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The Reverse Haunted House

ShadyCavalier

Ephemeral Spectre
Joined
Jul 24, 2016
Messages
315
The title doesn't quite sum up what I mean but I couldn't think of a better way of describing it. Usually, when a house is allegedly haunted, it's the occupants who make the claim - but I'm wondering if anyone has blissfully lived in a supposedly "haunted house" and experienced nothing?

Our house is part of an old building that was split up into three. Quite a few villagers/neighbours have told us it's haunted.

Someone who used to live in one of the other parts said her daughter saw things (I can't recall the detail). Our former neighbour (who lived in the third part) said that she also met a previous occupant who said it was haunted, I think by a girl.

Finally, the lady who sold us our part said that she had never experienced anything untoward, but an exorcist was once set round from next door and started speaking in Polish. Her girlfriend (at the time) was German and so could understand some of what the priest (?) was saying, and apparently he was transmitting a Polish POW who used to live at the house, but was one day taken down to the river and shot. The POW also had a fondness for their dog, and she - the previous owner - said that the dog would react to things in the house that weren't there...

When we introduce ourselves to other people in the village and say where we live, it's not uncommon for them to reply "ah, the place with the ghost" and suchlike. Now, I have lived here two and a half years and I certainly haven't seen or felt anything. My partner, who is more logical and less given to the supernatural than I am, has heard footsteps and a light switch flicking, as well as breathing in his room at night. This could be explained away by the wind, the cat, the house settling &c. Certainly not the kind of activity that warrants exorcisms...

If anyone asks I say, no - it's not haunted, because I don't (although a small part of me would like to) believe that it is.

Has anyone else had this kind of thing happen to them, whereby your house doesn't haunt you, but others?
 
Ghost phenomena (broadly defined) are often highly localized to a given spot. Within a larger building ghosts are often attributed to a specific interior location (e.g., a staircase; a room) rather than the building as a whole.

Maybe your portion of the subdivided building isn't the portion where a haunted / haunting connection is in effect.
 
Ghost phenomena (broadly defined) are often highly localized to a given spot. Within a larger building ghosts are often attributed to a specific interior location (e.g., a staircase; a room) rather than the building as a whole.

Maybe your portion of the subdivided building isn't the portion where a haunted / haunting connection is in effect.

You have a point, but the other two parts are split between the upstairs and the downstairs. We share one half of the landing of the upstairs part - and I thought ghosts were meant to walk through walls...
 
apparently he was transmitting a Polish POW who used to live at the house, but was one day taken down to the river and shot.

A Polish POW? Surely not in Britain then? There were no Polish POWs here as Poland was on our side. We certainly didn't summarily take Poles down to rivers and shoot them!

Could the language have been German or Ukranian?

'Displaced' Polish and other Eastern European people were housed in camps during and after the war but they were not prisoners.
 
Sorry, I meant (rather-clumsily, since I was up a ladder at the time) I get the impression that certain free-thinking/alternative-perspectives individuals sometimes appear to have had an 'early flowering' of such experiences, in childhood and early adolescence, followed by a lifetime of (it's hard to describe)....protection. Almost like an initial guardian angel sort of effect, though not necessarily in a literal sense.

My main point is that, for them, I can imagine this may have had some innoculative effect (this is sheer gut feeling with zero evidence) if they were ever subsequently exposed to some putative malign unknown forces in later life.

We certainly didn't summarily take Poles down to rivers and shoot them!
Certainly not, but I have been told by very-old former cops that a number of complicated & nasty scores were settled in the UK post WW2. Unofficial firearms ownership (trophies and...'retentions') and related incidents were rife right into the 1960s...
 
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Certainly not, but I have been told by very-old former cops that a number of complicated & nasty scores were settled in the UK post WW2. Unofficial firearms ownership (trophies and...'retentions') and related incidents were rife right into the 1960s...

So it'd be a murder then, rather than an execution, and of a 'Displaced Person' and not a POW.
 
German and Polish are VERY different languages. My Polish friends tend to learn German, but the reverse isn't often true. German and Dutch has a large cross over though. Why on earth would an exorcist start channelling a spirit? Is there any chance that it wasn't an 'exorcist' but a medium?
 
A Polish POW? Surely not in Britain then? There were no Polish POWs here as Poland was on our side. We certainly didn't summarily take Poles down to rivers and shoot them!

Could the language have been German or Ukranian?

'Displaced' Polish and other Eastern European people were housed in camps during and after the war but they were not prisoners.

No idea about this situation, but we did take Polish PoWs (PWs to use the contemporary abbreviation) because some Polish men were forced into service with the German army.

