Haunted Houses anyone?

[paigetheoracle]

Why are some houses reputedly haunted and others are not? Are there any common factors? Has any work been done on this in the scientific community? (Parapsychology/other discipline). Is it down to the condition/ architecture of the house stirring up the imagination of the viewer or stories associated with the place (tragedies/mysteries)?

 

Question two. Why do some residents report their house as being haunted while former/subsequent tenants do not? Is it the occupants attitude? Do the imaginative see things, while the sceptical deny things are happening, even if they have evidence to the contrary? Do the negative draw things out of the woodwork and the positive fill the place with such life, that nothing bad occurs there or is encouraged to manifest? Could it be like lucky charms and the common denominator being belief in something making it work/real?

 

Enlarging the view and bringing in a new perspective - how about 'Escape from New York' by John Carpenter and the realities of 60's New York, compared with now? Could neglect (abandon) haunt a place, a world and care restore it to its former glory? (Gulliniani's 'Broken Window' policy and legalised abortion occuring at the same time: Every street a cared for (wanted) street - every child a wanted child). It always starts small and grows bigger over time, minor increment by minor increment and the reverse is true too - vandalism starts off as small testing, to see if it gets a response: Is anyone at home?/ alive in there? (Is the body dead? Kick it and find out/ Is the house empty? Kick the door and see if anybody comes). Presence (life/movement) drives out absence (death). As they say in Zen 'We have 'nothing' to be afraid of and that is exactly what worries us (Life shouts back but death death is conspicuous by its absence).

 

Strange claims may not be the appropriate place for this, considering the stance but I thought the title alone merited it being placed here.:hyper:

[InfiniteNow]

Basically, people attributing spooky supernaturalism to events they cannot adequately explain, which, with effort, could be explained otherwise. Perhaps the former tenants were just not as predisposed to ignorance as the newer ones... :cup:

[paigetheoracle]

Basically, people attributing spooky supernaturalism to events they cannot adequately explain, which, with effort, could be explained otherwise. Perhaps the former tenants were just not as predisposed to ignorance as the newer ones... :cup:

 

Not sure ignorance is the right word. There may be more to physical reality than we know at present but yes, people can frighten the lives out of themselves through nothing more than an overworked imagination (Imagination is creative but are its products real in any sense?). It's like the whole question of evil - Zen implies in reality it's like ghosts - there is no 'substance' to the things we fear.

[InfiniteNow]

Not sure ignorance is the right word.

How about child-like fairy tales because the truth is too hard for them to grasp and the stories are easier? :cup:

[TheBigDog]

I posted this elsewhere to make a specific point, but it seems apropos here too...

When I was in my teens and living at home we got a free beat up pool table from a neighbor who was throwing it out. It was full sized, and too big for the basement so we played with broomsticks instead of queues. We only had seven balls and a queue, and five of the balls were solids with two stripes, so we had to make some creative games. Also, the table had been laying on its side in a flooded basement at one time, so the surfce along one side was pretty warped. It was not exactly flat anyplace, and the bumpers had no life at all. It had ball returns, but they were as warped as the table top, and sometimes the balls would get stuck in the returns, and you would have to roll another ball to knock the stuck one free. But none of that has anything to do with this post.

 

Me and my sisters thought that the table was haunted.

 

The basement always seemed creepy after we set it up. Like it was looking at you. And it would do strange things, like you would leave the broomstick laying across the table and go upstairs for a drink. When you would come downstairs the stick would be lying on the table, not across. Sometimes a ball would get stuck in a return and not come out. The seven ball would be in the tunnel. You would roll the cue ball in and hear them knock together, and then the cue ball would roll out, but no seven. There was no room for them to pass. These things always seemed to happen when you were not paying attention. I would roll a ball, and get a different one out, but did I really roll that one in? In any controlled experiment we never observed anything strange.

 

My point is that we set ourselves up emotionally to observe phenomena that was not happening. We all agreed that the table was creepy. that is was somehow scary to have down there. Then any small thing we observed our mind sought to justify based upon our preconceived notion that it was a haunted table. Because it was scary we conceived of the phenomena as demonic or evil. Had we had the initial notion that it was a fountain of good fortune, we may have perceived the same events as angelic, or of good luck. The human mind has an increadible ability to make your wishes come true in how it evaluates abstract events into your perception of reality. And you don't need a drug to make those things happen. All you need is an emotionally charged state of mind, and a conception of what might happen. Your mind will do the rest.

 

Wisdom gained over a lifetime helps you to control your mind state and separate real from fantasy. Youths seem to go through a period of exploration that is part of the typical developmental curve. While we go through it at different paces and different extremes, we all do it. And there are always a few who think they are inventing something new, and a very few who never grow out of it. But just because you are still scared of your own pool table doesn't mean that it is haunted. Give it time, I have been there.

Haunted Houses are the same deal.

 

Bill

[CraigD]

Why are some houses reputedly haunted and others are not? Are there any common factors?

