This picture is from the 1890s.
I had to add the house I grew up in to the list of 50 places I’m researching because as a personal witness to the phenomenon and the makeup of the land and structure, I can probably give more information to this site than the others.
Aspen Grove was built in Fairfax Virginia in the mid 1700s originally as a fort against Indians, supposedly. Back then, it was called "The Springfield" because it was fed by the Pohick Creek (an offshoot of the Potomac) and had lots of underground springs, one of which fed the well to our home and the outbuildings with the best tasting water I’ve ever had in my entire life. During the Civil War, the Union took it over and used it as a field hospital, then the Confederates got it back and used it for the same. Both sides bled and died there. You can't get more conflict than to have both sides haunting the place. The grounds were rich with relics, the wooden floors still stained dark from their blood, and the ghosts most assuredly restless.
Scoring:
1. It was made of stone.
2. It sat atop an underwater spring with a creek running through the yard.
3. The land was made up of sandstone, siltstone, and shale. In fact, I used to play with the crumbly shale that lined the creek out front. The yard was filled with quartz rock too which supposedly another good conductor for spirit activity.
4. The house was way over 50 years old.
5. Quite obviously, it saw a great deal of death and trauma.
The only thing that is missing is proximity to the train tracks. I hope to find that out by researching haunted sites that are near train tracks but meet little of the other criteria and ones that are very haunted but do not locate themselves near tracks. So far, what I can discern is that like the building being round or near a graveyard, train tracks might be a smaller factor rather than a large factor in the haunt-ability of a place.
It appears that the geology of the land is a very strong factor so far in creating the right conditions for a place to be haunted, but still you would need some other factors, as well, such as a moving bodies of water and of course a history of trauma/death.
As an extremely logic-minded (yeah, Virgo) person, I can't help but wonder if settlers simply put their homes down near supplies of water which are usually found on ground that has sedimentary rock because they were floodplains, and then train tracks were built to move those folks in the community around the countryside. The only way to really find out if they have a factor is to try and find a case of a haunted site that has good evidence it's haunted, but the ground is not right for a haunting,i.e. there's no waterways, the place doesn't have a long history of traumatic events... Have you ever heard of a place being haunted that had nothing traumatic happen there or on the land it's built upon? Hmm...
Well, as I learn more, I'll certainly be sharing it with you. I'd love to have folks chime in and throw in their two cents worth. The more heads the better.