Now a days I find that all real Ghost Hunting adventures begin right here on the internet. Many people search for new and old places to historically verify and research things that begin their journey. The Global web village as we all know is haunted by us who crave the answers. Just recently in the news I read, about the “Haunted tree” in Orissa village.

In Manglojodi, Orissa: Panic-stricken residents of an eastern Indian village say a killer ghost that lives on a tree stalks them, bringing true the prophesy of a possessed girl. Unable to bear the torture for long some of the braver ones in Manglojodi, a hamlet in Khurda district of eastern Orissa state pulled down the tree.

The story apparently did not stop there.

Villagers are too scared to come out of their homes once dusk falls, the favourite time of the 'Ghost who walks" to make its evening rounds.

Villagers refuse to go near the place where the tree stood, as they fear that they will meet the same fate of seven people who died at the hands of the ghost.

Bhawani Behra, a 19-year-old boy who had helped raze the tree, was the latest victim.

He died coughing up blood and told his sister Anasuya before dying that he saw a white cat moving spookily about the tree.

"Till date seven people have died after touching that tree since March. Everybody is scared of going anywhere near the tree. Children do not go to school and college anymore. By six in the evening, all is quiet and people are scared to go out even to the local shop. The murderous spirit seems to have paralysed our village," said Anasuya.

Children take a circuitous route to school and villagers talk in hushed tones, lest the deadly ghost hear them.

The felled tree still evokes panic amongst villagers as the tale acquires newer dimensions, adding credibility to the words of a possessed girl who had prophesied that the ghost would claim 21 lives.

"The prophecy of a possessed girl seems to be coming true. The spirit seems to have gone on a killing spree. Some time ago, the spirit had possessed the body of a young girl and said that it will take 21 lives before Dussehra (a Hindu festival)," said Laxmidhar Behra, the chief of the village's governing council.

In India's rural areas superstition is quite prevalent and villagers prefer black magic to medical treatment.

Social activists blame lack of basic health care facilities for the widespread superstitions.

http://www.zeenews.com/articles.asp?aid=365716&sid=ZNS

I then thought to myself that's a panic big enough to make the place turn into a real ghost town. Ghosts research, evidence, and discussion of ghost towns often evoke and unearth many historical facts and urban legends. Visit any "Supernatural Message Boards" on the net and a ghost story of a haunted abandoned town usually pops up. often I hear about Spirits that followed visitors home from ghost towns. But still have not had the time to investigate such things to my satisfaction as of yet.

Modern Ghost Towns do happen not just in America but around the world. Just on the north side of the Attila Line that partitions the island of Cyprus, the ghost city of Varosha (a suburb of Famagusta) is surrounded with barbed wire. 1974 the Turkish military invaded and carved up the island. Greek Cypriots in the north were forced to move south side of the line. Turkish Cypriots from the south were forced to move north. Greek Cypriot citizens in Varosha fled the Turkish invasion in terror. They expected to return to their homes within days. Instead, the Turks seized the empty city and wrapped it in fencing and wire. They forbid anyone from entering it to this day. Is it haunted? Some who are said to be in the know say it is. You can walk right up to it, though, and take a look. Photographing the dead city is not permitted. But if no one is watching there is nothing to physically stop you. To see actual photos he ghost city of Varosha Please visit here, Michael J. Totten: The Ghost City of Cyprus www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000985.html.

FENG-DU: The Realm of the Dead, containing all the Chinese Hells.

The town of Fengdu, said to be the abode of devils, is one of the first stops on your Yangtze River cruise. The famous 'Ghost City' Situated on the northern bank of the river between Zhongxian and Fuling, the city was depicted as the 'City of Ghosts' in two ancient, classic Chinese works - "Monkey King" and "Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio". The origin of the town's extraordinary reputation can be traced back to the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. - 220 A.D.) when two officials, Yin and Wang, became Taoist recluses here and eventually Immortals. Later in the Tang Dynasty, their names were combined to mean "King of the Underworld".

Thereafter, Mt. Mingshan gained its reputation as the 'City of Ghosts' where the king lived.There is a necropolis called Fengdu modelled after the Chinese Hell in Taoist mythology, built over 1800 years ago. The famous ghost town will become an island after Three Gorges Dam project. Specifically, part of the ghost town of Fengdu will be submerged, but scenery above the "Door of Hell" will remain.

