Would You Buy A Haunted House?

Piloton.it said:
A classic example taken from quantum physics:



(But personally I don't think it's just superstition)
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I wonder if some people just carry a lot of electricity, which causes very delicately balanced machinery to fail.

Also, I am well known at work for 'breaking the till' - whenever a till stops working (they freeze/refuse to process card payments etc roughly once a day) it will be me operating it. Everyone says 'oh, thought you were in when the call came out that Till One was down!'. They don't take into account though that I am MOSTLY on the tills, others tend to work the tills in rotation during a shift whereas I will spend a whole shift on them. So, statistically, it IS more likely to be me on the till when it breaks.
 
“If a house has had a past life, there may well be a higher chance of a sighting," (from the article).

What, you mean like practically every single house in the world, apart from those newly built within the last fortnight? Or are we 'regressing' houses now, to find out whether they think they might have been The Palace of Versailles in a former life?
 
If this was Scotland `Haunted` would be a prime selling point.

(Place I was looking at `mature apple tree` was a prime selling point.)

And why are the Garudian promoting this nonsense?

I betcha its an old house with attendant noises, rats and exciting plumbing.
 
Kondoru said:
If this was Scotland `Haunted` would be a prime selling point.

(Place I was looking at `mature apple tree` was a prime selling point.)

And why are the Garudian promoting this nonsense?

I betcha its an old house with attendant noises, rats and exciting plumbing.
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I think the success of Uncanny on Radio 4 and on TV has helped make ghosts trend again in the likes of the Guardian, after all Danny very much fits the stereotype of a Guardianista.

@catseye I agree, there is no actual evidence that old buildings are more haunted than new builds, in fact quite the opposite. Especially when you discount all the 'date unknown' and no actual witness legends of maids that threw themselves of the tower etc., that are all just romance and nostalgia. In fact, most of the better-known poltergeist cases happened in 20th Century terraced houses. Of course, older buildings have been around longer and so there has been more time for a haunting to occur and be recorded by someone but if you took a new build and an historic house and studied them over two decades I doubt there would be any difference.
 
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Paul_Exeter said:
I think the success of Uncanny on Radio 4 and on TV has helped make ghosts trend again in the likes of the Guardian, after all Danny very much fits the stereotype of a Guardianista.

@catseye I agree, there is no actual evidence that old buildings are more haunted than new builds, in fact quite the opposite. Especially when you discount all the 'date unknown' and no actual witness legends of maids that threw themselves of the tower etc., that are all just romance and nostalgia. In fact, most of the better-known poltergeist cases happened in 20th Century terraced houses. Of course, older buildings have been around longer and so there has been more time for a haunting to occur and be recorded by someone but if you took a new build and an historic house and studied them over two decades I doubt there would be any difference.
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At one time it always seemed to be council houses that had more hauntings.
I don't know if this is still the case (or ever was).
 
Floyd said:
At one time it always seemed to be council houses that had more hauntings.
I don't know if this is still the case (or ever was).
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At some point we began hearing about more ordinary people's weird experiences rather than the tired old creaky castles malarkey.
Books were written about them. The paranormal became a mainstream interest.

Great work by those dogged 1960s researchers and writers.:hoff:
 
escargot said:
Floyd said:
At one time it always seemed to be council houses that had more hauntings.
I don't know if this is still the case (or ever was).
Click to expand...

At some point we began hearing about more ordinary people's weird experiences rather than the tired old creaky castles malarkey.
Books were written about them. The paranormal became a mainstream interest.

Great work by those dogged 1960s researchers and writers.
Click to expand...

I think you're quite right to place this in the 60s (and perhaps slightly earlier). It seems more or less contemporaneous with the birth of Kitchen Sink realism and the soap opera—the refocusing effects of post-war social legislation having gradually seeped into all discourse.

I'm quite interested in this period; I think there is often a natural curiosity about the era just before one's own birth (I'm a 70s child). As far as I can see, a significant driver of the popularity of these working-class 'studies' (in both a descriptive and an academic sense) was a middle- and upper-class prurience that neatly reflected that which the working- and upper-classes themselves had long held about the occult (literal and supernatural) social lives of the aristocracy; in both cases, there was so little familiarity with an alien social sphere that even the most lurid tales could garner remarkable credence.

The besuited public-school broadcaster (usually on the younger side) shot in glorious black and white while asking naïve questions of taxi-cab drivers, market-traders or the harried wives of miners before turning to a learnéd academic for a concluding appraisal is practically its own genre.

Viewing at this temporal distance, some of the best bits arise when Sandy or Tristan gets duped by twinkle-eyed locals because he's overestimated his own power of perception and underestimated their appetite for mischief and capacity for guile.

