Local paranormal investigators point to the city's whaling era wealth and its later industrial revolution history as the source of most of its reported activity. Fortunes were made and lost fast in New Bedford, and the same buildings that housed that wealth later housed factory workers, including children, living through some of the hardest conditions of the era. That kind of history tends to leave a mark.

On August 4, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were found hacked to death inside their home on Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew's daughter Lizzie was arrested, tried, and ultimately acquitted, and to this day nobody has ever been convicted of the crime.

The Bridgewater Triangle is a roughly 200 square mile stretch of southeastern Massachusetts that has carried a reputation for unexplained activity since the 1970s.