Am I the only one or does that picture look kind of uncanny?
I can’t place it… It looks uneven and wavy.
I smell burnt toast.
Haunted houses are old. There’s no way McMansions will last long enough for ghosts to sprout.
It’s because it’s now dead malls that are getting haunted. To know what’s worth haunting today we’ll need to wait about 30 to 50 years to see what sorts of architecture is considered spooky.
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I honestly don’t understand the houses going up in my neighborhood - it’s getting gentrified and what is being built is so ugly. Who is buying these ugly ass houses for 1.5 MILLION dollars? If that was my budget I’d build something beautiful with a big porch like this picture, but all the “luxury” homes are boxes with big garages in front. I look at them on Zillow and they aren’t even pretty on the inside.
And they all look alike in some developments. One cheap house after another, all exactly alike. Crap materials, horrible construction. Seriously, who wants to live in that kind of neighborhood?
While this house is beautiful and magnificent, it probably also needs to be gutted, insulated, rewired/replumbed, and lacks common hidey holes for central air. All those shingles are custom now, and the whole thing needs repainting regularly. The doorways and stairs are narrow, and most of the rooms are small by today’s standards. The windows aren’t low-e, and even with all that, it’ll still probably leak air like a sieve.
It is a magnificent house, but it’s also an absolute money pit to maintain, heat, and cool.
Agreed. I have never lived in a house younger than 70. While there are upsides beyond style (old growth forest framing, solid wood floors) there are downsides - have always been able to get central air, even in the 1925 house, but so very many things have to be changed and fixed. I wouldn’t even try with a 200 year old house unless I was so rich. But if I was, I might. Or might build a reproduction with some reclaimed materials and some modern touches.
Even in our house, half 1940 half 1990, new metal roof, roof attachments, hurricane windows, and we are not yet close to the current building standards. An endless work in progress, I would enjoy that if it wasn’t financially stressful, but the house I love and it’s not as stressful as a mortgage and taxes on a 1.5M ugly house.
I work for a city that’s an enclave for the mega-rich and is going through hyper-gentrification. People are buying 3 million dollar houses, tearing them down, and building 15 million-dollar houses.
It’s the 1%ers being pushed out by the .01%ers. It’s a whole different planet.
But the contractors still suck and cut every corner they can, so it really is the same anywhere you go.
100 years from now haunted house stories will be about boxes with big garages in front.
1.5 didn’t get you much of you are spending 1 on the land alone.
New builds really bug me too. They’re so pricey and big, yet the developers keep putting them on postage stamp lots. Like, who wants to spend that much money on a freestanding house while being so crammed together that you might as well be sharing walls?
One of my profs in grad school had a new house built like that, enormous with almost no yard around it separating it from the neighbors. I asked him why and he said his wife liked it like that because it made her feel more secure. I was like, OK so now your neighbors can easily come kill you and then just go home instead of having to flee from a gated community.
TBF this was in Gainesville right after the Rolling murders. Reading about somebody’s head on a turntable might make you do strange things.
Yeah that happens here because they are knocking down one house and building two. I don’t really disagree with that, honestly. But they don’t need to be that big.
What other choice do people have? My options around here are 100 year old failing cardboard houses, or overpriced stupid Zillow Grey boxes. It’s that or just abandon my family.
If you have the budget to buy the ugly box, you have the budget to buy the cardboard house, knock it down and build something you like that isn’t so enormous. We didn’t have the budget for either so are just slowly renovating and hardening the house we bought.
My point isn’t that houses are too expensive - that is beyond question at this point. Even your cardboard box would cost too much now for most anybody. What I do not understand is rich people buying ugly prefabricated stuff in general. I would use that budget for something bespoke.
I know two people who were dead set on building a house who then gave up on it because it was too expensive. Just massively overpriced. Better to just buy an existing home
Say, isn’t that the old Henderson place? I heard they never could find a buyer after what happened.
