Creepy houses

[Suzette]

There’s an abandoned house near me that isn’t necessarily creepy looking but it is a safety hazard because it is literally falling apart. A window or two have fallen out with the glass still in the frame (luckily only landing on the porch roof and not the sidewalk) and giant weeds keep growing from the side of the house that faces the street. The city can’t do anything about the place because it is a federal lien and the government just lets it stay put. The porch roofs collapsed, there are broken windows, the front porch itself is falling in, and the place has been abandoned for at least seven years. I look at it and part of me wants to break in and steal these really nice lace curtains so that I can use them to make something else that is nice such as a fashion doll wedding dress and loot the place of anything valuable inside if any and the other part of me just wants to light some paper on fire and toss it onto the porch to make it look like an accident. But I know both could lead to some serious legal problems which is why I haven’t done anything. But the place is a major eyesore to look at and those lace curtains are rather nice looking.

That would drive me nuts! I swear, houses do better with people living in them, even if the house is still neglected. It's like the whole thing just holds together better with life to shelter and dpression sets in when it becomes "a useless property".

 

[Captain Jigglypuff]

That would drive me nuts! I swear, houses do better with people living in them, even if the house is still neglected. It's like the whole thing just holds together better with life to shelter and dpression sets in when it becomes "a useless property".

Imagine how we must feel having to look at the place being empty since 2015 and starting to literally fall apart since 2017 when the giant porch swing broke off the roof and left a hole and the weeds constantly growing out about 18 inches from the side that is actually in the street. The city keeps cutting the weeds to prevent issues driving near the house but they keep growing back even worse.

 

[watersprite]

There was a place like that nearby until a couple of months ago. A big backhoe knocked it down and then other equipment came & cleaned up the rubbish. It was strange, to hear the creaking & groaning and crunching as house met machinery.
Now it is a clean empty lot. They saved the huge trees, so it looks nice.
Is there a ghost of a house there, & will it haunt the new house that’s being built?

 

[Captain Jigglypuff]

The main issue is that only the federal government can do something about this house and they refuse to do anything. Petitioning wouldn’t work. Complaining has led to nothing. No one can even legally buy the place to tear it down because of the lien. We all would rather see it turned into a parking lot than stay put.

 

[watersprite]

@Suzette It keeps coming into my head that when you are older you might prefer being warm & near the ocean, instead of Kansas or Oklahama?
My old house is one of those built from a kit, but it is in a bustling little town with all sorts of stuff happening & people coming and going.
I would turn into a zombie or ghost in this house if it were out somewhere like you described.

 

[watersprite]

@Forest Cat Makes sense. But Florida might be a tiny bit too crowded with humans? Maybe we could form a business in which ASD property owners (of houses &/or land) could trade places for a week or more.

 

[Flown]

This is a strange topic for me to discuss. I like to think I am a very rational/logical person, but I have had experiences throughout my lifetime which I cannot scientifically explain.

I had nightmares/"visions" on the regular when living in one particular house (in the southeastern US) when I was a toddler. There was always a menacing red "male" figure hovering over my bed at night. There was also another figure hiding behind the bathroom door (I'm not sure if it meant to harm me, but it was still frightening), and I would have to bolt past it (in the hallway) to go jump in my mother's bed every night. My mother thought I was just going through a "phase" of some sort, but I found out (in a conversation with my grandmother) 20 years later that there actually had been a murder-suicide in the house before we had lived there. A man had killed his girlfriend/wife and then himself.

The first place my partner and I ever rented also unnerved me. It was a broken down trailer near a graveyard. There were holes in the floor, rodent and roach infestations, etc, but it was all we could afford at the time. I didn't so much have a problem with the entire trailer, but I could not bring myself to go into the master bedroom. There was nothing physically wrong with it, but it felt WRONG (I don't know how else to describe it). We ended up setting up our bed in the smaller bedroom on the opposite side of the trailer as a result. On multiple occasions I heard what sounded like fingernails clawing down the walls. We kept that bedroom door shut at all times.

The one other notable "haunting" I can recall was when my partner and I were moving across country from Massachusetts to Washington state. We stopped in at my partner's uncle's home in Wisconsin. Half of the house was newer, but the part in which we were sleeping was the attic/top floor of a very old (1800s?) farmhouse. I could not rest at all (which is not rare in strange houses/places), but I kept sensing a small girl in the room with us (once again, no idea how to describe the sensation; i know i sound like a delusional person). A couple of years later, we asked my partner's parents about that part of the house (we didn't disclose anything about our experience)--and they admitted that it was "haunted by a little girl".