Today, the town throngs with many tourists who come to visit temples and shrines dedicated to the gods of the underworld. Landmarks here bear horrific names - Last Glance at Home Tower, Nothing-to-be-done Bridge, and Ghost Torturing Pass - the three trials for ghosts who wanted to enter the nether world.

Temple of Heng and Ha

The origin of the two vajras can be traced back to ancient Indian Buddhism. In one classic Chinese legend, they were transformed into two guardians with supernatural strength. Guardian Heng could roar or bellow a dazzling light and Han a yellow wind. A ghost who had misbehaved when alive would be knocked down by the light and wind, and prevented from entering the nether world.

Nothing-to-Be-Done Bridge

This three-arched marble bridge is acknowledged to be the second inspection point. A ghost who could stride across it in three steps was considered as a virtuous man while those who could not were considered villains. They would drop down into the river below, and would forever more be deprived of choosing a new life.

Ghost Torturing Pass

Ghost Torturing Pass is the last test before entry to the nether world. Temples display instruments of torture and horrible demon images. Two devilish guards (Shopkeepers) kept a basin of water into which customers threw their coins; if the coins sank they were genuine, but if they floated, the coins were ghost money and unacceptable. For the sum of one dollar, visitors can obtain a 'Passport to Heaven', stamped by the local magistrate and the abbot.

On the other side of the Bridge, Mt. Shuangguishan is reputed as being This World, which is considered a fairyland of tranquility and harmony with lush greenery. There stand some commemorative buildings such as Confucius Temple, Luming Temple, Yuming Spring and En'lai Pavilion, consecrated to Zhou En'lai.

The Ten Courts of Chinese Hell
Court 1: Mirror of Retribution. Ruled by QIN-GUANG-WANG.
Court 2: The Pool of Filth and the Hell of Ice. Ruled by QU-JIANG-WANG.
Court 3: Black Rope Hell and the Upside-Down Prison. Ruled by SONG-DI-WANG.
Court 4: The Lake of Blood and the terrible Bee Torture. Ruled by WU-GUAN-WANG.
Court 5: Sixteen Departments of Heart Gouging. Ruled by YEN-LO-WANG.
Court 6: Screaming Torture and Administrative Errors. Ruled by BIAN-CHENG-WANG.
Court 7: Torture by Mincing Machine. Ruled by TAI-SHAN-WANG.
Court 8: Hot Suffocation Hell. Ruled by DU-SHI-WANG.
Court 9: Iron Web and Office of Fair Trading. Ruled by PING-DENG-WANG.
Court 10: The Wheel of Rebirth. Ruled by ZHUANG-LUN-WANG.

When your agony is complete and you've repented for all you're worth, it's time to be reborn. You're summoned to the Tenth Court, where ZHUANG-LUN-WANG decides the manner of your next existence. (Human being or slug?) Then Lady MENG-PO gives you the Tea of Forgetfulness, which erases your memory and ensures that you completely forget all the punishments you've just been suffering. There is a very good reason for this, but we don't know what it is.

Finally you are given a free ride on the Wheel of Life. Round and round you go, faster and faster, until you shoot off into the void and land in the body of a newborn baby. Or, if you haven't repented enough, the body of a slug.

Mirage

A mirage is a naturally-occurring optical phenomenon, in which light rays are bent to produce a displaced image of distant objects or the sky. The word comes to English via the French mirage, from the Latin mirage, meaning 'to appear, to seem'. This is the same root as for mirror. Like a mirror, a mirage shows images of things which are elsewhere. The principal physical cause of a mirage, however, is refraction and not reflection.

Mirage photo Provided by:
Pekka Parvianinen, Turku University

The picture above is mirage - it's an actual photograph taken by Pekka Parviainen, a lecturer in mathematics at Turku University in Finland. Mirages are commonly seen on many water bodies if clear skies and calm winds prevail. The photo above is a classic example of a superior mirage - the image of a distant object is always displaced upward. In the early spring, when the water is still cold but the air has begun to warm, it's often possible to see superior mirages. Cold water and warm air above creates an atmospheric inversion that can result in the deviation of the usually straight-line movement of light rays. Under such conditions, an object can seem to be displaced or distorted from where we expect it to be or how we expect it to appear. That's the case with this photo. The sailboat in the foreground seems normal, but the island in the background is severely distorted. http://epod.usra.edu/archive/epodviewer.php3?oid=53888

A mirage is not an optical illusion. It is a real phenomenon, and one can take photographs of it. The interpretation of the image, however, is up to the fantasy of the human mind. Is the ghost village just that and that alone?

