The city that never sleeps apparently has nothing keeping it up at night.
New York City finished 68th out of 74 destinations in a new ranking of America’s spookiest places, making it the seventh-least frightening city in the study.
The crown went to a Comstock-era boomtown that, with a population of roughly 855, could fit inside a single Manhattan high-rise.
Virginia City, Nevada, topped the 2026 Spookiness Index from home security company Vivint, which scored cities on seven factors including reported ghost sightings, haunted places, haunted house attractions, psychic and spiritual businesses, funeral services and eerie Google searches.
Tombstone, Arizona, placed second and Eureka Springs, Arkansas, took third, followed by Galena, Illinois, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Cape May, New Jersey.
Most of those metrics are measured per 10,000 residents, a formula that gives tiny tourist towns a big edge. Virginia City racked up roughly 10,870 spooky searches per 10,000 locals, the highest rate in the study, plus about 124 haunted house attraction listings for the same population.
Vivint acknowledges its Yelp counts can sweep in businesses outside city limits, which helps explain how a town that size logs more than 1,100 funeral service listings per 10,000 people.
The raw tallies paint a different picture. Austin, Texas, led the country in reported ghost sightings with 115, ahead of Dallas at 64 and Houston at 48. Los Angeles claimed the most reported haunted places, with 61.
Travelers are also increasingly looking to sleep with the dead. Searches for haunted hotels soared 315% from 2023 to 2025, while interest in haunted houses nearby slipped about 11%.
NYC actually logged more reported ghost sightings than any other New York city studied, with 16, along with seven haunted places. It still finished last in the state, trailing Poughkeepsie (44th) and Buffalo (49th).
The Big Apple’s problem is appetite. New Yorkers ran about 104 spooky searches per 10,000 residents, the second-lowest rate in the nation, beating only Ipswich, Massachusetts. The five boroughs also posted the third-lowest concentration of spiritual shops in the country and just 1.5 psychic and astrologer listings per 10,000 people.
Amityville, meanwhile, landed 13th nationally to claim the state title despite a single reported ghost sighting, tied for the fewest in the study, and no reported haunted places at all. The Long Island village rode its business density instead, posting about 78.6 haunted house attraction listings per 10,000 residents, second only to Virginia City, and roughly 176.6 psychics and astrologers. That was enough to outrank New Orleans (22nd), Savannah (28th) and Salem (41st).
Amityville’s reputation rests largely on one Dutch Colonial on Ocean Avenue. Before the 1979 film made it famous, the house was where 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr. killed his parents and four younger siblings in 1974.
A year or so later, George and Kathleen Lutz bought the place and moved in with three kids and a dog, then fled in less than a month, and their account fueled the bestselling book and the franchise that followed.
Owners have spent decades trying to shake the gawkers. The original address, 112 Ocean Avenue, was switched to 108 to discourage onlookers, and the signature quarter-round windows were removed years ago.
The stigma has shown up on the price tag. The home hit the market in May 2010 at $1.15 million and sold that September for $950,000. It came back in 2016 at $850,000, offering five bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths, a boathouse and a slip on the Amityville River, and it last traded in March 2017 for $605,000.
Not every owner bought the hype. James Cromarty, who lived there for a decade after buying in 1977, told Newsday, “Nothing weird ever happened” beyond the parade of curious visitors.
The nation’s top scare sits on Nevada’s Comstock Lode, where silver money, saloon brawls and frontier violence left plenty of material for ghost tours.
The Silver Queen Hotel, built in 1876, is the town’s oldest, and legend says a prostitute named Rosie worked there during the Comstock boom and took her own life in Room 11 in the late 1800s. Her spirit is said to show up in that room and on the staircase. Guests who book Room 11 have described tapping at the door, whispering and even growling, and the hotel has hosted paranormal TV crews, including Zak Bagans’ “Ghost Adventures.”
Down the street sits the infamous Suicide Table, an 1860s Faro bank table blamed for the deaths of three owners. The first, a gambler known as “Black Jake,” supposedly shot himself after losing $70,000 in a single night of cards. The furniture has proven tougher than its owners. The Delta Saloon, its longtime home, exploded on March 11, 2019, but the table came through nearly untouched and now resides at the Bonanza Saloon.
Then there’s the Bucket of Blood Saloon, raised in 1876 after the Great Fire of 1875 leveled most of the town. Lore holds that the name came from blood-soaked sawdust hauled off the floor after nightly shootings, stabbings and fistfights. Its real history is arguably more striking. In 1997, historians discovered it was built atop the remains of the Boston Saloon, the only Black-owned saloon in the West at the time.
Tombstone, which posted the study’s highest rate of psychics and astrologers at 625 per 10,000 residents, needs little introduction. On October 26, 1881, a roughly 30-second shootout involving the Earps left Frank and Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton dead, and the corral is said to be haunted by the cowboys to this day.
Nearby, the Bird Cage Theatre ran around the clock from 1881 to 1889, saw 26 deaths and still bears 140 bullet holes, with locals claiming as many as 31 resident ghosts.
In Eureka Springs, the 1886 Crescent Hotel carries the darkest résumé. Norman Baker, who had no medical training, bought it in 1937 and turned it into a cancer hospital peddling miracle cures, complete with a psych ward and a morgue.
He was later convicted of mail fraud and sent to Leavenworth for four years after bilking patients out of roughly $4 million. Guests seeking a fright request Room 218, known as “Michael’s Room,” and Room 419, tied to a woman named Theodora. Michael is said to be an Irish stonemason who plunged to his death during construction, and general manager Jack Moyer, a onetime skeptic, has collected more than 5,000 reports of unexplained activity since arriving in 1997.
Cape May, which ranked second nationally for spiritual shops, mixes Victorian charm with a long roster of ghost stories, many dating to the Great Fire of 1878 that destroyed more than 40 acres of the resort.
Ghost tours have run since 2004 at the 1879 Emlen Physick Estate, and that tourism is credited with keeping the house standing. At the Hotel Macomber, an elderly woman’s mischievous ghost is said to linger in Room 10, while visitors to the Southern Mansion on Washington Street report a well-dressed female spirit.
The Cape May Lighthouse, guiding sailors since 1859, has its own Lady in White, and some locals tie the restless spirits of Higbee Beach to Thomas Higbee, who died in 1879 and was entombed near the shore.
At the other end of the list, Santa Fe, New Mexico, finished dead last.
