying shapes, including a monkey with golden teeth, a bald-headed giant, an enormous rat, or a riderless motorcycle, according to the "Encyclopedia of Giants and Humanoids in Myth, Legend and Folklore" (McFarland, 2016).

Zburator

The winged, vampirelike zburator, whose name means "the flying thing," is a creature from Romanian mythology that resembles a handsome dark-eyed and black-haired young man. Zburators seduce young women and steal their life energy, draining their victims until they are pale, sickly wraiths, according to the "Encyclopedia of Beasts and Monsters in Myth, Legend and Folklore" (McFarland, 2016).

Manananggal

These terrifying flyers from Filipino folklore gain their name from the Tagalog word "tanggal," which means "to split." Generally depicted as female, the manananggal hunts for blood and human flesh by sprouting wings and severing the upper half of its body. It flies with its entrails dragging along after it, sucking the blood of sleepers and feasting on the hearts of fetuses still in their mothers' wombs, using a proboscis-like tongue, according to "Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology" (University of the Philippines Press, 1971).

Californians and Texans seem to suffer from a fear of holes, Georgians fear heights, and Americans generally seem to really be creeped out by the number 13 — or at least, that's what our search histories suggest.

Security company ADT has a blog called yourlocalsecurity.com, and in the spirit of Halloween, those who run the blog decided to look carefully at what scares people. The method was simple: matching up search terms with "why am I afraid of…," according to Scott Bay, author of the blog and a communications specialist at the company, who said the results don't really mean that people suffer from the actual phobia. True phobias are clinical terms and require a diagnosis from a psychologist or psychiatrist. "Our data points come from search data and merely represent what people are searching for, not necessarily the phobia they may have (if any)," Bay told Live Science. 

To get the data, Bay and his colleagues looked at Google Trends, using data from a yearlong period starting in September 2016. They cross-referenced the "why am I afraid of" text string with the top 24 phobias in the United States determined by fearof.net. [What Really Scares People: Top 10 Phobias]

It's not possible to track an individual's search data, because Google Trends looks at things in aggregate. Even so, the algorithm reveals not only generalized search trends over the whole country but also a way to see where certain terms are concentrated.

The results were, in some cases, surprising — few would guess that New Yorkers seem to be really interested in claustrophobia, the fear of enclosed spaces. Half the population lives in densely populated New York City, where getting a kitchen big enough to sit down in is a relative luxury. Claustrophobia seems a common search term in Florida as well.

Other phobias — with their more exotic names — are found in California and Texas, where searches for trypophobia, or the fear of holes, was most common. Arizonans have a lot of people searching for brontophobia ― the fear of thunder and lightning. Residents of Kentucky would seem to have an inordinate fear of commitment — gamophobia — which was the most common phobia searched.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, the top two phobias searched nationwide were triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13) and xenophobia, the fear of the unknown, which also gets conflated with fear of foreigners and immigrants. (The term is often used interchangeably, though it isn't quite the same thing). The third most-commonly searched phobia in the U.S. was coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns — anyone who was traumatized at a childhood birthday party might recall that one. In fourth place was trypophobia,  followed by thalassaphobia, or fear of the ocean.

An odd statistical fluke meant that while thalassaphobia was in the top five, it wasn't concentrated enough to show up as the top phobia for any state. (Clowns made it in Colorado and Nebraska. Xenophobia made it to the top spots in no fewer than nine states: Alaska, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin). Triskaidekaphobia made the top spot only in North Dakota. Trypophobia was in first place for California, New Mexico, Texas and Vermont.

Nevadans seem to fear ghosts (phasmaphobia). They share this one with Kansans, Oregonians and Tennesseans.

The phobias might offer some ideas for region-specific Halloween costumes. Evidently dressing up as the land shark will do well to scare people in New Jersey and New Hampshire, where galeophobia was their top-searched phobia.

Originally published on Live Science.

Do you dare?

This time of year, there are plenty of man-made terrors lurking, ready to leap out and pounce. But vampires, the undead and other ghoulish fictional horrors can at least be explained away. Our planet offers up some very real scary spots, and no amount of rationalizing will snuff them out of existence. Here we've put together a list of a few terrifying places you may not have thought of. A crucifix and garlic will do nothing to save you in these places...

Waverly Hills Sanatorium

Ready to be scared out of your wits? Then head over to the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, located on the edge of Louisville, Kentucky. This hospital was built in 1910 as a treatment center for tuberculosis patients.

The bat-winged building earned a harrowing reputation after thousands of patients died there of the "white plague," a tuberculosis epidemic that ravaged the United States throughout the early 20th century. At the time of the epidemic, there was no known cure for tuberculosis, and many patients — historians put the number at around 8,000 — died at Waverly Hills over a period of 50 years. After the discovery of antibiotics to treat tuberculosis, the sanatorium was reopened as a geriatric hospital. Now privately owned, the sanatorium is a popular site for haunted Halloween tours, and plans are in the works to turn the allegedly haunted building into a hotel and conference center. Stay the night, if you dare.

Savannah, Georgia

What's the most haunted place in the United States? Ironically, it's the "Hostess City of the South," or Savannah, Georgia. Savannah is home to dozens of haunted houses and hundreds of ghost sightings and is a popular place for ghost tours. One of the city's spookiest locales is the Bonaventure Cemetery, a veritable jungle of tombstones and Spanish moss-covered trees.

Among Savannah's haunted homes is the Hampton Lilybridge House. Built in 1797, the house was later moved to a new location, which happened to contain a mysterious underground crypt. Since it was moved, dozens of people who lived in the home have complained of supernatural activities in the residence, including furniture that rearranged itself and doors that locked of their own volition.

Bachelor's Grove Cemetery

All cemeteries are a bit spooky, but which cemetery is the scariest of them all? Many argue that the distinction belongs to Bachelor's Grove Cemetery on the outskirts of Chicago, Illinois. More than 100 documented ghost sightings and supernatural episodes have been reported in and around the burial ground.

Many of these ghoulish reports reference a ghost farmer and his horse, while other visitors report seeing a 1940s-style car that appears and disappears along the roads leading to the cemetery. The image above was published in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1991. It shows what appears to be a woman sitting on a gravestone inside Bachelor's Grove. However, the photographer claims that the woman was not present when the picture was taken. The figure, now known as the "Madonna of Bachelor's Grove" is popularly believed to be the ghost of a woman buried next to her young child. She allegedly walks the graveyard during the full moon with the child in her arms.

Tower of London

What historic building in England has been home to queens, criminals, the crown jewels, a menagerie and a whole slew of ghosts? The Tower of London, of course. The 900-year-old castle and fortress is said to be haunted by a number of specters, including the ghost of Arabella Stuart, a cousin of King James I. Arabella made the grave mistake of marrying against the king's wishes, and she's still serving her time inside the tower, according to legend. Other famous Tower of London ghosts include Queen Anne Boleyn (decapitated wife of the fickle King Henry VIII) and Thomas Becket (murdered Archbishop of Canterbury).

Aokigahara Woods

Nestled at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan is one of the world's most terrifying places: Aokigahara Woods. Also known as the Suicide Forest, Aokigahara is a 14-square-mile (35 square kilometers) swath of trees where hundreds of people have committed suicide over the past several decades. In 2010, 247 people attempted suicide within the forest's boundaries, and 54 of those people succeeded in their attempt, according to a report by the Japan Times. The same report also states that the number of attempted and successful suicides in the woods continues to rise every year.

El Aziza, Libya

If the idea of a hot summer day with no available air conditioning scares you, then get ready to scream about this next location. Often cited as the hottest inhabited place on Earth, El Azizia in Libya has experienced temperatures of 136 degrees Fahrenheit (58 degrees Celsius). The reason for the extreme heat has to do with southerly winds that blow hot air into this small town from over the Sahara Desert. Sounds a bit like hell on Earth, doesn't it?

Croke-Patterson Mansion

No list of spooky places would be complete without a haunted house, and perhaps no house does a better job of looking haunted than the Croke-Patterson Mansion in Denver, Colorado. Built in 1890, the mansion resembles a small castle, with its red sandstone turrets and high garret windows. Those who have lived in the house claim to hear the incessant cries of a baby coming from the attic. And local lore suggests that one of the home's former owners committed suicide in the attic by inhaling poison gas.

Nagoro, Japan

If an island chock full of disintegrating doll parts isn't your thing, perhaps you'd prefer a quaint mountain town full of life-size dolls. Nagoro is a tiny village in Japan with a population of about 30 people. However, the village's doll population is booming; about 350 scarecrow-like dolls reside there.

The dolls are the work of local artist Tsukimi Ayano, who creates the life-size figures to replace all the people who have left Nagoro for larger cities and for those who have died over the years. The inanimate doppelgangers inhabit the town in much like their human counterparts once did — sitting outside the local shops, attending classes and fishing by the river. Despite the dolls' sentimental underpinnings, some visitors to Nagoro say their presence all over town is a bit unsettling.

Isla de la Muñecas, Mexico

What could possibly be creepier than a tree full of hanging dolls? How about a whole island of trees full of hanging dolls?

Isla de la Muñecas, or Island of the Dolls, is a small island located in a canal south of Mexico City. The island is named for its doll population — a collection of intact toy dolls, doll heads and other disembodied doll parts that are strung from the island's trees and perched on overhead branches. The dolls were put there by a local man who reported finding a young girl's body washed up on the shore of the island about 50 years ago, according to Atlas Obscura. The man has since died, but the island now serves as a popular (and super creepy) tourist attraction. Some visitors say they have heard the now decrepit dolls whispering to each other in the treetops…

Bell Witch Cave

Bell Witch Cave has become a must-see attraction for ghost hunters in the U.S. The Adams, Tennessee, cave is located on a farm that once belonged to the Bell family. Legend has it that, beginning in 1817, the Bells were tortured by an evil "witch being." The family reported seeing strange animals around their farm and waking up to inexplicable noises throughout the house, such as scratching at the doors and the sound of chains being dragged across the floor. The Bell Witch, as this spirit came to be known, was thought to be the spirit of a deceased (and seemingly vengeful) neighbor named Kate Batts, according to the official Bell Witch Cave website.

Today, tourists are invited to roam the cave where the Bell Witch once taunted the youngest Bell daughter.

Door to Hell, Turkmenistan

This next spooky spot is quite literally hell on Earth. Commonly known as the "Door to Hell," the natural gas crater pictured above can be found in Derweze, Turkmenistan.

Located in the Karakum Desert, the Door to Hell became a 230-foot-wide (70 meters) burning hole back in 1971. That's when a group of engineers drilling for oil accidentally tapped into a pocket of natural gas, which caused their drilling rig to collapse and form a crater. Fearing that poisonous methane gas would seep out of the crater, the engineers decided to set the gas on fire. The engineers expected the natural gas reserve they had disrupted to burn for a few weeks, but they clearly underestimated the inferno. The Door to Hell continues to burn to this day.

Beelitz-Heilstätten hospital

What's so creepy about Beelitz-Heilstätten hospital in the German state of Brandenburg? It's hard to choose just one thing; it could be the crumbling vine-covered buildings, the abandoned medical equipment, the rusty hospital beds or the fact that the hospital once treated Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Hitler was a patient at Beelitz-Heilstätten after he sustained a leg injury at the Battle of Somme in 1916. The hospital was later occupied by Soviet forces and remained a Soviet military hospital until the 1990s. Some parts of the hospital remain open to patients, while others are frequented by camera-toting explorers.

Capuchin Catacombs

Most catacombs are a little eerie, but the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily, in southern Italy, are truly freaky. The catacombs contain about 8,000 skeletons and more than 1,000 mummified bodies. But what's strange about these corpses is that most of them are wearing clothes, and some of them are posing together in little groups.

One of the best-known mummies of Capuchin is that of 2-year-old Rosalia Lombardo, an Italian child who died of pneumonia in 1920. Her corpse is so well preserved by embalming fluids that she appears to be merely sleeping nearly 100 years after her death.

Sedlec Ossuary

If mummified corpses are a bit too much for you to stomach, then perhaps you should skip Sicily and head straight to the Czech Republic's Sedlec Ossuary. Located beneath a cemetery, the ossuary (or catacomb) contains the bones of an estimated 40,000 to 70,000 people. But, it's not the bones themselves that are freaky; it's the way the bones are presented.

In the late 1800s, the woodcarver František Rint was hired to organize the bones in the ossuary, which had become a bit overcrowded. Rint took some artistic liberties, carefully arranging the bones to create a giant chandelier, a coat of arms and other ghastly decorations. The morbid artist even signed his name in bone on the ossuary wall.

"The Boneyard" (Monthan Air Force Base)

Let's move on to a different kind of cemetery — one where old military aircraft go to die. The Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, is commonly referred to as "The Boneyard." And while this spot might not be super scary, it certainly looks like the backdrop for a post-apocalyptic thriller. In fact, this 600-acre cemetery of steel has been captured on film before. It was the setting for the video "Learning to Fly" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

This strange graveyard contains almost every plane flown by U.S. military pilots since World War II, including the B-52 StratoFortress and the much newer F-14 Tomcat. But don't try to enter this private Air Force Base because it's not open to the public. However, you can gawk at the dusty metal carcasses on Google Earth (try coordinates 32 08'59.96" N, 110 50'09.03"W).

Death Valley

Yes, the name itself is sinister, but Death Valley has its name for a reason. Spend too much time in the area the hottest, driest and lowest place in North America and you'll learn why early settlers bestowed such a forbidding name upon the place.

Nestled between steep mountains, Death Valley stretches for 140 long, hot miles (225 kilometers), and lies 282 feet (86 meters) below sea level. In July, temperatures hover around 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46 degrees Celsius). The scorched valley boasts the second-highest temperature ever recorded, a stunning 134 F (57 C) in July of 1913.

Make sure to bring plenty of water if you visit. Large parts of the valley have no cell phone coverage, so you may not be able to call for help.

Australia

This continent is rife with biting beasts that may not steal your eternal soul but can definitely do some nasty things to your corporeal parts.

It's the only place on Earth where venomous snakes outnumber non-venomous snakes. Australia's brown snakes and tiger snakes can kill humans with a single strike, but life-saving anti-venom treatments are widely available.