Ghost Towns

We have all heard of ghost towns. Cities and haunted places where the living once dwelled now abandoned and dead. But what bout a city that was there and in a blink of an eye gone?

A ghost town is a town that has been abandoned, usually because the economic activity that supported it has failed or because of natural or human-caused disasters such as war. The word is sometimes used in a depreciative sense to include areas where the current population is significantly less than it once was. It may be a partial ghost town such as Tonopah, Nevada or a neighborhood where people no longer live (like Love Canal). A tourist ghost town has significant economic activity from tourism, such as Oatman, Arizona, (also see: My Dog The Ghost Hunter) or numerous sites in Egypt, but cannot sustain itself except by tourism. A true ghost town is totally abandoned, such as Bodie, California, but often will see visitors. A ghost town may be a site where little or nothing remains above the soil surface, e.g. Babylon. Often a ghost town will still have significant art and architecture, e.g. Vijayanagara in India or Changan in China. Most large countries and regions contain locations that can be considered ghost towns.

Some ghost towns are tourist attractions, such as Kolmanskop and Elizabeth Bay, outside Luderitz. This is especially true of those that preserve interesting architecture. Visiting, writing about, and photographing them is a minor industry. Other ghost towns may be overgrown, difficult to access, dangerous or illegal to visit.

Factors leading to abandonment of towns include natural resources such as water no longer being available, railways and motorways bypassing or no longer accessing the town (as was the case in many of the ghost towns along Ontario's historic Opeongo Line), shifting economic activity elsewhere, human intervention such as highway rerouting (as was the case with many towns located along U.S. route 66, when motorists bypassed the towns on the faster moving I-44 and I-40), river rerouting (the Aral Sea being one example of this), and nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl. Significant fatality rates from epidemics have also produced ghost towns; for example, some places in eastern Arkansas were abandoned after near-total mortality (over 7,000 Arkansans died [1] during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 and 1919). The Middle East has many ghost towns, created when the shifting of politics or fall of empires caused capital cities to be socially or economically unviable.

Natural disasters can also create ghost towns. After being flooded over 30 times since their the town was founded in 1845, residents of Pattonsburg, Missouri had enough after two floods in 1993. With government help, the whole town was rebuilt a mile away, now known as New Pattonsburg, leaving the old Pattonsburg behind as a ghost town.

Ghost towns may also be created when land is expropriated by a government and everyone living there is told to leave, such as when NASA needed a rocket propulsion testing center and built the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, which required a very large (approximately 55 square kilometers) surrounding buffer zone because of the loud noise and potential dangers associated with testing huge rockets. This created abandoned communities and roads overgrown in the middle of the forest. There are also underwater ghost towns brought about by the building of dams. A good example of this would be the settlement of Loyston, Tennessee, which was inundated by the creation of Norris Lake. The settlement was reorganized and continues to exist today on nearby higher ground. Centralia in Pennsylvania was abandoned due to a dangerous underground coal fire, but since some residents chose to stay despite the dangers, it cannot be classified as a true ghost town.

The Shadow Cities Of America

New Orleans as many can testify has become a shadow city since hurricane Katrina. Many locals report seeing shadow people, figures walking the streets day and night. And shadow homes the ghost of a house that was. Not like New Orleans wasn't one of the most haunted cities in America before August 2005, it stands more haunted now and waiting for people to investigate.

Ghost towns around the world

Argentina
Most European immigrants to Argentina settled in the cities, which offered jobs, education, and other opportunities that enabled newcomers to enter the middle class. Many also settled in the growing small towns along the expanding railway system. Since the 1930s, many rural workers have moved to the big cities.

The 1990s saw many rural towns become ghost towns when train services ceased and local products manufactured on a small scale were replaced by massive amounts of cheap imported goods. Some ghost towns near cities offer tourist attractions, specially during weekends.

Canada
Ghost towns are seen in Northern Ontario, Central Ontario, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador and in Quebec. Some of these were logging towns or dual mining and logging sites, often developed at the bequest of the company. In British Columbia, they were predominantly mining towns and prospecting camps as well as canneries and, in one or two cases, large smelter and pulp mill towns.

