Creepy houses

[Suzette]

I have been looking at a lot of houses on Zillow lately. My husband and I would like to buy a house to use as a "home base" and as a home for when we get too old to live on the boat.

Anyway, we are looking at smaller homes in Oklaholma and Kansas as they are cheap and close to his family. The oak forest, waterways and rolling hills of the extreame eastern edges of these states are beautiful too.

Many of the houses we are looking at are 100+ years old. Some are old Sears kits houses with wonderful built in cabinetry, leaded windows and loads if other semi custom features. A lot of the houses need serious updating and work too. Which brings me to the subject title. "Creepy houses".

I have noticed a lot of these houses are in dying old towns. We drove through many of them this summer. Some towns just seem to drip with despair and depression.

And the houses for sale in these towns are often weird with multiple finishes on the walls, patchy paint colors, mismatched wall paper and 50 year old carpet and with big stains on the floor. In one house the photo clearly shows a reddish stain peeking out from a slab of plywood on the floor.

Honestly, some of these houses seem to be the stuff ghost stories are made up about. I love craftsman houses and Sears kit homes in particular. But having looked at hundreds of these weird little houses I have started looking at newer, modern houses more favorably.

 

[Suzette]

I have been looking at a lot of houses on Zillow lately. My husband and I would like to buy a house to use as a "home base" and as a home for when we get too old to live on the boat.

Anyway, we are looking at smaller homes in Oklaholma and Kansas as they are cheap and close to his family. The oak forest, waterways and rolling hills of the extreame eastern edges of these states are beautiful too.

Many of the houses we are looking at are 100+ years old. Some are old Sears kits houses with wonderful built in cabinetry, leaded windows and loads if other semi custom features. A lot of the houses need serious updating and work too. Which brings me to the subject title. "Creepy houses".

I have noticed a lot of these houses are in dying old towns. We drove through many of them this summer. Some towns just seem to drip with despair and depression.

And the houses for sale in these towns are often weird with multiple finishes on the walls, patchy paint colors, mismatched wall paper and 50 year old carpet and with big stains on the floor. In one house the photo clearly shows a reddish stain peeking out from a slab of plywood on the floor.

Honestly, some of these houses seem to be the stuff ghost stories are made up about. I love craftsman houses and Sears kit homes in particular. But having looked at hundreds of these weird little houses I have started looking at newer, modern houses more favorably.

 

[Gerontius]

This may sound really weird but I wouldn't move into a house, especially an old house, unless I called a priest and had the place blessed. Something seems better about giving the place a chance to start over--places, people, or things; we're all nouns really, lol. And over years & years it seems nice to give it a bit of something good, and new, as any time there are humans involved there's misery in it.

Used to see more of these old houses where I was at and I would go and write -- sometimes they made good settings for stories because they were very tactile. Going inside one of these old places is a new sensory landscape and great to explore. Grew up in a house from the '50s and it was not a picnic but still more interesting than a brand-new house.

I want to go find one of those creepy old wooden houses with minimal updates and go live in that. What seems really creepy, to me, is a house built in a world where Amazon & HGTV govern what constitutes good taste. Sorry I'll take my chances with the push-button light switches and the creepy wallpaper.

 

[Metalhead]

 

[Suzette]

@Gerontius

One of tbe best houses I have seen was an old Sears kit house. It had all the original woodwork with built in sideboards and dressers. It also has the original lamps in the dinning room, leaded glass windows, and craftsman tited fireplaces. It was almost a museum with so much being original and in pretty good shape too.
It was built in 1914 in Newton Kansas. Newton isn't my kind of town though so we never really considered it. It sold within days of hitting the market.

But houses like these aren't creepy. No, what I am refering to are houses that look like they someone loved them just once, way before the gold- brown carpet was installed, and everyone else has stuck their own bandaid over old problems.

My inlaws live in an HGTV type house. I always feel like we are at a mall when I visit. No one cooks but they have a 20 foot kitchen with commercial appliances and everything is so matchy, matchy, complimentary that there is no soul.

 

[Misery]

I love the idea of spooky/creepy houses.

One thing that’s interesting to me is houses that aren’t necessarily ALL creepy. They’ll be mostly normal… until you get to that one part that just isn’t. The mood and aesthetics abruptly shift, and you just hope the power doesn’t go out while you’re in those sections.

I’ve shown these places before, but I’ll show them again… the sections of my own house where it goes from “friendly” to “I’d really rather not go in there without my phone”.

