OOOOOO.....This would make a good thread for October!
I can only tell you what I've experienced...I'm not saying I believe or not...but I do know that some houses and some pieces of property just make me feel creepy with goosebumps rising on my arms, and the hairs on the back of my neck start to stand up.
When I was in college back in the early 70s, I would drive every day past a house that sat up on a high hill among a stand of old oaks and hickorys. The house was visible for quite a few miles along my route to school. It was an old house, two story, darkly stained, and there was never any life about the place. Someone kept the yard mowed and the bushes trimmed but that was about it. No car, no lights, no window curtains....no life. As time went on, I began to notice that a feeling of sadness and foreboding would come over me when that house came into view. The feeling would quickly escalate into deep, dark, brooding depression. I had no reason to be depressed. I would be happy and carefree, then I would see that house in the distance, and a black cloud descended.
For the few miles that I could see that old house, looming up there, I actually felt as though I had no reason to continue to school, no reason to feel hope for a future in education, no reason to smile, to laugh, or to look forward to anything....until I got out of sight of that house. Then, it was as though the sun came back out. The sad, depressed feeling lifted, and I drove on to school, feeling a bit dazed and really spooked! What was going on? Why did the sight of that old house have that effect on me?
I asked a few questions of the librarian, and she said the house had belonged to a widow who had hanged herself there back in the early 60s. The librarian went on to tell me that the woman had suffered from serious bouts of deep depression after her husband had left her for a younger woman. The house now belonged to her son, who kept the place neat, but refused to live in the house or to sell it. I asked my history professer, who lived in the same general area, if he ever noticed the house and if he felt peculiar when he was within sight of it. He told me quite solemnly that he did all he could not to look at it, because he felt a deep sadness whenever he did.
Well, I soon found an alternate route to school that did not bring me into contact with that house. Many years later, I heard that it had burned down. Arson was suspected.
Whether or not that house was haunted, I cannot say. I cannot determine that the feelings of deep depression that I experienced as long as I was within sight of the house had anything to do with the poor woman who had hanged herself. It's just weird as shit and I've never forgotten the creepy, awful, sick feeling of hopelessness that used to assail me as long as that house was within my range of vision.
Shudder, shudder...I hadn't thought of that experience in years!
Catherine
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"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Honore de Balzac
"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it." ~Harry S. Truman
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