When I was in high school my friends and I would drive out into the country to abandoned houses and structures... haha... to ghost hunt. We would scare each other so bad! We would sometimes camp out by the abandoned buildings just to scare ourselves! Such good times. The adrenaline of real fear is so cool!
It is curious how from time immemorial man seems to have associated the idea of evil with beauty shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly fear while at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic attraction.
There is something about the South that accepts the supernatural. If you don't accept it and you're having a conversation with someone who does it's just one of those polite things where you don't question their belief in ghosts. You just go 'Oh yeah okay.' It's amazing to be able to have conversations like that.
Largely this is a class thing - writers tend to be cosseted little middle-class kiddies who think that the world owes them a royalty cheque. But just doing it - being in your room for years on end locked in your head alone with invented ghosts - it weakens and softens the body. And I know I can't just live in my head.