When we bought this house, we knew there were issues. It was owned by HUD — never a good sign. We have not been able to piece together the history, HUD knows little, tells less, and since we bought the house ourselves instead of having a bank buy it for us we had about no clout at all when it came to pushing for details. I believe it was foreclosed on, but how it got to the point where HUD held the note is an unknown. I have heard the previous owners had difficulty selling the place (not surprising, if you finance a manufactured home at the height of the housing and credit boom and then try to sell it after it’s depreciated and the market has collapsed and there are 50 others just like it out there, it’s going to be hard) so after several years of trying they may have somehow worked something out with HUD, who then used it as low-income housing? Conjecture, but I think maybe that’s the deal. Anyway, I don’t think the folks right before us were owners.
A month or so after we moved in the neighbors expanded a bit on their “Oh, they were just awful people” stories about our predecessors. I had asked a bit because I had two fears — 1) we had pushed out a poor needy family or 2) meth lab. Doesn’t sound like either was the case. But eventually it teased out, we were told that of the three who occupied this place last, one left on his own, one left in an ambulance, and one in a police car. My neighbor swears the woman who was stabbed survived, which is probably true, but I think she’d probably lie if it weren’t.
Now, my neighbors are pretty clear on this. We’ve kind of moved into the spooky house on the corner — the white trash version. My neighbor with the neglected kid says they drove up the drive once when it was empty to look, and her daughter thought there was just something so creepy about it, she didn’t want to go near it. My other neighbor is more gentle on us, she says she thought the house needed a happy home because of its “bad energy”. Why I’m pretty sure that she wouldn’t tell us if there’d been a murder is that she figures it would be unbearable for me to live in a house where a woman was murdered and it would be a kindness to just cover up that part.
I met a woman once who owned a house that she’d rented to an upper middle class nice family where the father had, police believe, murdered his wife and daughter. They couldn’t rent it, couldn’t sell it. No one wanted that house, which had been such a prize before (this was at the height of the boom).
I do believe most of us feel a twinge of sympathy for this point of view. Some days the twinge yanks me off my feet. I have an imagination. And my children live here.
But, you know, that’s not the way evil works. I believe in angels, and I believe that fallen angels are devils. But devils go after people — they aren’t interested in houses.
I believe in life after death. I believe in heaven, hell, and purgatory. I don’t particularly believe in ghosts. I don’t necessarily think the existence of a “ghost” would contradict Catholic teaching, but I think a ghost that spent eternity bugging people in their homes might, and at the very least if you look at the whole grand plan of the afterlife any sideshow of some kind of haunting looks pretty small.
I definitively do not believe in “bad energy”. Nice try, folks. Evil is not a force or an energy, it is a choice. It is a choice that persons make. It is absolutely real, and it is something we bring to the game, not something visited mysteriously upon us against our will. Yes, others can do evil to us — other persons. We don’t get zapped with evilness rays and then, oops, sorry guys, I’m evil now, guess them’s just the breaks.
So, the short of it is that I am fearful, with all this creepy oogey stuff turning up, and I have the mama bear instinct to sit up all night in my kids’ rooms with a crucifix and a baseball bat. And here’s the shame of it.
By buying in, even against my own beliefs, to this garbage, here’s what I get. I get to be afraid — God tells me I don’t have to be. I get to communicate that in between the lines to my kids. I get to not feel at home in my own home. I get to think of the previous occupants as characters in some story instead of the poor souls they were, and pray for them. I get to distance myself from the truth. And if I buy into it too much, or if I’d known and bought into it before we bought the house, I wouldn’t be here. We’d still have a mortgage, we’d be living a lifestyle that is conducive to sin, we’d be thousands of dollars in debt, we’d be farther apart as a family and my marriage would probably be seriously on the rocks. No, really.
I’m kind of a big fan of pre-Christian pagans, and I’m a big fan of horror movies (the real ones). I’ll put garlic on my door and sharpen stakes. I’ll hole up against zombies. I’ll carry a handax against the big bad wolf and I’ll root for the gods against the giants. I do believe that stuff can and usually winds up pointing to Christ when Christ is born. But this “send me good vibes”, “that spot has bad energy” stuff, it’s for the birds. And I think it’s the prevailing religion in most communities these days, because I know the folks that would blink at me if I tried to explain transubstantiation and think how that’s just so weird or foolish would nod their heads at my neighbor saying she believes some places just have “bad energy”.
