Poetry: Haunted houses – Part 3

is your house haunted?

how can you tell

has things happened

for no reason you know?

do the lights flicker

or the water come on?

do things move about

all on their own?

do you hear voices

not knowing what they say?

does something strange happen

each and every day?

do things disappear

and suddenly they reappear?

you maybe living in a haunted house

will you live in fear?

Reflections: Living in a haunted house – Part 2

I know that this sounds really strange, but I was born in a haunted house. You see my mother and father bought this house from my mothers inheritance from her beloved Aunt. The house they boughts owner was dying of cancer, she had spent her whole life in this house. This house was built on the remains of an old plantation, indian burial grounds in the middle of its pecan and fruit orchards. The owner asked my mother for the climbing white rose bush in front of the window, and my mother told her no. Well later on, when me and my sister were about ages four and seven, her spirit would walk in and tell us that the house was too full of people and that our family needed to move out. She was not mean, just fed up. She thought that she was still alive. You wonder why we did not run screaming from the room. Well for one reason, my sister is clairvoyant, and I am clairaudient. We were not afraid of the ghosts in our house, we were afraid of our father. He himself was an atheist and deeply into science. My mother on the other hand was deeply religious. I know, what a pair, but opposites do attract. At any rate, when we told our mother what the lady said, she turned white, and told us to never tell anyone, and that they would think we were crazy. After awhile she would tell us to stop lying, and that we were of the devil. She did not scare my sister, but I was so scared of what my mother was saying that, I refused to say my nighttime prayer. I took the meaning the wrong way. It was the one that says,”Now I lay me down to sleep,” that part did not scare me the part about the lord taking my soul should I die did. Actually the spirit activity did not really crank up until one night, my sister spent the night with her best friend, and my parents had friends over for a card game. The Sunday before that my father burnt my mothers bible in the back yard, out of spite. That next night during the card game, I being very small, crept out to the hallway to watch. I was a hyperactive child and did not go to sleep fast. Any way as they were in the living room playing cards, smoking and drinking beer, I heard a noise like a locomotive or a Hurricane behind me, the wind blew past me into the living room that had blown the cards and beer and ciggerettes to the floor. That night is the night, that it walked in. It was an very angry entity, it hated my father with a passion. I do not wonder why, because we were all afraid of our father more than our mother. My father would drink, and when he drank he was very violent. You get the idea of where our real fear was? At any rate, it would shine a light in his face so that he could not sleep. It would yank the covers from his side of the bed, it would also throw dishes at him. The furniture would move around at night. He and mother were terrified, my sister and I were not. We knew that it would not hurt us. When my younger brothers were born, father gave up the fight and we moved into a new home. As far as we know, no one stays in that house long. We still see spirits, but we are never harmed. My father renovated that house, and in some ways we think that started the activity. But most of the spirits did not see us actually, it was almost as if they were just passing through the house and disapeering into the woods, like a doorway. The thing that went after father, well we used to say he started that fight and lost. I actually loved that old house, Ileft home at an early age. Twenty some odd years later I came home to find out my father had commited suicide. It was strange, when I was doing chemotherepy, I use to meditate, and I thought I felt his spirit there. I did not know he had passed away. I see him now and then, he is in his own haunted house now.

Movie reviews: The Haunting

The Haunting (1963)

Most of us have heard of the 1999 re-make of The Haunting, and even more so what an utter flop it was. So what about the original? Read on.

The Haunting’s tagline, “You may not believe in ghosts but you cannot deny terror”, is surprisingly accurate to my own experience of this film. While I like a good ghostly yarn about headless knights, poltergeists, and scorned lovers back from the grave, I tend to consider anyone that seriously believes it all to be somewhat unhinged. Their hallucinations are obviously stress related or caused by sunspots. That makes sense. This is one of the few films that really sends a shiver down my spine, and I know I’ll be looking up ‘Ghostbusters’ in the phone directory by five in the morning.