This all being said...my partner and I are currently looking to buy a home. Viewing the home and getting a "feel" for it is an important step I think

 

[Suzette]

@Suzette It keeps coming into my head that when you are older you might prefer being warm & near the ocean, instead of Kansas or Oklahama?
My old house is one of those built from a kit, but it is in a bustling little town with all sorts of stuff happening & people coming and going.
I would turn into a zombie or ghost in this house if it were out somewhere like you described.

With good humour, you must think I am in my dottage and senile!
54 is older than you but far from needing to be kept from errant drafts!

Besides, I own a sailboat that we keep in Mexico and have lived on it for 6 years now. Didn't you know old sailors live forever? In is in the U.S.C.G. rules when you register your boat. "By signing this registration form...blah blah verbage about offering your vessel in the deffense of the U.S. in times of war...blah..blah...thou shalt acknowledge that from this day forward the captain and crew of (boat name) will either live forever, or under the direction of the captain, agree to sail off into the sunset to be consigned to Davey Jones Locker but not before having given 'forever' a reasonable go".

There are lots of lovely towns in Kansas and Oklahoma. But even happy little towns have creepy houses that someone is trying to sell. Did I really give the impression that I want to move into a dying village with more mold and ghosts than people? I guess it wasn't my best writing day.

 

[maycontainthunder]

Not so much creepy houses but morbid. I've done a few garage/shed clearances that are deceased estate. It feels really weird going through a dead persons stuff like that.

 

[Suzette]

@Flown
I've had a few incidents happen like you describe.

The house I lived in with my 1st husband was weird. When we first moved in there would be loud crashing sounds in the kitchen. Like all of the dishes suddenly crashing to the floor, we would run in expecting an intruder and dishes smashed everywhere but all would be neat and tidy!

Sometimes we would hear booted foot steps wandering around the ground floor when we were upstairs. And when we made love, there was always the smell of brewing coffee in the air.

Our bedroom was weird too. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would wake to feel the blankets being pulled off the bed. At first I just thought they were falling off the bed because we were restless sleepers. But one night I woke up, my husband is asleep beside me and lying still, the blankets were up to my chin. As I lay there quietly the blankets started to slide down as though being pulled from the foot of the bed. I shouted "Oh no you don't" and grabbed the blankets pulled them back up. Ghost? I don't know. But weird! I don't recall that it ever happened again.

I lived in the house for 23 years. Eventually the weird stuff stopped.

 

[watersprite]

@Suzette No gosh of course I don’t think you’re decrepit. Sorry it came across like that?!

{watersprite outta here}

 

[Neonatal RRT]

For all the money that you will eventually spend on an old house, the plumbing, electrical, insulation, windows and doors, furnace/AC, paint, flooring, roofing, foundation,...and the heating and cooling bills (horribly inefficient),...you may be able to build a brand new one (new materials, efficient, up to new building codes, etc.) in the same style as the old one and save yourself a ton of money on the back end. Old homes are absolute money pits,...not to mention the time and frustration.

 

[Suzette]

@Neonatal RRT & @Forest Cat

Neonatal RRT, with love dear, it has been awhile since you did the house hunt. The price of building materials, lumber in particular doubled since 2020. I believe the price for lumber is starting to come down some but it is still crazy high.

But lets talk about old houses. They actually make far more economic sense than you realize.

First, any home that has been continuously lived in for 100 years or more will have been updated some time in the past. It is very rare to find a home that is so dated it is constantly in danger of imploding. Most have already had the old windows replaced with double paned glass, and have furnaces and hot water heaters less than 10 years old. Not all of course but many!

We are also finding that quite a few homes have already had their major systems overhauled in an effort to sell them. New roofs, furnaces, plumbing and gas lines are the most commonly updated items. Obviously homes like this are favored by us. We aren't too concerned about the electric because my husband is a very compent electrician. Though we have found most older houses have been updated to 220v service anyway.

But this isn't our first time buying a house for either of us. We are well aquainted with house and site evaluation and know how to make friends with a building inspector.

Finally, we are talking small homes here. 1200 to 1500 sq ft. So our costs are not high no matter what.

