Egregore

An egregore is a group mind made of belief: an entity sustained by many people's attention — a mascot, a house spirit, a town's private devil — that occultists claim gains a life of its own. The sociology is real even for skeptics: shared expectation shapes what whole communities perceive. The stories filed here are small-town cases mostly: the bridge everyone avoids and the year someone did not, the office superstition that started enforcing itself. Whether the town made the thing or the thing made the town is the argument.

Related on this site: /tag/unexplained-events/ /tag/small-town/ /most-discussed/