The entrance to the main one is this:

There’s something messed up about opening a door in an otherwise lavishly decorated house to see a blank concrete wall right in your face… it’s not even a “room”. It’s a hallway. But you’re not entering from the END of that hall, like you’d expect… you’re entering right in the middle, and there are no other doors in there. It dead-ends both to the left and right.

The left section looks like this:

(Also for the record, whoever came up with the interface to use simplistic commands like copy and paste on the iPad should be covered in bees)

But the right side is where things get extra weird.

I shall again use the increasingly hated iPad’s bad interface of SCREAMING STUPID to show this next one:

Like, what the heck? What even IS that? What is it for? Why is there linoleum flooring on that end? Notice, also, that there’s a freaking latch lock on it. WHY. Nobody has been able to figure out an explanation for any of this.

This “room” just has this inherently unpleasant quality to it. That weird gross ceiling doesn’t help.

The even weirder thing though is that it is not the only “weird long thin concrete room” in the basement. There are two others. The “utility hall” and the “wire room” (which is also a weird thin hall). They aren’t much better. The rest of the basement is fully finished and detailed just like the rest of the house. But it’s got those anomalous spaces in it, clashing with everything else and not making much sense.


Spaces like this, in an otherwise normal house (well, okay, the rest of the house is weird, just not creepy weird) are the sorts of things that make me wonder what the story is. Something like an abandoned run-down place, the story ain’t too interesting… they’re just old and nobody is doing upkeep, they speak for themselves. But something like the gate in the hall? What the heck is the story there?

Oddly though, the most unpleasant moments so far didn’t happen in any of those 3 rooms. Instead, it happened in the kitchen. But that’s another story.

 

[Metalhead]

I love the idea of spooky/creepy houses.

One thing that’s interesting to me is houses that aren’t necessarily ALL creepy. They’ll be mostly normal… until you get to that one part that just isn’t. The mood and aesthetics abruptly shift, and you just hope the power doesn’t go out while you’re in those sections.

I’ve shown these places before, but I’ll show them again… the sections of my own house where it goes from “friendly” to “I’d really rather not go in there without my phone”.

The entrance to the main one is this:

There’s something messed up about opening a door in an otherwise lavishly decorated house to see a blank concrete wall right in your face… it’s not even a “room”. It’s a hallway. But you’re not entering from the END of that hall, like you’d expect… you’re entering right in the middle, and there are no other doors in there. It dead-ends both to the left and right.

The left section looks like this:

(Also for the record, whoever came up with the interface to use simplistic commands like copy and paste on the iPad should be covered in bees)

But the right side is where things get extra weird.

I shall again use the increasingly hated iPad’s bad interface of SCREAMING STUPID to show this next one:

Like, what the heck? What even IS that? What is it for? Why is there linoleum flooring on that end? Notice, also, that there’s a freaking latch lock on it. WHY. Nobody has been able to figure out an explanation for any of this.

This “room” just has this inherently unpleasant quality to it. That weird gross ceiling doesn’t help.

The even weirder thing though is that it is not the only “weird long thin concrete room” in the basement. There are two others. The “utility hall” and the “wire room” (which is also a weird thin hall). They aren’t much better. The rest of the basement is fully finished and detailed just like the rest of the house. But it’s got those anomalous spaces in it, clashing with everything else and not making much sense.


Spaces like this, in an otherwise normal house (well, okay, the rest of the house is weird, just not creepy weird) are the sorts of things that make me wonder what the story is. Something like an abandoned run-down place, the story ain’t too interesting… they’re just old and nobody is doing upkeep, they speak for themselves. But something like the gate in the hall? What the heck is the story there?

Oddly though, the most unpleasant moments so far didn’t happen in any of those 3 rooms. Instead, it happened in the kitchen. But that’s another story.

You could film a low budget horror movie in those rooms.

 

[Misery]

Also I’d like to present to you another thing that reveals some similarly bizarre spaces in other houses, often quite weirder than my own:

 

[Misery]

You could film a low budget horror movie in those rooms.

Indeed.

I actually call it the “horror hall”. Why? Because I’ve seen so many spaces that look exactly like that in a bazillion indie horror games. It was the very first thing I thought of when I went in there the first time.

