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I think that the haunting is obviously important to the story. As for myself, I have never seen a ghost but if they do exist I don't think they have any harmful intentions.

I have no belief in the supernatural... including religion. So for me, stories that rely on things like ghosts, demons, gods, angels, vampires, werewolves, fairies, etc. usually hold no interest for me. They're not scary or creepy or spooky for me simply because they're too unbelievable.
That said, I have read and enjoyed a few haunted house/ghost stories from authors I already knew and liked from reading their other works, like 'Hell House' by Richard Matheson, but the appeal wasn't the ghostly parts of the story but the reactions/psychology of his well-written characters.

This is a tough one. I do think that there are haunted dwellings but I also believe that our imagination helps build it up.

I don't think it can be said whether they are fact or fiction. I think it's a possibility....as is anything pertaining to the afterlife. We'll know when we're dead, I suppose.

Let me tell you a story from Biddeford, Maine.

Once I lived in a house on the side of a hill. It shared a street with three other houses. All of those houses were the same, but mine was different. All of them faced my home, and were lined up one beside the other at the foot of the hill. Before we moved in, the realtor stated that my home was built by a man with the last name of Lemieux. He owned all the land surrounding us, most of it developed now. Our home was his home. The three at the bottom of the hill belonged to those who helped with the property. The realtor also claimed our home had an in-house access point to get to the basement.

When we first moved in, I had to stay in a spare room on the first floor. It faced the pantry, where the trap door to the basement was supposedly located. My cat held no qualms with the house, save for the pantry and the living room at night. She would skirt around the pantry, giving it such a wide birth that I would wonder how she had it in her to even venture to that spare room. She would never be found venturing into the living room unless somebody was physically in there. In fact, she stuck to the spare room, kitchen, and dining room only at night. These rooms were side by side. While it concerned me and made me wonder, I didn't question it too much.

Upstairs, my house had three eaves. So the realtor told us. One could be found through my sister's closet. It ran the length of the house, and shared walls with her room as well as my room. One had a direct access from my room into it. It stopped when it reached the wall shared by the bathroom. The other could be found in the bathroom, and ran behind my sister's bedroom.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this house. Not with its location, and not with its layout. Not until we really started to live there...

We would come to learn that our "trap door" didn't exist. While it was in the plans of the house, it wasn't actually present in the pantry. In fact, they wound up putting the furnace directly below the pantry! (The furnace not being part of the original plans of the house.) We surmised that whoever modernized the home completely changed the pantry for safety reasons. Wouldn't we hate for somebody to open the door and land on the furnace! In addition, somebody actually died in our house. Yup, died. In the living room. On their chair. It's also possible that Lemieux's wife died in the house as well. To make it even creepier, the eave that could be accessed in the bathroom was nailed shut. This was also done without the realtor having a clue. She thought the shelves were just placed there!

So please picture yourself living in a home, on the side of a hill, overlooking a row of houses that are all identical and knowing that your home is different. Your home is very different. Not just from those three houses, but from the blueprints to your own home.

In Maine, granite is a common rock form in the earth. It would seem somebody built this house on a hill of it. Our basement had a lovely granite boulder in one corner, and it made it near impossible for the water to adequately drain in the hill. My father made a point to dig a trench halfway around the house to fix this problem. This is when things became weird.

Mind you, the preteen in me wasn't into ghost stories. I was into facts and all things logical. The lack of the trapdoor in the pantry made sense. People die in homes all the time! (And it wasn't like he was murdered.) And that mysterious eave? No big deal! Somebody was probably sick and tired of the shelves moving or that back popping open. (I mean, honestly. Who decides to put a door leading into an eave at the back of a shelving unit?)

But this story is a ghost story.

My cat continued her odd antics until the day she was put down. Moving took a huge toll on her, and I really believe that the pantry and the living room stressed her out too much. She was there for less than a year before we put her to sleep to ease her misery. My dad, that following spring, began the trench work. Soon after, my sister and I began our nightmares and visions.

My sister was eternally creeped out by her eave entrance, and she plain hated her room. It was the best place for spiders to lay their eggs, so she almost always had baby spiders terrorizing her walls and windows. I, on the other hand, remained spider free and loved using my eave. I did not, however, enjoy waking up in the middle of the night to a male face staring down at me from the ceiling. A ceiling that was angled due to the roof and was only a foot above my face. I did not enjoy hearing the stairs creak without anybody stepping on them, or the footsteps that walked past my room and went into my sister's. I did not enjoy the way our doors, which stood opposite the other, seemed to close by an invisible rush of air. And I especially did not enjoy hearing my sister tell me she saw a man enter her closet on occasion.