However, no amount of anti-venom can protect against the saltwater crocodile, one of Australia's most dangerous animals. Common in the northern Outback, the crocs kill one or two people a year. They are monstrous; the largest males can grow up to almost 23 feet (7 meters) long, and they are very aggressive.

Add to that the infamous great white shark and a host of venomous creatures the deadly box jellyfish, the blue ring octopus, the creepy-looking stone fish, dangerous spiders and Australia lives up to its reputation as a spot that'll toughen you up if it doesn't kill you first.

Central Africa

Perfect for aspiring Dr. Frankensteins, pretty scary for everybody else. This area gets more lightning strikes than any other place on the planet, as shown in this satellite map of global lightning flash density.

The average lightning bolt carries about 30,000 amps of charge, has 100 million volts of electric potential, and is about 50,000 F (27,760 C). Lightning strikes are the second-deadliest weather-related threat in the United States, killing, on average, 58 people a year.

The odds of being struck in your lifetime (if you live to be 80) are 1 in 3000 in the United States, but probably a bit higher if you spend time in the planet's lightning capital.

Komodo Island, Indonesia

On Komodo Island no one can hear you scream...at least the Komodo dragons can't. Their ears can't pick up high-pitched frequencies like a human howling in pain, but their tongues can smell you, even if you are hiding a couple of miles away.

The largest lizards in the world, these cannibalistic, scavenging, predatory monsters would do well in a B-grade horror movie. Not only are they big and scary-looking, they're also just plain gross.

The largest recorded Komodo was 10.3 feet (3.13 m) long and weighed 366 pounds (166 kg).

Komodo dragons eat carrion, but they also hunt, attacking everything from smaller lizards to rodents to water buffalo. To kill, the Komodos will knock an animal off its feet and tear it to pieces. If the Komodo's large, serrated teeth don't do the trick, the venom and deadly bacteria in a Komodo's saliva will kill any animal that escapes within a few days, and the dragons can then feast on the carcass.

The lizards are efficient eaters, polishing off bones, hide, hooves, even intestines to clean out the feces of their victims, they vigorously swing the innards around. Since Komodo dragons are cannibalistic, juveniles often roll in fecal matter. The smell keeps the bigger adults from turning the little ones into breakfast.

Antarctica

During the Antarctic winter, darkness rules the land. From late March until mid-September, the sun never appears above the horizon, vicious blizzards can reduce visibility to just a few feet, and temperatures stay around or below minus 76 F (minus 60 C).

Vostok Station, a Russian research center, holds the record for the lowest temperature ever recorded at the surface of the Earth: minus 128 F (minus 89.2 C), in 1983.

If you don't freeze to death on the southernmost continent, you might die of loneliness. Antarctica is the only continent on Earth with no native population. Only scientists and adventurers spend time in this windswept, frozen, forsaken place.

Gomantong Cave, Malaysia

Like a self-contained horror film, in this cave, the darkness is alive!

If the millions of bats don't creep you out, maybe the millions of cockroaches feasting on massive mounds of bat guano will. And the roaches don't just eat the guano. Bats or birds foolhardy enough to fall into the heaving mountains of insects are quickly devoured, their tiny bones picked clean by the insatiable cockroaches.

However, there is some poetic justice at work. Enormous, cockroach-eating centipedes skitter across the cave's walls. And so the circle of life, in all its beauty, rolls onward.

Don't get caught in here without a flashlight. Or perhaps a completely-sealed space suit.

Madidi National Park, Bolivia

We humans are accustomed to our spot at the top of the food chain. The conditions in this tropical rainforest turn that paradigm on its head. In this steamy spot, you are the food.

Photographer Joel Sartore's unforgettable account of his time in the park, first published in National Geographic in 2000, was so terrifying we still can't get it out of our heads.

During frightening days and dark nights filled with the cries of mysterious beasts, Sartore recounts horror after horror: botfly maggots that burrow into the flesh; packs of wild pigs that will tear a man to pieces; stingray bites that can leave a person bedridden for more than a month; parasitic worms that infest the human stomach; stinging ants; fungus that attacks human skin.

Even the leaves and moths here are venomous, and touching them can leave a person in pain for several hours.

Sweet dreams tonight...

For many people, fall is the spooky season. Daylight wanes as nights become longer, a chill touches the air, and trees lose their leaves and take on a skeletal silhouette.

If that alone doesn't make you uneasy, Halloween's approach triggers an outpouring of decorations and costumes that embrace the macabre: jack-o'-lanterns with evil grins; skulls and bones; crumbling gravestones; bloodthirsty vampires; and shambling, rotted corpses lurching toward an impending zombie apocalypse. 

It's enough to send shivers down your spine. But why do certain things frighten us, and what can science tell us about what happens in our bodies when we're afraid? [The Anatomy of Fear (Infographic)]

Cultural influences can lead people to be fearful of certain things, such as black cats or killer clowns. But there are also universal triggers of fear, according to neuropsychiatrist Dr. Katherine Brownlowe, chief of the Division of Neurobehavioral Health at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

"Typically, those are things that are going to make you die," Brownlowe told Live Science.

[Everything You Wanted to Know About Halloween] 

"Heights, animals, lightning, spiders, somebody running after you in a dark alley — generally, people have some kind of fear response to those kinds of things," she said.

Fear factor

Fear is, first and foremost, a survival mechanism. When the senses detect a source of stress that might pose a threat, the brain activates a cascade of reactions that prime us either to battle for our lives or to escape as quickly as possible — a reaction in mammals that is known as the "fight-or-flight" response.

Fear is regulated by a part of the brain within the temporal lobes known as the amygdala, Brownlowe told Live Science. When stress activates the amygdala, it temporarily overrides conscious thought so that the body can divert all of its energy to facing the threat — whatever that might be.

"The release of neurochemicals and hormones causes an increase in heart rate and breathing, shunts blood away from the intestines and sends more to the muscles, for running or fighting," Brownlowe explained. "It puts all the brain's attention into 'fight-or-flight.'"

Fluff, freeze, focus

Some of our bodies' responses to mortal terror are throwbacks to mechanisms that served our ancient ancestors, though these responses aren't as useful to us anymore. When fear raises goose bumps on our skin, it makes the hair on our arms stand up — which doesn't seem to help us either fight an enemy or escape from one. But when our early human ancestors were covered with hair, fluffing it up could have made them look bigger and more imposing, Brownlowe said.

Freezing in place like a deer caught in a car's headlights is another frequent response to being scared, and Brownlowe noted that this behavior is commonly seen in animals that are preyed upon.

"If you freeze, then the predator is less likely to see you and pay attention to you — and, hopefully, less likely to eat you," she said.

The emotional response that we feel when we're afraid serves a purpose, as well — it heightens alertness, keeping the body and brain focused on staying safe until the threat is neutralized.

Even babies can be fearful of things such as loud noises, sudden movements and unfamiliar faces, and young children may be terrified of things that adults know aren't real — like a monster hiding under the bed or a boogeyman in the closet. It isn't until kids reach age 7 or so that they can differentiate between real-world threats and threats that live only in their imaginations, Brownlowe said. [Goblin Sharks and 'Skeletorus': 6 Scary Beasts to Haunt Your Halloween]

Facing our fears

What makes humans' responses to fear different from other animals' is that people can process that fear and tamp it down once they consciously understand that they are not really in danger.

"We can get startled, but instead of running away like bunny rabbits, we reassess the situation and figure out that we don't need to respond in a 'fight-or-flight' manner," Brownlowe said. "And then we can just get on with our day."

Some people even deliberately seek out the experience of being frightened — they watch horror movies, brave the terrifying drop of towering roller coasters and do whatever generates a feeling of immediate personal risk. According to Brownlowe, they're enjoying the chemical aftermath that follows a rush of fear — a feeling that can be euphoric.

"Once the 'fight-or-flight' signals cease, the brain releases neurotransmitters and hormones that mediate what we call the 'rest-and-digest' system," Brownlowe said. "The heart rate is coming down, the breathing is slowing, goose bumps are relaxing. There's a sense of internal cognitive relief in the body, and that feels good."

The modern world comes with a number of stresses that early humans never faced and never could have imagined — financial burdens, performance anxieties, and a number of other social pressures that can generate fear and crushing anxiety. A good old-fashioned scare can make some of the everyday fears we face seem less terrifying, Brownlowe added.

"It gives people perspective," she said. "If you're anxious about talking to your boss about getting a raise and then you get the crap scared out of you, talking to your boss is no big deal."

Original article on Live Science.

With Halloween just around the corner, everyone seems to have costumes on their minds. People who typically wear jeans and T-shirts are suddenly eyeing colorful spandex, capes, wigs and corsets, and are opening their wallets to acquire an outfit that will present them to the world as someone — or something — they're not.

But for people who cosplay — dress in costumes to role-play characters from movies, TV shows, books, comics and video games — the challenge of transformation is one they happily accept at various times year-round.

Cosplayers can invest considerable time, money and effort into crafting or commissioning head-to-toe presentations that are one-of-a-kind. Some creations include enormous accessories, facial or body prosthetics, working electronics or complex mechanical parts. Other costumes limit how well the wearers can see or move, making it difficult for them to sit, or navigate a room, without help. [Comic Con Cosplay: Photos of the Coolest Costumes]

But what inspires cosplayers to reinvent themselves so elaborately? Cosplayers and psychologists who study the phenomenon reveal the individual and community features that make dressing up so enticing and rewarding.

For the love of costumes

From Oct. 6 to 9, hundreds of cosplayers attended New York Comic Con 2016 (NYCC), costumed as superheroes and supervillains, Jedi and Sith, Ghostbusters, Starfleet officers, Hogwarts students and teachers, and many, many other characters.

"Cosplay makes me happy," Edgar Roldan, a cosplayer and NYCC attendee, told Live Science recently.

Roldan — who wore a furry, blue suit and an oversize head to represent Happy from "Fairy Tale" (Del Rey Manga) — said the most satisfying part of cosplay was "just being you — being whatever and whoever you want."

Other NYCC cosplayers said cosplay allowed them to explore their own creativity, particularly when much of their costume was handmade. Joe Bokanoski and Mike Labarge told Live Science that they assembled their costumes — postapocalyptic interpretations of DC Comics' Captain America and his nemesis, Red Skull — by scouring flea markets and junkyards.

Their outfits were bulky and cumbersome. But despite the discomfort, they were enthusiastic about wearing them and seeing the appreciative reactions they provoked.

"It's worth it just to put some smiles on people's faces," Bokanoski said.

Inhabiting a character

When a cosplayer selects a particular costume, they are often tapping into a specific character — or combination of characters — because something about that role speaks to them personally, according to Robin S. Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

Rosenberg, who has written extensively about how people interpret and embrace fictional characters, particularly superheroes, told Live Science that she became interested in studying cosplay after seeing cosplayers in convention centers where she was delivering talks.

"We know from psychology that we all play different roles through the day and week," Rosenberg said. "Different aspects of me — 'psychologist,' 'wife,' 'mother' — come to the fore in different contexts. I became curious about people who truly inhabit a role, and what's coming to the fore when you wear a costume."

Certain costumes offer some people a way of working through personal difficulties, Rosenberg said. Batman, for example, can be an especially meaningful cosplay choice for someone coping with trauma. The dark superhero faced devastating trauma when he was a child — witnessing the brutal murder of his parents — which he overcame to become a hero.

"When people are dressed as Batman, many talk about having [experienced] their own traumatic experiences," Rosenberg said. "He survived and found meaning and purpose from his experience, and that is inspiring to them."

Rosenberg noted that Wonder Woman is another enduring and popular choice that resonates with many women, partly because she holds her own in the male-dominated world of costumed comics superheroes. For those cosplayers, dressing as Wonder Woman is a way of celebrating and embracing her power, Rosenberg said.

Recently, a series of images on Instagram featuring a 3-year-old girl costumed as Wonder Woman quickly went viral. Her father, a photographer, said he not only "fulfilled my daughter's dream of becoming Wonder Woman" by creating an elaborate costume but also staged a photo shoot that placed his daughter in scenes from the upcoming movie, due in theaters June 2, 2017. Judging by the girl's expressions in the photos, she wholeheartedly embraced her new role as a superhero. [DIY Halloween Costumes: 7 Geeky Getups for Any Party]

Cosplay is a type of performance; putting on a costume broadcasts a visible and public statement about the dresser upper's allegiance to a character or fandom, and it frequently moves strangers to approach the character for conversation and photos. So it surprised Rosenberg to discover from her conversations with cosplayers that many identified as introverts.

"When they wore a costume, they became much more socially outgoing," Rosenberg said. She explained that, sometimes, wearing a costume allows a person to tap into confidence they didn't know they had, and helps them overcome shyness in real life.

"When you do any kind of costuming — but particularly cosplay — on the one hand, it gives you permission to step outside yourself," Rosenberg said. "But on the other hand, it can summon something in you that doesn't usually come out."

Building a community

Costume play not only imbues powers upon individuals but also fosters a sense of community, according to Michael Nguyen, a cosplayer and costuming columnist for the "Star Trek" news website Trekmovie.com. "Star Trek" was Nguyen's gateway to cosplay, he told Live Science. And through creating and wearing "Star Trek" costumes, he discovered a rich and widespread network of people who shared his interest in the characters and in the world they inhabited.

"In 'Star Trek,' there's this idea of diversity and unity," Nguyen said. "It portrays a future a lot of people want to believe in."

"They're physicians, attorneys, in Ph.D. programs — just people who enjoy expressing themselves, and what they hope the future to be." [10 Futuristic Technologies 'Star Trek' Fans Would Love to See]And cosplayers come from all walks of life, he added.

In addition to cosplaying at conventions, Nguyen organizes bimonthly social events for "Star Trek" fans in New York City to get together and hang out in costume. The idea began with five people in 2013 and expanded to 50 to 60 participants three years later. Nguyen described friendships he's formed over the years with people who live thousands of miles away, with whom he's shared the fun of "nerding out" over science fiction and who have inspired his cosplay creativity.

"Costuming is more fun if you do it with other people," Nguyen told Live Science. "You create your own look, but you also feel like part of a universe when you surround yourself with people who enjoy it as much as you do."