I read only yesterday of a man whose Polish grandfather served with the German army, was captured and imprisoned in the UK and then volunteered to serve in the Polish Corps.

He ended up in the commandos and survived the war

...a total of 68,693 men were captured by the Allies in north-west Europe. The overwhelming majority of them, 53,630, enlisted into the Polish Army under the British Command, and served in the Polish Armed Forces in the West against the Germans until the end of World War II.
 
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A Polish POW? Surely not in Britain then? There were no Polish POWs here as Poland was on our side. We certainly didn't summarily take Poles down to rivers and shoot them!

Could the language have been German or Ukranian?

'Displaced' Polish and other Eastern European people were housed in camps during and after the war but they were not prisoners.

It's quite possible that the "spirit" was German and the girlfriend was Polish. Or perhaps not a POW but a refugee (sort of thing) as you suggest. Either way I think it was highly unlikely that he would have been shot unless he was found guilty of doing something wrong... another story is that the house was a military hospital at one stage - so perhaps he shot himself (PTSD maybe?)
 
Sorry, I meant (rather-clumsily, since I was up a ladder at the time) I get the impression that certain free-thinking/alternative-perspectives individuals sometimes appear to have had an 'early flowering' of such experiences, in childhood and early adolescence, followed by a lifetime of (it's hard to describe)....protection. Almost like an initial guardian angel sort of effect, though not necessarily in a literal sense.

My main point is that, for them, I can imagine this may have had some innoculative effect (this is sheer gut feeling with zero evidence) if they were ever subsequently exposed to some putative malign unknown forces in later life.


Certainly not, but I have been told by very-old former cops that a number of complicated & nasty scores were settled in the UK post WW2. Unofficial firearms ownership (trophies and...'retentions') and related incidents were rife right into the 1960s...

Is this in reference to me, the neighbours, or someone else? :actw:
 
German and Polish are VERY different languages. My Polish friends tend to learn German, but the reverse isn't often true. German and Dutch has a large cross over though. Why on earth would an exorcist start channelling a spirit? Is there any chance that it wasn't an 'exorcist' but a medium?

I only have the previous owner's account to go by and sadly she has since died... which lends yet another creepy angle to the house but again I've never felt her presence... other than the dust and dirt she left behind, bless her.
 
The title doesn't quite sum up what I mean but I couldn't think of a better way of describing it. Usually, when a house is allegedly haunted, it's the occupants who make the claim - but I'm wondering if anyone has blissfully lived in a supposedly "haunted house" and experienced nothing?

Our house is part of an old building that was split up into three. Quite a few villagers/neighbours have told us it's haunted.

Someone who used to live in one of the other parts said her daughter saw things (I can't recall the detail). Our former neighbour (who lived in the third part) said that she also met a previous occupant who said it was haunted, I think by a girl.

Finally, the lady who sold us our part said that she had never experienced anything untoward, but an exorcist was once set round from next door and started speaking in Polish. Her girlfriend (at the time) was German and so could understand some of what the priest (?) was saying, and apparently he was transmitting a Polish POW who used to live at the house, but was one day taken down to the river and shot. The POW also had a fondness for their dog, and she - the previous owner - said that the dog would react to things in the house that weren't there...

When we introduce ourselves to other people in the village and say where we live, it's not uncommon for them to reply "ah, the place with the ghost" and suchlike. Now, I have lived here two and a half years and I certainly haven't seen or felt anything. My partner, who is more logical and less given to the supernatural than I am, has heard footsteps and a light switch flicking, as well as breathing in his room at night. This could be explained away by the wind, the cat, the house settling &c. Certainly not the kind of activity that warrants exorcisms...

If anyone asks I say, no - it's not haunted, because I don't (although a small part of me would like to) believe that it is.

Has anyone else had this kind of thing happen to them, whereby your house doesn't haunt you, but others?
Yes.

The house I grew up in was like the Borley Rectory of our village. People did the same to me - would always come up and say "You live in the haunted house?" and yet when they described "the ghost" it was not at all what we were experiencing, and the supposed haunted room was probably almost the only room in the house where no-one ever saw a thing...

I was told my house was haunted by the ghost of an old lady in one of the downstairs rooms (old farmhouse so it had two living rooms and a large living kitchen - ghost was meant to be in the front left room). In later years, when stepfamily moved in, someone actually slept in the supposedly haunted room (not sure we ever told her) and she never experienced a thing. The upstairs was super haunted, though but by a man, not a woman.

Could be you're not sensitive to it. My father lived there the longest of anyone and claimed he never saw or heard a thing. But then people who slept there for just one night had an eventful time of it...