It would seem, from our youthful understanding, that I heard a male ghost walk up the stairs and go into her room. He would then access my sister's eave through the closet. We speculated that it might be the man who died in the living room, but we realized that it wasn't. What I saw and what she saw were older clothes, dated closer to when Lemieux owned the home.

We never opened the nailed eave. We never wanted to. It was suspected that Lemieux's wife killed herself. I speculated that she hung herself beneath the stairs, over the trapdoor that no longer exists. I have no clue where I got that fanciful thought. It was a thought that seemed to make all the sense in the world once I said it. When my dad dug the trench, he found all sorts of trash from the late 1800s, from the time of the Lemieux's. And yes, he had all kinds of trouble with the trenches and getting a drainage system in there. In addition, my mother would claim she put things down in a spot, but then they would magically no longer be there. Sometimes those objects disappeared completely.

For a school project that year, I went to the local library and discovered that my house owned a fair amount of property that spanned from one cemetery to another, to another, to another, and to another. That's right. Five cemeteries. One cemetery was located across the street (behind the row of four houses). Another one was tucked away just off to the side of that one. Another cemetery was down the road a bit. Another cemetery up the road a bit, in the opposite direction. And the last was like a shining North Star. It was behind my house, perhaps a five minute drive away.

If you could visualize it, like I could when I was staring at a map from the late 1800s, you could easily connect the cemeteries to form a beautiful pentagram. Definitely not something you want to do when you have ghosts, things not lining up with the realtor, historical trash being dug up, and an increasing death count.

I have no clue how much of it was a result of our over-active imaginations or how much of it was based in truth. I just know that I only lived in that home for four years, and I will never forget what we experienced inside of it.

And random fact: Our city theater is actually a popular go-to spot for ghost hunters. You should look it up some time!

To a certain point, yes I do believe in haunted dwellings. In an old house that I used to live in, my bedroom was basically a place of nightmares for me. I would have literal nightmares every single night when I went to sleep for many years. Also I could see things, what you would call demonic things, in my bedroom if I opened my eyes. This made me afraid to go to bed every night, in which I got into the habit of staying up for most of the night. Eventually I figured that I had to face my fears and I told them to go away. To this day though, I do not have fond memories of that house, and I was thrilled when my parents and I finally moved.

Mindy_M wrote:Let me tell you a story from Biddeford, Maine.

Once I lived in a house on the side of a hill. It shared a street with three other houses. All of those houses were the same, but mine was different. All of them faced my home, and were lined up one beside the other at the foot of the hill. Before we moved in, the realtor stated that my home was built by a man with the last name of Lemieux. He owned all the land surrounding us, most of it developed now. Our home was his home. The three at the bottom of the hill belonged to those who helped with the property. The realtor also claimed our home had an in-house access point to get to the basement.

When we first moved in, I had to stay in a spare room on the first floor. It faced the pantry, where the trap door to the basement was supposedly located. My cat held no qualms with the house, save for the pantry and the living room at night. She would skirt around the pantry, giving it such a wide birth that I would wonder how she had it in her to even venture to that spare room. She would never be found venturing into the living room unless somebody was physically in there. In fact, she stuck to the spare room, kitchen, and dining room only at night. These rooms were side by side. While it concerned me and made me wonder, I didn't question it too much.

Upstairs, my house had three eaves. So the realtor told us. One could be found through my sister's closet. It ran the length of the house, and shared walls with her room as well as my room. One had a direct access from my room into it. It stopped when it reached the wall shared by the bathroom. The other could be found in the bathroom, and ran behind my sister's bedroom.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this house. Not with its location, and not with its layout. Not until we really started to live there...

We would come to learn that our "trap door" didn't exist. While it was in the plans of the house, it wasn't actually present in the pantry. In fact, they wound up putting the furnace directly below the pantry! (The furnace not being part of the original plans of the house.) We surmised that whoever modernized the home completely changed the pantry for safety reasons. Wouldn't we hate for somebody to open the door and land on the furnace! In addition, somebody actually died in our house. Yup, died. In the living room. On their chair. It's also possible that Lemieux's wife died in the house as well. To make it even creepier, the eave that could be accessed in the bathroom was nailed shut. This was also done without the realtor having a clue. She thought the shelves were just placed there!