Cosplayers at NYCC agreed. A woman dressed as She-Ra: Princess of Power from the TV show "Masters of the Universe" (Filmation) told Live Science that "the acceptance" was the best part of doing cosplay.

"It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like," she said. "It's a community — it's like a big family. Once a year, I come and I see people I haven't seen but once a year, and it's just great."

Another woman costumed as a Hogwarts student from the "Harry Potter" books and movies described participating in a "flashmob" at NYCC, where 75 attendees in Potterverse cosplay came together for a photo — and for one group member to propose to his girlfriend.

"It's wearing your interests on your body," she said. "It's a really great way to bridge the gap and find the common ground."

Original article on Live Science.

Did Mischief Night come early this year? In a growing list of states, people have unsettling tales to tell of enigmatic and downright sinister clown sightings.

The situation is no joke to the police. In regions where clown appearances are on the rise, local and state officials are monitoring descriptions and urging people to report suspicious individuals or activities — especially if they might pose a threat to children — though as yet there have been no specific warnings issued in connection with Halloween.

Clowns were initially spotted across two South Carolina counties beginning on Aug. 23, and the sightings continued through the first week of September, according to a timeline of incident reports created by FOX Carolina. [10 Clowns to Fuel Your Nightmares]

Since then, people have spied mysterious clowns in North Carolina, Maryland, Georgia, Alabama and Pennsylvania, the Associated Press reported on Sept. 23, while law enforcement officials in Kentucky and Tennessee recently shared warnings and updates about clown sightings on social media.

In most of the encounters, those who glimpsed the clowns did so from a distance, and emerged from the encounter rattled but unharmed. However, one teen in Summitville, Tennessee, told WKRN-TV, "I thought I was going to die," when a knife-wielding person in a clown mask approached him from behind and slashed his hand. The clown fled the scene and an investigation is still underway, WKRN reported.

Threats or hoaxes?

In fact, there have been numerous reports across Tennessee of clown sightings, according to Lt. Bill Miller, a public information officer with the Tennessee Highway Patrol, Department of Safety and Homeland Security.

Some people who contacted officials described seeing a clown by the side of the road as they drove by, though any photos they captured from the car didn't show much detail, Miller told Live Science. In one case, the clown was shirtless but had a painted face and "clown hair," and was kneeling by the roadside holding a child-size doll that resembled Raggedy Ann, Miller said. Photos, predictably, were blurry and indistinct.

"We don't know if they're threats or hoaxes," Miller said. "But they're causing a lot of public concern, and we have an obligation to make sure that we address that and give the public the best information we have."

In most of these instances, the clowns didn't seem to be behaving in a threatening way. However, many people find clowns' bold face paint and garb unsettling, no matter what the clowns might be doing. Experts told Live Science that people may experience an immediately negative response to seeing a clown for a number of reasons.

As performers, clowns sport heavy makeup that conceals their expressions, use highly exaggerated gestures and behavior, and are often unpredictable. All of these factors could cause someone to cringe at the sight of a clown even in places where they wouldn't be surprised to find one — at a circus or a birthday party, for example. Unexpectedly coming across a clown standing near the woods or by the side of the road could understandably inspire unease in people.

To promote awareness about the clown situation in Tennessee, the state's Highway Patrol tweeted a "watch for clowns" warning on Sept. 24, clarifying in a later tweet that the photo they used did not represent clowns that were actually spotted in Tennessee, and was a stock image intended to draw attention to the potential danger to children.

Social media can also be used to deliberately fan the flames of clown fear, as residents of Rainbow City, Alabama, discovered. On Sept. 19, cryptic social media posts about a clown visiting a local middle school prompted absenteeism and police involvement, Rainbow City Police Chief Jonathon Horton told Live Science.

However, the posts were quickly traced and identified as a juvenile prank, and Horton seemed unperturbed about the possibility of future clown-related incidents.

"If we hear 'clown' and 'school' in the same sentence, we're concerned about it," Horton said. "If they make a statement on social media or cause a scare to the general population — as in a school — we plan on intervening." 

"But we're not out looking for clowns," he added.

Proactive protection

Social media played a more proactive role in the Barbourville, Kentucky, police department's response to so-called "clown complaints." Barbourville police detective Steve Owens told Live Science that these local sightings were probably "copycats," inspired by reports of clowns that came in from the Carolinas and elsewhere.

Copycats or not, the Barbourville clown reports caused enough alarm that the police issued a statement on Sept. 20 on Facebook, advising people to refrain from dressing as a clown in public, as this could lead to "a dangerous situation for you and others."

According to Owens, the statement was intended to discourage people who might be tempted to don a clown suit as a prank, urging them to recognize how this might frighten others and lead to someone getting hurt.

But it was also a warning against overreacting to a perceived threat from someone doing nothing more than walking around in an unusual outfit. Police officials warned that "assaulting, shooting, attacking or otherwise injuring someone" simply because they were wearing a costume could lead to criminal charges.

"We felt we had an obligation to protect the safety of individuals who wanted to dress up, as well as the general public," Owens said.

Original article on Live Science.

Love them or fear them, the spooky creatures that haunt your Halloween nightmares have complicated histories. Legends about scary beasts, such as werewolves and zombies, span continents and centuries. From the 15th century vampire myths of Serbia to the werewolf tales of ancient Rome, here are the origin stories of your favorite Halloween monsters.

Vampires

Vampire legends were popular long before Edward Cullen won the hearts of "Twilight" fans. Blood-sucking corpses like the Cullens are really just the most modern manifestations of the vampire myth, and they have other famous vampires, such as Bram Stoker's Dracula, to thank for their existence.

Dracula, arguably the most famous vampire of all time, is the fictional monster that put revenants (human corpses that return from the grave to harm the living) on the map in the late 19th century. But some historians think that a real person — Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad III, a medieval Romanian prince who was also known as Dracula — inspired Stoker's literary vampire. [Dracula & The Walking Dead: 5 Real-Life Monsters]

The real Dracula probably didn't drink anyone's blood, but he was ruthless and had a gruesome habit of impaling his enemies with pointy stakes. However, in the northern Balkan Mountains, near Vlad III's home region of Wallachia, locals do tell folktales about "moroi," or vampirelike children. According to legend, moroi are children who die before they are baptized and who dine on the blood of cattle before leaving Earth and finding their place in heaven or hell, Florin Curta, a professor of medieval history and archaeology at the University of Florida, told Live Science in 2014. 

Many other regions and cultures share similarly creepy stories about vampirelike creatures. In China, there are jiangshi, evil spirits that attack people and drain their life energy. And some historians date vampires all the way back to the time of the ancient Egyptians, whose myths include references to demons summoned from other worlds. Ancient Babylonians and Greeks may also have believed in these reanimated corpses, Tracy Betsinger, a bioarchaeologist at the State University of New York at Oneonta who has studied "vampire graves," told Live Science in 2014.

Archaeologists have found evidence of so-called vampire burials — in which the body of the deceased is pinned to the earth with wooden stakes or iron bars — in countries such as Poland, Bulgaria and the United States.

These strange graves, which sometimes also feature decapitated skeletons or skulls with bricks shoved between the jaws, may have originated in the Middle Ages, as early as the 11th century, when tales about vampires started to emerge in Europe, Betsinger said. But people continued to bury suspected vampires this way into the 18th century in Poland, and a vampire grave discovered in Connecticut in the U.S. dates back to the 1830s, according to Smithsonian Magazine. People likely buried suspected vampires this way to keep them from emerging from the grave as revenants that could harm the living.

Zombies

Fans of the hit TV show "The Walking Dead" may be interested to know that their favorite flesh-eating characters are based on some very real history — that of Haiti in the 17th and 18th centuries. Zombies are what Amy Wilentz, an English professor at the University of California, Irvine, called a "New World phenomenon."

In a piece she wrote in 2012 for The New York Times, Wilentz described how modern ideas about zombies arose from the blending of old African religious beliefs and "the pain of slavery" that defined Haiti before it gained independence from France at the turn of the 19th century. In certain traditional African religions, people believe that a human soul can be stolen from the body and be bottled up for later use, but this idea took a much different form when it reached Haiti.

Slaves who considered committing suicide to escape their miserable lives were constantly reminded by their overseers (usually other slaves who were sometimes also Voodoo priests) that, if they killed themselves, they might become zombies, or walking dead with no souls who are bound to do the bidding of a mortal master. Zombies could never reach lan guinée (which literally means Guinea, or West Africa, the final resting place), according to Wilentz. [10 of the Spookiest Haunted Houses in America]

But the modern concept of a zombie in Western cultures has diverted significantly from its Haitian roots. Films portraying reanimated corpses that feast on human flesh first started popping up in the 1960s with George A. Romero's film "Night of the Living Dead." In 1985, on-screen zombies added human brains to their ghastly menu in the movie "Return of the Living Dead" (despite its similar name, "Return of the Living Dead" was not also directed by Romero). Why the undead feel such an insatiable hunger for human body parts is really anyone's guess.

Werewolves

Remus Lupin in the "Harry Potter" movies, Jacob Black in the "Twilight" series, Scott Howard in "Teen Wolf" — these are just a few of the best known werewolves from books and movies. But like zombies and vampires, shape-shifting human-wolf hybrids have quite a long history in the folklore of many nations.

Tales of werewolves appear in the nearly 2,000-year-old writings of the ancient Roman novelist Petronius, and in Ovid's narrative poem "The Metamorphoses." But even "The Epic of Gilgamesh," a Babylonian tale that is nearly 4,000 years old, might mention a werewolf. In the epic poem, a goddess turns a shepherd into a wolf (a similar thing happens in Ovid's tale). But regardless of when, exactly, werewolves were first written about, belief in these creatures remained strong throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.

In some parts of the world, popular legends depict people taking the form of other animals. In some Asian countries, like Japan and Korea, there are myths about were-foxes. In India, were-snakes are a popular element of traditional folktales.

Known as lycanthropes by some, werewolves are usually "born" in popular legends when people are bitten by a wolf or werewolf or are cursed by someone. But even seemingly innocuous things were once believed to turn people into flesh-craving human-wolf hybrids, according to the book "Giants, Monsters, and Dragons," (W.W. Norton & Co., 2001) by folklorist Carol Rose. So take care this Halloween, because if the legends are true, even just falling asleep under a full moon or eating certain herbs can turn you into a werewolf.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The Haunted House is a time-honored horror setting. All of us have shivered our way through spooky flicks such as The Haunting, The Amityville Horror, The Sentinel and Poltergeist.

It’s not only at the movies that we pay good money to frighten ourselves to death: commercial haunted houses are an integral part of 21st-century Halloween theater, with an estimated 5,000 such attractions operating in the United States each year.

The portrayal of cinematic haunted houses has remained remarkably consistent across time, and the architects of our annual macabre Halloween rituals incorporate all of the same bells and whistles (okay – creaks and groans) that we’ve come to expect.

From a psychological point of view, the standard features of haunted houses trigger feelings of dread because they push buttons in our brains that evolved long before houses even existed. These alarm buttons warn us of potential danger and motivate us to proceed with caution.

Haunted houses give us the creeps not because they pose a clear threat to us, but rather because it is unclear whether or not they represent a threat.

This ambivalence leaves you frozen in place, wallowing in unease.

For example, it would be considered bizarre and embarrassing to run screaming out of a house that makes you feel uneasy if there is actually nothing to fear. On the other hand, it could be perilous to ignore your intuition and remain in a place that is dangerous.

These are the psychological mechanisms behind feeling “creeped out.” They may be useful if they help you maintain vigilance when threat is uncertain. They also help you manage the balance between self-preservation and self-presentation (ie, presenting yourself in a socially desirable way).

While human psychology can explain what makes a haunted house so scary, it also provides the perfect guide to making one ourselves.

Things that trigger our ‘agent detection’ mechanisms

Evolutionary psychologists have proposed the existence of agent detection mechanisms – or processes that have evolved to protect us from harm at the hands of predators and enemies.

If you’re walking through the woods alone at night and hear the sound of something rustling in the bushes, you’ll respond with a heightened level of arousal and attention. You’ll behave as if there is a willful “agent” present who is about to do you harm.

If it turns out to be a gust of wind or a stray cat, you lose little by overreacting. But if you fail to activate the alarm response and a true threat is present – well, the cost of your miscalculation could be high.

Thus, we evolved to err on the side of detecting threats in ambiguous situations. Things that activate hypervigilance for malevolent supernatural (or natural) agents abound in large, drafty old houses: rattling or creaking sounds in upstairs rooms; the sighing and moaning of wind passing through cracks; ragged curtains fluttering in the breeze; echoes; and cold spots.

Feeling trapped

Research has consistently shown that we need more personal space while seated than while standing, more space when we are in the corner of a room rather than in the center of it and more space in rooms with low ceilings.

We feel uncomfortable when our personal space is violated anywhere, but especially so in situations where we feel as if escape will become difficult.

Such feelings of discomfort are symptomatic of the fact that we are constantly – even if unconsciously – scanning our surroundings and assessing our ability to flee if it should become necessary.

Consequently, a haunted house is our worst nightmare.

The prototypical haunted house is in a remote, isolated location, far removed from the rest of society (think of the off-season resort hotel in The Shining, for example). If bad things do happen, help would be a long time coming, even if communication with the outside world were possible. (Conveniently, in old horror movies the telephones always stop working.)

Also, the darkness and confusing layout of the house may cause us to get lost; at the very least, it would slow us down. Escape could further be impeded by hedges, iron fences or crumbling stairways, all of which are featured prominently in Hollywood haunted houses.

A womb with a view

British geographer Jay Appleton was the first to describe two crucial features that determine whether a place is attractive or frightening to humans: the more “prospect” and “refuge” a place offers us, the more attractive it is.

Refuge means having a secure, protected place to hide where one can be sheltered from danger, while prospect refers to one’s clear, unobstructed view of the landscape. Attractive places offer us a lot of prospect and a lot of refuge, or what landscape architect Randolph Hester refers to as a “Womb with a View.”

In the words of Appleton, these are, evolutionarily speaking, places where “you can see without being seen, and eat without being eaten.”

