Ever been in a haunted building? (1 Viewer)

[Greg_S_H]

I beat you both to it when I acknowledge it sounded like sleep terrors.

Why can't this just be a fun thread without the need to poke holes in everything?

 

[andrew markworthy]

A couple of points. First, one of the current psychological theories is that a great many reports of hauntings are due to very very low frequencies. Various laboratory studies have shown that people can hallucinate when exposed to very low frequency sound. Now as we all know, houses can creak and groan, but what isn't so well known is that some houses (particularly very old ones) will do this quite frequently at very low frequencies. I can't recall the reference for this study, but one done in England showed that supposedly haunted rooms in a couple of ancestral homes were also the epicentres of these very low frequency noises.

But if you want a bizarre case, try the following. I swear that everything in this is true. Back in the 1960s, some family friends bought a very old house (bits of it dated back to the Domesday Book). Shortly after they moved in, their daughter (about three years old) became seriously ill. And then things started happening. At first it was a banging sound on the ceiling. I was about eight or nine at the time and I can clearly recall being in the house when this happened on one occasion. It was like a large man was jumping up and down in one of the bedrooms above. The only snag was that everyone in the house was downstairs at the time, and there was no possible way anyone else could have got into the house, done this, and then got out.

Then things began to get weird.

At first, it was a simple matter of things seemingly moving from one place to another in the house. This was attributed, logically enough, to people being forgetful about moving something. But then the house owners and on at least two occasions visitors (including my mother) saw things slide along a mantelpiece, seemingly of their own accord.

Okay, now all of this could be due to settling in, subsidence, etc. And indeed this is what the owners attributed it to. I should explain at this point that they were intensely sceptical of a paranormal explanation. Until the last, final event. As I said, their daughter was seriously ill. One night, she started running a fever and was put to bed. Her parents had literally just gone downstairs from putting her to bed when there was the most enormous noise of banging from their daughter's room. They ran upstairs and found the daughter lying on the floor, and the bed tipped on its side with a sheet wrapped and tied round it. And straight after that, the daughter's fever broke. She recovered and there was never another incident in the house.

Years later when I became a psychology student and started reading about parapsychology I urged the family to contact a parapsychology expert. They absolutely refused. They've never talked about the incident except to close friends (and I'm only mentioning the event here because you guys have zero chance of identifying the people involved), and they still insist that it all has a rational explanation. I agree that everything can be explained up to the final episode, and if anyone can account for that then I'd really like to know.

Incidentally, the family still live in the house. In some cases of supposed parapsychological acts, folks behave fraudulently, either to gain attention or because they're unhappy where they are living and are desperately seeking an excuse for making a change. But neither of these explanations will serve here.

 

[Radioman970]

Cool idea for a thread. I love old dilapidated houses situated out in the sticks or weeds. Oooooo,yeah. *hugs self and grins lustily* :p

I lived near the remains of an old baseball player's mansion in the 1970s/early-mid 1980s. You had to go through a stretch of woods from my house to get to it...or you had to drive a long narrow uphill street from the main highway, which we rode our bikes and motorcycles many many times. The mansion had burned down years before and was a pile of rubble but the servants quarters were still there. There was also a small miniature golf course off to the side that my best friend found under the weeds one day. I remember he wanted to fix that old thing up so we could play golf. Like playing miniature golf at ground zero. We played around that place throughout my teens. We climbed all around that servants building...in the attic, etc. But it never failed...I always got an eery feeling around that place. No hearing of voices or ghostly apparitions but my friend said he saw "colored lights" coming from it through the woods but I never believed him. I'd only go there alone if I had my big irish setter dog with me. There were a lot of wine bottle dumps in the woods around it...my dad felt the place had been used as a rehabilation facility for a time. Maybe some partying going on? No telling. Not sure how the place burned down but my guess is more than one person perished in those flames. We got caught after dark there once. Couldn't get out of there fast enough if you know what I mean. I'd love to visit that place again and see what has happened to it. Most likely someone bought the land. I'd kill to get it and build me a house there.

 

[KeithAP]

Maybe we can meet and discuss some of our experiences?

How about meeting here... Welcome To The Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast

-Keith

 

[Bryan X]

I have wanted to stay there for quite some time. That would be so cool.

 

[Paul D G]

Radioman - visit it on GoogleEarth!