@Forest Cat, there are stone houses here but they aren't at all common. One is more likely to find brick. But I agree, stone houses are lovely if you can get one!

 

[Au Naturel]

I saw this a while ago, it`s in a place called Valdres and it was for sale. The kind of place that is nice when you arrive and then it turns into a horror movie. If anyone have some extra money laying around, this nightmare can be yours.

View attachment 73807

I want it.

 

[Au Naturel]

In southern California, I could see that going for millions. If you simply transplanted the house to a bad neighborhood in the suburbs, it would still go for 400K even on an itty bitty lot.

 

[Captain Jigglypuff]

The experiences I’ve had with ghosts or spirits is that they mostly came to me for some reason. I’ve only been to one place that was evidently haunted and a bit cursed but not to the point people got hurt. It was in an old building downtown and my dad knew two different people who operated a Chinese restaurant from there but each quit the business after about three to five years. Then another restaurant opened there and didn’t last more than a couple of years and it was then vacant for about seven years. I told someone I knew about how there was this weird drawing on the wall in the basement and it always gave this weird feeling that something was watching you. That night they somehow got into the building and cleansed it from the ghost and it looks like it actually worked as there is now a new restaurant in that place that’s been there for eight years which is a record for any business in there since I first encountered that drawing. Basically you can tell if a spirit is evil or not by the temperature in the room if you feel like something is watching you. If you feel a warm soothing sensation, it’s friendly and won’t hurt you. But if you feel cold suddenly and it feels like there’s a draft then that’s a bad spirit which you can drive away by burning some fresh sage like incense.

 

[Gift2humanity]

I have been looking at a lot of houses on Zillow lately. My husband and I would like to buy a house to use as a "home base" and as a home for when we get too old to live on the boat.

Anyway, we are looking at smaller homes in Oklaholma and Kansas as they are cheap and close to his family. The oak forest, waterways and rolling hills of the extreame eastern edges of these states are beautiful too.

Many of the houses we are looking at are 100+ years old. Some are old Sears kits houses with wonderful built in cabinetry, leaded windows and loads if other semi custom features. A lot of the houses need serious updating and work too. Which brings me to the subject title. "Creepy houses".

I have noticed a lot of these houses are in dying old towns. We drove through many of them this summer. Some towns just seem to drip with despair and depression.

And the houses for sale in these towns are often weird with multiple finishes on the walls, patchy paint colors, mismatched wall paper and 50 year old carpet and with big stains on the floor. In one house the photo clearly shows a reddish stain peeking out from a slab of plywood on the floor.

Honestly, some of these houses seem to be the stuff ghost stories are made up about. I love craftsman houses and Sears kit homes in particular. But having looked at hundreds of these weird little houses I have started looking at newer, modern houses more favorably.

What you are feeling is the electro-magnetic energy of what has happened before.

If negativity has happened you will be picking up on this electromagnetic energy.
Emotions from people now past, stay there as energy, think of Einstein.
Think of powerful microscopes which show us that everything is empty space, quantum physics (I'm still learning)
This explains hauntings.
The Russians send cats into houses to see if they are haunted.
Please don't give up on old houses if that is what you prefer, you might find one where the occupants were happy.
If the energy of the surrounding houses is ok, it might be the right place for you.

 

[Suzette]

@Gift2humanity, thanks for your comments. But all of my comments are about zillow photos.
Though you might be right about EMFs creating a disturbance.

I used to belong to a paranormal group and we often found high EMFs in old houses. Very often it was simply because the electrical system was not properly grounded.

 

[Au Naturel]

Really? $400K in a bad neighbourhood for that house? That sounds way too high. I thought $240K was $90K too much.

LOL! The average home price in LA is about 900K dollars. Includes condominiums, co-ops and single-family homes. Single-family house with a yard is more like 1.2 million. A lot the size of that island would be a million even without a house. Maybe double since it is on the coast.

 

[Suzette]

LOL! The average home price in LA is about 900K dollars. Includes condominiums, co-ops and single-family homes. Single-family house with a yard is more like 1.2 million. A lot the size of that island would be a million even without a house. Maybe double since it is on the coast.

Yup!
Colorado is less expensive than California but even so my mothers house, a mere 900 sq ft (small by u.s. standards) is about $500,000. She paid $240,000 20 years ago!