Unfortunately, most haunted houses make for a bad combination of very low prospect for us, and very high refuge for the creepy-crawly things that are lying in wait to get us. Research has confirmed that people experience such environments as unsafe and dangerous.

Such places also lack what environmental psychologists refer to as legibility. Legibility reflects the ease with which a place can be recognized, organized into a pattern and recalled – in other words, a place that we can wander around in without getting lost.

Thus, the typical haunted house is large, dark, surrounded by overgrown vegetation, and full of surprising architectural features such as secret rooms and closets under staircases. Attics and basements are also must-have items, and, of course, spider webs, bats, rats and insects make nice accessories.

The older the better

Most haunted houses have some sort of “legend” associated with them. It usually involves a story about a grisly death or accident. There may even be a history of suicide and murder.

The older a place is, the more likely we are to perceive it as haunted because there’s been much more time for tragic things to have taken place.

Stimuli such as moldy odors, antiquated Victorian or Gothic architecture, wood interiors and old portraits on the wall reinforce an ambiance of great age. Assuming that the house is no longer occupied, signs of life suddenly interrupted and frozen in time only amplify the fear factor.

For example, remnants of a half-eaten meal on a kitchen table or clothing laid out on a bed waiting for a homeowner who has apparently vanished without warning create a frightening ambiguity about what may have taken place in the house. (There are bonus points awarded if the house is conveniently located next to or on top of an old cemetery or burial ground!)

Ultimately, whether or not a house is perceived as haunted obviously depends upon something other than the physical features of the house. Just as important are the inherent beliefs of the person exploring the house.

Individuals who believe in paranormal phenomena and have expectations that creepy things might actually be present in such a place are more likely to engage in the sort of top-down, cognitive processing that induces fear.

For these people, otherwise innocuous but uncertain surroundings can become a chilling experience.

Frank T McAndrew, Cornelia H Dudley Professor of Psychology, Knox College

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Certain houses' reputations precede them. The Amityville house, for example, hardly needs an introduction: It is the real-life site of an alleged haunting in New York that spurred both a book and multiple films. On the West Coast, in sunny San Jose, the Winchester Mystery House acts as both tourist trap and ghostly hotspot: Original owner and designer Sarah Winchester built the bizarre, sprawling mansion with its own séance room and continuously added new rooms to confuse the spirits she thought were stalking her. 

Related: 11 of the most haunted places in the US

Science may suggest that ghosts are a figment of the imagination, but what's the fun in that? (Researchers who've tried to unearth proof of the paranormal have failed, but they have managed to create the illusion of ghosts, suggesting that hauntings are all in people's heads.) It's hard to hear the horror stories from Amityville or tread the halls of Sarah Winchester's creation without getting a little chill down your spine. In that spirit, we're highlighting some of the lesser-known "haunted" houses in the country. These homes may not really be haunted, but they sure feel that way. [Are Ghosts Real? The Pseudoscience of Hauntings]

Woodburn Mansion

The governors of Delaware might get more than they bargained for when they move into their official residence in Dover. Woodburn Mansion, built in 1798, has housed the state's governors since 1965. It's also allegedly the home to some mostly friendly ghosts, including the spirit of the builder, who quaffs any wine that might be left out each night. Visitors and residents have reported seeing the man, Charles Hillyard III, wearing a 1700s-style powdered wig and breeches. Another ghostly resident is a small girl in a gingham dress, supposedly sighted by guests during the inauguration of Gov. Mike Castle in 1985. (Photo Credit: National Park Service)

Franklin Castle

In Ohio, this imposing Cleveland home has a reputation for horror. Also known as the Tiedemann House, this home at 4308 Franklin Ave. was built in 1881. The haunted house rumors started around 1965, according to The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, which dismisses the tales as "spurious." (Photo Credit: Christopher Busta-Peck)

Spurious perhaps, but spooky nonetheless. According to legend, the house is full of hidden passages and rooms, used to conceal liquor during Prohibition. Several of the Tiedemann family children died while the family occupied the home (perhaps not an unusual occurrence in the late 1800s, but enough to fuel later rumors of murder and mayhem). Perhaps the creepiest tale is that an occupant once found piles of baby bones in one of the secret rooms. [10 Ghost Stories That Will Haunt You for Life]

Pioneer Park

Colorado's most famous spooky spot is the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, which inspired the Stephen King novel "The Shining." But the snowy ski town of Aspen has its share of things that go bump in the night.

Pioneer Park, or the Henry Webber House, is one of the few old structures left in Aspen. It was built in the 1880s and is supposedly haunted by the wife of the builder, Henry Webber. According to the Aspen Times, Harriet Webber died suddenly in 1881, only a year after the couple arrived in the then-mining town and set up a shoe business. Harriet's last words were allegedly, "Henry will know," spurring rumors that her death was a murder or a suicide. In fact, she died of strychnine overdose, which doesn't rule out the possibility of an accident: The poison was sold as an over-the-counter anxiety cure at the time. Henry Webber went on to marry his wife's niece — with whom he may have been having an affair — a mere four months later. (Photo Credit: National Park Service)

Rowan Oak

Does William Faulkner still walk the halls of his old home in Oxford, Mississippi? Legend has it the author's spirit is restless — and Rowan Oak, a stately 1844 mansion, seems ripe for haunting. Two imposing rows of pines lead to the pillared white porch. The house is open for public tours, but reports of paranormal experiences there are fittingly vague: A ghostly Faulkner has been seen writing on the walls of his office, according to legend, and he roams the grounds scaring off University of Mississippi students who venture near the house at night.

Visiting Rowan Oak after dark is strictly prohibited, a museum spokesman said, no matter your belief in the paranormal. "Our security guards are much scarier than any ghosts," he said. (Photo Credit: Used with permission by Rowan Oak)

Epperson House

With 56 rooms, an imposing Tudor facade and an original owner who died less than two years after the house was completed, it's no wonder that Epperson House near the University of Missouri–Kansas City has acquired a reputation as a ghostly hotspot.

According to the university, the ghost of a music student is said to play the organ in the home's living room. Security guards have reported disembodied footsteps, and a police officer even reported feeling a car rear-end his patrol vehicle in front of the house … only to get out and discover no damage and no sign of another car. (Photo Credit: Lance Nash/HexFX Aerials)

Ferry Plantation House

This brick plantation house in Virginia Beach is supposedly quite crowded. A whopping 11 spirits are said to haunt the place, which dates back to 1830. According to legend, dancing balls of light have been seen hovering over the roof of the house. A Lady in White supposedly manifests every now and then. Visitors have reported seeing small children on the stairs and in doorways. An old African-American man is said to walk upstairs and cross a sitting room, apparently lighting a ghostly fire in a now bricked-over fireplace.

The home has been the site of several visits by mediums and "paranormal investigators," all of whom come away with spooky stories and supposed spectral recordings. Myth or fact? See for yourself — the home is open for public tours. (Photo Credit: Rlevse, Creative Commons)

Moss Mansion

This handsome stone mansion in Billings, Montana, was built in 1903 with up-to-the-minute technology, like a call-button system for servants, according to the historical society that now owns the home. Preston Moss was a banker, newspaper founder and all-around entrepreneur — he even started his own toothpaste factory.

Over time, the Moss Mansion was witness to several deaths in the family, including the tragic loss of the family's sixth child, 5-year-old Virginia, from diphtheria in 1908. As with any old, creaky home with lots of history, the mansion has attracted its share of ghostly legends. That little Virginia still flits about the mansion is the tale with the most basis in history; another "manifestation" is said to be a male who likes to hang out in the master bedroom, according to HauntedHouses.com. Virginia's sister, Melville Hollingsworth Moss, is another candidate for the haunting. She lived in the mansion from the time she was 7 until her death 82 years later. (Photo Credit: Kelsey Palmer)

Rotherwood Mansion

Perched above the Holston River in east Tennessee, Rotherwood Mansion is allegedly home to at least two ghosts, one sad and one scary.

The melancholy ghost is known as the Lady in White. According to legend, she's the spirit of Rowena Ross Temple, daughter of the owner of Rotherwood. Rowena's first love supposedly drowned in the Holston shortly before their wedding; she married twice more, but then committed suicide by drowning in the same river that claimed her first fiancé. Her wedding-gown-clad ghost is said to roam the house and riverbanks, looking for her lost love, according to "Strange Tales of the Dark and Bloody Ground: Authentic Accounts of Restless Spirits, Haunted Honky-Tonks and Eerie Events in Tennessee" (Rutledge Hill Press, 1998).

Far more frightening is the ghost of Joshua Phipps, a slaveholder who ran the estate in the 1840s. Phipps was a sadistic master, the story goes, much hated by both his slaves and nearby townspeople. In 1861, Phipps fell ill. The ghost stories say he died not of his sickness, but of suffocation when a great black cloud of flies landed in his room, covering his face. At the funeral, a team of horses strained to carry the coffin up a hill, but the cart wouldn't budge — until thunder cracked and a huge black dog suddenly burst out of the casket and ran away. This black hound is said to still roam the mansion grounds.

Though these legends seem unusually detailed, they're likely more folklore than fact. The first records of the ghost stories don't appear until the 1940s, according to Virginia Creeper magazine. (Photo Credit: DM, Flickr Creative Commons)

Labadie Mansion

Haunted ruins and a murder mystery? This spot in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, has it all. Little stands of the Labadie Mansion beyond a few brick walls, but these ruins are said to be haunted by the ghosts of Frank and Samantha Labadie, as well as their former slave, Enos Parsons.

The legend goes like this: In 1893, Frank Labadie shot Parsons in a jealous fit, believing that he had fathered his wife Samantha's newborn baby, which Frank threw in the creek. Decades later, in 1935, Frank claimed that Parsons was haunting him. He shot his wife and then himself. The ghosts of the entire family, including the baby in the creek, are said to haunt the ruins and surrounding woods, along with the ghost of Parsons. On occasion, the story goes, ghostly shots ring out, startling birds out of the trees.

Or maybe not. Other sources suggest that Samantha and Frank died of carbon-monoxide poisoning in 1935 from a leaky stove after celebrating 50 years of happy marriage — no slaves, illicit babies or murder involved. (Photo Credit: Johnny Fletcher)

Croke-Patterson Mansion

The Croke-Patterson Mansion in Denver looks more like a castle than a home. Built in 1890 from red sandstone, the mansion features high garret windows and multiple turrets. It also, according to local legend, is the territory of spirits.

Many of the spooky stories date back to the 1970s, when the building was undergoing renovations. Allegedly, work done during the day would be undone by morning. The owners bought two or three guard dogs to watch over the property, but the very next morning, one of the dogs was found dead on the driveway, having jumped through a window sometime the previous night. The next night, the second dog leapt to its death, according to tales collected by the alternative newspaper Westword. The third dog was found cowering in a corner.

Residents and overnight visitors have claimed to hear the incessant cries of a baby from the attic, and there are rumors that an infant was buried in a basement wall. Others have said they've lost their breath at the top of the attic stairs — and not just because of Denver's mile-high elevation. Allegedly, a former resident of the house committed suicide in the attic by inhaling poison gas.

But it's not all bad: One former resident, pregnant with triplets, reported waking up one morning to the ghost of a woman named Kate, who lent her a helping hand to get out of bed. Now that's a sweet spirit. (Photo Credit: National Park Service)

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitterand Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Some sport extra-long fangs, while others perform ghoulish acts. Some roam the deep sea, while others haunt the land. But if there's one thing all of the animals listed here have in common, it's this: They are ready for Halloween 365 days of the year. Here are 10 creepy critters to contemplate as you bob for apples, carve pumpkins and eat copious amounts of candy.

Toothy bats

The long-fanged bat has impressively huge canines, but it doesn't use these fangs to suck blood out of victims. The bat feasts on insects, and it needs sharp teeth to break through the hard shells of its favorite prey. Discovered in 2014 in the Greater Mekong region of Asia, the long-toothed bat Hypsugo dolichodon can consume bugs that its closest relatives, bats of the genus Pipistrellus, have trouble eating. (Photo: Judith L. Eger)

Skeleton spider

Spiders are already the unofficial mascots of Halloween, but there's one arachnid that plays dress up better than most: Maratus sceletus. Better known as Skeletorus, this itsy-bitsy peacock spider doesn't seem very scary, but its white skeletonlike markings, which contrast sharply with its black body color, make it stand out from other peacock spiders. In addition to being-creepy looking, male Skeletorus spiders are really good dancers, engaging in an elaborate mating disco to woo females. The spider was first described in 2015 by researchers in Australia. (Photo credit: Jürgen Otto) [Real or Fake? 8 Bizarre Hybrid Animals]

Soul-sucking wasp

Like a character out of the "Harry Potter" series, the dementor wasp (Ampulex dementor) sucks the "souls" from its favorite victims — cockroaches — after injecting them with highly toxic venom. The venom doesn't kill the wasp's prey; it just immobilizes the victim, which means that cockroaches are still alive when dementor wasps drag them off to a private spot and gobble them up. (Pretty spooky, right?) Like the long-fanged bat, the dementor wasp was discovered in 2014 in the Greater Mekong region of Asia, an area that encompasses parts of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. (Credit: Michael Ohl/Museum fur Naturkunde)

Costume goals

Any critter that can successfully combine vampire teeth, a pig nose and mouse ears into one ensemble clearly has a strong costume game. The hog-nosed rat (Hyorhinomys stuempkei), which resides on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, has all of these features, all year long. Although it may look cute at first glance, with its Miss Piggy-type nose and Mickey Mouse ears, keep looking and you'll notice the giant incisors jutting out from its bottom jaw. Those fangs might help the rat gnaw through hard foods, like seeds or plants, said the researchers who discovered the species back in 2013. (Photo Credit: Kevin C. Rowe, Senior Curator of Mammals, Museum Victoria)

Goblin or elf?