Oh, and something I didn’t mention: It is always cold in there. Always. I’m told it’s because of the ground above; this isn’t beneath any part of the house itself, above that place is just dirt leading up to the surface. So, it’s not insulated. This takes an already unpleasant place and just makes it worse. The rest of the basement is not cold.

 

[Gerontius]

Creepiest thing I ever saw at an abandoned house was--I was walking back out of the woods after what was supposed to be deer hunting but turned into a lot of nothing. Walked past an abandoned homestead and heard something moving in the house, dragging around in there. I reloaded my gun and snuck up the back steps of the house, looked around--didn't hear anything.

Probably raccoons; they liked it in there. But in the forest no one is really skeptical for long.

Some other time I did walk by and watch squirrels bailing out of the kitchen window like weird little paratroopers or something so there was that. I don't think the place is haunted but forests are beautifully busy even when--or especially when--there are no people.

 

[Au Naturel]

I love the idea of spooky/creepy houses.

One thing that’s interesting to me is houses that aren’t necessarily ALL creepy. They’ll be mostly normal… until you get to that one part that just isn’t. The mood and aesthetics abruptly shift, and you just hope the power doesn’t go out while you’re in those sections.

I’ve shown these places before, but I’ll show them again… the sections of my own house where it goes from “friendly” to “I’d really rather not go in there without my phone”.

The entrance to the main one is this:

There’s something messed up about opening a door in an otherwise lavishly decorated house to see a blank concrete wall right in your face… it’s not even a “room”. It’s a hallway. But you’re not entering from the END of that hall, like you’d expect… you’re entering right in the middle, and there are no other doors in there. It dead-ends both to the left and right.

The left section looks like this:

(Also for the record, whoever came up with the interface to use simplistic commands like copy and paste on the iPad should be covered in bees)

But the right side is where things get extra weird.

I shall again use the increasingly hated iPad’s bad interface of SCREAMING STUPID to show this next one:

Like, what the heck? What even IS that? What is it for? Why is there linoleum flooring on that end? Notice, also, that there’s a freaking latch lock on it. WHY. Nobody has been able to figure out an explanation for any of this.

This “room” just has this inherently unpleasant quality to it. That weird gross ceiling doesn’t help.

The even weirder thing though is that it is not the only “weird long thin concrete room” in the basement. There are two others. The “utility hall” and the “wire room” (which is also a weird thin hall). They aren’t much better. The rest of the basement is fully finished and detailed just like the rest of the house. But it’s got those anomalous spaces in it, clashing with everything else and not making much sense.


Spaces like this, in an otherwise normal house (well, okay, the rest of the house is weird, just not creepy weird) are the sorts of things that make me wonder what the story is. Something like an abandoned run-down place, the story ain’t too interesting… they’re just old and nobody is doing upkeep, they speak for themselves. But something like the gate in the hall? What the heck is the story there?

Oddly though, the most unpleasant moments so far didn’t happen in any of those 3 rooms. Instead, it happened in the kitchen. But that’s another story.

Bomb shelters? Tornado shelters?

 

[Suzette]

@Misery, your hall includes all the elements the create the "uncanny valley" effect. Normal, but not normal. Familiar, yet different.

Wood is particularly good at carrying vibration to create music. Scients claim that a Stratvarius violin sounds so good in part because of wood type and layers of shelllac. But maybe it is also because the cell walls of the wood have absorbed the emotions of the musicians that have played it? What if houses were a bit the same; the thoughts and emotions of all the residents absorb into the structure? Good thoughts, good vibes. Bad thoughts, creepy vibes?

 

[Luca]

One of my fascinations is with paranormal stuff. But I would be afraid to live in a house like that too because I’m a big scaredy-cat

My grandparents had a very old house that I was never able to confirm was “haunted,” but it sure felt like it was.

I would very much prefer to live in an old historical home than the one I live in now though. It’s pretty lifeless-looking on the inside. It’s creepy in a different way, especially in the dark.
But there’s so much light pollution here that I just sleep with the shades up because it works as a night light. Pretty sad though The whole sky is orange at night. And worse because I live right across the street from a supermarket.

Anyways, those houses sound pretty terrifying @Suzette
Especially the one with the red stain in the floor. What the heck
My best friend moved here from Oklahoma. From what I understand, most of the houses there are a similar style and from a similar era. So you might encounter more of the same
My friend lived in a farmhouse when he lived there. Although I don’t think their farmhouses look like the ones where I live. But they’re beautiful.