As with most haunted house tales, the story is simple, and mostly set up in a fairly gruesome and quick introduction. Hill House was born bad. It is a deranged and leprous mansion miles from any other dwellings in New England. Ever since Hugh Crane had it built over 90 years ago, its history has been riddled with mysterious deaths and incidents. For years it has been left empty, and remains largely the source of gossip and morbid curiosity. Dr John Markway is fascinated by Hill House as a subject for his investigations into the supernatural world. He believes that its turbulent reputation could be proven true, and allow him to record groundbreaking evidence of the existence of ghosts or something more. He convinces the landlady to allow him and a team of researchers to stay in the house for a couple of weeks.

The design of Hill House is as much a part of the success of this film as anything else. It is a very foreboding building from the outside and the sets inside compliment it marvelously. It is grand in every sense and yet full of quirks. One of the most interesting being the concept that it was built with all the door and corridor angles just a few degrees off at every junction, leading to an overall distorted feeling of being lost in the house. Director Robert Wise (The Day The Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Andromeda Strain) uses a number of lingering shots to gradually build up the atmosphere. He makes even the most static image come alive, transforming shadows into hideous figures, pitting your own imagination against yourself.

The team of researchers is an interesting mix of characters designed to be identification figures for the audience. Dr Markway (Richard Johnson) serves to feed our

Living in a haunted house – Part 30

Our house is over two hundred years old, and I can only imagine the people who have passed through here in the time that it’s been standing.

I’ve been told by more than one person that I have psychic tendencies, so maybe that’s why I have seen things here. Nothing malicious, but when I’m standing in the kitchen (which is an add-on built much later than the rest of the house) I have seen on many occasions a figure out of the corner of my eye – standing in the doorway which would have been the original back door into the garden.

My parents have both passed on, so it could be mum or dad coming back to check on me, but I always feel like it’s someone who has been in the house previously.

I have promised myself one day I will research the two hundred years of history between me and the time this house was built… but I’m always a little worried about what I will find!

Living in a haunted house – Part 2

My family in the coarse of growing up have lived in a couple different haunted houses. One when I was very young, practically chased my family out. Sheets that were packed away in boxes in the attic, fell on my uncle when he opened the trap door to the attic. The boxes were not chewed at by animals. My mother heard loud noises stomping around in the attic and in one instance there was a loud groaning coming from the attic. Scared my mother enough to grab us kids and run to the neighbor in her underwear. The neighbor came over to investigate it with gun in hand and when she heard the noises ran back outside. These were only a few of the things that happened in that house. The best story is that my older brother was at a party many years later and they were talking about haunted houses. He found out that a girl who was there told stories about the same house. She had moved in some time after we left.

In another house, my brother and his wife and son were living with my parents for a short time. They heard someone walking up the steps next to their room. My nephew who was only three was deathly afraid to go up those stairs. When I helped them move out, I waited at the house alone with their dog while they took a load to the new house. I heard someone stomping really hard upstairs and I know I was the only one there.

That is my story of haunted houses. I would also like to give my opinion of what it really is. As a Christian, I do not believe the dead walk around haunting houses. When we die, we go to heaven or hell. We do not hang around scaring people. However I do believe in angels and demons. I do believe those spirits are among us. When we have what we think of as ghosts in our house, what we truly have are evil spirits. Yes, I know they dont always seem evil. That some can act friendly. They are evil none-the-less. They are not of God and they are not dead people’s souls. The reason some of these spirits know so much about the person who might have died there, is because they are whats called familiar spirits. Demons that have stayed around that person throughout his or her life. Therefore the spirit knows everything about that person.