Some think it resembles a goblin; others think it looks like an elf, but whichever creature the Mitsukurina owstoni takes after, one thing is clear: This deep-sea shark is weird-looking. The shark is rarely spotted by humans, but several specimens have been brought aboard fishing boats over the years, most recently off the coasts of Australia and Florida. The ghoulish shark uses a sense system in its snout, known as ampullae of Lorenzini, to detect food, and its nail-like teeth are perfect for munching on small prey items, such as shrimp, fish and squid. (Photo Credit: Carl Moore)

Vampire of the deep

Dracula himself would likely swim away from this cephalopod, the aptly named vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis). Although it appears to have an abundance of fangs, the spiny, tentacle-laden squid is not out for blood. This cephalopod is actually a scavenger, feasting on bits of dead crustaceans, larvae and fecal matter that float down to its deep-sea habitat. Those creepy looking spikes on its arms might serve as "fingers" that help the vampire squid stuff all that yummy debris into its mouth, said researcherswho study these animals. (Photo Credit: © 2011 Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute)

Cutie-pie cannibal

A great Halloween costume is equal parts cute and terrifying, just like the gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus). Indigenous to Madagascar, this tiny primate is adorable, yes, but it also has a horrifying secret. Though the lemur usually chows down on fruits and insects, it's also been observed gobbling up members of its own species. Lots of other adorable animals are also secret cannibals, including domestic cats, dogs and certain species of frogs. (Photo Credit: David Haring of the Duke University Lemur Center)

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Not sure what to be for Halloween? Google may be able to help.

A new Google Trends tool shows you what costumes are popular right now in your area and around the country, so you can be sure to wear something more original than, say, a Stormtrooper costume to this weekend's festivities.

Dubbed Frightgeist, the Google tool takes the 3 billion search queries typed into Google every day and filters out costume-related inquiries. Then, the tool maps the top 500 costume searches throughout the United States. You can use the tool to see what costumes are trending on the national level, or you can find out what costumes are hot right now, anywhere from San Francisco (anything Star Wars) to Scranton, Pennsylvania (Poison Ivy). [DIY Halloween Costumes: 7 Geeky Getups for Any Party]

But if you want to look like everyone else this Halloween, then go out and buy a Harley Quinn costume. Also known as Dr. Harleen Frances Quinzel, this supervillain is best-known as an adversary to Batman and a bosom buddy of the Joker. She'll make an appearance in the upcoming movie "Suicide Squad," and she will also most certainly be at any Halloween party you attend this weekend.

"Star Wars" takes second place on this year's most wanted costume list, but the movie characters you see trick-or-treating in your neighborhood will depend on where you live. If you call Monterey, California, home, you'll be sure to see a few Luke Skywalkers roaming the streets, and the force will also be strong in Louisiana, where Jedi searches abound. However, Darth Vader will be lurking in the colder northern states, most notably Michigan and Ohio.

While many of this year's most popular getups have their roots in Hollywood blockbusters or comic book sensations, there are also a number of more traditional costumes on Google's list. Hippies are all the rage in Colorado this year, for example. And in Honolulu, pirates are the costume of choice. Owls are a hit in Oklahoma.

Oh, and if you're afraid of clowns, steer clear of Portland, Maine.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

With Halloween less than a week away, science nerds everywhere are scrambling to put the finishing touches on their costumes. But if you've waited until the last minute to throw an outfit together, don't worry. There's still time to assemble an appropriately geeky getup in time for this weekend's festivities. Here are a few science-themed ideas to get you started.

Dark matter

It's invisible, intangible, misunderstood and sometimes misrepresented. What is it? It's dark matter, of course. This nonluminous material (it doesn't produce any light of its own) is thought to make up about 27 percent of the universe, according to NASA.

A Halloween costume depicting dark matter can pretty much look however you want it to look, because no one knows what dark matter really is. But if you want people to get a general sense of darkness and mystery, here's what you'll need: black tights, a black shirt, black stockings (for your head) and a pair of black slippers. [Photos: The Best Science-Themed Halloween Costumes]

Adorn yourself in these articles of clothing, and then slink around the party, saying mysterious things like, "Are my axions showing?" Also, be sure to do a lot of unpredictable things, like grab people and hold them in one place (explain that dark matter was once believed to be a sort of "glue" that held galaxies in place) and then push them away (explain that astronomers are no longer sure that dark matter actually serves as an anchor for anything).

Doc Brown

It's October 2015, which makes a "Back to the Future"-themed costume most fitting this Halloween. If you're not familiar with the famous time-traveling trilogy, 2015 was the year in the future that Marty McFly visits in "Back to the Future Part II."

You could build a hoverboard and go as McFly, but if you want to embrace your inner mad scientist, then Doc Brown is the better option. You'll need just a few things to create the look: a lab coat, a Hawaiian shirt, frizzy hair (preferably white), and any old electronic device with an antenna or an enormous old cell phone.

To really sell this costume, keep your eyes wide open, and be sure to use the expression "Great Scott!" intermittently throughout the evening. Also, refer to all iPhones as flux capacitors (that's the gadget that enabled time travel in the movies).

Pluto & New Horizons

If you're attending a costume party this weekend with a significant other (or a baby), then you'll want to wear coordinating outfits. Luckily, there's a space-themed costume that's perfect for the occasion: Pluto the dwarf planet and the space probe New Horizons.

For the sake of accuracy, the larger person in the duo should be Pluto. To make the costume, just cut two large circles out of a piece of cardboard and color them to look like Pluto. Create straps using two pieces of ribbon and a stapler, and you'll be ready to go.

For the space probe, you'll need something that looks like a satellite dish (perhaps one of those cones from the veterinarian's office or a Styrofoam bowl). You can construct the metal frame inside the dish using silver-painted chopsticks or pencils. You'll also need to create a "solar panel" out of cardboard to attach to one of your arms. Wear yellow or wrap yourself in gold-tinted foil to complete the look, and then cozy on up to Pluto.

El Niño

El Niño: It isn't just the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a periodic climate cycle caused by variation in sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean. It's also the perfect costume for an outdoor Halloween party.

Transforming yourself into El Niño is easy because the effects of this warm-water phenomenon vary so greatly. In some places, El Niño is associated with warming sea surface temperatures (you could wear a bikini!), but it's also associated with increased sea ice in certain places (put on your full-body wet suit!).

One of the most widely known effects of El Niño is increased rainfall in some areas of the globe. If you relate to this, try carrying some water bottles around with you, and squirt them at your fellow partygoers. Everyone will love it, unless they hate it — in which case, put the water bottles down and dry people off with a towel. (El Niño is also associated with drier-than-average weather in certain areas of the world.)

Iron (Fe) Man

If you want to be a superhero and a science geek at the same time this Halloween, then the "Iron (Fe) Man" costume is perfect for you. To assemble your costume, find two large pieces of cardboard (one for your front side and one for your backside). Draw a large "Fe" (the atomic symbol for iron on the Periodic Table of Elements) on each piece of cardboard, and strap them onto your body to complete the look.

If no one understands your costume, it may be time to find nerdier friends.

A constellation

If the thought of being dark matter for Halloween sounds gloomy, then a constellation might be a better costume choice for you. To make this costume, assemble an all-black outfit and buy a package of large, plastic, glow-in-the-dark stars. Lay your black clothes down on a bed, and stick the stars to the clothes in the shape of your favorite constellation.

Orion, Cassiopeia, the Little Dipper — it doesn't really matter which one you choose; you're sure to be the star of the show.

Skeletorus

You could be a skeleton this Halloween, or you could be something so much better — a Skeletorus. If you're not familiar with this tiny arachnid, which was first discovered in Australia earlier this year, then do some quick reading before making your costume.

To create the spider costume, you can either purchase a skeleton shirt or make one yourself (Fiskars has good tutorials on how to make your own using a black T-shirt, a white T-shirt and some wax paper). Then, you'll need to make four spider legs (your two arms and two legs will serve as the other four legs) by stuffing black tube socks or stockings filled with crumpled-up newspaper and sewing or stapling them to the sides of your shirt.

To complete the look, you'll need oversize eyes — so get out your most fashionable sunglasses, and then go party.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. The publication contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Children and adults alike are digging out those spooky costumes ready for a celebration. We’ve reached that time of year again: Halloween. October 31 is dedicated to remembering the dead.

We’ve all experienced fear, but Halloween is the particular time of year when we look for that rush that usually accompanies feeling scared. Are you in need of a “scare-specialist” for this year’s Halloween celebrations? Then you need not look further than your very own brain.

Perhaps you’ll be spending Halloween watching A Nightmare on Elm Street with your hands over your eyes? Or maybe you’d rather wander around a haunted house waiting for ghouls and critters to pop out of unseen annexes? Whatever your tastes may be, when faced with such spine-tingling situations your brain enters into fight-or-flight mode. This mode is a primitive survival mechanism in which your body undergoes a stress response to a perceived threat in your surrounding environment.

Mental threat

While this reaction originally developed to help our ancestors circumvent predators in a world filled with danger, it is more common today for us to experience such feelings in response to mental threats. Mental threats are threats which are unlikely to harm us physically, but those which are more likely to cause some psychological distress.

The fight-or-flight response is handled by your amygdala – the part of your brain involved in the experience of emotion. This ancient brain system is an integral part of fear processing, but it is unable to distinguish between a physical or a mental threat. So while sweaty palms and anxiety may make more sense in the presence of a hungry bear, they also manifest in undesirable scenarios such as during job interviews or scary films.

There is plenty of evidence to support the involvement of the amygdala with fear processing. Impressively, when this brain region was completely removed in rats they no longer displayed fearful or avoidance behaviours towards their sworn mortal enemy – the cat.

So when that creepy atmospheric music in your horror movie starts to get louder and louder, and the sudden appearance of the masked murderer makes you jump, this will act as a stimulus which will trigger a signal in your amygdala. In response to a perceived threat, it releases a brain chemical called glutamate, which acts on two other regions of your brain. The first signal is sent deep into the base of the brain, into an area called the mid-brain, which we have little control over. This makes us freeze or involuntarily jump, which isn’t great if you’ve got a box of popcorn in your lap.

Feel the dopamine kicking in yet?

The second signal is sent to the hypothalamus, a section of the brain responsible for producing hormones. The hypothalamus triggers our autonomic nervous system – which is how our fight or flight instinct starts to kick in. The heart rate and blood pressure go up, and adrenaline and dopamine (the brain’s “reward hormone”) are pumped throughout the body. This helps our bodies to prepare for deadly combat or for the run of our lives, and it is why you feel such a rush whenever you’re scared.

Why some people like it

Some people actually enjoy these experiences of fear and the accompanying rush more than others. Perhaps you’re one of those individuals who watches terrifying films throughout the year or seeks out extreme sports or risky activities.

There is emerging evidence that our underlying brain chemistry may also be responsible for individual differences in the enjoyment of being afraid. David Zald and colleagues from Vanderbilt University showed that people differed in their chemical responses to thrilling situations.

We know that dopamine is released in response to scary and thrilling situations, but in those who reported enjoying such terrifying situations, their brain lacks a “brake” on the dopamine release and re-uptake in the brain. This means that they experience more pleasure and reward in spooky or risky situations from even higher levels of dopamine in the brain. While some of you may cower at the mere mention of Freddy Krueger, others will feel the bubbles of excitement beginning to brew.

So if you get your kicks from ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night, this is probably why.

Kira Shaw is one of the Sheffield NeuroGirls @Shef_NeuroGirls

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Just in time for Halloween, a spooky set of thunderstorms passed over the Eastern Pacific Ocean today (Oct. 31).

NASA's Terra satellite spotted the ominous brew around midnight Eastern Time. A storm cluster that resembled a jack-o'-lantern with a stem can be seen in the false-color weather image, which highlights the towering clouds.

The weather system is part of Tropical Storm Vance, which is about 450 miles (720 kilometers) south of Acapulco, Mexico. The rare November tropical storm is expected to strengthen into a hurricane by Sunday, NASA said in a statement. Vance is the 20th named storm and would be the 13th hurricane of the season in the Eastern Pacific. Typically, there are no hurricanes in November in the Eastern Pacific, according to statistics from the National Hurricane Center.

Follow Becky Oskin @beckyoskin. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. The publication contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Halloween is upon us tonight and it’s all just a bit of harmless fun, right? Or is there truly a dark side to Halloween?

What should we make of kids getting together in groups, wearing costumes that hide their identity, and going from house to house asking for treats at the threat of a “trick”?

One dark Halloween night many years ago, some researchers decided to find out by hiding in houses throughout suburban Chicago, in the United States, and observing the behaviour of 1,039 children who were trick-or-treating by themselves or with other children (but not with adults).

The aim was to see if the children’s behaviour would be influenced by anonymity and/or the behaviour of the other children they were with (if they were in a group).

Look who’s knocking

When the experimenter greeted children at the door, some children were asked their names and where they lived (they were considered “identified”) while others were not (they were considered “anonymous”).

The front entrance to each house contained a table with a bowl of candy and a bowl of coins. The experimenter told the children they could take one piece of candy each, and then left them unattended.

As you may expect, when children were anonymous they stole more. Children who were by themselves stole 14% more when they were anonymous than those who gave their name and address.

But surprisingly, the anonymous groups of children stole more than twice as much (36%) as the identified groups.

So why were children more likely to steal when they were in an anonymous group compared to when they were anonymous and alone? After all, the children in the groups weren’t anonymous to each other whereas the children who were by themselves weren’t accountable to anyone.

What causes this?

The children in groups usually copied the behaviour of the child who acted first. So if the first child to approach the table stole money or candy, most other group members followed suit. Similarly, when the first child didn’t take extra candy or money, most other group members also didn’t.

The children who made the first move were more likely to steal if they were anonymous or in a group. So it appears that being in a group or being anonymous affected the children who were the first to act which then affected the behaviour of the rest of the group.

This phenomenon, where people’s inhibitions are lowered and they are more likely to violate social norms, this is what psychologists call deindividuation.

A meta-analysis of 60 studies found that deindividuated behaviours tended to occur when the behaviour was considered appropriate in that time and place. People were more likely to go against the wider societal norm if their behaviour was seen as normal within the situation or group.

This shifting of the norm explains why so many children in the Halloween study copied the first child in their group when they chose whether or not to steal the candy.

It’s all about the group’s norms. When the norm is to act violently, then that’s what people will do. But if the norm is to act compassionately, then they will act compassionately, as we see in the next case.