Oh wait, here comes a happy and naive young family from out of town.
Look at this place baby… So much room. I could totally see us living here the rest of our lives.
…GeT…OuuuUuut…
To bad we can’t stay baby!
Small houses can be scary, too! My living room when I moved in back in October (not a joke):
And there’s so much more!
Do those numbers mean something?
No idea. I thought it might be the combination to the gun safe, but that doesn’t seem to be it. Sort of a LOST situation, I deemed it best not to get too hung up on the numbers, after much speculation.
The spacing almost looks like Ol’ Boy 22 or something. Weird find!
Edit: maybe Ol’ Boyzz?
The previous owner went through a tragedy and had a rough go of it:
Also the crawlspace is labeled “The Dark Side” and there were shoes. And a VHS camera/tape I’ll never watch.
STILL NOT JOKING!
This is some rough environmental storytelling. Damn. I’d be curious about the camera/tape, but not watching it is almost certainly the right call.
Given the context, maybe married 1/13/2004 and divorced 2022?
Edit: actually, if they married in 2004 they would have been married 22 years this year. Maybe dude just rounded up.
Jesus Christ. All I found in my house was a hat one of the workers left in the attic when it was built (1942).
I feel bad for the dude, looking at the pictures you posted it seems like the poor bastard had a mental break.
Yeah, I was told his young son died, sooo…that probably did it. I’m still working to get it fixed up, it’s already a fair bit better. It’s certainly not at all overwhelming, so that’s nice.
ALDV? I don’t get it.
We figured out how to install gas lines appropriately. Many “ghosts” were gas inhalation induced hallucinations.
It’s like all those stories from the 1800s of clocks stopping the moment a person died. Turns out of a lot of the clocks back then would stop running if you turned them sideways, which a lot of doctors did at night to be able to read the time of death.
And ‘juvenile delinquency’ stopped after they took lead out of gasoline.
It’s amazing how much the violent crime rate went down with the removal of leaded gas.
I like to read science fiction from that time and look at the things the authors, some of them actual scientists, overlooked.
An example of things that authors missed! I just watched a YouTube video looking at the history of instant communication devices in Sci-fi and Fantasy, and also how the author thought to use them in the narrative; contrasting that with how we’d actually use them through our modern understanding. They go on to argue that usage of instant communication is now so ubiquitous to our collective psyche that current sci-fi and fantasy stories can just invent it in basically every setting nowadays. It’s actually a really easy thing to cook up if your narrative has any kind of magic system, be it science or standard issue. https://youtu.be/2Pw_7vAK9k8
Are video essays, specifically ones about storytelling, my special interest? Yes, but I hardly see how that’s relevant.
You didn’t see anything!
The lights have always been this way.
All I am seeing here, is the insane yearly cost of recurring maintenance on an old wooden house…*shudders*
Shutters
It’s really not that bad except the paint job every 10-20 years which costs as much as a new car, but back in the day they had oil paint which didn’t peel like latex does. Still, imo, worth it to live in an historic, unique, drag queen of a home.
I suppose if you can afford a house like this you can afford a really nice new car every so often. A really nice car. Because a full scraping, sanding, and repair plus 2-3 color paint can cost over $100,000.
Or … you just develop a hobby of house painting…
You could start a small business just to paint and maintain your own estate.
My brother legit did this to repair his old farm house that he shouldn’t have bought. Tools and supplies are tax write offs, the company always operates at a loss, but he is basically a decent carpenter and worked through college and highschool summers as one.
Also don’t buy an ancient house unless you have the funds to build another house in it.
Your own personal golden gate bridge
As someone with an old wooden house, it’s actually not bad. They’re built so damn well that they just… stay there.
The expensive part is if you need to do any renovations. Updating electrical, plumbing, and HVAC sucks.
The looks you get when you tell your contractor you want plaster, not drywall.
