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The Haunted House

  
 
Tamayyurt
15:26 / 13.04.05
I don’t know why but recently I’ve become interested in the idea of a haunted house… maybe it’s all those commercials for that Amityville Horror movie. The idea that ghost, spirits, or negative energy could be trapped in a space, a home is not that remarkable or even unbelievable but that they can affect the material world, the atmosphere is fascinating. The idea of a house a ‘pocket underworld’ is also very interesting to me. So I want to open up this thread to the discussions of the Haunted House. You can talk about great novels, short stories, movies, or urban legends about the subject. For the intellectuals among us you can discuss the archetype of a Haunted House, why we’re so fascinated by it and why it’s persisted into the 21 century. You can talk about your first hand experience in a haunted house. Or, as magicians, how you cleansed a house or how you made a house haunted for whatever reason. (I know Mordant’s made a ghost… Who’s made a whole house full of ‘em?)
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
15:43 / 13.04.05
(Erm, I never actually got around to making that ghost in the end. My life asploded and I got sidetracked. You know how it is.)
 
 
--
00:26 / 15.04.05
I've never been in a haunted house but I've always had a fascination with them. For example, near some shopping plaza up on a hill in my area there are all these old stone buildings covered in ivy, their construction dating back to the Victorian era. Around the turn of the century these buildings were used to house insane patients, who were cruelly abused and tortured there. I can't imagine what it would be like to explore a place like that after dark! Too bad they're going to be converted into yuppie retail outlets soon.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
01:25 / 15.04.05
I was in a haunted mansion once. I camped out there with a bunch of sped/drunk/randomly twatty and not very serious people. But I still saw and heard shit that could not have been created by said people.
 
 
Tamayyurt
02:44 / 15.04.05
Too bad they're going to be converted into yuppie retail outlets soon.

This is not necessarily a bad thing… if the space is indeed haunted than the new structures should be haunted as well and the yuppies that move in are going to be in for a scare. It brings a smile to my face just thinking about it.
 
 
Etruscan
05:34 / 15.04.05
I've had a pet theory about hauntings for a while, actually. Having been in many places where a really obvious deep impression has been left behind, it seems that we people 'stain' places with our emotional energy, right? So wouldn't overloading a place that's been 'tainted' with fresh people, kinda overwriting the original bad vibes with good or merely ambivalent vibes... does this make sense? Busy intersections don't have ghosts. Empty roads have ghosts.

Anyone a little more versed in this kind of thing want to jump in? Has anyone had success with this sort of thing? Family driving out the ghosts instead of the ghosts driving out the family? The effects of a haunting fading over time?
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
09:49 / 15.04.05
I grew up in one. Previous family that lived in my parent's house were all killed with a shotgun by their troubled son, whose bedroom I then grew up in. Figures.

So wouldn't overloading a place that's been 'tainted' with fresh people, kinda overwriting the original bad vibes with good or merely ambivalent vibes...

I think that's possible, but it's generally not as clear cut as that. What is? It depends on the nature of the haunting and the nature of the new influence. A low grade haunting, in my experience, tends to be like a background noise that colours the atmosphere of a place. You might not even notice it at first or put two and two together and call it a haunting. Your activities in the house might overwrite it to some extend but it will probably remain there if it can, bubbling away in the background, providing a subtle texture to whatever happens.

This may or may not cause problems, for instance, if some particularly emotionally trying or upsetting stuff happens to take place in the house, the presence might come to the forefront a bit more and have more leverage to cause bother if that's its nature. Or if a particularly "psychically sensitive" person moves in, they might be more influenced by the presence than other less "open" folks that might take it in their stride. It's like being in a room with someone in a foul mood - some people might pick up on that straightaway, others might be thick skinned/self absorbed enough to not even notice.

As an example, my current flat had a vague creepy old lady feel to it when we moved in, which I didn't really pay much attention to or classify as a "haunting" straight away. After I moved in, and started doing a lot of heavy magic there, the general sense of presence backed off a bit. I felt like it retreated into the background, not wanting to mess with other presences that were coming in. But it still considered the place as its home and hung about there. The place was more or less OK to live in, but never felt like home. It was felt as if we were unwelcome guests in someone else's house, who wasn't really happy with us being there. There was a low level sense of non-specific discontent about the experience of living there, which you could work around and shut out, but was there nonetheless.

I finally got round to turning my attention to this, and sorted out a proper cleansing. It felt like stuff was being stirred up and chased out, stuff that had been lurking and festering in the corners and alcoves. To be honest, I only really appreciated how much of a problem it actually was after the fact. You get used to stuff if you live with it. After I'd claimed the turf, it felt really tangibly different. Even my non-magically orientated flatmate picked up on it straight away. The house felt lighter, lifted of a burden, more youthful, and it felt as if we could stand tall in the flat for the first time and call it our own. He described it as "quieter" as if a background hum we'd become accustomed to had suddenly been switched off. Ever since then I've been much happier living there.

I think a lot of these things go on at levels that you don't consciously interact with. I'd maybe speculate that "hauntings" are a much bigger part of life than we generally admit to, but because the vocabulary of magic is cut off to most people, it gets reframed in other ways. I can think of a few bars that feel somehow "unwelcoming" despite the best efforts of the landlords, and consequently don't get as much business and custom as they logically should be getting. A low level unwelcoming buzz pervades them and people unconsciously pick up on that and don't like drinking there. If magic were more widely accepted as a means of engaging with this sort of shifty, unquantifiable problem, then such things could conceivably be attended to...
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
20:54 / 11.05.05
Bumping this coz I've come to the conclusion that there's something in the flat I'm currently renting. I've never been entirely comfortable here, and on a couple of occasions I've glimpsed figures on or near the stairs.