What about the costumes?

Costumes may set a standard for how people believe they should act. In one study, participants were instructed to wear either a nurse’s uniform or a Ku Klux Klan uniform, and then administer electric shocks to someone in another room at whatever intensity they felt was appropriate.

All participants were told they were part of a group wearing the same uniforms and administering shocks. They were told the other group members were sitting in separate cubicles. In reality, there were no other group members and there was no one actually receiving shocks.

Half the participants were identifiable to their group; they were told that the “other group members” would see a photo of them and everyone in the group would see the voltages of the shocks everyone delivered.

Participants actually saw fake shock voltages delivered by the “other group members” on their computer screen. The shock voltage could be between -3 and +3 and the fake voltages were programmed so that they eventually averaged out to 0.

The other half of the participants were anonymous to their group; the “other group members” didn’t know who else was in the group and no one in the group could see the voltages delivered.

Dressed to thrill

Regardless of anonymity, all people dressed as nurses delivered lower intensity shocks compared to those dressed as Ku Klux Klan members. This suggests that people felt more compassionate when they were dressed as nurses.

Interestingly, the anonymous nurses administered the lowest intensity shocks on average.

But why would the people dressed as nurses act nicer when they were anonymous compared to when they could see what their group was doing? Again it comes down to what people perceive the group norm to be.

Participants who were identifiable seemed to choose a shock intensity that was more in line with what they saw the “other group members” giving. Participants who were anonymous to their group had no information on how their group was behaving and had to use other clues to work out what the group norm would be.

Thus, the nurse’s uniform could have created a situational norm (be nice and give lower intensity shocks) which was counter to the general norm (when an experimenter tells you to shock someone, you turn up the voltage).

In the meta-analysis mentioned earlier, things such as costumes, anonymity and size of the group were found to only have a weak influence on deindividuated behaviours.

They may make people more likely to act in line with group norms, but they are not the main driving force behind deindividuated behaviours. At the end of the day, the driving force is the need to conform to situational norms.

The power of the group

Although the studies described above were carried out many years ago, I’ve found nothing that overturns or contradicts their findings so they still offer us important insights into how deindividuation occurs.

Most importantly, if an individual identifies with their group, the group’s norms are likely to be seen as right.

So back to Halloween. For parents who are worried that dressing up their child as a villian such as the Joker or some other evil character will make them more likely to behave badly, maybe dress them as a superhero instead.

And for those greeting trick-or-treaters tonight, maybe now is a good time to reduce anonymity by getting to know the kids in your neighbourhood.

Zenobia Talati does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Autumn is a time for leaf peeping, jack-o'-lanterns and pumpkin pie. The bright orange globes are the quintessential symbols of the season, and spooky jack-o'-lanterns have become a staple of Halloween celebrations everywhere. But long before pumpkin spice lattes became the fall favorite at coffee shops, the fleshy gourd was a symbol of American family farms and a bountiful harvest. From their ancient roots to the biggest pumpkin ever grown, here are nine crazy facts about pumpkins.

1. Ancient plant

Pumpkins are perhaps the oldest domesticated plants on Earth, with archaeological and botanical evidence suggesting that people cultivated pumpkins as far back as 10,000 B.C., said Cindy Ott, an American studies professor at Saint Louis University in Missouri, and the author of "Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon," (University of Washington Press, 2012). The first cultivated pumpkins, which were small, hard gourds that bear little resemblance to the fleshy orange giants of today, likely originated in the highlands of Oaxaca in Mexico, Ott said. [In Images: Peculiar Halloween Pumpkins]

2. Same plant, different name

The scientific name for pumpkins is Cucurbita pepo, with "pepo" meaning "to ripen in the sun." Though Americans consider pumpkins, squash and zucchini to be different foods, they are in fact all the same genus and species, and can be bred with one another. The Europeans who first saw the strange fruits thought they looked a lot like melons, so they called them "pompions," which is French for melon, Ott said.

3. Survival fruit

When the British colonists arrived in North America, they quickly learned to rely on the pumpkin as a survival food because European staples weren't readily available. Pumpkin could be substituted for wheat and barley in beer and was a fast-growing and hardy crop, Ott said.

4. First recipe

Though Thanksgiving is now synonymous with pumpkin pie, the original colonists considered pumpkin more of a savory ingredient, and it's not clear they even ate it on Thanksgiving Day. Most preparations used pumpkin, in addition to corn, in meat stews, Ott said. The first mention of pumpkin pie seems to have been a recipe for "pumpkin pudding baked in a crust," which appeared in the first American cookbook, "American Cookery," published by Amelia Simmons in 1796, Ott said.

5. Farm feed

The pumpkin was never considered a particularly luxurious food, and by the 19th century, when European foods became more readily available, the pumpkin was mainly known as a cheap substitute food or as feed for livestock, Ott said. The only people who grew them were small family farmers, and few people ate pumpkins.

"It was considered food of last resort and food of desperate times," Ott said.

6. Sentimental food

Around the 19th century, when most Americans had stopped eating pumpkins, the squash became associated with nostalgic and romantic images of small American family farms, Ott said. Pumpkins began cropping up in paintings of rustic farms, people wrote sappy odes to the orange fruit and it became an even stronger symbol of the fall harvest and bounty, Ott said.

7. Jack-o'-lanterns

Though the image of a grinning orange face may seem to be the epitome of Halloween now, the pumpkin only recently took up the mantle of jack-o'-lantern. Halloween has its roots in the Celtic holiday of Samhain, when the spirits of the dead walk the Earth for a night and people make lanterns out of turnips to scare the evil spirits away. [10 Ghost Stories That Will Haunt You for Life]

But when Irish immigrants came to the United States, pumpkins as the symbol of small American farms merged with the spooky Halloween tradition. It's not clear when the jack-o'-lantern practice first emerged, but by 1867, an article in the magazine Harper's Weekly shows a spooky image of two boys carving a "pumpkin effigy," the first image of a jack-o'-lantern in its modern-day form.

8. Pie market

The vast majority of pumpkin in the United States is produced and consumed in the fall, and one company, Libby's, produces almost all of the canned pumpkin in the country, Ott said. Because it doesn't make economic sense to ship pumpkins cross-country, most of these pie pumpkins — which, from the outside, look like cantaloupes — are grown in Illinois near the Libby's canning factory, Ott said.

9. Giant pumpkin

Though the average pumpkin in the supermarket may weigh about as much as a bowling ball, competitive pumpkin growers have taken the fruits to new extremes. Giant pumpkin enthusiasts trade tips, such as spiking the soil with fish feed, in order to grow pumpkins of truly gargantuan proportions. In 2013 for instance, a California man broke the world record for the largest pumpkin. At 2,032 pounds (921.7 kilograms), the overgrown squash was nearly the size of a small car.

"These giant pumpkin growers say you can almost see and hear the plant grow, because they grow tens of pounds in a day," Ott said.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

They moan. They bite. They shuffle. Or sometimes, they sprint, swarm and carry on surprisingly intelligent conversation.

Zombies are something of an open-source pop-culture phenomenon. Unlike Dracula or Frankenstein, these Halloween monsters aren't based on a literary resource. In fact, the modern conception of a zombie dates back to 1968, in a movie that doesn't so much as use the word: George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead."

"He didn't call them zombies, and he didn't think about them as zombies," said Ozzy Inguanzo, a screenwriter and author of "Zombies on Film: The Definitive Story of Undead Cinema" (Rizzoli, 2014). But the public did, Inguanzo told Live Science.

Related: What could drive humans to extinction?

"Audiences saw these lumbering dead people, and they called them zombies … therefore, they became zombies," he said. Since then, the walking undead have wormed their way into video games, comic books — and even the classics (witness 2009's novel "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"). 

From Haiti to Hollywood

The true zombie origin story dates back further than 1968, of course. The sad beginning of the myth harks back to Haiti during the 1600s and 1700s, when African slaves were worked to death on sugar plantations. As UC Irvine journalism instructor Amy Wilentz pointed out in the New York Times in 2012, it's not hard to see how the notion of a dead body, stripped of will and personality, forced to do the bidding of a sorcerer, would occur to an enslaved people.

The notion of zombies is still part of Haitian folklore. The belief is that, through magic or poison, a sorcerer makes a person fall ill and appear to die. After the family buries the body, the sorcerer retrieves the person, who is alive, but held in thrall. In a 1997 article in the medical journal The Lancet, researchers studied three real-life cases of "zombification" and diagnosed the three sufferers with catatonic schizophrenia, epilepsy and mistaken identity. In the final case, a 31-year-old woman with possible fetal alcohol syndrome was mistaken for another woman who had died 13 years before. The cases suggest that zombification has often been used to explain mental illness or brain disorders in rural Haiti.

Zombies made the leap from Haitian religion to American entertainment in 1932, Inguanzo said, with a film starring Bela Lugosi and Madge Bellamy called "White Zombie." That movie, in turn, was largely inspired by a 1929 travelogue by William Seabrook, a journalist who also happened to be the kind of guy who, after failing to get a good enough description of the taste of human flesh from a West African chieftain, manages to acquire a hunk of flesh from a corpse to cook up himself. (In his 1931 book "Jungle Ways," Seabrook helpfully describes the taste as being very similar to veal.)

Zombies popped up in horror flicks over the next few decades, frequently in keeping with the Haitian voodoo theme, but sometimes branching out: The "Revenge of the Zombies" in 1943 took a sci-fi angle, with a Nazi scientist trying to create an army of the undead for Hitler. 

Related: The 10 weirdest ways we deal with the dead

The modern zombie

But the quintessential zombie flick was actually inspired less by these films and more by vampires. Working off the 1954 post-apocalyptic novel "I Am Legend," by Richard Matheson, which tells the story of the last man standing in a world of vampirelike monsters, George Romero and John Russo told their own tale of a group of bickering humans threatened by the shuffling, moaning living dead.

"He took the Haitian component out of the previous character storylines and brought them here, to suburbia," Inguanzo said. "They were our friends, our relatives, our neighbors who were coming back from the dead."

Romero's zombies became the touchstone for those that would follow, with writers adding their own quirks to the genre. In 1985's "Return of the Living Dead," the zombies hungered not just for human flesh, but also for "braaaains." That idea stuck. The movie was also the first to introduce talking zombies, and perhaps more crucially, fast-moving zombies.

These days, fast-walking zombies are overtaking their shambling counterparts, at least on the big screen. The trend is, in part, inspired by video games like "Resident Evil," which first came out in 1996.

"Video games had a huge impact in bringing [zombies] back to the forefront," Inguanzo said. "These are easy bad guys to kill. There's no remorse there."

The zombie virus has also spread to the comic-book world, like the 2005-2006 Marvel series in which all of Marvel's superheroes get infected by a zombie virus. The superheroes stay strong and smart, but crave human flesh. Even wholesome Archie Comics has been bitten by the zombie bug, with a 2013 series called "Afterlife with Archie."

Zombie comics are, in turn, making the leap back to the screen, as with AMC's series "The Walking Dead." And Hollywood seems to be recognizing that zombies are moneymakers, turning out big-budget Brad Pitt spectacles like 2013's "World War Z."

"Those types of movies are focusing on explosions and action and adrenaline," Inguanzo said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Halloween is a time to celebrate mythical creatures that haunt our dreams — when the undead come to life and bloodsuckers go on the prowl.

But some of these monsters have real-life counterparts in the animal world.

From vampire bats to zombie ants, here are some of the creepiest real-life Halloween creatures. [13 Halloween Superstitions & Traditions Explained]

Vampire bat

The common vampire bat has earned a bad rap for its bloodthirsty habit, and the fact that it sometimes spreads rabies to cattle, but this spooky creature very rarely bites humans, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In fact, the bat's salivacontains an anticlotting agent that has been used as a treatment for blood clots in humans.

True to their name, vampire bats feed on the blood of their prey. Three species of bloodsucking bat exist: the common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus), the hairy-legged vampire bat (Diphylla ecaudata) and the white-winged vampire bat (Diaemus youngi). (Image Credit: (Daniel Streicker)

Zombie ant

In the animal kingdom, it's the closest thing to "Night of the Living Dead": a parasitic fungus infects the brains of carpenter ants, making the insects crawl to a spot that is ideal for the fungus to reproduce.

Just before the zombie ant dies, it chomps down on a leaf with its mandibles. The parasite (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) continues to grow out of the ant's dead body, converting its insides into sugars. After a week or two, the parasite sends spores to the floor where they can infect other unsuspecting ants. (Image Credit: David P Hughes)

Ghost frog

No Halloween would be complete without ghosts, and again, Mother Nature doesn't disappoint. The Table Mountain Ghost Frog (Heleophryne rosei) was namedafter the ghostly atmosphere of Skeleton Gorge, South Africa, where the animal was first found, according to the IUCN. But soon, this critically endangered species could live up to its name — it's population declined by an estimated 50 percent between 1980 and 2000, as a result of foreign vegetation, fires and water shortages, the IUCN said. (Image Credit: Atherton de Villiers)

Hagfish

This nasty creature may be even scarier than its name suggests. The Atlantic Hagfish (Myxine glutinosa) bores a hole in dead or dying fish and munches away at its internal organs and muscles. Yet despite its horrifying habits, the hagfish plays a critical role in cleaning the ocean floor and recycling nutrients, according to the IUCN. (Image Credit: Image courtesy of the HabCam Group and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Skeleton tarantula

As if spiders weren't terrifying enough, this eight-legged beast is named for the resemblance it bears to a sack of bones. The Skeleton Tarantula (Ephebopus murinus) is native to the lowland forests of Suriname, Guyana and northern Brazil. With a 4.5-inch (11.4 centimeters) leg span, it's not considered a large tarantula, though some females can have leg spans of more than 6 inches (15.2 cm).

