San Antonio Has 56 Haunted Places but Only 27 Ghost Sightings in a Month, a New Study Finds

San Antonio's ghosts have plenty of places to haunt; they just do not seem to be showing up much. A new study by home security company Vivint, assessing how haunted 74 U.S. cities are, counts 56 purportedly haunted places in San Antonio — second only to Los Angeles, which has 61 — according to the San Antonio Current's account of the study, read this cycle.

The sightings tell the other half of the story. San Antonio recorded just 27 reported ghost sightings last month, less than a quarter of Austin's 115 — the highest of any city in the study — and that gap helps explain why San Antonio finished 11th on the study's Spookiness Index, per the Current. Researchers looked at seven factors, including reported ghost sightings, haunted places, haunted house attractions, paranormal-themed businesses and spooky Google searches, using data collected in September, normalized each measure and combined them into a single score, per the account.

On the study's other measures San Antonio is less spooky than its haunted-places count suggests. The city had the study's second-lowest concentration of psychics and astrologers, at 0.73 per 10,000 residents, and logged just 163 spooky Google searches per 10,000 residents — the lowest among the four Texas cities in the study's top 20, per the Current. The file lands on Día de los Muertos Sunday, in a city whose historic missions, hotels and theaters carry ghost lore year-round — the study measures the lore's footprint, not the ghosts.