They had to find a guy who still knew how to do plaster walls when we redid our bathroom. He was well past retirement age.
I put in about 40hrs a year on scraping and painting and the total building envelope is only 160m2, and is much less detailed.
“My house is haunted.”
“You live in a ranch in the suburbs built in 1983. What kind of white bread ghost stuck around that mess?”
ranch in the suburbs
I thought that was what they call eating out in Iowa?
Fun fact I once witnessed someone chug ranch dressing in a rural Nevada parking lot. I wish I filmed it because they drained it from new to empty in the same period of time it takes me to chug a gallon of water.
Literally the plot of some Phasmophobia maps lol
One who complains about the lack of Bree and the quality of the toilet paper?
You have to own the house to have it be haunted. So boomers are kinda the least generation of people to be haunted.
That house looks like it’s $3.2 million dollars.
I wonder if older houses seem more “hauntable” simply because they were built to facilitate air flow within them. Before air conditioning, homes had to be built to allow air to naturally circulate. Thought was placed into room, door, and window layouts to encourage air flow throughout the home, windows were designed to fully open, and transom windows allowed air flow even when doors were closed.
The point is that old homes were built to allow air flow. This means that there’s more opportunity for doors to randomly close and other things to be disturbed by the wind. Older homes also weren’t as sealed and insulated as well. They were designed assuming that some of the structure would get wet and then dry out. Older buildings were designed to undergo constant moisture cycling, while newer buildings try to seal out moisture all together. More dramatic changes in lumber moisture content means more creaks, groans, and other ghostly noises.
Simply because of how buildings science has evolved, it’s possible that older homes just more readily produce “haunting” sounds than modern ones.
If we go by the logic in some media where the ghosts are bound to the house/property, they probably don’t want to be stuck somewhere that will eventually just dissolve in the rain.
We don’t build houses like that anymore because it would cost a fortune. That’s a lot of man-hours of intricate, custom woodworking right there, and that don’t come cheap.
You used to be able to buy similar homes from a sears catalog and put it together yourself. Maybe not quite as much detail, but still a lot more than you’d find anything on the market in the last 40 years.
Btw $753 adjusted from 1913 is only around 25k.
For some reason the thought of mail ordering a house from Sears has always seemed a weirdly comforting, once affordable American thing to me. Living in the western Chicago suburbs, I understand that there are several still standing in this party of the country.
I actually live in one that was built in the 30s. They’re actually really well built since they used truss plates for all the framing, plus the quality of the wood from back then is night and day compared to the stuff you can get now.
only around 25k
For materials cost alone, mind you – not including any labor you hire out in constructing it, and not including the land to put it on.
(And I’m guessing that 25k doesn’t include any electrical, certainly not any HVAC, and maybe not even any indoor plumbing…)
Still, building codes and inspections aside, I think it could be a decent idea even in modern times to have mass-produced, mail-order house construction kits available. Trailer homes have kind of absorbed most of that niche, but they’re not as well insulated or as long-lasting as real houses.
For materials cost alone, mind you – not including any labor you hire out in constructing it, and not including the land to put it on.
These were typically put together by farming communities, kinda like a barn raising. Even if you had one of these put together for you, it’s not like labour was a huge expense back then.
And I’m guessing that 25k doesn’t include any electrical, certainly not any HVAC, and maybe not even any indoor plumbing…)
It’s hard to make out, but in the link I posted you can see the add one that includes things like heating, electrical, plumbing, or different roofing materials. The additions are pretty affordable as well.
Still, building codes and inspections aside, I think it could be a decent idea even in modern times to have mass-produced, mail-order house construction kits available.
It was a pretty lucrative business for sears until the great depression hit. Unfortunately it was their mortgage side of the operation that forced them under. It would be interesting to see how they would operate today. The quality is great, I live in one from the early 30s and the bones are still rock solid.
Turn out haunting a house also cost some ghost buck and inflation makes haunting unaffordable.