Like many New World tarantulas, it defends itself by brushing stinging bristles called urticating hairs off its body, which can cause great discomfort if they get in an animal's skin or eyes. (Image Credit: xtotha | Shutterstock.com)

Goblin shark

Goblin sharks (Mitsukurina owstoni) are truly fearsome animals to behold. These creatures have a pinkish-white color with blue fins, a long, flattened snout and three rows of menacing teeth. Mature males have been measured at between 8.7 and 12.6 feet (2.7 to 3.8 meters), while mature females have spanned 11 to 12.2 feet (3.4 to 3.7 m). A bottom-dweller, the goblin shark is rarely seen at the surface or in shallow waters, but has been found in deeper waters around the world near continental slopes. (Image Credit: Carl Moore)

Editor's Note: If you have an amazing creepy animal photo you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please contact managing editor Jeanna Bryner at LSphotos@livescience.com.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Halloween isn't just an occasion to put on zombie makeup and binge-eat candy. Some researchers embrace Oct. 31 as an opportunity for serious study. From an analysis of racist costumes to an assessment of the hazards of egg throwing, here are a few strange chapters from the annals of Halloween science.

No fear: Woman immune to haunted houses

For years, scientists have been intrigued by a woman who doesn't seem to experience fear. Now in her late 40s, the patient known as SM suffers from a rare condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease that has destroyed her amygdalae. This pair of almond-shaped structures in the brain is associated with fear. [7 Weirdest Medical Conditions]

A few years ago, a group of scientists conducted a battery of unusual tests to try to scare SM. They exposed her to live snakes and spiders. They made her watch clips from "The Ring," "The Shining," "The Silence of the Lambs" and other horror movies. And during Halloween, they took SM to a haunted house set up inside the gothic Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky. In the journal Current Biology in 2011, the researchers noted SM's bizarre behavior on the tour:

"From the outset, SM voluntarily led the entire group through the haunted house, showing no signs of hesitation while walking around corners or into dark hallways. As the other members of the group lagged behind her, she would repeatedly call out, 'This way guys, follow me!' The hidden monsters attempted to scare SM numerous times, but to no avail. She reacted to the monsters by smiling, laughing or trying to talk to them. In contrast, their scare tactics typically elicited loud screams of fright from the other members of the group."

In the haunted house, SM approached the monsters and tried to touch them. She actually scared one of the characters by poking the person in the head, the researchers said. Before, during and after the haunted house tour, SM reported fear ratings of 0. Instead of fear, she claimed to have a high level of excitement and enthusiasm throughout, describing the experience as similar to the enjoyment she gets while riding a rollercoaster.

Costumed college kids are probably drunk

These studies might have made the cut for Live Science's annual roundup of obvious findings. Between 1978 and 1982, researchers polled more than 1,000 students from two colleges in upstate New York about their Halloween activities. Did they wear a costume? Did they drink? The researchers found that, yes, for college students, dressing in costume is linked to the use of alcohol. About 82 percent of students wore costumes on Halloween, and among that group, 87 percent reported that they drank, according to the findings published in the journal Adolescence in 1993. [13 Halloween Superstitions & Traditions Explained]

Another group of researchers, from Virginia Tech, revisited this rich topic of celebratory drinking with a study published in the journal Environment and Behavior in 2007. But rather than rely on the college students' self-reports, the intrepid researchers went out into the field equipped with breathalyzers on Halloween and St. Patrick's Day. The students who said they were drinking because they were celebrating these holidays had high levels of intoxication, with a mean blood alcohol concentration of 0.096, the researchers found. (For comparison, the legal limit for driving in the United States is 0.08.) Students who were not celebrating, meanwhile, had an average blood alcohol concentration of 0.074.

Eggs can hurt you

Projectile eggs have become part of the repertoire of Halloween mischief. But did you know that a raw egg "can act as a substantial missile" and that it fits right into the eye socket "like a squash ball"? (Apparently, squash players are prone to eye injuries.) That's what a group of doctors wrote in a letter to the journal Eye in 2003, highlighting three cases of eye injuries wrought by flying eggs.

Since an egg can fit so nicely into the eye cavity, "relatively little force is therefore dissipated to the orbital rim, the egg transferring most of its kinetic energy directly to the globe on impact." Ouch.

Maybe you could dress up like a lab scientist or aviator and wear protective goggles. Or, better yet, just refrain from throwing eggs. Eye injuries aside, egging can still take a dangerous turn. Just in New York, at least two dozen people were seriously hurt or killed in stabbings, shootings, beatings or accidents that started out as "egg-throwing confrontations" around Halloween since 1984, The New York Times reported in 2010. 

Racist and sexist Halloween costumes abound

The public shaming of people wearing racist Halloween costumes has become almost as much of an annual ritual as trick-or-treating. Who could forget the 25-year-old white Florida man dressed as Trayvon Martin last year? Already, pictures of revelers in misguided Ray Rice costumes are invading Facebook feeds and drawing the ire of TV pundits.

Why do people think these kinds of costumes are OK each Halloween? A few years ago, a group of sociologists led by Jennifer Mueller, now an assistant professor at Skidmore College, sought an explanation. The researchers had dozens of college students write down their observations around Halloween in a journal, and they found that racialized costumes are quite common on American campuses. While some students were appalled at seeing their friends or strangers in blackface, others didn't seem all that alarmed. Some were actually amused. One white student wrote that seeing her two white male friends "covered in black paint from head to toe" to dress up as tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams was "the funniest thing [she] had seen in a long time."

Another white male student reported that one of his friends (also white) revealed plans to dress up as "the black girl from [the film] 'Coyote Ugly'" for Halloween. (That character was played by Tyra Banks.) The student wrote: "He then elaborated, 'All I'll have to do is paint my skin and smell bad. Oh, and it'll help if I act like I don't know how to swim.' Everyone got a good laugh out of it."

Dressing up on Halloween might allow people to let go of their inhibitions and defy social norms, the researchers wrote, but in this context, some celebrators might be under the impression that they get a free pass to be offensive. Most of the white students who participated in the study "actively suspended their criticisms or behaved in wholly uncritical ways" despite the clear intentions of some of their fellow students to caricature and degrade blackness with their costumes, Mueller and colleagues wrote in the journal Qualitative Sociology in 2007. And even among the students who seemed upset by racially insensitive getups, few reported that they offered their criticisms out loud.

Halloween is also an annual reminder that gender stereotypes still dominate, even among young kids. Around Halloween in the late 1990s, Adie Nelson, a sociology professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada, looked at 469 children's Halloween costumes in craft stores, department stores and specialty Halloween stores. Less than 10 percent of those costumes could be considered gender neutral, and most of those were for infants. Nelson found that feminine costumes had a predictably narrow range: beauty queens, princesses, cupcakes and brides.

"Decades after the second wave of the women's movement, you would expect more of a gender-neutral range of costumes," Nelson told The New York Times in 2006. Her study was published in 2000 in the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly.

Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

If you're looking for something spooky to do this Halloween, you might consider walking around the block to search for ghosts in your neighborhood.

Just in time for the scariest night of the year, networking and communications company D-Link announced it is offering customers free refurbished cameras equipped with motion detectors and night-vision capabilities — perfect for keeping an eye out for things that go bump in the night. These Wi-Fi-enabled cameras, which let users monitor footage in real time from a mobile device, will be given away to those "looking to capture paranormal activity this Halloween season," according to company representatives.

But to get a free camera, you'll first have to prove your chops as a ghost buster. You can do this by going to D-Link's Web page and submitting a story about how you plan to use the camera. If you're chosen to receive a camera, you'll be asked to create a video detailing how you used the ghost-monitoring apparatus. Then, you'll have to spill all the gory details about what you saw. [13 Halloween Superstitions & Traditions Explained]

"When we ask customers what they're monitoring with our Wi-Fi cameras, we're always surprised to hear how many are looking to capture the paranormal," Daniel Kelley, vice president of marketing for D-Link, said in a statement. "So, in the spirit (pun intended) of the season, we decided to arm those DIY ghost hunterswith cameras and see what ghoulish images they come up with."

In your request for a free camera, you will need to specify whether you want to monitor ghostly activity inside (with D-Link's Cloud Camera 5000) or outside (with the Outdoor Cloud Camera). Footage from both cameras can be captured in real time from a laptop, smartphone or tablet device. You can also set up instant email alerts that will notify you if the motion sensors on the camera pick up any activity — paranormal or otherwise.

Though D-Link's decision to put free cameras in the hands of ghost hunters is a seasonally appropriate marketing move, it also speaks to a growing trend of ghost huntingthat has gripped parts of American society. Aided, in part, by the SyFy channel series "Ghost Hunters," Americans — as well as those in other parts of the world — are taking to local haunts in hopes of documenting paranormal activity.

And if you're a believer in spooky sightings, you're not alone. A 2005 Gallup poll found that 32 percent of Americans believe in ghosts and 37 percent believe some houses are haunted.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

One idea for a Halloween dinner party could involve asking your guests to dress up in gothic gowns, and decking out your house to look like Dracula's castle. If you are into such a plan, here are five strange and spooky dishes from around the world to put on the table.

Although these dishes are not usually prepared for any specific rituals or holidays, cultures from around the world have invented the recipes — perhaps grotesque, but still tasty — out of what seems to be a rather dark imagination, making them quite suitable for Halloween. And if they're not enough on their own, you can always serve with a side of snails, fried bats or puppy-sized goliath spiders.

Pressed duck

In the mood for French delicacy? Pressed duck is one traditional dish, but it is far from delicate. A specialty of Rouen in France, pressed duck was popularized by the high-end Parisian restaurant La Tour D'Argent.

The recipe dates back to 19th century and is relatively easy to carry out, as long as you have nerves of steel. The dish is partly prepared where it's to be served, in front of the guests. It consists of a duck, which is killed by strangling, to keep as much blood within the bird as possible. The duck is then roasted for about 20 minutes, and the breasts are cut and put on a plate. Then the whole carcass is put into a special cylinder made of silver, which looks more like a medieval torture device. Then a press is applied to extract the blood and juices. The resulting sauce is cooked with a touch of wine and lemon juice, and is then poured on the breast meat. Voila!

Sheep's head

What is scarier than half of a face on your plate? This Norwegian dish is usually eaten around Christmas, but it may be more suitable for Halloween. It is called Smalahove, and is basically salted, smoked and cooked sheep's head.

The recipe is straightforward. The head is first burned over fire to remove the hair. Then it's cooked. Sometimes the brain is removed, but the eye is scooped out and eaten, along with the delicate cheek muscles. One head serves two. [Halloween's Top 10 Scary Creatures]

Sheep hooves

Sheep hooves, also called Khash or Kaleh Pacheh, are a traditional dish in Iran, Turkey and neighboring countries. The dish consists of boiled sheep's hooves and its broth. Sometimes the entire head and intestines are thrown in as well.

Traditionally, this ominous dish is served only during the dark early hours of the day, from 3 a.m. until just before dawn.

Haggis

This Scottish dish sounds like a lot of work to prepare: Sheep's lung, heart and liver are minced with onion and oatmeal, then stuffed into sheep's stomach.

Stuffed camel

This gigantic dish is said to have been traditionally served at the weddings of Arab sheikhs in Saudi Arabia, but skeptics say it may be merely a product of fiction, seen only in Arabic folklore. The dish consists of a medium-sized whole camel stuffed with a whole sheep, which is itself stuffed with whole chickens, rice, dates and eggs. Whether this dish is real or not, its recipe is mentioned in a few cookbooks. And "roasted camel" was named the largest item on any food menu in the 1997 edition of the "Guinness Book of World Records."

Email Bahar Gholipour. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

Ghost stories

From a spooky 3,200-year-old tale written on broken pottery pieces to amateur YouTube videos of "ghost chases," frightening tales of apparitions, demons and goblins have been documented since ancient times and continue to fascinate people today.

Although these paranormal events aren't supported by science, they have persisted throughout history. Here's a look at some of the most frightening cases.

1200 B.C. ghost story from Egypt

In 1915, Egyptologist Gaston Maspero published a translation of an ancient Egyptian ghost story, possibly set in Luxor (ancient Thebes, shown above), that was discovered on four pieces of pottery. In the story, a ghost of a mummified man tells a high priest of the god Amun about his current condition.

"I grew, and I did not see the rays of the sun. I did not breathe the air, but darkness was before me every day, and no one came to find me," the ghost says (translation by Maspero).

"The ghost seems to complain of some accident that has happened to himself or to his tomb, but I cannot make out what is the subject of his dissatisfaction," Maspero wrote. [Spooky Tales: The 10 Most Famous Ghosts]

The ancient Egyptians believed strongly in life after death, and created a series of spells called the "Book of the Dead," which they believed helped them reach the afterlife.

Ghost of Tu-po

Tu-po was an ancient Chinese ghost with revenge on his mind. Before he died, Tu-Po served as a minister to Chinese Emperor Hsuan (lived 827-783 B.C.). The two had a disagreement, and Hsuan had Tu-Po killed in about 786 B.C., despite warnings that Tu-Po would come back and haunt him.

Tu-Po did a lot more than haunt the emperor: Three years later, in 783 B.C., "Hsuan was killed with an arrow fired by an apparition resembling Tu-Po in front of an assembly of feudal lords," wrote Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu (lived 470-391 B.C.). (Translation by Yi-pao Mei, from "The Complete Book of Ghosts" by Paul Roland.)

Chained man in ancient Athens

Roman senator Pliny the Younger, who died in A.D. 113, told a ghost tale so haunting that it survives to this day. "There was at Athens a large and roomy house, which had a bad name, so that no one could live there. In the dead of the night, a noise — resembling the clashing of iron — was frequently heard, which, if you listened more attentively, sounded like the rattling of chains," disturbances that led to the appearance of a specter "form of an old man, of extremely emaciated and squalid appearance, with a long beard and dishevelled, hair, rattling the chains on his feet and hands."

Needless to say, the house was abandoned and had to be rented out for a cheap price. When a philosopher named Athenodorus heard the story, he reportedly rented the house and confronted the ghost. The ghost appeared, and rattled around before vanishing. Athenodorus calmly marked the spot where the ghost vanished and, in the morning, ordered that the spot be dug up, the story goes. (Image Credit: Nick Pavlakis | Shutterstock.com) [Americans' Beliefs in Paranormal Phenomena (Infographic)]

"This was accordingly done, and the skeleton of a man in chains was found there, for the body, having lain a considerable time in the ground was putrefied and mouldered away from the (chains). " After being given a proper burial, the ghost departed, and the house was haunted no more, according to Pliny's tale. (Translation from Pliny the Younger, The Harvard Classics, 1909-1914.)