Alas, ghosts, peculiar religious sects and New Age practitioners have long since been replaced by the endless quest to ferret out paedophiles and adulterers—even drug addicts don't get much of a look-in these days. Mainstream access to the supernatural has been ceded to enthusiastic pseudo-scientists and thrill-and-click seeking ghost-hunters: very democratic, and in consonance with the modern distate for 'gatekeepers', but far less interesting to anyone genuinely interested in strange phenomena.

I have used 'enthusiastic' as a perjorative here. I'm not some kind of Puritan, but I'm sure a lot of us here have read books, attended events, and turned on television shows only to sigh when it becomes clear that the writer/host/speaker is going to find a supernatural explanation for everything from the uncommon hardness of the cheese in his sandwich to the fact that his shoelaces came untied twice on a vigil; there's a fine line between open mindedness and a need to believe.
 
Yithian said:
I think you're quite right to place this in the 60s (and perhaps slightly earlier). It seems more or less contemporaneous with the birth of Kitchen Sink realism and the soap opera—the refocusing effects of post-war social legislation having gradually seeped into all discourse.

I'm quite interested in this period; I think there is often a natural curiosity about the era just before one's own birth (I'm a 70s child). As far as I can see, a significant driver of the popularity of these working-class 'studies' (in both a descriptive and an academic sense) was a middle- and upper-class prurience that neatly reflected that which the working- and upper-classes themselves had long held about the occult (literal and supernatural) social lives of the aristocracy; in both cases, there was so little familiarity with an alien social sphere that even the most lurid tales could garner remarkable credence.

The besuited public-school broadcaster (usually on the younger side) shot in glorious black and white while asking naïve questions of taxi-cab drivers, market-traders or the harried wives of miners before turning to a learnéd academic for a concluding appraisal is practically its own genre.

Viewing at this temporal distance, some of the best bits arise when Sandy or Tristan gets duped by twinkle-eyed locals because he's overestimated his own power of perception and underestimated their appetite for mischief and capacity for guile.

Alas, ghosts, peculiar religious sects and New Age practitioners have long since been replaced by the endless quest to ferret out paedophiles and adulterers—even drug addicts don't get much of a look-in these days. Mainstream access to the supernatural has been ceded to enthusiastic pseudo-scientists and thrill-and-click seeking ghost-hunters: very democratic, and in consonance with the modern distate for 'gatekeepers', but far less interesting to anyone genuinely interested in strange phenomena.

I have used 'enthusiastic' as a perjorative here. I'm not some kind of Puritan, but I'm sure a lot of us here have read books, attended events, and turned on television shows only to sigh when it becomes clear that the writer/host/speaker is going to find a supernatural explanation for everything from the uncommon hardness of the cheese in his sandwich to the fact that his shoelaces came untied twice on a vigil; there's a fine line between open mindedness and a need to believe.
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I often ponder what life here would have been like if there hadn't been the two wars.

I suppose rock 'n' roll and the advent of 'the teenager' wouldn't have happened, or certainly not until many years later, or even the move to a more liberal ruling political party.

I doubt that Ken Loach or John Osbourne would have been allowed to write what they did, or not turned into films at least. The working classes were to be seen, but not heard.

Would we be just entering the 1970s now- culturally speaking?

Would we still see city gents in bowlers?
 
Yithian said:
I think you're quite right to place this in the 60s (and perhaps slightly earlier). It seems more or less contemporaneous with the birth of Kitchen Sink realism and the soap opera—the refocusing effects of post-war social legislation having gradually seeped into all discourse.

I'm quite interested in this period; I think there is often a natural curiosity about the era just before one's own birth (I'm a 70s child). As far as I can see, a significant driver of the popularity of these working-class 'studies' (in both a descriptive and an academic sense) was a middle- and upper-class prurience that neatly reflected that which the working- and upper-classes themselves had long held about the occult (literal and supernatural) social lives of the aristocracy; in both cases, there was so little familiarity with an alien social sphere that even the most lurid tales could garner remarkable credence.

The besuited public-school broadcaster (usually on the younger side) shot in glorious black and white while asking naïve questions of taxi-cab drivers, market-traders or the harried wives of miners before turning to a learnéd academic for a concluding appraisal is practically its own genre.

Viewing at this temporal distance, some of the best bits arise when Sandy or Tristan gets duped by twinkle-eyed locals because he's overestimated his own power of perception and underestimated their appetite for mischief and capacity for guile.

Alas, ghosts, peculiar religious sects and New Age practitioners have long since been replaced by the endless quest to ferret out paedophiles and adulterers—even drug addicts don't get much of a look-in these days. Mainstream access to the supernatural has been ceded to enthusiastic pseudo-scientists and thrill-and-click seeking ghost-hunters: very democratic, and in consonance with the modern distate for 'gatekeepers', but far less interesting to anyone genuinely interested in strange phenomena.