British Columbia has more ghost towns than any other jurisdiction on the North American continent, with one estimate at the number of abandoned and semi-abandoned towns and localities upwards of 1500. Barkerville, once the largest town north of San Francisco and west of Chicago is also located in BC. See List of ghost towns in British Columbia.

Chile
Most of the ghost towns in Chile have once been mining camps or lumber mills, such as the many saltpeter mining camps that prospered in from the end of the Saltpeter War until the invention of synthetic saltpeter during the First World War. The ghost towns of Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works in the middle of the Atacama Desert were declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2005. In matters of copper the mining camp of Sewell high up in the Andes of Central Chile became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006. Despite protection laws most of this ghost town suffer "tourist looting" due to the lack of vigilance among other reasons.

Port Famine (Spanish: Puerto Hambre) is arguable Chile's oldest ghost town. It was founded in the Strait of Magellan in 1584 by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. Starvation and the cold climate killed all of the inhabitants. The English navigator, Sir Thomas Cavendish landed at the site in 1587 he found only ruins of the settlement. He renamed the place Port Famine.

Other lesser known ghost towns are located in the southern part of the Chilean Coast Range, were they once were lumbermills were Fitzroya were cut down to make roof shingles, as they it was a typical element of Chilota architecture.

Guyana
Jonestown in Guyana became a ghost town following the mass suicide of the Peoples Temple community that lived there.

Mexico
Real de Catorce

One of the finest ghost towns in the Americas, Real de Catorce was once a flourishing mining town in northern Mexico. Its marvelous landscapes and buildings have been used by Hollywood for movies like The Mexican (2001) with Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts. Recent efforts to adapt the town to tourism have created a nice mixture of ghost town scenario and tourist site adapted to visitors in search of interesting historic traveling south of the border.

USA
There are many ghost towns in the American Great Plains, whose rural areas have lost a third of their population since 1920. There are more than 6,000 abandoned sites of settlement in the state of Kansas alone, according to Kansas historian Daniel Fitzgerald. Ghost towns are common in mining or old mill town areas: Washington, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Montana, and California in the western United States and West Virginia in the eastern USA. They can be observed as far south as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia and Florida. When the resources that had created an employment boom in these towns played out, eventually the businesses ceased to exist, and the people moved on to more productive areas. Sometimes a ghost town consists of many old abandoned buildings (like in Bodie, California), other times there are simply structures or foundations of former buildings (ie Graysonia, Arkansas). Even some of the earliest settlements in the US are or have been ghost towns, such as Jamestown, Virginia and the Zwaanendael Colony in Delaware.

Old mining camps that have lost most of their population at some stage of their history, such as Central City, Colorado; Aspen, Colorado; Virginia City, Montana; Marysville, Montana; Tombstone, Arizona; Deadwood, South Dakota; Park City, Utah; Crested Butte, Colorado; or Cripple Creek, Colorado are sometimes included in the category, although they are active towns and cities today.

A recent attempt to declare an "Official Ghost Town" in California collapsed when the adherents of the town of Calico, in Southern California, and those of Bodie, in Northern California, could not come to an agreement as to which of their favorites was more deserving.

Antarctica
The oldest ghost town in Antarctica is located in Deception Island, were in 1906 a Norwegian-Chilean whaling company started using Whalers' Bay as a base for a factory ship, the Gobernador Bories. Other whaling operations followed suit, and by 1914 there were 13 factory ships based there.

Antarctica also has many more-recently abandoned scientific and military bases, especially in the Antarctic Peninsula.

Australia
Similar to the United States, Canada and other former frontier countries, most ghost towns in Australia were usually formed after the end of mining operations or the removal of railway services. They are spread throughout the country and are located in every state and territory. Some ghost towns in Australia include Cassilis in Victoria, Farina in the far north of South Australia and Goldsworthy in Western Australia.

Europe
In Europe, many villages were abandoned over the ages, for many different reasons. Sometimes, wars and genocide end a town's life, and it is never resettled. This happened to the Swedish town Sjöstad, in Närke, in 1260, when the town's 700 merchants had crossed the ice of Lake Vättern and been cut down by the Danes. The Danes then proceeded to the town, ravaging and burning it. The town was never resettled. A farm named Skyrstad, ruins and a silver treasure which yielded 4000 coins are all that testify to its existence (see abandoned village). In the United Kingdom, the once thriving farming village of Knaptoft in Leicestershire was abandoned after it was razed by puritan parliamentarian forces during the English Civil War and was never resettled. The ruins of the former church still exist as a graveyard, with graves even occupying ground inside the ruins of the church. The village of Imber on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire was evacuated by the British army and the abandoned buildings are now used for training exercises. Natural disasters also play a role. For example, the erupting volcano of Vesuvius famously terminated Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy in 79.

