Should a Cowardly Ghost Fanatic Have a Bucket List?

Everybody knows about bucket lists. I don't actually have one pertaining to my life in general, but I have a two-item list pertaining to all things weird and supernatural. You'd think they would be visits to haunted sites, right? Uh, no, actually, they're not.

Even though I read and write about ghosts constantly, I do not have a list of haunted places that I feel a driving need to see. For one thing, some of the most haunted places on the planet include mental institutions, prisons, and places where something really bad happened. Let's go over that list.

1. Mental institutions. Think Transallegheny Lunatic Asylum, purportedly one of the most haunted places in the country. People lived in abject misery there, were tortured in place of actual treatment, and then died, only to be buried on the grounds of this nightmare facility. I doubt very much that anyone or anything haunting the place is going to be either chipper or welcoming. I have a hard enough time with the "neutral" types that walk through my house. Do I really want to run into the spirit of someone who was unwell and then tormented for the rest of his or her life? I don't think so.

2. Prisons. Think either Alcatraz or the haunted Old Charleston Jail in South Carolina. Like their brethren in the mental institutions, these people were also incarcerated and treated very badly. Some of them, in Charleston, were executed there. So what we would have are beings who were probably pretty dark and disturbed to begin with, who then went on to live their lives in a pretty dark and disturbed place. And again, some of those lives ended very badly. I know I don't want to run into a deceased murderer who is still hacked-off at the world and likely to take that out on anyone who passes by. No thank you.

3. Places where something really bad happened. My friend, writer and ghost hunter Sylvia Shults not only spends a lot of time hanging out in the abandoned Peoria Mental Hospital (she wrote a book about it called Fractured Spirits) and doing paranormal investigations got herself. She also got over to the Lizzie Borden House to investigate there. She was so excited when she told me about it. I was so serious when I told her she was crazy. I've heard some of the audiotapes from that night. YIKES. Interestingly, the Lizzie Borden House is a bed and breakfast. You can pay to spend the night there. Someone would have to pay me to spend the night there. There's also the Villisca Ax Murder House in Iowa in case someone in the Midwest is really jones-ing for a site that involved grisly murder. And that murder was never solved so I doubt that any spirit around the entire area is very peaceful. Having been on several ghost tours in Chicago, I've been to the location of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and also to the alley where John Dillinger met his demise. Neither place is remarkable on casual inspection, but I wouldn't hang around there after dark for several reasons, and at least one of them is the paranormal aspect of those sites.

My friend Terri Reid and I took a ghost tour once and she was disappointed that "nothing happened." I think that was her way of saying that the haunted places we went to were less active than her own house. That's one difference between Terri and me: I like listening to the history and the ghost stories about a haunted place. She wants to experience things first-hand. I always think no, no, stories alone are good. Stories are enough for me. She might actually prefer an investigation, and considering what her house is like, I guess her idea of paranormal has a much higher threshold than mine.

So what two places would a cowardly ghost fanatic have on her bucket list? 

1. The International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. I think it was the first of its kind, although when I researched "cryptozoology museum" other listings popped up in Maryland, North Carolina, and London. There was even a "cryptozoology-museum-near-me" option. Wow! I think my list just got longer!

2. Ghost lights. I write that without a specific place in mind because I don't care if I go to Marfa, Texas, Brown Mountain in North Carolina, or up near Paulding, Michigan on the Upper Peninsula. I'd just like to see actual ghost lights. Once.

I guess I wouldn't mind seeing a Sasquatch out in the Pacific Northwest, either, And maybe the Mothman Museum. So there are tentative third and fourth items.

There's the bucket list of a ghost fanatic who is not in a hurry to see another ghost. None of these have anything to do with hauntings, unless the ghost lights do. But all of them have to do with the weird. I can handle that.