I have used 'enthusiastic' as a perjorative here. I'm not some kind of Puritan, but I'm sure a lot of us here have read books, attended events, and turned on television shows only to sigh when it becomes clear that the writer/host/speaker is going to find a supernatural explanation for everything from the uncommon hardness of the cheese in his sandwich to the fact that his shoelaces came untied twice on a vigil; there's a fine line between open mindedness and a need to believe.
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This is, I think, part of the issue. The 'othering' of the lower classes (and also a slight belief that a lot of the poltergeists and ghosts were being manufactured by the inhabitants to get a better or bigger house). A bit of the 'aren't they funny, poor people?'

And yet it went hand in hand with haunted castles and stately homes, which didn't seem to merit the same level of investigation.
 
catseye said:
This is, I think, part of the issue. The 'othering' of the lower classes (and also a slight belief that a lot of the poltergeists and ghosts were being manufactured by the inhabitants to get a better or bigger house). A bit of the 'aren't they funny, poor people?'

And yet it went hand in hand with haunted castles and stately homes, which didn't seem to merit the same level of investigation.
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The old Unexplained magazines seemed to have a lot of council house hauntings in it- (always involving people in very high waisted, polyester flares).
And Nationwide as well of course.
 
catseye said:
I wonder if some people just carry a lot of electricity, which causes very delicately balanced machinery to fail.

Also, I am well known at work for 'breaking the till' - whenever a till stops working (they freeze/refuse to process card payments etc roughly once a day) it will be me operating it. Everyone says 'oh, thought you were in when the call came out that Till One was down!'. They don't take into account though that I am MOSTLY on the tills, others tend to work the tills in rotation during a shift whereas I will spend a whole shift on them. So, statistically, it IS more likely to be me on the till when it breaks.
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So you're the Lucy Letby equivalent of tills operators?. I have similar bad luck with mobile phones so I don't even bother trying to own one anymore which always gets people looking at me in a weird way or even not believing me when I state I haven't got one. On the plus side, none of my employers have been able to pressure me into using my non existent mobile phone for their work reasons and no weirdos have my non existent mobile number .. and I can't be tracked if I go on a murderous rampage. Which is unlikely.
 
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catseye said:
I wonder if some people just carry a lot of electricity, which causes very delicately balanced machinery to fail.

Also, I am well known at work for 'breaking the till' - whenever a till stops working (they freeze/refuse to process card payments etc roughly once a day) it will be me operating it. Everyone says 'oh, thought you were in when the call came out that Till One was down!'. They don't take into account though that I am MOSTLY on the tills, others tend to work the tills in rotation during a shift whereas I will spend a whole shift on them. So, statistically, it IS more likely to be me on the till when it breaks.
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I once worked for a chap who could not wear watches as they simply would not work, so there must be something in it.

Mind you, as an ex motorbike racer, he did have quite a bit of metal in him.
 
Swifty said:
So you're the Lucy Letby equivalent of tills operators?. I have similar bad luck with mobile phones so I don't even bother owning one anymore which always gets people looking at me in a weird way or even not believing me when I state I haven't got one. On the plus side, none of my employers have been able to pressure me into using my non existent mobile phone for their work reasons and no weirdos have my non existent mobile number .. and I can't be tracked if I go on a murderous rampage. Which is unlikely.
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True, but you also can't drunkenly text your best mate's wife and tell her.... oh yes I see your point.
 
I've known men who swore they couldn't wear a watch because it would always go wrong due to some farfetched circumstance.
It was often their suffering an electric shock as a youth which made their body all charged or summat.

As I'd laugh in their faces the subject only ever came up the once. :chuckle:

This was in the days of mechanical watches. My guess was that as they'd stop if you forgot to wind them, and you'd then need to consult another timepiece to set them by, a less organised person might find it all too much trouble. Especially if Mum or Wifey were on hand to help with all that confusing stuff.

My watch and alarm clock were wound at 9pm every day. I wasn't getting caught out. :bthumbup:
 
escargot said:
I've known men who swore they couldn't wear a watch because it would always go wrong due to some farfetched circumstance.
It was often their suffering an electric shock as a youth which made their body all charged or summat.

As I'd laugh in their faces the subject only ever came up the once. :chuckle:

This was in the days of mechanical watches. My guess was that as they'd stop if you forgot to wind them, and you'd then need to consult another timepiece to set them by, a less organised person might find it all too much trouble. Especially if Mum or Wifey were on hand to help with all that confusing stuff.

My watch and alarm clock were wound at 9pm every day. I wasn't getting caught out. :bthumbup:
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