I woke up and saw a female spirit standing on my boyfriends side of the bed." "The cats would not go up the stairs...sometimes they hiss at something out of nowhere." More than two out of five Americans believe in ghosts, and nearly one in five claim they've encountered one themselves. And the rest of us are morbidly curious about it, judging from the wild success of dramatizations of spirit encounters through shows like Netflix's Paranormal and movies like Spirited. Just in time for Halloween, we present an organized collection of compelling ghost stories, tales of haunted houses, energy orb sightings, and other unexplained phenomena, and bring some science to bear. Do our dead really still live among us in a shadowy alternate state...and if not, what in the world is actually going on?