I can't say I've experienced anything, but my mom has a bunch of stories. She claims the house I grew up in was haunted (it was a 75+ year old place). She says on the first day we lived there there was a lot of noise coming from the attic above their room and she knew none of us were up there wandering around (late at night and we were all young and asleep). Over the years she would occasionally ask me if I had been up in the attic the night before (not usually, no) and I found out years later it was because she would hear footsteps pacing back and forth coming from there.

Eventually we all grew up and moved out and they sold the house. My parents were alone in the house on the last night and, again, she heard a loud racket coming from the attic even though it was empty. She said she called up to the ceiling and told the 'house' that she appreciated the warmth it supplied us over the years but they needed to move on and she hoped it would take good care of the next family, and the noise stopped. She said she believed the house was upset we were leaving.

I never heard footsteps up there but my room wasn't really under part of the attic. I did frequently hear a rapid ticking sound (not like a clock) coming from the corner of my room that I was never able to figure out where it was coming from. It'd creep me out and when I'd try to tell my dad he'd just yell at me to go to sleep.

I don't know how much of this I believe but I wish my mom had let me in on all this while I was growing up.

-paul

 

[Jay H]

I've taken the Cape May, NJ Ghost tour before, I've been to Alcatraz, but in normal life instances, I can't say I've ever been in a "haunted house" unknowingly.

Jay

 

[Radioman970]

Holy shhhhh...! It's still there!!

Is there any way to post a location? I'm at work but later I'll do screen grabs and post pictures so everyone will know I'm not full of bull.

Could be Ty Cobb's family hasn't bothered with the land. Although, my mom and dad told me that side of town is crime-ridden...I'd given thought to buying our old house. The long road (called Tidewater) has nearly disappeared but you can see . The servants quarters is a pile of rubble now too. But you can clearly see the outline of the old mansion and the walkway and steps leading up to it. Only thing I don't see if the minature golf course but I'd bet $5000 it's under the weeds again. I used to play all around that area. The woods are mostly gone with subdivisions all over the place. That's sad because it looks like skin cancer on those great woods that used to be there. I know time (progress?) does that. Some of the old trails I used to endlessly ride my dirt bike on (with my long dead beloved irish setter trailing behind me) are STILL THERE! I'm elated to have seen this again. I can't thank you enough Paul. You da man!

Pictures later!!

 

[Andrew 'Ange Hamm' Hamm]

Wow, a dog ghost story too!

 

[Bob McLaughlin]

Lots of people have told me over the years that they all thought the house I grew up in was haunted. It was old and run-down looking and creaky. The basement was dark and musty. But I never saw any ghosts or heard anything unusual.

There was a small bedroom upstairs. My parents had 12 children and about half of us had been put in the front room as toddlers, then moved out as we got bigger to make room for the next toddler. When I was a teenager my mother told me a strange story. She said that my youngest sister had woken up in the middle of the night crying, and my mother asked her what was wrong, and she said a man with a tall hat was leaning over her crib looking down at her. My mother thought this was very strange because she said each of the kids who had been sleeping in that room had said the same thing at some point: there was a man with a tall hat staring down at them. She had never told anyone about it because she didn't want to scare anyone.

When my mother told me this story, I know it sounds like a cliche from a bad horror novel, but the hairs on the back of my neck went up. Suddenly I was flashing back to the time I was a toddler in that room, and I realized I was remembering the same thing had happened to me, but I had suppressed the memory. I can still picture exactly how that man with the tall hat looked, more of a shadow than a person, and the memory still gives me the creeps.

As a grownup I wonder what was really happening. One of my theories is that the man with the tall hat was really just my dad checking in on me in the middle of the night, but he didn't wear a tall hat so that explanation doesn't work 100%. But maybe the hat can be explained by the shadowy nature of the room. If the lighting and shadows were right, maybe a person would look like they were wearing a hat. Of course the ghost-story explanation would be easier: the tall hat is because it was someone from the early 1900's when the house was built, right?

The only other weird incident came years later after my mother had died and no one was living in the house at the time, so I was all alone. I had to go back into the house to get some old financial records that my mother had been keeping in the basement. It was creepy because my mother had died suddenly in an accident and I found her old purse amongst the records, and it was still intact and untouched from the last day she had been living: it still had a half-used pack of her favorite chewing gum in it, there were still used Kleenex in it, some cash, etc. Suddenly the power went out in the house and I was in total darkness for a few seconds until my eyes could adjust.

