Famous ghost stories and haunted places
Tower of London, Eastern State Penitentiary, the Stanley Hotel (inspired The Shining). Haunted places trivia rewards horror fans.
Q1.The Winchester Mystery House, famous for its staircases that lead nowhere, stands in which US state?Tap to reveal
Answer: California
Sarah Winchester's fortune came from the repeating rifle company built by her husband's family.
Q2.The 1975 haunting case that inspired The Amityville Horror took place in a house in which US state?Tap to reveal
Answer: New York
The Lutz family lasted 28 days in the house, which had been the scene of six family murders committed by Ronald DeFeo Jr. the year before.
Q3.Which Colorado hotel inspired Stephen King to write The Shining after he stayed in room 217?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Stanley Hotel
King spent a single night there in 1974, at the end of the season, when the hotel was almost empty and about to close for the winter.
Q4.The Tower of London's most famous resident ghost is said to be which beheaded queen?Tap to reveal
Answer: Anne Boleyn
She was executed in 1536 by a swordsman brought over from Calais rather than by the usual axe.
Q5.Which English royal palace has a Haunted Gallery where the ghost of Catherine Howard is said to scream?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hampton Court Palace
Catherine Howard was the fifth wife of Henry VIII, and the legend has her running down that corridor to beg him for her life before her execution in 1542.
Q6.What name do folklorists give to the legend of a young woman who is picked up by a driver at night and then disappears from the moving vehicle?Tap to reveal
Answer: The vanishing hitchhiker
Versions of the tale were collected long before cars existed, with the phantom passenger riding in carts and carriages instead.
Q7.The RMS Queen Mary, now permanently docked and running ghost tours, sits in which California city?Tap to reveal
Answer: Long Beach
The liner served as a troopship in the Second World War, when she was painted battleship grey and nicknamed the Grey Ghost.
Q8.Which Edinburgh cemetery is said to be haunted by the Mackenzie Poltergeist?Tap to reveal
Answer: Greyfriars Kirkyard
The same graveyard is far better known to tourists for Greyfriars Bobby, the terrier said to have kept watch over his owner's grave.
Q9.The 1977 poltergeist case that inspired The Conjuring 2 centred on a council house in which London borough?Tap to reveal
Answer: Enfield
The disturbances focused on two young sisters, and one of them later admitted that some of the phenomena had been faked, which is why the case remains disputed.
Q10.Which Essex building was promoted in the 1930s as the most haunted house in England?Tap to reveal
Answer: Borley Rectory
Investigator Harry Price made its reputation with books and a year-long tenancy; the building burned in 1939 and was demolished a few years later.
UFOs and famous sightings
Roswell 1947, Phoenix Lights 1997, USS Nimitz Tic Tac 2004. UFO trivia spans 80 years.
Q1.Which secretive US Air Force facility in the Nevada desert sits at the centre of UFO lore?Tap to reveal
Answer: Area 51
The government did not publicly acknowledge the base until declassified CIA documents in 2013 described it as a test site for the U-2 spy plane.
Q2.In July 1947 the Army Air Field at which New Mexico town issued, then withdrew, a press release announcing it had recovered a flying disc?Tap to reveal
Answer: Roswell
The Air Force's 1994 report attributed the debris to Project Mogul, a classified programme of high-altitude balloons that listened for Soviet nuclear tests.
Q3.Pilot Kenneth Arnold's 1947 report of objects skimming like saucers on water gave the world which two-word phrase?Tap to reveal
Answer: Flying saucer
Arnold was describing how the objects moved, not their shape, but newspapers turned it into the disc that has defined UFO imagery ever since.
Q4.Which three-letter acronym has the US government adopted in place of UFO in its official reporting?Tap to reveal
Answer: UAP
It first stood for unidentified aerial phenomena and was broadened in 2022 so that objects reported underwater and in space would also be covered.
Q5.Which US Air Force programme collected and investigated UFO reports from 1952 until it was shut down in 1969?Tap to reveal
Answer: Project Blue Book
It logged more than 12,000 sightings, of which roughly 700 were still filed as unidentified when the programme closed.
Q6.In March 1997 thousands of people reported a huge V-formation of lights over which US city?Tap to reveal
Answer: Phoenix
The Air Force attributed the later part of that evening to flares dropped over a training range, an explanation that does not cover the earlier formation many witnesses described.
Q7.The 1980 UFO incident often called Britain's Roswell took place in which Suffolk forest, beside two US airbases?Tap to reveal
Answer: Rendlesham Forest
The case became public largely because a memo written by the deputy base commander describing the lights was released years afterwards.
Q8.Betty and Barney Hill's 1961 New Hampshire case is regarded as the first widely publicised account of what kind of UFO experience?Tap to reveal
Answer: Alien abduction
Their account, recovered under hypnosis, introduced the large-eyed grey being that went on to dominate later abduction reports.
Q9.US Navy pilots nicknamed the object in their 2004 encounter off the coast of California after which breath mint?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tic Tac
The infrared footage was captured by a fighter's targeting pod and was officially released by the Pentagon in 2020.
Q10.A famous wave of black triangle sightings in 1989 and 1990, investigated with the cooperation of the national air force, took place in which European country?Tap to reveal
Answer: Belgium
The wave's most reproduced photograph, showing a triangle with lights at its corners, was admitted to be a hoax by the man who made it in 2011.
Cryptids — Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman
Cryptozoology trivia. Each cryptid has its own backstory and reported sightings.