So please picture yourself living in a home, on the side of a hill, overlooking a row of houses that are all identical and knowing that your home is different. Your home is very different. Not just from those three houses, but from the blueprints to your own home.

In Maine, granite is a common rock form in the earth. It would seem somebody built this house on a hill of it. Our basement had a lovely granite boulder in one corner, and it made it near impossible for the water to adequately drain in the hill. My father made a point to dig a trench halfway around the house to fix this problem. This is when things became weird.

Mind you, the preteen in me wasn't into ghost stories. I was into facts and all things logical. The lack of the trapdoor in the pantry made sense. People die in homes all the time! (And it wasn't like he was murdered.) And that mysterious eave? No big deal! Somebody was probably sick and tired of the shelves moving or that back popping open. (I mean, honestly. Who decides to put a door leading into an eave at the back of a shelving unit?)

But this story is a ghost story.

My cat continued her odd antics until the day she was put down. Moving took a huge toll on her, and I really believe that the pantry and the living room stressed her out too much. She was there for less than a year before we put her to sleep to ease her misery. My dad, that following spring, began the trench work. Soon after, my sister and I began our nightmares and visions.

My sister was eternally creeped out by her eave entrance, and she plain hated her room. It was the best place for spiders to lay their eggs, so she almost always had baby spiders terrorizing her walls and windows. I, on the other hand, remained spider free and loved using my eave. I did not, however, enjoy waking up in the middle of the night to a male face staring down at me from the ceiling. A ceiling that was angled due to the roof and was only a foot above my face. I did not enjoy hearing the stairs creak without anybody stepping on them, or the footsteps that walked past my room and went into my sister's. I did not enjoy the way our doors, which stood opposite the other, seemed to close by an invisible rush of air. And I especially did not enjoy hearing my sister tell me she saw a man enter her closet on occasion.

It would seem, from our youthful understanding, that I heard a male ghost walk up the stairs and go into her room. He would then access my sister's eave through the closet. We speculated that it might be the man who died in the living room, but we realized that it wasn't. What I saw and what she saw were older clothes, dated closer to when Lemieux owned the home.

We never opened the nailed eave. We never wanted to. It was suspected that Lemieux's wife killed herself. I speculated that she hung herself beneath the stairs, over the trapdoor that no longer exists. I have no clue where I got that fanciful thought. It was a thought that seemed to make all the sense in the world once I said it. When my dad dug the trench, he found all sorts of trash from the late 1800s, from the time of the Lemieux's. And yes, he had all kinds of trouble with the trenches and getting a drainage system in there. In addition, my mother would claim she put things down in a spot, but then they would magically no longer be there. Sometimes those objects disappeared completely.

For a school project that year, I went to the local library and discovered that my house owned a fair amount of property that spanned from one cemetery to another, to another, to another, and to another. That's right. Five cemeteries. One cemetery was located across the street (behind the row of four houses). Another one was tucked away just off to the side of that one. Another cemetery was down the road a bit. Another cemetery up the road a bit, in the opposite direction. And the last was like a shining North Star. It was behind my house, perhaps a five minute drive away.

If you could visualize it, like I could when I was staring at a map from the late 1800s, you could easily connect the cemeteries to form a beautiful pentagram. Definitely not something you want to do when you have ghosts, things not lining up with the realtor, historical trash being dug up, and an increasing death count.

I have no clue how much of it was a result of our over-active imaginations or how much of it was based in truth. I just know that I only lived in that home for four years, and I will never forget what we experienced inside of it.

And random fact: Our city theater is actually a popular go-to spot for ghost hunters. You should look it up some time!

Thank you for sharing your story! You should write a book. This story would make a great one.

gali wrote: ↑04 Oct 2016, 22:27 I don't believe in Haunted Dwellings and think it is a fiction. It may have an atmosphere though, and our imagination does the rest.

I totally agree with you on this.

I believe in haunted dwelling and I believe everyone should too because a lot of thinks are a mystery in the world and we tend to act like they don’t exist hoping that they go away. I have had a ghost encounter before so I certainly believe it should not be taken lightly.