the heyday of the Roman Empire. Pliny reported that the specter of an old man with a long beard, and rattling chains, was haunting his house in Athens. The Greek writer Lucian and Pliny’s fellow Roman Plautus also wrote memorable ghost stories. In a 2005 Gallup poll, 37% of Americans, 28% of Canadians, and 40% of Britons believed that houses could be haunted. In a 2009 Pew Research Center survey, about 29% of Americans believed they had been in touch with someone who had died. According to a Research Co. poll released in 2020, 40% of Canadian women and 25% of Canadian men stated they believed in haunted houses. In Japan, there is a tradition, linked to Buddhism, of creating (ghost houses) in August, when it is believed that ancestral spirits may visit. People go to ghost houses to listen to frightening stories or seek elaborate decorations and costumes to experience shivers as a way to feel cooler in the hot summer temperatures. The Shanghai Disneyland Park planners decided against building The Haunted Mansion because of the local cultural beliefs about ghosts and hauntings. Building the house would have been considered a mockery of their fear. In Wuhan, China, the police have built a haunted house to train their police force by testing their nerves. They filled a dilapidated house with faked severed limbs, bones, skulls and a frightening atmosphere that includes lightning and rain. The house is also open to the public. During the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020, Indonesian lawmakers of the Sragen region on the island of Java decided to lock people who did not follow quarantine guidelines in abandoned and supposedly haunted houses. It was an attempt to motivate a superstitious population when science failed to do so. Proposed causes According to Owen Davies's book, The Haunted: a Social History of Ghosts, "[e]ven the most devout believers in ghosts over the centuries recognized that many hauntings were frauds." In an interview with USA Today, Davies states that "[f]or skeptics in the past and present, the house was obviously the center of hauntings because it was where people slept and dreamed of the dead, or where people lay drunk, drugged or hallucinating in their sickbeds." Such basic poltergeist phenomena as rapping or knocking were very easy to orchestrate with the help of accomplices or a variety of ploys. According to science writer Terence Hines, cold spots, creaking sounds,