This process continues to this day, with the village of Etzweiler in northwestern Germany being abandoned in the 1990s to make way for a coal mine.

Pyramiden (Swedish, meaning "the pyramid",) was a Russian settlement and coal mining community on the archipelago of Svalbard, Norway. It was founded by Sweden in 1910, and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927. The settlement, with a one time population of 1,000 inhabitants, was abandoned in the late-1990s by its owner, the state-owned Soviet company Trust Artikugol, and is now a ghost town. There are no restrictions on visiting Pyramiden. However, visitors may not enter any buildings without permission, even if the doors are open. Most buildings are now locked. Pyramiden is accessible by boat or snowmobile. Guided tours are available (in Russian, Norwegian, and English).

The city of Prypiat and dozens of smaller settlements in northern Ukraine and southern Belarus were abandoned after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and turned into a closed alienation zone. The area has been largely untouched since then, and as such it functions as a large time capsule of the late Soviet era. There is an online photojournal of this area.

The Île aux Marins of the Saint-Pierre and Miquelon groups of islands.

In Finland, which is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, the most of people live in the biggest towns, and some villages near the Russian border and in Lapland are nearly abandoned.

In Hungary,many small village(mainly in Northern Hungary) has only a few inhabint,or none. They previosly had residents around 500-1500. The reason is the negative demographic scale, and this village's population are past beared.

While Athens, Greece, experienced severe decline after the end of the Byzantine Empire, it may never have been a ghost town, although it certainly came close, dwindling to some 3,000 or 4,000 people by the 19th century. It has since gone back to being a major city. Rome experienced similar declines, but it, too, might not have been completely abandoned (one of its lowest estimated populations was 17,000 in 1347, down from more than a million in Imperial times

Middle East
Following the 1974 events in Cyprus, the southern part of Famagusta, also known as Varosha/Maras, was abandoned by its original inhabitants without being settled. While the problem is not resolved, Varosha/Maras is a ghost town and a tourist attraction. Megiddo is an ancient ghost town in Israel, while Catal Huyuk is an archaeological site in Turkey.

Japan
Hashima Island was a Japanese mining town from 1887 to 1974. Once known for having the world's highest population density (in 1959 at 3460 people per square kilometer), the island was abandoned when the coal mines were closed down.

Asia
Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, two ancient cities in current day Pakistan, found use as free brick piles for centuries after their abandonment. In addition, numerous cities in China and India, such as Luoyang, Vijaynagar,and other such towns have been known to have been destroyed /turned into ghost towns and revived or had new cities built in the vicinity over the millennia, due to such things as shifts in the course of the Yangtze River, political struggles, and changes in the country's capital (China has had several capitals over its long history).

Africa
Outside Luderitz, Namibia there are two ghost towns, Elizabeth Bay and Kolmanskop. Both were diamond mining towns and have been partly covered by the shifting sands of the Namib Desert. There is also the ancient city of Carthage, which was rendered a ghost town by the Romans, revived by the same empire, and then destroyed again a few centuries later, with Tunis becoming the central city. Suburban settlement later occurred in the Carthage area.

Ghosts of Pluckley The Most Haunted Village in England

A little way across the fields from the village is the Elvey Farm Country Hotel. Originally a barn built in the 1400’s, an upper storey was added in the 16th century and it was converted into a comfortable home. In the days when the building was a farmhouse, there were frequent sightings of a fair-haired man in his mid –20’s with a short-cropped beard. Doors were known to have opened mysteriously in the night, phantom footsteps were heard plodding along corridors, and lights were switched on by unseen hands. There is a tradition that a tenant farmer committed suicide at the farm in the 1850’s following the death of his wife and the failure of his business. Intriguingly a Japanese television crew who visited the hotel in the 1990’s brought with them a medium to contact whatever spirits haunted the building. No sooner had she climbed out of the car, than she suddenly felt the overwhelming sensation of someone drowning She could not have known that the hotel’s car park actually stood on the site of a pond which had long since been filled in!

http://www.london-walks.co.uk/50/index.shtm