I hope you find your perfect home
I had to look at houses and apartments almost daily for about a year until I found mine. Everything was either too expensive, too creepy, or didn’t allow dogs or certain breeds of dogs, or was in a questionable neighborhood or an area that was too urban.
It takes a lot of searching, but when you find it, it’ll be worth it
Happy hunting! Or should I say “haunting”

 

[Suzette]

Oddly though, the most unpleasant moments so far didn’t happen in any of those 3 rooms. Instead, it happened in the kitchen. But that’s another story.

Do tell! Please!

 

[Fino]

You live on a boat? Do you save money by doing that?

 

[Misery]

Do tell! Please!

Well, there’s not a huge amount to tell.

I’m in the kitchen at night, because I’m often up at night… I seem to have something called “non-24 sleep-wake syndrome” which gives me a bizarre rotating sleep schedule. So, at this point, I was on the night side of my “cycle”. So, lunch time at like 1 in the morning.

I go into the generally silent and peaceful kitchen to get some tasty foodstuffs. Let’s see… sandwich, cheese, let’s go around the island in the center to get the utensils.

And then: “euuuuuuugggghhhhh”. This wasn’t a soft sound, but it wasn’t super loud either. Very… guttural. Long and drawn out.

I freeze up, and have no idea what to do.

It made no sense. It sounded like it came from the immediate other side of the kitchen island. No machines are active, and none of them can produce a sound like that anyway.

After a moment of thinking I went and got my phone and snapped a pic of the room as a whole to see if anything showed up. Yes, this seemed bloody silly even at the time. But when things stop making sense and I can’t think of a response, “bloody silly” often just has to do. Nothing came of this, but the fact that it occurred to me to try it at all should say something.


That was the freakiest thing in THIS house. It didn’t particularly scare me all that much, mainly because it couldn’t compare to a worse incident in the previous house. But that one, I don’t just mention outright, lest I seem like a raving lunatic. I’d only explain that one in a private message.

Anyway, I’ve no idea what to think of any of that. I simply tried not to, really. I’m no stranger to general weirdness but I can get a tad frustrated when no answer presents itself.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

 

[SusanLR]

@Misery I keep telling you that is the area they kept the girls tied up in!

Take a walk down desolation lane. Who knows what you'll find there.

 

[Captain Jigglypuff]

There’s an abandoned house near me that isn’t necessarily creepy looking but it is a safety hazard because it is literally falling apart. A window or two have fallen out with the glass still in the frame (luckily only landing on the porch roof and not the sidewalk) and giant weeds keep growing from the side of the house that faces the street. The city can’t do anything about the place because it is a federal lien and the government just lets it stay put. The porch roofs collapsed, there are broken windows, the front porch itself is falling in, and the place has been abandoned for at least seven years. I look at it and part of me wants to break in and steal these really nice lace curtains so that I can use them to make something else that is nice such as a fashion doll wedding dress and loot the place of anything valuable inside if any and the other part of me just wants to light some paper on fire and toss it onto the porch to make it look like an accident. But I know both could lead to some serious legal problems which is why I haven’t done anything. But the place is a major eyesore to look at and those lace curtains are rather nice looking.

 

[watersprite]

My house was built in 1916. My previous house was new - no one else had ever lived there. The contrast was brutal. If you have the $, go for the new, in my opinion. You can add new “eye candy” - either build or have a cabinet-maker design and build custom features to your specifications.

 

[Captain Jigglypuff]

Serious legal problems and it could land you in heavy debt. How annoying would that be, having to pay money for that house. So better not do it. And remember there could be cats and other animals hiding or living in there.

I know all of that which is why I said I only thought about it. The thing is the city really doesn’t like the house being abandoned and posing a major safety hazard to the public and even the police chief looked into what could be done with it because even he agrees that it needs to be torn down at this point. He doesn’t disagree with me that the idea of burning it and make it look accidental is necessarily a bad idea given it’s come to the point that something has to be done with how bad the situation is now but also that someone could be squatting inside and I don’t know it. There’s a huge hole in the front porch roof, the back entrance porch roof caved in with the support beams fallen down and leaning on the door. I don’t think any cats are inside as none of us seen a bunch of feral cats in the area but we all agree that a ton of rats and mice must be inside and if the place burned down, they’d all be killed and prevent any diseases from being spread. It’s a really complicated situation that seems to have no actual resolution to it. I’m actually hoping that lightning will eventually strike the place and set it on fire but nothing yet.