WASHINGTON — It was bad enough when the TV and lights inexplicably flicked on at night, Misty Conrad says. When her daughter began talking to an unseen girl named Nicole and neighbors said children had been murdered in the house, it was time to move.
Put Conrad, a homemaker from Hampton, Va., firmly in the camp of the 34 percent of people who say they believe in ghosts, according to a pre-Halloween poll by The Associated Press and Ipsos. That’s the same proportion who believe in unidentified flying objects – exceeding the 19 percent who accept the existence of spells or witchcraft.
Forty-eight percent believe in extrasensory perception, or ESP. But nearly half of you knew we were about to tell you that, right?
To put the roughly one-third who believe in ghosts and UFOs in perspective, it’s about the same as, in recent AP-Ipsos polls, the 36 percent who said they are baseball fans, the 37 percent who said the U.S. made the right decision to invade Iraq and the 31 percent who approve of the job President Bush is doing.
By 31 percent to 18 percent, more liberals than conservatives report seeing a specter.
