The Most Haunted Place in the World

There is no most haunted place on earth, because there is nothing to measure and nobody who ranks it. Every list you find is somebody's editorial choice, usually built from other lists. What does exist is documented history and the stories people told about it, and those two things can be told apart, which is what this site does.

Measurable rankingNone exists

Ranking bodyNone exists

What the lists areEditorial choices

What can be checkedDates, tolls, court and police records

Copenhagen legendThe Rosenborg ghost cat

Copenhagen recordPlague, fires, bombardment, cholera

Why the question has no answer

A haunting cannot be counted, so a place cannot be ranked by it. Any article that puts one location at number one has chosen it, and the choice is usually inherited from an earlier article that chose it for the same reason. We are not going to produce a list of ten buildings with invented details attached, because that is how the entire genre went wrong.

What can be established

Take Copenhagen. The plague of 1711 killed about 20,000 of 66,000 people. The fire of October 1728 destroyed 47% of the medieval core. The Royal Navy fired 300 Congreve rockets into the city in September 1807, killing about 195 civilians, and burned the cathedral. Cholera killed 4,737 people in 1853. A permanent execution scaffold stood on Nytorv from 1627 to 1761. Every one of those is a date and a number, and together they make this pretty, safe capital one of the most thoroughly death-marked cities in Europe.

And what people told each other

Separately, and labelled as such: Rosenborg Castle is said to be haunted by a guard's cat; Frederiksberg Palace by Frederik VI as a small dog; Laksegade by whatever broke the windows in September 1826, which the police statement of 15 September called fabrication apart from the glass. Those are stories. Keeping the two columns apart is the only honest way to answer a question like this one. See the haunted places page, the Devil in Laksegade and the most famous ghosts.

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Frequently asked questions

What is the number one most haunted place in the world?

There is no answer. Nothing measurable is being ranked and no organisation ranks it. Every list is an editorial choice.

Is Copenhagen a haunted city?

It is a heavily death-marked one, with documented plague, fires, a bombardment and cholera. The ghost stories are told here as stories.

What are Copenhagen's haunted places?

Rosenborg and Frederiksberg carry palace legends, and Laksegade carries an unsolved 1826 case. See the haunted places page.