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Buildings Converted Into Houses Or Other Residences

Haunted by Crying

In addition, I've heard of a few former funeral homes rehabbed back into private dwellings being "haunted by crying" - with one exception, nothing worse than that.

That exception was a case investigated by Connecticut lay exorcists and ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren. But there were two factors there which seemed to go far beyond the usual "imprinting":

One of the former embalmers had engaged in necrophilia with the corpses;

And the rehabbing itself had been a notoriously rushed slap-dash job, with many of the accoutrements of the undertakers' trade apparently simply left in place or scooted off to odd corners, especially in the basement. This suggests to me that the rehabbers may themselves have experienced unpleasant phenomena there and wanted to "complete" the job and bid good riddance to the place just as quickly as possible.
 
Re: Haunted by Crying

OldTimeRadio said:
This suggests to me that the rehabbers may themselves have experienced unpleasant phenomena there and wanted to "complete" the job and bid good riddance to the place just as quickly as possible.
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Or that they were just lazy, like many workmen are when doing a cut-price job.
 
I gues there are asylums and aslyums, morgues and morgues, etc.

Those who died a relatively peaceful and expected death, from old-age or illness, would have no reason to hang around a morgue, I expect. But those who died a violent death, from accident or murder, say, may not have completed their transition or departure from the body, by the time they were taken to the mortuary. So it's possible they may emerge from a kind of faint to find themselves on a slab, or in one of those 'tray in cupboard' things we see on tv. In which case, they may well fail to make the full transition and instead hang around the mortuary in a state of mindless shock and confusion. Or, if they were murdered or died in a fight, the ghost may retain the feelings of anger, disbelief, fear etc. that he/she felt immediately prior to physical death. And if they fail to move on, it's possible, if we grant that ghosts are real, that they may continue to hang around the morgue. They may not realise they're doing so. They could be simply stuck and unthinking. Same could be said of hospitals, no doubt.

It's true that many average homes have witnessed a great deal of violence, sadness, grief, shock and other disturbing emotion. But so have many asylums. Rape, beatings, mental and physical torture all took place within asylum walls. The inmates were unable to escape, had no-one who would believe or defend them in many instances. If you weren't 'mad' to begin with, you would certainly become so before long. Women were often sent to asylums by husbands who wanted them out of the way. It's not all that long ago that unwed mothers were placed in asylums, as well as embarrassing members of families; those with epilepsy for example. In other words, perfectly normal people were locked in these places for varying lengths of time; often for several decades, often at the mercy of sadistic minders, many of whom were far less intelligent and far more disturbed than those over whom they held complete and utter power. Asylum inmates were experimented upon quite often. I don't think we could even begin to understand the desperation, rage and despair they experienced, every hour of every day, for decades; some all their lives.

Imagine being a young girl dragged to one of those places for no other reason than you refused to stay married to someone with a degree of 'influence', or because you'd fallen pregnant. Their babies were torn from them, they were often raped several times a week by human slugs ghastly enough to make one vomit. If they complained, they were beaten black and blue. If their spirit held, they were beaten into submission, or locked in solitary, or drugged or subjected to electric and other shock. Their complaints resulted in their being described as 'violent, dangerous and beyond help'. Many asylum inmates were systematically destroyed, mentally and physically. Hope is the only thing that keeps us going and these people were denied hope of any kind. Even walls of stone would absorb a degree of that misery. I wouldn't like to live there. Just thinking about what had gone on inside those walls would be enough, quite apart from possible ghosts.
 
again6 said:
Women were often sent to asylums by husbands who wanted them out of the way.


But it worked the other way, too. In Ohio as recently as 25 or 30 years ago, either spouse could commit the other, no questions asked.

Wives as well as husbands discovered that this was a dandy way to punish cheating spouses or indeed to provide a convenient cover for their own affairs.
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'One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest' being a prime visual example of the sane going insane? Or is that the insane going more insane?

The thing is, with the subject of estate, a buildings past cannot be allowed to degrade the property in any way. I am just in the process of buying a house, and have heard from someone that sellers now have to declare any paranormal activity in the sellers description, otherwise they can be liable to court action action the deal is complete. Apparently nothing was said when said friend of mine purchased her flat, so if this is true, you could assume there is nothing for her to worry about?

Saying that, I can honestly say I would never buy accomodation that had the slightest hint of it sending my imagination into overdrive. Being a writer myself, the paranormal side of life inside hospitals etc has always fascinated me. Despite all the facts and history, no matter how nice the pad, I would be continuously trying to live in the accomodations past, rather that looking to the future.
 
