Left: Former President Donald Trump (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) Right: A double exposure of a silhouette of a mysterious hooded figure standing in a forest at night. (Getty Images)
Want the best of VICE News straight to your inbox? Sign up here.Gather ’round the fire to hear a terrifying tale, of how Facebook memes ruined your uncle’s brain and he thinks Donald Trump is still the actual president. More than 4 in 10 Americans say they believe in the existence of ghosts, according to a YouGov survey released this month, but just 20 percent said they’ve personally encountered one. That’s fewer than the nearly 30 percent of Americans surveyed this summer who believe that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from Trump, according to an August YouGov/Yahoo poll.Nearly a year of legal challenges and both legitimate and half-baked election audits have definitively proven that President Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020, by a lot. The jury’s still out on ghosts. The YouGov poll on ghosts surveyed 1,000 Americans between October 8 and October 13. While just one in five Americans said they’ve seen a ghost, 41 percent say they believe in the existence of ghosts. Slightly more say they believe in demons, driven by a majority of Republicans, according to the YouGov poll. (Roughly a third of Democrats believe in demons.) The belief in werewolves and vampires isn’t nearly as strong—fewer than 10 percent of Americans believe in either of those. While it’s unclear whether Trump himself believes in ghosts, he has nominated at least one self-described ghost hunter to the federal bench. In 2017, Trump nominated 36-year-old Brett Talley to a district court seat in Alabama, but Talley was one of the few Trump judicial nominees whose nomination was pulled because he couldn’t be confirmed, even in a Republican-led Senate.For whatever reason—the ongoing systematic breakdown of our institutions and dim prospects for our society and planet could be one theory, just throwing it out there—it doesn’t seem as though many are in the Halloween spirit this year. Nearly three-quarters of respondents told YouGov they don’t plan to wear a costume this year, and among parents of children under 18, just 40 percent said they plan on letting their kids go trick-or-treating while nearly half said they wouldn’t. The real monsters? The 4 percent of parents who said they’d eat all of their kids’ Halloween candy.
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