Do movies rated PG

From what I’ve seen many a great horror movies have come about with an MPAA rating that ranges from G to R. Old classics like “The Haunting,” for example, contained nothing to give it an adult rating. The scare factor came merely from loud sounds. The movie was an enormous success and the forerunner of haunted house movies. More recently, PG-13 movies like The Ring have come about that would be classified as horror movies. No one could deny that the aim of that movie was to frighten the viewers. The rating doesn’t matter; the movie is still scary and horrific with or without an R rating. An R rating can be achieved if there is so much as full nudity, which typically has nothing directly to do with the scariness of the movie. Most horror movies with an R rating contain heavy gore, but gore isn’t the only way to invoke fear on the audience. Suspense and atmosphere work as well, if not better. Horror movies are aimed at teenagers rather than adults regardless of ratings as evidenced by the fact that the major victims and/or protagonists of horror films tend to be teenagers. Then, I can think of another classic movie that would be classified as a horror movie, namely “Poltergeist”. With merely a title like Poltergeist, you can already see the intent of supernatural horror. In the movie, a little girl is drawn from her bed into a purgatory realm between worlds, a boy is nearly eaten by a tree, and coffins with corpses emerge from the ground in the middle of a house. These are clearly terrible events that would frighten, thus, the movie is a horror movie by definition. To say that the only way a horror movie can occur is if it has an R rating is like saying all animated shows on television cannot reach a PG rating, which many do. Horror in the simple definition does not require disgusting mindless violence or immoral content to exist. The horror movies with lighter ratings merely try more to achieve their fright through psychological and emotional technique rather than mindless disgusting acts of violence or simply unrealistic adult sexual action. The best way to scare a person in my opinion is to let the person scare themselves through their own imagination. That is what these suspenseful horror movies are trying to accomplish and it really works. More of these PG-13 movies are receiving positive reviews than the sloppy gore-fest films that needed gore, sex, and drugs to boost themselves.

Living in a haunted house

My old apartment had a very high likelihood of being haunted. During the Civil War, the town in which I lived played host to a very small “battle,” more accurately described as a skirmish. After the battle, one of the stores downstairs was used as a field hospital, and my apartment was used as the morgue.

It’s hard to say how many of the oddities I experienced there were actual hauntings, and how much was the product of an overactive imagination. When I saw lights flicker across the ceiling at night, it could have been ghostly apparitions, or it could have been the reflection of cars driving past. When I lost the TV remote, it could have been a spirited poltergeist, or it might have just been my poor memory.

The one thing that I do believe was a visitation by ghosts is this. One night, while I was lying in bed, trying to get to sleep, I felt a presence behind me. My roommates were both in their beds, so I knew it wasn’t simply one of them passing through my room. As I lay as still as I could, afraid to roll over and face whatever figure might be awaiting me, I sensed two additional presences outside of the skylight in my room. I never did roll over to see these “ghosts,” even though I felt nothing malevolent coming from any of the three presences.

In my mind, I decided that the single presence in the room with me was that of a female nurse, looking over one of the unfortunate men in the morgue. The two presences peeping in the skylight seemed smaller, as though two young boys were looking to see the dead bodies. I never will know for certain if my speculation was accurate, as I moved from that apartment many years ago, but that night is still vivid in my memory.

Living in a haunted house – Part 4

Very Small Ghost

Have you noticed nearly all reports about haunted places are populated by people, or at least, the ghosts of people? I don’t recall hearing of anyplace haunted by an animal. My experience with a haunted house was quite different. I lived in a house haunted by a cat. There seemed no explanation for a cat to haunt a place, but there it was.

It started after my husband and I had lived in our new (to us) home for several months. The house was not particularly old, perhaps built some twenty years earlier. Just a small, two bedroom home, with attached garage. There were half a dozen houses on our street built on the same basic floor plan. The area, not too many years in the past, had been farm land a few miles from a large city. Nothing mysterious there.

One night when my husband was taking a night training course, I felt a small mass land softly on the foot of the bed, then walk diagonally up to the top of the bed. We owned a cat at the time, but she was shut in the garage, or so I thought. I got up grumbling and turned on the light, thinking the cat had somehow slipped in without my noticing. There was no cat in the bedroom. When I checked the garage, our cat was curled up in her special bed, blinking at my flashlight as it shone on her. Puzzled and a little uneasy, I returned to bed.

This happened a number of times, always on nights when my husband was either working late, or taking a class. I started sleeping with a big flashlight close at hand. I even shut the bedroom door. The ghost cat didn’t appear every night I was at home alone. I could find no pattern to the sporadic visitations.

