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Shouldn’t The Colosseum Be The Most Haunted Place On Earth?

The astounding number of people killed on the sands

Grant Piper
4 min readJan 4, 2025
(By Giovanni Battista Piranesi — R.S. Johnson fine art, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5765775)

Most people equate hauntings with violent or unjust deaths. Many tales have been told of houses being haunted by the spirits of the deceased, usually people who died within the home. Given this understanding of how hauntings come into existence, the Roman Colosseum should be one of the most haunted places on Earth, if not the most haunted. That is because the Colosseum saw an astounding number of deaths within its walls.

The estimates of the number of people who died within the Colosseum range between 400,000 and 500,000, not to mention an uncounted number of animals that also met their grisly ends within the Colosseum. That equates to roughly 1,000 people per year over a roughly 400-year history. That is 2.7 people dying inside the Colosseum every day for 400 years. Few places on Earth have such a long and bloody history as this ancient edifice.

These deaths came from a number of sources. The Colosseum housed public executions, chariot races, mock naval battles, hunting spectacles, and, of course, bloody gladiator combat. Each of these events led to deaths, sometimes by the dozens. The sands of the Colosseum are some of the bloodiest in the world.

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Grant Piper
Grant Piper

Written by Grant Piper

Professional writer. Amateur historian. Husband, father, Christian.

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