Re firearms after the war.... in the next room I'm talking about, my brother recalls our dad had a sten gun. It disappeared some time in the 1960s but was just left in a cupboard presumably since 1947.
 
Yes.

The house I grew up in was like the Borley Rectory of our village. People did the same to me - would always come up and say "You live in the haunted house?" and yet when they described "the ghost" it was not at all what we were experiencing, and the supposed haunted room was probably almost the only room in the house where no-one ever saw a thing...

I was told my house was haunted by the ghost of an old lady in one of the downstairs rooms (old farmhouse so it had two living rooms and a large living kitchen - ghost was meant to be in the front left room). In later years, when stepfamily moved in, someone actually slept in the supposedly haunted room (not sure we ever told her) and she never experienced a thing. The upstairs was super haunted, though but by a man, not a woman.

Could be you're not sensitive to it. My father lived there the longest of anyone and claimed he never saw or heard a thing. But then people who slept there for just one night had an eventful time of it...

Re firearms after the war.... in the next room I'm talking about, my brother recalls our dad had a sten gun. It disappeared some time in the 1960s but was just left in a cupboard presumably since 1947.

Having lived in a village for two and a half years now, I do find the locals like to embellish stories and Chinese Whispers seems to be the only from of communication between acquaintances here. It would have only taken one member of your family, or perhaps a guest, to casually mention to someone that there's something odd about your house and the villagers will happily fill in the blanks themselves.

We had a rather sad case here a couple of years back that got people in the area making wild speculations. When the case came to court the evidence was nothing like what the locals purported it to be...
 
Having lived in a village for two and a half years now, I do find the locals like to embellish stories and Chinese Whispers seems to be the only from of communication between acquaintances here. It would have only taken one member of your family, or perhaps a guest, to casually mention to someone that there's something odd about your house and the villagers will happily fill in the blanks themselves.

We had a rather sad case here a couple of years back that got people in the area making wild speculations. When the case came to court the evidence was nothing like what the locals purported it to be...
No, it had been my grandad's house from the 1940s on. The rumours had been going on long before I was born and various guests who saw or heard stuff knew none of this (very insular place - think 'The Wicker Man' - locals didn't chat to outsiders until the 1980s when there were more outsiders than locals...)
 
... We share one half of the landing of the upstairs part - and I thought ghosts were meant to walk through walls...

There's no standard set of features or habits for ghosts. Some are reported as appearing to walk through walls, but this isn't a canonical element of ghost encounters.
 
No, it had been my grandad's house from the 1940s on. The rumours had been going on long before I was born and various guests who saw or heard stuff knew none of this (very insular place - think 'The Wicker Man' - locals didn't chat to outsiders until the 1980s when there were more outsiders than locals...)

Reminds me of something someone told me when I first moved here:

"If you want to see what (Norfolk town) was like in the 1980s, go there now."

Whereabouts was the house?
 
Reminds me of something someone told me when I first moved here:

"If you want to see what (Norfolk town) was like in the 1980s, go there now."

Whereabouts was the house?
The old West Riding, now North Yorkshire. It was in a large village outside Leeds. I remember the first time someone told me about my house's ghost, I was at junior school, and shocked that our house even had a rep for that. We didn't talk about it much, ourselves and what I was told by more than one person was our ghost - simply wasn't. Something else entirely was there, though...

My grandad had rented the house from somewhere around wartime, and my parents bought it very cheaply in the 1950s. The village was quite big, even when I was a kid in the 1960s, so it was surprising people knew about this particular house. The street it was on, was named after it, so I guess there was that.
 
The old West Riding, now North Yorkshire. It was in a large village outside Leeds. I remember the first time someone told me about my house's ghost, I was at junior school, and shocked that our house even had a rep for that. We didn't talk about it much, ourselves and what I was told by more than one person was our ghost - simply wasn't. Something else entirely was there, though...

My grandad had rented the house from somewhere around wartime, and my parents bought it very cheaply in the 1950s. The village was quite big, even when I was a kid in the 1960s, so it was surprising people knew about this particular house. The street it was on, was named after it, so I guess there was that.

Ah, if the street was named after it, am I right in thinking that most of the other houses were more modern than yours? If so, I'm in the same boat. It's rare you hear of a haunting in a post-war house...

I'm sure you've previously spoken of your house's hauntings but could you point me in the right direction as I'm relatively new.
 
We didn't talk about it much, ourselves and what I was told by more than one person was our ghost - simply wasn't. Something else entirely was there, though...

What else entirely??
Please don't leave us at the mercy of our imaginations :mattack: (unless it's too private, of course).
 
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