Boarded-up bathhouse

The writer Plutarch, who lived from A.D. 45 to 120, tells a ghost story that has a much sadder ending than the one from Athens. In the city of Chaeronea, Greece, there was a boy named Damon who attracted the attention of a Roman military commander, who apparently loved him, historical records suggest. Damon refused the commander's advances, enraging him.

Knowing that he would be killed if he did nothing, Damon got a group of friends together, ambushed the Roman commander (and several other Roman soldiers), killing them. The city council of Chaeronea condemned Damon and his friends to death. After that proclamation, Damon, who had not been killed, had the council members killed.

Damon and his friends then took to the countryside, plundering it. Eventually, the townspeople allowed Damon to return, but he was killed shortly afterward in the local bathhouse.

"And because, for a long while thereafter, certain phantoms appeared in the place, and groans were heard there, as our Fathers tell us, the door of the vapour-bath was walled up, and to this present time, the neighbours think it the source of alarming sights and sounds," Plutarch wrote. (Translation from Loeb Classical Library, 1914.)

The Tower of London

Britain's numerous castles are hotspots for ghost stories. The 900-year-old Tower of London is said to contain numerous ghosts, and the Queen's House is considered by tower officials to be one of the most haunted places.

Among the ghosts in the Queen's House is that of Arabella Stuart, cousin of King James I. Arabella made the mistake of marrying against the king's wishes and was sent to the tower as punishment. According to the ghost story, she is still serving her time.

In another spooky tale, a phantom bear is said to haunt one section of the Tower of London, called the Martin Tower. A guard who saw the phantom bear is said to have dropped dead from the shock. The Tower of London served as a menagerie for part of its history and held a variety of animals, including bears.

Aokigahara Woods

At Aokigahara Woods, located at the foot of Mount Fuji in Japan, the corpses of dozens of suicide victims have been found over the past two decades, and the forest has become a popular place for troubled Japanese citizens to end their lives.

Today, there are signs in the forest, urging people not to end their lives and asking them to seek help. Given the number of suicides that have occurred in the forest, ghost stories abound, including several alleged encounters with the apparitions of those who have died there, which can be seen on You Tube.

Exorcism of Roland Doe

In 1949, a boy from Cottage City, Maryland, who was referred to as "Roland Doe" (not his real name), underwent an exorcism performed by a group of Roman Catholic priests, accounts suggest.

There are conflicting reports as to Roland's alleged powers: Some stories claim that Roland had supernatural strength, could speak in ancient languages that the boy had no knowledge of and could apparently move or levitate the mattress he was lying on.

Since 1949, investigators have called into question many of these claims, providing evidence to suggest that Roland was a psychologically troubled boy who hated to attend school and that his abilities were far from supernatural. In any event, the exorcism took place. The events inspired a 1971 novel called "The Exorcist" by William Peter Blatty, which, in turn, inspired the famous 1973 movie.

Brown Lady of Raynham Hall

In 1936, a photographer taking pictures of the 300-year-old Raynham Hall in Norfolk, U.K., captured an image of an apparition floating down the stairs. It's one of the most famous ghost photos ever taken, although some experts believe it was caused by double exposure.

The manor, covering an area of 7,000 acres (2,833 hectares), has a long history of being haunted, and the BBC notes that the ghost may be of Lady Dorothy Townshend, the wife of the second viscount of the estate. She died in 1726, supposedly of smallpox, after having an affair, which her husband Lord Townshend had learned about before her death. She is said to still wander the manor dressed in brown.

The CCTV ghost

Hampton Court Palace in Surrey, England, has a photogenic ghost of its own. In 2003, a CCTV camera caught an image of a skeletal figure, clad in centuries-old clothes, closing a sturdy fire door that had flung open. The ghost, nicknamed "skeletor," attracted a great deal of media attention.

"It wasn't just security staff who thought they were seeing things. A visitor wrote in the palace's visitor book on the [day that skeletor appeared on camera] that she too thought she had seen a ghost in that area," officials wrote on the Hampton Court Palace website.

Skeletor is not the only ghostly inhabitant of Hampton Court Palace. Catherine Howard, one of Henry VIII's wives, was imprisoned there and was supposedly dragged to her room, screaming all the way. The area that she haunts is called the "screaming gallery."

Amityville

The Amityville haunting is perhaps the most famous ghost story in America. Ronald Defeo Jr. was convicted for the 1974 killing of his mother, father and four of their children at their home in Amityville, New York. Reports indicate that the gun Ronald used didn't have a silencer, and there was no sign of a struggle inside the house — facts that left investigators puzzled.

In 1975, a new family, the Lutzes, moved into the Amityville home, having bought it at a discounted price. They lived there for less than a month. During that time, voices were heard around the house, their daughter developed an imaginary friendship with a red-eyed pig called Jodie, the house attracted swarms of flies, there was banging on the walls and the furniture was said to move on its own, according to reports from the family. [Spooky! Top 10 Unexplained Phenomena]

Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren were called in to investigate, and they also reported encountering paranormal phenomena. Ed Warren said he was pushed to the floor of the basement by an unknown force. The house still stands today, although recent owners say it is not haunted. The 1977 book "The Amityville Horror" and a number of films are based on the story.

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Ghost ships have long sparked fascination and fear, from mariners and nonmariners alike. These spooky vessels run the gamut from phantom ships that appear as eerie apparitions to real-life abandoned wrecks to those craft that disappeared mysteriously with no survivors, such as the HMS Erebus that was lost in the Canadian Arctic in 1845. Here's a look at some of the most haunted ships throughout history.

El Caleuche

El Caleuche is a ghost ship said to sail the waters off the coast of Chile. "El Caleuche always sails at night and appears suddenly through the fog or mist, brightly lit," writes author Ann Bingham in her book "South and Meso-American Mythology A to Z" (Chelsea House, 2010). The ship "guards the waters and punishes those who bring hardship to the sea or the creatures that live in it." 

The ship’s crew is said to consist of dead, shipwrecked, sailors along with witches. The witches are said to leave the ship by riding a seahorse named Caballo Marino Bingham added. Apparently the witches and shipwrecked sailors are a happy crew. "On calm nights, it is said, music and laughter can often be heard coming from the ship," Bingham writes. [The Top 10 Most Famous Ghosts]

HMS Erebus and Terror

On May 19, 1845, two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, departed England and set sail for the Canadian Arctic. Their goal was to travel through the treacherous waters of the Northwest Passage that separated the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Led by Sir John Franklin, the ships were to collect samples and conduct scientific studies along the way. Out of the 134 officers and men on the expedition, not a single one ever returned. 

Messages later discovered by a rescue mission indicate the ships became trapped in ice off of King William Island in the Canadian Arctic. Franklin died on June 11, 1847, and the ships were abandoned on April 22, 1848. The initial survivors attempted to cross the ice and reach safety on the Canadian mainland. [See Photos of the Lost Ship from the Franklin Expedition]

Recently, Parks Canada archaeologists found the wreck of the HMS Erebus during the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition. (Image Credit: © Parks Canada)

København

On Dec. 14, 1928, the København, a Danish East Asiatic Company sailing ship left the Rio de la Plata (an area between Uruguay and Argentina) en route to Australia. It was notable for having five masts.

"She was a well-found vessel, fitted with wireless (radio) an auxiliary engine and ample lifeboats," writes Hamish Ross in Sea Breezes Magazine. "A training ship, she had a crew of 60 men, many of whom were cadets, some from very prominent Danish families."

The ship was in touch, through radio, with the Norwegian steamer William Blumer on Dec. 21, but after that it was never heard from again. 

"Following the København's disappearance, many theories sprang up as to her loss, but the most likely seems to be that she struck an iceberg in darkness or fog," writes Ross. "There were also reports of sightings of a phantom five-masted vessel in 1930." In 2012, a wreck was found at the island of Tristan da Cunha that could potentially be the København. (Image Credit: State Library of Queensland, courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

HMS Eurydice

In 1878, the HMS Eurydice, a Royal Navy training vessel, was lost while sailing near the Isle of Wight. A sudden snowstorm sunk the vessel, killing 364 crewmembers, on what had been a calm day. The storm occurred so suddenly, the ship's crew didn't have enough time to react, according to news reports. 

The "Eurydice continued at full sail with her gun ports open before disappearing in the midst of the blizzard," writes Victoria Bartlett in an article on the BBC website. Ultimately, there were only two survivors, Bartlett notes. The ship was refloated but, being heavily damaged, was scrapped. 

Since then, there have been stories of a ghostly HMS Eurydice haunting the area where the ship sank. "Sailors and visitors are also said to have witnessed sightings of a 'ghost ship' off the Isle of Wight," writes Bartlett. In the 1930s, a British submarine reported encountering the ghostly vessel. Additionally, "Prince Edward reportedly saw the ship while filming an ITV documentary in 1998," Bartlett writes. (Image Credit: public domain, courtesy Wikimedia)

Mary Celeste

On Dec. 4, 1872, a boarding party on the British brigantine ship named the Dei Gratia found a ship named the Mary Celeste adrift at sea in the Atlantic Ocean, not far from the Azores. The ship was completely deserted, the boarding party found. 

Of the 10 people known to have sailed aboard the Mary Celeste, none were ever found. A lifeboat was missing, but the ship's log gave no indication as to why the Mary Celeste was abandoned. The boarding party found that there had been some flooding, with at least one pump out of order. The ship was carrying over 1,700 barrels of alcohol, a few of which had spilled open. 

There was little damage, and the flooding posed little problem. A crew from Dei Gratia pumped out the water and sailed the Mary Celeste to Gibraltar where the British authorities began an investigation into what happened. They were unable to come up with a definitive answer, and the case of the Mary Celeste has remained unsolved ever since. 

Different ideas have been put forward. A few barrels of alcohol had spilled open, which might have made the crew afraid that their hold was going to explode. This could have prompted their captain, Benjamin Briggs, to order them to abandon ship. It's also been proposed that Briggs thought the flooding was worse than it actually was. With at least one pump not working, he may have given the order to abandon ship. [In Images: Ancient Maps and Sea Monsters]

Other, more far-fetched ideas involve sea monsters, mutineers or pirates. (Image Credit: Public domain, courtesy Wikimedia Commons) 

Flying Dutchman

The most famous ghost ship of all is the Flying Dutchman, said to haunt the waters near the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. 

"The term 'Flying Dutchman' actually refers to the captain, not his ship," writes Angus Konstam in his book "Ghost Ships: Tales of Abandoned, Doomed and Haunted Vessels" (Lyons Press, 2005). 

There are several variations of the story, but the most famous one is that the ship's pilot, Captain Hendrick Vanderdecken, who lived in the 17th century and served with the Dutch East India Company, encountered a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, Konstam notes. "He swore that he would spite God's wrath, and take his ship into Table Bay, despite anything that God and the elements could throw against him," Konstam writes. But the ship hit a rock and sank, taking the entire crew along with it. 

As punishment, the captain and his ghostly crew are said to sail the waters for all eternity, hoping one day to be forgiven. "They were hence refused admittance into every port, and are ordained still to traverse the ocean on which they perished, till the period of their penance expires," reads a story, published in an 1803 book by John Leyden, describing how the crew's punishment worked. (Image Credit: PLRANG | Shutterstock.com)

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It's an age-old question … or at least one asked by those health-conscious no-good-doers: What can neighbors give out to kids on Halloween night that won't contribute to the childhood obesity epidemic?

Many ideas out there will surely get your house egged or worse. Hand out bookmarks or spooky pencils? Seriously? Why not just label which garage windows you want the disgruntled children to soap?

A list of healthy alternatives on a Clemson University website includes bean dip. Fun times in South Carolina, for sure. Other ideas bantered about on the Internet are well-intentioned, but ultimately impractical. Spooky toys and decorations? News flash: Halloween is over by the end of the night. Vampire teeth just don't have the same impact on Nov. 1.

Money? That's kind of, well, expensive. Candy costs less than 10 cents apiece. Handing out a dime seems rather cheap. And don't even think of trying 10 pennies. Play-Doh? That's very expensive, and big kids — the kind who can TP your house — don't care much for "creative" toys.

What follows is a list of five candy alternatives for Halloween that are practical in terms of expense, trick-or-treaters' health, acceptability among a wide swath of ages, and safety to home and person from mischievous pranks. [13 Halloween Superstitions & Traditions Explained]

• Glow sticks and finger lights: Glow sticks cost about $1 for a pack of 15, on par with the price of small pieces of candy, or about 7 cents each. Online, you can buy them in bulk for as low as a pack of 100 for $5. LED finger lights are much cooler, but will set you back $6 for a pack of 40, or 15 cents per kid. The only downside, which isn't entirely insignificant, is that you're creating a lot of trash for landfills.

• Mini-packs of pretzels, raisins or dried fruit: These are marginally acceptable by the kids, and you reduce the impact on landfills that glow sticks bring. But with these, you're getting up into the 20-cents-per-kid range, and you likely aren't saving any teeth. These foods may be lower in calories than a candy bar, but their carbohydrate base and ability to stick to the teeth ultimately promote tooth decay.

• Batch of warm, low-sugar cookies: Hear me out on this one. The kids will either eat them immediately and happily, or their parents will toss them out later because they don't trust their origin. Either way, your house and wallet are safe.

• Temporary tattoos: With an amazing variety of choices — dinosaurs, butterflies, pirates, zoo animals and the like — you can probably please trick-or-treaters of any age. You can buy sheets of 100 or more tattoos for just pennies per tattoo.

• Obscene noisemakers and whistles: Their parents will hate them, but the kids themselves probably won't. Unfortunately, you would have to demonstrate how to use them.

As the saying goes, you can't please everyone … except with a big bar of chocolate. So it may be wise to have a few chocolate bars on hand for those kids who look like they are old enough to shave. They likely have hit at least 100 houses before yours, and they mean business. You've been warned.

Follow Christopher Wanjek @wanjek for daily tweets on health and science with a humorous edge. Wanjek is the author of "Food at Work" and "Bad Medicine." His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on Live Science.