On the nights it did show up, the arrival of the spirit, or whatever, was distinct. A small body landing on the foot of the bed, then the deliberate walking diagonally up to the top of the bed. One night I woke quickly and turned on the flashlight. I could swear I saw something shadowy dive THROUGH the bedroom door. I was unable to sleep the rest of that night, convinced I must be losing my mind.

For a long time I was afraid to mention this ghostly visitation, but one night’s discussions about odd happenings with my husband uncovered the fact HE had also been visited by our mysterious feline on nights I was taking night courses at the college. When I asked him for details, he described exactly the same set of sensations I had experienced.

We occasionally discussed what was going on, trying to find some rational explanation for the event. Nothing we could think of seemed satisfying. Finally, due to other circumstances, we moved to another section of town. We never had a visitation from our spooky cat after that.

How to create a haunted house

How do we make that Scary:

A Guide to Making an Effective Haunted House

Its Halloween night, and you’re walking down a dimly lit hallway, surrounded by ghosts creeping around you and monsters waiting for you around every corner. From somewhere in the building, you can hear the screams of the tortured and dying. At the end of the hallway, there’s a door. You go through it and…it’s over. With a sigh of relief, you exit the haunted house. Every Halloween, hundreds of people attend haunted houses, hoping and expecting to be scared out of their minds. As an active member of my local community theater, I have had the opportunity to participate in several haunted houses, and have always enjoyed playing one of the scary or creepy characters. But for the most recent haunted house, I was offered the opportunity to assistant direct, and I learned a thing or two about what it takes to make a good haunted house happen.

One very important thing to consider before beginning the process is that putting together a haunted house is not an easy task. Anyone wanting to create a haunted house will need to conceptualize, build, and organize volunteers and rehearsal time. It requires hard work and dedication, but I’ve organized the process into steps to make the process a little simpler for anyone wanting to take on the task.

The first step is to decide on an overall concept for your haunted house. It should be something that will attract people to the haunted house and provide a cohesive design theme. Haunted hospitals and prisons are good examples of effective concepts. It should also include some ideas about what characters will be appearing, and which characters will be the major scares. A good thing to keep in mind when brainstorming a concept is: less is more. Try to make your designs as simple as possible while still achieving the desired effect. This will make the overall process run more smoothly. Also, an effective “creep factor” is added to the final product when audiences are expecting something to happen and it does not.

Another part of the concept-building step is finding a venue for the haunted house. It is a good idea to have your concept at least partially prepared before you go to a venue. You will have a better chance of securing it if you have an idea you can explain clearly and enthusiastically. A good place to start would be your local community theater. Many theaters hold annual haunted houses, and are always

Living in a haunted house – Part 29

THE REAL UNSEEN

This is the truth and nothing but the truth.It started when i was six and living in an old army house attached to military barracks.I remember it was a summer night as i kicked the clothes off the bed. My little sister was asleep beside me and all was quite, suddenly the bedroom curtains started blowing wildly from the closed window, i jumped up and started calling for my parents, then the bed started shaking violently with my sister in it.This went on for about two minutes before my parents opened the door, then it stopped, just like that, no curtain moving no bed shaking.

My parents were cross at been taken out of their beds, no matter what myself or my sister told them they resorted to ‘it was just a bad dream’.

We stayed in that house for a further four years and although that particular incidence did not happen again,we found that my room was always cold and you always got the feeling of been watched.

In my parents room they were constantly woken with knocks on the bedroom door at twelve o clock every night.My father put it down that it was next door hitting a floorboard when they were going to bed.

After we moved from that house,the people who moved in called one day to ask my father about these knocks, they were still occurring at night.My father stuck to the same conclusion ‘that it was next door’.

About ten years ago the army decided to demolish the houses and upon preparation the attics were searched.In our old house they discovered ammunition, clothes and old newspapers dated back to 1810.

Was this the ghost of a soldier protecting his valuables?we will never know…

My father eventually faced up and told me that he could not explain the knocks ‘as the floors were made of concrete’.

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