What’s in a Home, Especially if That Home Is Haunted?
By
Rick Fehr
The past few months have been a blur of house hunting for my family and me. The market is right, and we want to own. This triggers a whole process orchestrated by real estate agents, mortgage brokers, banks, sellers, and buyers. Amid this activity come the actual home viewings. This is a whole other process where homes are carefully staged and cultivated to offer a warm embrace, and if you view the home on the MLS Realtor website, you can be sure the homes are lit with exuberance.
Throughout the crafting of homeyness, the potential buyer walks through and imagines their family at home there. Or, if the home is to be an income property, how many bedrooms can be rented out to university students and at what ridiculously high price.
Of the twenty-five homes we viewed in a really short time, I can say one was most definitely haunted. It was the 17th home on our list, and there was an off-putting note the moment we stepped inside. Unlike the dazzlingly bright images on MLS, the home was ill lit. We walked into the living room to see a rocking chair gently moving, a scene reminiscent of the 1977 classic Amityville Horror. This was witnessed by the realtor, my wife, and I, although we concluded it may have been one of our daughters who walked in and quickly walked back out of the room again. But then, something happened that couldn’t be easily explained. I stood in an upstairs nursery and looked out the window. I thought my wife was directly behind me, and I heard a woman say “DON’T” in a stern voice. I turned, and nobody was there.
The literature on haunted houses is rich and diverse, with branches that have a deep reach into folklore, parapsychology, phenomenology, and increasingly into trauma-informed research. The Danish American Parapsychologist William Roll (1926–2012) was a forerunner in poltergeist research, taking both a meticulous and careful quantitative approach to things that go bump at all times of the day and night. In many cases, he discovered a human cause to the disruptions, and this led to greater questions about family dynamics. In several of these cases he determined that a family member was experiencing dissociation during episodes.[1]
Figure 1: A case investigated by Roll in Columbus, Ohio, Frame 25. The famous “flying phone” photo seen worldwide. Credit: The Dispatch Printing Company. https://jamesaconrad.com/Tina/Tina-Resch-Boyer-paranormal-case.html
Other cases were not so easily explained, and these occasions often featured the spontaneous movement of household objects, sometimes in front of Roll and other witnesses.
Roll coined the term Recurrent Spontaneous Psycho Kinesis, or RSPK, to theorize the activity.[2] Roll was deliberate with his academic abbreviation, to avoid the assumption that ghosts were to blame. To this end, Roll offered the etymology of haunting as distinct from a poltergeist, “Haunt comes from the same root as “home” or “-ham” (as in Birmingham); in other words, haunting means “homing,” and implies that a spirit has remained at or has returned to its earthly habitat.”[3] Bryan Williams (one of Roll’s protégés) and Annalisa Ventolla offer greater dimension to the definition poltergeists:
Events that are characterized by a series of apparently anomalous physical phenomena such as the sudden movement of objects without any apparent force acting upon them, and scraping or knocking sounds that do not seem to have clear source. Like many cases of ghosts and apparitions, these occurrences have a long tradition steeped in myth, folklore, and superstitions.[4]
Where does my home viewing fit into these discreet definitions? The moving object had a plausible explanation, and a woman’s voice in my ear is also subjective. This leads me to consider the deeply personal experience of the encounter theoretically without worry about the veracity.
I have no idea what triggered that single moment in an otherwise uneventful series of home viewings. My initial thought is that we entered the home—all the homes we viewed—intrusively. If we can imagine the perspective of the homes we viewed, it makes sense. Wave after wave of families and potential property investors come in and view the home for all its flaws, potential, and modifications. The house is not a home in such situations, it is a commodity. There is a sacred aspect of homes that invite us to consider its thresholds and familial histories that made it much more than a purchase item. The boundaries are remade here. But in all approaches to a house, we simultaneously accept the borders while imagining them broken to suit our needs and desires.[5]
Phenomenologist Bernd Jager notes that a thief similarly violates a home by way of a violent transgression, dismantling all boundaries entirely: “In effacing the threshold, that is, in ignoring its transforming guardian powers, all the household objects are pried loose from their adherence to their place and from their special relationship with the inhabitants.”[6] The sacred space of a home, its askese, is violated in a visceral way for the homeowner, who picks up the broken lampshade, cleans through discarded clothing, and repairs broken doors or windows. The owner and the home experience a violation.
Haunted homes can have the same effect on the people living inside. Just as the thief disappears, the unseen assailant of a haunting has a power to upset boundaries. The boundaries in a haunting are separated by what is real and unreal. Household objects should not move of their own accord. A witness to the Baldoon Mystery, a 200-year-old haunting in my hometown, noted: “At times every inanimate thing about the place seemed to be endowed with life and would move about in the most unaccountable manner.”[7]
Such reports aren’t uncommon in poltergeists or hauntings, and in the Baldoon Mystery they typify what witnesses encountered. More than two-dozen testimonials were gathered in the decades following the events in Baldoon. And while no approach resembling Roll’s methodology was applied, there are several curious sociological factors that might speak to the disruption of the askese.
The settlement was home to a community of previously landless Scots who were placed on the frontline of American aggression. On top of that, it was land that was unceded by the Anishinaabeg of Bkejwanong Territory.
So, yeah, there was probably a lot of things happening in the home!
Figure 2: Baldoon Haunted House on the Snye River near Wallaceburg, Ontario. Courtesy of Wallaceburg Museum.
The home of John McDonald was said to be particularly troubled. People reported witch balls crashing through windows and walls, coins appearing and falling in dish plates, balls of fire igniting floors and walls, and a menacing black dog reminiscent of their highland Fairy Dog who was a harbinger of death and destruction.
We don’t know what the familial dynamics were in the McDonald home, but the events happened during years of crop failure. The events were also experienced by veterans of the War of 1812, some of whom were prisoners of war at the time. The Anishinaabeg were justifiably lobbying for a return to their land, American expansionists would, in a few short years, resume hostilities in the border lands through the Patriot’s War.
Hauntings or poltergeists never happen without some psychological and sociological factors that influence their occurrence. Whether they are disproven, as many are, or their veracity is open, mysterious happenings in the home are deeply connected to tension.
[1] William Roll, The Poltergeist, Nelson Doubleday, 2004: 54.
[2] Roll, Poltergeist, 10.
[3] Roll, Poltergeist, 9.
[4] Bryan Williams and Annalisa Ventola, “Poltergeist Phenomena: A Primer on Parapsychological Research and Perspectives.” PublicParapsychology.org, 2011.
[5] Bernd Jager, “The Space of Dwelling: A Phenomenological Exploration,” in Humanitas Journal of the Institute of Man 13, no. 3 (1976): 325.
[6] Jager, Space of Dwelling, 327.
[7] Neil T. McDonald, The Baldoon Mystery, updated by Alan Mann (Wallaceburg, ON: Standard Press, 1986): 55.