Q1.What is the popular nickname of the Loch Ness Monster?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nessie
Loch Ness holds more fresh water than every lake in England and Wales combined, which is part of why sonar sweeps keep coming back empty.
Q2.Bigfoot is also known by which name, borrowed from the Halkomelem language of British Columbia?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sasquatch
The word is an anglicisation of sasq'ets, popularised in the 1920s and 1930s by a schoolteacher who collected local accounts.
Q3.The Mothman is tied to which West Virginia town?Tap to reveal
Answer: Point Pleasant
The sightings of 1966 and 1967 became linked in legend to the collapse of the Silver Bridge in December 1967, which killed 46 people.
Q4.The famous 1967 film clip that appears to show a Bigfoot striding away is known by which hyphenated pair of surnames?Tap to reveal
Answer: Patterson-Gimlin
It was shot at Bluff Creek in northern California and has never been conclusively authenticated or debunked.
Q5.Which cryptid blamed for draining livestock has a Spanish name meaning goat sucker?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chupacabra
The first reports came from Puerto Rico in 1995, while later Texas specimens turned out on examination to be coyotes suffering from mange.
Q6.The 1934 Surgeon's Photograph of the Loch Ness Monster was faked using a sculpted head and neck mounted on what kind of toy?Tap to reveal
Answer: A toy submarine
The picture was revenge on the Daily Mail by big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell, whose own "monster footprints" at the loch had been exposed as prints made with a dried hippo's foot.
Q7.The Yeti is associated with which mountain range?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Himalayas
The name Abominable Snowman came from a journalist's garbled translation of a Tibetan term reported by a 1921 expedition.
Q8.The Jersey Devil is said to haunt which forested region of southern New Jersey?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Pine Barrens
The legend makes it the thirteenth child of a woman remembered as Mother Leeds, born in 1735 and transformed at birth.
Q9.Which water-dwelling creature of Aboriginal oral tradition is said to lurk in Australian swamps and billabongs?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Bunyip
Colonists in the 1840s exhibited skulls as bunyip remains, but naturalists identified them as deformed horse or calf skulls.
Q10.Expeditions hunting the dinosaur-like Mokele-mbembe have concentrated on the swamps of which African river basin?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Congo
Repeated expeditions since the 1980s have returned with eyewitness stories but no physical evidence whatsoever.
Pop culture paranormal
Ghost Hunters (TV), The X-Files, Stranger Things, Paranormal Activity. The franchises that mainstreamed paranormal.
Q1.In Ghostbusters (1984), what is the name of the giant marshmallow figure that stomps through New York in the finale?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man
The creature takes that form because Ray is the only Ghostbuster who fails to clear his mind when the choice of destructor is offered.
Q2.Who recorded the theme song for Ghostbusters (1984)?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ray Parker Jr.
Huey Lewis sued over the song's resemblance to I Want a New Drug, and the case was settled out of court.
Q3.In The Sixth Sense (1999), what does young Cole Sear whisper that he sees?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dead people
The filmmakers used a rule throughout the production that the colour red only appears on screen when the supernatural is present.
Q4.Which married pair of self-described demonologists investigated the cases that inspired The Conjuring films?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ed and Lorraine Warren
Their claims were disputed even by other paranormal researchers, and several families involved later challenged how the films portrayed events.
Q5.Which 1999 low-budget film was marketed as recovered footage left behind by three missing student filmmakers?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Blair Witch Project
The campaign was so convincing that the three lead actors were briefly listed as deceased on film databases while the film was in cinemas.
Q6.In Poltergeist (1982), which household appliance do the spirits first use to speak to little Carol Anne?Tap to reveal
Answer: The television
Steven Spielberg co-wrote and produced the film, and a long-running dispute over how much of it he rather than credited director Tobe Hooper actually directed has followed it ever since.
Q7.Which television series followed FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully as they investigated the paranormal?Tap to reveal
Answer: The X-Files
Its opening titles carried the tagline The Truth Is Out There, which was swapped for other phrases in a number of special episodes.
Q8.The Exorcist (1973) was adapted from a novel by which author, who drew on a 1949 exorcism case?Tap to reveal
Answer: William Peter Blatty
The real case involved a boy in Maryland rather than a girl, and Blatty changed nearly every identifying detail before writing the book.
Q9.In Ringu and its American remake The Ring, what object carries the deadly curse?Tap to reveal
Answer: A videotape
The story began as a 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki, and the vengeful girl's name, Sadako, was changed to Samara for the American version.
Q10.Which spirit-communication board, patented in the United States in 1891, is treated by horror films as a doorway for the dead?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Ouija board
It has been sold as an ordinary board game since Parker Brothers bought the rights in 1966, and it is owned by Hasbro today.
Running paranormal trivia
Paranormal trivia works at Halloween. Mix history (Roswell, Bigfoot dates) with pop culture (X-Files episodes).
Trivio.NET has Paranormal packs in the General Knowledge category.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the most-asked paranormal trivia?
Roswell year (1947), Bigfoot's other names (Sasquatch, Yeti — different beings), and the original 'Loch Ness Monster photo' (1934, later proven a hoax).
Is paranormal trivia good for kids?
Older kids 10+. Cryptids are great kid content; UFO/ghost stories can be scary depending on detail.
Where can I find paranormal trivia packs?
Trivio.NET's General Knowledge category has Paranormal packs by topic.
Is paranormal trivia respectful of skeptics?
Yes — best paranormal trivia gives both the believer narrative AND the skeptic counter-explanation. Both perspectives.