I remember in 1999 when three friends and I were travelling across the US. We arrived in a small town called Mantle, which was either in Utah or Arizona. We got in about 10 o'clock in the evening and stupidly had not booked any accomodation in advance. It was in the midddle of summer so we thought in a worse case scenario, we would sleep under the stars and pick up somewhere to sleep the next day.

We went to a bar that was open late and we asked the woman behind the counter if she knew of anywhere that we could doss down for the night. She said not but asked one of the other patrons if he knew. He said we could stay at his annex, but only for the night as he had family arriving the following evening. We bought the dude a beer and promised that we would cause him no trouble at all. He said he knew we wouldnt cause any trouble as his resident ghost would keep an eye on us......Nervous laughs from my buds, but in true 'stiff upper lip' style we soldiered on.

We got back to this guys house and lo-and-behold, he was living in a renovated wing of an old clinic. He said that he had only finished the work on the place about a month prior and that he was really pleased with the result. But he did reiterate that there had been a number of disturbances since the work was finished. Voices, sound of running water, occasional shouts etc....

Anyway, speeding on, we all dossed on the floor in our sleeping bags and after about an hour we had all fallen asleep when from the next room, we were all woken by a voice that shouted, what sounded like 'Where is she, where is she?', but it was really loud and with a good degree of urgency in the voice.

There was only one door into the annex and we were sleeping right next to it.

Needless to say, we vacated there and then and slept in the blokes orchard at he end of his lawn.
 
Dis-embodied voices in the dark in a place you do not know?

No thankyou. I'm off.
 
I've come to prefer the "Stone tape" theory myself, based on some personal experience with a "ghost" and on some reading, particularly in a magazine primarily aimed at do-it-youself old-house renovators that occasionally printed ghost stories submitted by readers. These were people who bought old houses and generally lived in them while renovating them.

In many of those stories, the haunting started as work began on a particular area of the house and stopped when the work was complete. This suggests that the phenomenon is related to a physical part of the house. In one very memorable story, an apparition of a boy appeared, only once, and evidently caused by the unearthing of an old lamp in the basement - - the ghost boy was holding a ghost version of the lamp. The implication is that the lamp somehow held a memory of its former owner. In many of the other stories, the haunting activities were repetitious and almost mechanical - the "ghost" performed the same actions and made the same sounds every time it appeared. This presumeably would not be the case if it were a concious being.
Quoth graylien:
I find it hard to believe that the walls of a building can soak up "negative energy" as if it were seeping damp.
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Me too, but not much harder than to believe that disembodied spirits are walking around.
...surely the "energy" stored in the walls would gradually weaken over time; so would not the building be far more likely to "play back" recent events rather than scenes played out years ago by people now dead? We would surely be more likely to be haunted by the ghosts of ourselves from last week rather than the ghosts of people who lived in our house decades ago.
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OK then how about this: walls and other objects can sometimes record memories of their human users and keep them locked away, almost indefinitely, until they are disturbed. Certain kinds of disturbances can release the memories. Since we the living are disturbing our stuff all the time the memories don't get a chance to stick.

Or maybe it's a change in the pattern of distrubance that releases the memory - like somebody else moving in to a house.

And...there are some stories in these forums of people encountering their own doubles and "ghosts" of their (living) spouses, roommates, friends. So those are cases when the memories do stick and get replayed, even for the living.

That's my theory of the day, if you can be kind enough to overlook all the gaping logical holes and improbability...one man's un-testable conjecture about an un-proveable phenomenon.
 
It has come to my attention that a downtown building originally constructed as jail and more recently used for record storage has been purchased with the intent of converting it into a hotel.

Since most of our buildings downtown are haunted, however, I doubt the tourists have any more to worry about in that one than in any of the purpose-built hotels.
 
I think it is unlikely that those spirits would want to stay in your friends building after death.When my grandmother died her spirit couldn't wait to leave the home were she lived( she suffered from alziemers for a number of years). she visited me at my new home that she never even knew about when she was alive and she also visited me on my wedding day at the hotel i stayed in at the lake district.We loved each other very much and nothing can stop such a strong emotion.
 
Battersea Power Station reopens following 10 year development.
It comprises 254 apartments, restaurants, bars, offices and shops.
Must be like living in a Fritz Lang movie.

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https://www.theguardian.com/busines...-for-public-opening-after-10-year-development
 
My best friend lives in an old school - a small village primary school that was converted into a single dwelling back in the 80s. The original school was built in the mid nineteenth century but they added one high-ceilinged room at the end in the 1880s (which is now the kitchen, complete with mezzanine floor) and a second high-ceilinged room some years after that (now a downstairs bedroom). She hasn't mentioned any weird stuff to me but the house will be undergoing extensive work in the near future (badly converted!) so it will be interesting if anything pops up then.