From the anecdotes I’ve observed, and as paige notes, places reputedly haunted must have an “origin story”, usually involving an unjust death, the disturbing of a grave, or both (eg, in order of assumed severity: an old person dies there naturally, a family died in a fire there, a deceived spouse was murdered there, it was built on a mass grave of the massacred children of the last of an oppressed tribe)

Has any work been done on this in the scientific community? (Parapsychology/other discipline).

I think the scientific community considers Parapsychology, psychometry, etc. to be pseudosciences.

 

This is not to imply that ghosts and hauntings can’t, and haven’t been scientifically investigated. Over the centuries, many reasonable theories predicting ghosts and haunting have been advanced and tested. All of those for which experiments have been designed and conducted have been disproved and discarded (although in several cases, the scientists involved have been terribly embarrassed and ridiculed when fooled by “mere” slight-of-hand artists and charlatans into reporting positive results).

 

As I see it, as technology makes new kinds of experiments possible, and scientific theory moves in to provide explanations and predictions of them, new Theories of Ghosts (and complementary Theories of the Soul) tend to appear. For example, as ancient astronomy was able to categorize and predict the motion of celestial bodies, ToGs involving these bodies appeared (Astrology appears to be a vestige of such a ToG). When astronomy theorized the existence of Earth-like worlds of other stars, ToGs involving interaction with these planets appeared. When early microscopes revealed the presence of microorganisms within animals, ToGs appeared suggesting that ghosts might be due to these microorganisms. As the effect of electricity on animals was investigated, ToGs suggesting that ghosts were electrical in nature appeared. When the formalism of electromagnetic fields emerged, ToGs describing ghosts as field effects emerged (and are common in pseudoscience to this day).

 

Among the latest ToGs are ones involving quantum mechanics. Some suggest that the process of quantum renormalization imply a ghostly “vacuum consciousness”. Others, such as the Speculations of Roger Penrose, suggest that human consciousness is due to non-algorithmic quantum effects in very small nerve structures. These latter kinds of ToGs pertain little to the sort of ghost that could haunt a house, being more TotSs.

Is it down to the condition/ architecture of the house stirring up the imagination of the viewer or stories associated with the place (tragedies/mysteries)?

 

Question two. Why do some residents report their house as being haunted while former/subsequent tenants do not? Is it the occupants attitude?...

The mostly empirical discipline of Psychology has much to say about phenomena of perception in which people believe their houses to be haunted. Though its theories and speculations are numerous, they all can be simplified to “it’s all in their heads”.

 

A few well known psychologists, such as Jung, have proposed that it’s not all in our heads. Well designed and conducted experiments to confirm such speculation have failed to do so.

Do the imaginative see things, while the sceptical deny things are happening, even if they have evidence to the contrary?

Imaginative and skeptical people alike have the emotions and imagination inherent in human neurology. Both kinds of people experience spooky occurances. Skeptics, I believe, are more inclined to attempt to support their perceptions with objective evidence. The favored approach in doing this is to search for scientific explanations. Skeptics are fallible, however, and commonly settle on the incorrect of several scientific explanations for a phenomena. Although this can prove embarrassing, even a wrong scientific explanation suffices to reassure a skeptic that he is not being haunted, providing emotional relief.

Do the negative draw things out of the woodwork and the positive fill the place with such life, that nothing bad occurs there or is encouraged to manifest? Could it be like lucky charms and the common denominator being belief in something making it work/real?

From the 1930s through the 1990s, and to a lesser extent to present times, the notion that one’s expectations can influence objective reality (other than in the obvious way – eg: I expect my yard to get raked. I rake it. Therefore my expectation effected reality) can be attributed to a collection of speculative interpretations of quantum mechanics, roughly as follows:

It has been shown that, on the scale of fundamental particles such as the photon, the act of observing an interaction effects the probability of future interactions (renormalizes, or “collapses the quantum wave function”);

Nothing happens without a cause;

Therefore, observation is caused by an observer (us);

Human conscious and unconscious thought is poorly understood, and potentially much more capable than apparent by such things as our test-taking ability;

Possibly, we are able to chose the outcome of very large numbers of quantum level observation, sufficient to chose a specific macroscopic chain of events corresponding to our wishes and expectations.

 

I believe that advances in the interpretation of quantum mechanics is leading to a model of renormalization in which this speculation is a fallacy. My experience with this branch of science is that it is very technical and difficult to understand.

Enlarging the view and bringing in a new perspective …

No, thank you – I feel enlarged enough just now. :D

Strange claims may not be the appropriate place for this, considering the stance but I thought the title alone merited it being placed here.:cup:

At least in the direction I’m following it, it seems to straddle History/philosophy of science, Physics, and Psychology. Though not really “strange”, it’s “cross-disciplinary” enough that strange claims seems a good place for it.

[Queso]

"They" claim the winchester mystery house in San Jose is haunted...

From my observations it's just haunted by tourists.

 

There's also a Haunted Toys R Us in Sunnyvale.

 

Probably just by spoiled children like me.