Little things. Nagging problems. Like leaks--something here is always leaking. I've got through a gallon of sealant since moving here. Crockery gets smashed at a collosal rate, I had to replace two of the light fittings, the fridge is shagged, you get the picture.

There's also this sense of... irritation? A sort of flavour in the air of disapproval, of being an uninvited and baffling presence. An irritant, yes.

I'm not absolutely sure what to do but I've been reflecting on the idea of house-wights, the spirits that are thought by some to live in your dwelling and take care of this kind of thing. Not certain how much historic evidence there is for this belief having existed, but it is prevelant among modern heathens and it really resonates with me.

So having just set up a permenant shrine to our red-haired friend, I'm now thinking of creating something similar if less impressive in the kitchen (where most of the annoyance has been centered.) We'll see how that goes.
 
 
Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown
21:45 / 11.05.05
I actually work in a restaraunt that's purported to be haunted. Just started back there after a couple years out of town.

Back the first time I worked there in 2003, I worked a lot of late night shifts. As a bit of history, Sharkey's Dockside Cafe & Lounge used to be a hotel, and before that was a mill. Several of the offices and storage rooms are simply emptied out hotel rooms, and I think that our main prep kitchen was the hotel's original kitchen. The building itself is, more or less, still intact.

There are a few stories, I'll post what I can remember. Apparently some lady drowned her baby in the shower stall if what is now our patio's dishpit. And there are apparently a few ghosts of men and women who haunt the place.

I can definitly attest that the place has a vibe to it. Its not really noticable in the day time, but at night I kept getting a lot of flashes at the corners of my vision, and kept feeling presences moving around. I have a decent "sensing" area when it comes to people around me, and I can normally tell pretty accuratley when someone is behind me, even if they don't make a sound. I KEPT getting this feeling, even in empty rooms. Like there were a few people still around.

I haven't worked any nights since I started back on Monday, but I'll post here if I sense anything else. The place is being torn down next year, so I'm hoping to find something there before I leave for Oxford in mid July.

As a not-quite-haunting, when my family first moved into our current house it had a lot of that "spiritual leakage". My theory is that between the time the old tenants moved out, and took most of their old resonance with them, and the time that we moved in...something else took up residence. I got the very distinct impression that its some form of centipede spirit that lives in an alcove in the back of the washing room, around the water heater and behind the washer and dryer. Not for sounds...but the general vibe I got off it.

For the longest time it and I were on...not the best of terms. It was a genuinly hostile entity that, I think, resented me having my room in the basement....possibly also because I brought my own small brood of spirits along with me (in the form of the little guardian figurines that I put around my room), and the fact that I used to have a tendency to shield any room I slept in on general principle (don't ask me why...I honestly don't know, this was back when I was 15 or 16 or so).

The spirit has quieted down in recent years. My room has a lot fewer shields, and the protective web formed by the guardian figurines has pretty much been demolished because I started moving them around, and really didn't want to explain to my parents WHY I needed that pewter figure in JUST that position. Similarly, the spirits I used to work with, which were anchored to a few different objects, have largely gone dormant while I've been away at university.

I remember very distinctly about a year or two ago I had a very vivid dream where I watched from by bed as a giant centipede slithered under my door, moved to attack me...and then had its ass handed to it by a miniature version of the Midnighter. Don't ask me, I have absolutly no clue what that was about. Midnighter's not a spirit/totem/idea I play with. At all. But...that's what I saw. And I didn't get a lot of trouble after that, so that might have been a contributing factor.

Another possibility is just that my family has lived in the house long enough to impose its own resonance onto it, thus causing the spirit to slither off for greener pastures. I certainly haven't seen any centipedes about lately, and the damn things used to be all over the place in the basement. Big, fucking creepy things, some about the length of my thumb, that crawled on just about anything that wasn't glass, plastic, or ceramic. Molted grayish brown...and just creepy-like.
 
 
Tamayyurt
14:58 / 13.05.05
Mordant- Besides the shrine, have you tried communicating with it? Keep us posted on this.

Bard- That was a cool centipede-spirit story.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
17:15 / 13.05.05
I grew up in an extremely haunted Edwardian house but it was okay, not nasty, just haunted. No breakages or leaks or anything like that but they used to call me all the time. There were certain rooms where I'd just hear a woman call my name and I'd reply and invariably the answer would come back that my mum had not yelled for me. This happened constantly until we moved when I was 13. I used to see flashes of cloth out of the corner of my eye all the time, people walking past I assumed when there was no one there. One night I woke up to see a girl, dressed in boys clothing walking in freeze frame through the middle of my room. Her figure faded, I was so scared I have no idea how long it took for the image to go completely.

In the next house I lived in my brother saw all kinds of things in the first year of living there. An old woman watching him from the corner of the room, someone sneering violently at him when he woke up in the night... I walked into my room to see myself lying on my bed and ran out of the room- I have no idea now whether I imagined that or not. I waited for years to see if I would be lying on a bed to see my younger self walk in but it never happened. A plate used to fall off a shelf on occasion even though I moved it around the room. The same plate everytime.

Now I'm living in a new flat and I have seen fleeting splashes of colour out of the corner of my eye but nothing more substantial. This place is probably haunted to but I like living in haunted houses, it's become normal.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
19:49 / 13.05.05
Haven't really been able to chat to whatever-it-is so far. I've got the location of the shrine and a couple of small details. Whoever's asking for the shrine wants a white plate with some white candles and a white flower, and some water or a clear white spirit placed there regularly. What I don't know is if it's the cranky presence asking for this stuff or something else that wants to come and deal with the cranky presence. For that reason, I've been holding off on creating the shrine in case I end up with two bloody entities facing off in my kitchen.

Meh, think I'll just go for it. Not going to be here forever anyway.
 
  
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