As mentioned earlier each square metre of the place feels unsafe. Even if you managed to go run outside, overgrown vegetation and unusual fences old designs just feel creepy make the escape a lot harder for everyone.
For many of us Victorian and Federation architecture feel creepy especially if the structure is dilapidated and abandoned. Old designs, structures and their history have their unique way of making us feel uneasy. It could be the result of watching movies wherein we now associate old structures with something sinister and creepy. But that association may have some basis after all. The old streets and structures have seen a lot through the century.
Nevertheless, sellers are, in many states, obligated to disclose virtually anything that could affect a house's marketability, which the oddities described above certainly could.
Smart sellers would describe exactly what they've observed, without drawing conclusions. Or, they might need to describe related issues like whether you'll face regular nuisances in the form of megaphones blasting from the local ghost-tour bus, or eager ghost-hunters taking photos through your windows. Ask the neighbors what they know about the house. It's best to start generally, with open-ended questions like, "Do you think that house would be a desirable place to live? Try a Google or other Internet search.
Too bad Jeffrey Stambovsky wasn't able to do a little Web-surfing before he bought a turreted turn-of-the-century Victorian home in Nyack, New York in Being from New York City, Stambovsky wasn't familiar with local legends, and the seller hadn't disclosed to him that the lovely riverfront home came with its own family of Caspers.
According to reports by the previous owner, Mrs. Helen Ackley:. Once Stambovsky got wind of all this, he wanted out of the purchase. He took the seller and real estate agent to court, claiming fraudulent misrepresentation. The lower court was not sympathetic and ruled that the seller and agent had no obligation to disclose ghostly presences. But a New York appellate court made the astonishing ruling that the house was haunted:. And right now, as Halloween approaches, is the perfect time to plan a visit.
The home was where the dead were mourned, he explained, and where memories of their presence often remained. Sometimes, homes have attracted a reputation for housing phantom occupants because they were left empty for a long period of time. The thought, Davies explained, was that if people were to fail to occupy a human space, then external forces would move in.
And while haunted houses have had a place in history for centuries, they became an attraction a bit more recently. According to an article from the Smithsonian , haunted houses originated, in some format, in London in the early 19th century.
At the time, the public was exposed to new forms of entertainment — exhibits of the creepier variety. They were eerily true figures, since Tussaud had created death masks for the real people after they faced the guillotine. Americans were moving as far away from the Victorian-style as they could. The Colonial-style was revived in the s and s as something pure and simple and open--and as something that embodied the American ethic.
It was a statement against a particular form of excess, and a declaration that the public outlook was changing. The Victorian-style with its heavily curtained windows and darkened rooms had no place here.
But it wasn't as if the Victorian homes that existed could be torn down en masse--though some critics suggested just that or taking a hammer to them to open them up a bit--these homes continue to exist and house people. It's during this time that the very experience of the home came under fire for representing outdated customs.
For example, prior to rise of funeral homes, it was customary for the dead to be received at home, meaning it was a Victorian custom for the deceased to be laid out in the parlour of the home for viewing. For a society looking forward, this was another perversion that these home harbored.
This feeling of wrongness was able to grow exactly because so many people of the time had experienced these things themselves: they had seen home funerals, they had watched the factories belch soot in their towns, seen the spread of poverty that served to support the economic advancement of a few. And while these homes were gradually abandoned, they held a legacy of life within them. Families moved in and invested their histories within those walls, and then moved out and the cycle repeated itself.
This was not something the newer constructions could claim and this history accumulated in the corners like cobwebs. These homes were physical manifestations of the things that Americans wanted to escape. They gradually became haunted by the lives that were lived within them. Burns writes:. Each house was a vessel, a lid clamped down on a stew of powerful emotions, both personal and cultural--fear, dread, trauma, anxiety, disgust, repulsion, grief, guilt--meant to be shoved to the back of a dark closet and forgotten.
What the house contained, thought, always threatened to seep out, no matter how strong the desire to subdue and repress it. Like Pandora's box, it exerted a perverse allure, roused the irresistible impulse to raise the lid, peer inside, discover the secret, penetrate the mystery. What haunted these houses were memories that refused to die.
Popular media could not resist the urge to peek and probe. Drawing on a literary legacy of "bad homes" from the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne that preyed on the well-being of the families within them, the trope of the evil house was so often repeated that it became "blank narrative," that is, as a media device, the Victorian house's reputation was enough that its mere presence implied something terrible was lurking within.
Media and reality began to bleed into each other as these homes were abandoned by the wealthy for newer establishments leaving them to decay or to be divided and subdivided into rooming houses, which carried their own horrific experiences.
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