An uncle of mine, in his later years, moved to a flat that had been built in my dad's old school.

And we live in the grounds of the local converted Victorian mental hospital. I've seen a picture from the turn of the 20th century and I think there might have been greenhouses here at that point - although somebody told me that there was a nurse's home here later on. I often wonder whether any of the residents of the hospital itself have experienced anything untoward.
 
I live not far from there and only walked past the other day it’s in the cemetery but also the path that runs alongside is in the largest park in Plymouth called Central Park . The path is a delightful place to walk in the day time and lots of trees etc make it very natural. It runs parallel to the cemetery. At night however I don’t think I would want to walk along there. The house itself is gorgeous, just unfortunate that it’s situated where it is. Unless you like that sort of thing.
Unrelated to that but related to the thread my mum and step dad moved into a converted hospital that had originally been a workhouse. They live in a townhouse on the grounds but some people live in the converted original buildings including the morgue. Strange occurrences have been reported in those houses but not to new builds. I can’t specify what strange occurrences but mum told me sightings and noises and there is a high turn over of people moving out. Maybe coincidence.
 
Seasidepagan said:
live not far from there and only walked past the other day it’s in the cemetery but also the path that runs alongside is in the largest park in Plymouth called Central Park . The path is a delightful place to walk in the day time and lots of trees etc make it very natural. It runs parallel to the cemetery. At night however I don’t think I would want to walk along there. The house itself is gorgeous, just unfortunate that it’s situated where it is. Unless you like that sort of thing.
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Small world, innit? It's not the nicest part of Plymouth, it's true, but then again it's not the worst. And the neighbours are dead quiet, on one side at least.
 
I spent quite a few years of my life living in a mental hospital. Don't jump to conclusions - I was staff, and living in a staff house on the grounds, opposite the admissions ward. I always found that place incredibly peaceful. The buildings were spread out over huge park-like grounds, and it was a great place to wander in the evenings, or take the dog for a stroll at night. Even the interiors of the wards had an oddly quiet, dreamy atmosphere, nothing unpleasant or unhappy.

That was a while ago, but these days I live in another sort of building - an 1880's bank, which still has the vault, the steel bars on the ground floor windows, and the emergency security bars on the doors. This house has more of a 'presence' than the mental hospital ever did.
 
Salmonellus said:
That was a while ago, but these days I live in another sort of building - an 1880's bank, which still has the vault, the steel bars on the ground floor windows, and the emergency security bars on the doors. This house has more of a 'presence' than the mental hospital ever did.
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Great choice of house, considering that our civilisation may fall apart any day now.
 
I’ve often wondered about people living in old asylums. Our town had three, the joy of taking on London’s patients. Two have had their buildings converted with newer additions and the other one has now got new builds where it was (which might not save them from ghostly visitors).

I’m getting agoraphobia from the bathroom in that listing.
 
Here in Melbourne we have Kew Asylum (aka Willsmere) which was built on the outskirts of town in the 1860's. It was a truly beautiful building. A hundred years later it was surrounded by expensive upmarket suburbs, so the grounds were sold off and developed for housing, and the main building converted into expensive apartments.

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It's good to see these old buildings preserved rather than destroyed.

Anyway, there are lots of vague rumours that the main building is haunted, and that the occupants of the new flats report some strange experiences. There isn't a lot on the Internet, but I found a couple of references:

"People who live and stay there report doors opening on their own, tapping on the walls, distant screams, running footsteps and banging, and some have reported waking up to find a figure at the foot of their bed."

No first hand accounts, though.
 
I’ve asked a local Facebook group about their ghostly experiences. I’ve just had someone who lives in a house were the town hospital used to stand and they are saying there’s a lot of paranormal activity.
 
MorningAngel said:
I’ve often wondered about people living in old asylums. Our town had three, the joy of taking on London’s patients. Two have had their buildings converted with newer additions and the other one has now got new builds where it was (which might not save them from ghostly visitors).

I’m getting agoraphobia from the bathroom in that listing.
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Someone who lives in a new build on the site of one of the asylum saying she saw spirits in the garden. Including a lady in a gown with nothing on her feet.
 
The old municipal abattoir in Mayenne (my wife's home town) was a hideously grim building.
I can recall going past it back in the 80s after its decommission and suppressing a shudder at the cavernous dark unglazed openings each with a rusted gate in place to deter trespassers.

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Now, its prime riverside location has been redeveloped, using the shell of the old building, into luxury flats.

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Not sure I'd fancy living there, but I haven't heard any accounts of residents reporting phantom animal noises though.
 
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