I suddenly really had this sense of not being alone in the basement, and I had that "get out" feeling that other people have talked about. I certainly wasn't feeling the loving presence of my mother, it was just a feeling of being very unwelcome, it was almost tangible. I grabbed what records I had found and got up the stairs, and managed not to run.

I am a fairly agnostic person who is pretty skeptical of any eyewitness accounts. There is nothing here (in my experiences) that is proveable and all of it is highly subjective. I definitely won't leap to the conclusion that these experiences necessarily mean there is anything supernatural going on. But I am a lot more sympathetic to other people who have experiences they can't explain. But to me, that's all they are. Experiences that haven't been explained yet. You don't always have all the information you need to arrive at a proper and satisfying conclusion.

 

[Radioman970]

He'll visit you tonight.

 

[Radioman970]

Here we go! The SAT shots were done in 2002. I'm wondering if this stuff is STILL there. Must be. It's haunted and stuff!!

The road called Tidewater is so ghostly you can't even see it in pic #1!! On the left side of the hwy it's along the edge as the wooded area starts from the clearing...travels all the way along that edge NW and looks like a scar!! Eeery, eh?

1. Highway view. That's I-25 (Peach Orchard Rd) that travels NE thru Augusta, GA
[url=https://static.hometheaterforum.com/imgrepo/d/d9/htf_imgcache_34107.jpeg] [/url]


2. Plotted out. The large square is where the mansion was. The smaller one is the servants/guest quarters. The blacked out part lower left was all woods in the late 70s early 80s. Damn fun (and SCARY) woods too! I miss that. Never a day went by that I didn't play in those woods. There were actually trails on all sides of this site. I'd usually come from the right or back. The trails went on for miles and miles in those woods. I was lucky to grow up with all of that.
[url=https://static.hometheaterforum.com/imgrepo/c/c7/htf_imgcache_34108.jpeg] [/url]


3. Close up of the haunted site... I mean, look at that friggin tree near the top!! Addamn's Family landscapers? Damn right.... I just can't believe all of this was still there in 2002.
[url=https://static.hometheaterforum.com/imgrepo/5/55/htf_imgcache_34109.jpeg] [/url]


4. Labeled. The walkway was also a set of creepy stairs!
[url=https://static.hometheaterforum.com/imgrepo/5/51/htf_imgcache_34110.jpeg] [/url]

5. My house from 1978-1987. Some of the best years in my life. Look in my backyard and you'll see a black dot. It's really red...IRISH REDDDDD.... I mean seriously, that IS where my Setter's (and Beagles) dog house was. *hides under the table*
[url=https://static.hometheaterforum.com/imgrepo/d/d3/htf_imgcache_34111.jpeg] [/url]



I wonder if Google Earth will ever be real time. That would be totally awesome. Anyway, I had fun with this. I'd love to see other peoples Google Earth haunted places! Please please!

 

[Paul D G]

No problem, Radioman.

I was just commenting to my coworker about an hour ago why people don't use satellite imagery more often. I use it all the time for both nostalgia and legitimate navigational uses.

-paul

 

[Radioman970]

I was stunned at how clear it is too. Seems especially clear in a large cities like Augusta. Dog house in the back yard is darn amazing.

My dad was talking about this some time ago. He's real big on this stuff. Oh, I hate nostalgia.

Oh, some funny nostalgia...my mom used to get real nervous when she'd go for a job interview. One day after an interview she parked her Ford Pinto BOMB in the driveway and forgot to put it in park and/or apply the emergency brake. We lived on a hill. It rolled down and hit that house across the street (the one above there it says "HOME") where a Vietnam vet lived. It didn't explode luckily but made a lot of noise. The vet said he had flashbacks after the noise. They had to have the front of their house redone.

I'd heard this place we used to call "Indian Mountain" in those same woods where I used to ride my dirt bike was gone. Might be, but it was still there in 2002 because I found it! It had this huge rock where everybody chisled their names. man this is neat!! Of course, Indian Mountain was a weird place too.

[url=https://static.hometheaterforum.com/imgrepo/4/48/htf_imgcache_34148.jpeg] [/url]

 

[Bob Graham]

Yes, I've been in a haunted building, Fenway Park, but the ghosts are all gone now. They were last seen in the Bronx.