HOW TO DEAL WITH THE SUPERNATURAL, PART 1  

Looking For A Place To Live?  

When To Consider Looking At A Few More Properties Before You Make Your Final Decision

  

1.  Was the house built in the Victorian Era?
2. Is the price of the house far, far less than its condition and location merit?
3.  Has the house been vacant for more than 20 years?
5. Is the real estate agent reluctant to enter or evasive when it comes to the history of the property?
7. Are there any doorways that have been nailed shut and painted over until they look like bas reliefs instead of doorways?
8. Is there a hidden room?  Not always a deal breaker, frequently an asset.  If the realtor shows it to you, chance is in your favor.
9.  Is the basement floor made of dirt? Lots of reasons to hesitate, but the supernatural is the least of them.
10. Does it show signs of having been dug up?  Could have been kids, could be evidence of a secret Victorian Era infant burial.
11. While searching around the property, did you find rocks arranged in odd configurations?

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A Brief Word Before Continuing:
The Victorian Era weighs heavily in the question of whether or not a given thing is a haven for the otherworldly.  This is culturally specific to white America, and can be shown on a graph that I had to make with typing because I am too old to use the table feature.  
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1776-1836  stable level of red weird__ 
1837-1901  stable level of white weird
1902-1920  lonely weird 
1921-1975  vegan hippies smoking mexican dirt weed and hallucinating
1976-1984  _   Virtually no weird, not counting Flock of Seagulls
1984-Now  _all hope of rational inquiry is dashed ___________________________________
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1776 = Standard indigenous weirdness
1837 - 1901 Weird level remains the same. Meanwhile practically everyone who dies during this period remains on earth as a tormented spirit, while demons and their associated ilk invade our sphere of being like hungry roaches; all of them hidden within Porcelain Dolls, House Timbers, Back Bedrooms, Kitchens, Bathrooms and Dirt-Floored Cellars, waiting patiently for 1921.
1902 - 1920 Americans are too infatuated with secret societies and esoteric cults to notice if they're being haunted or not, so they travel to the Continent to get their fix of Anne Boleyn, bursting-at-the-seams Borley Rectory, and Ladies In White On Stairways.
1921 - 1975 Returning from the Continent, American phenomena ramps up in horror and frequency until by 1975 you can't sit in a chair without pissing off something from hell.
1976 - 1984 The advent of the Internet plays a brief role in debunking 98% of all supernatural phenomena.
1985-present Millions of butt-ignorant people with too much time on their hands buy computers and commence posting an unending tsunami of butt-ignorant ignorance. 

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Good!  Now Let's Continue!  

Looking for a place to live?  

When To Run Like Your Ass Is On Fire    

1. The house was built during the Victorian Era.
2. Any of the rooms have been painted red.
3.  Hundreds of crows are standing on and around the home.
4.  Bloodstains in the form of pentagrams, strange symbols, or in a swath on the floor that suggests something large and bleeding profusely has been dragged.
5. The house has a long, long history of having been occupied and then abandoned shortly thereafter.
6. Native Americans a. fell to slaughter b. slaughtered settlers  c. had a graveyard  d.performed rituals on the property or nearby.
7. There a hidden room in the dirt-floored basement.
8.  There is a graveyard next door (or on the property). 
9.  Neighbors pass you by on the sidewalk and mouth 'It's haunted!'. 
10.  Library research reveals old newspaper articles about the following subjects:
     a. Somebody in the Victorian Era hung themselves in the house
     b.  a horrible Victorian Era mass murder took place on the property
     c. a slavering deformed family member was found during the Victorian Era after having been chained in the cellar for 40 years, or
     d. Victorian Era children disappeared mysteriously from the home.
11.  Blood drips from places is has no business dripping from, E.g. the dryer.
12.  Anything whatsoever having to do with the Civil War happened either on or within a five mile radius of the property
13. You find strange rock configurations on the property ALONG WITH  sunken rectangular areas, sticks woven into odd shaped tied in the shrubbery, multiple religious statues, or a walkway paved with old tombstones.

And by the way; Yes, I've really run across a walkway made of old tombstones.

What To Do If You Ignored My Advice Like A Dipshit 
And Now Find Yourself Living With Unwanted Guests 

Oh, you poor things....you'll have to wait 'til the installment for that.  Go cry.     

General Manager Liu Laogen Brown Ferocious!

My mother was a highly superstitious, old-school Irish Catholic kind of mother, and as a consequence I grew up with an unshakable belief in the supernatural in general; and specifically, that my every move was being watched and weighed by a host of highly judgmental invisible beings, not all of  whom had my best interests at heart.  This had two effects on my childhood.

The first was that I was inspired to create a fan-dance-like routine based on making sure none of the saints, angels, principalities, powers, Jesus, God, demons, Satan, or dead relatives acting as guardian angels would catch a glimpse of my horrifying grade-school bareness on the toilet or in the bath by cleverly manipulating towels and the shower curtain.
The second was a strong inclination toward the morbid end of the entertainment spectrum.

Book or movie, if it had a lot of gore and aliens and ghosts and Dracula and so forth, I was there, either reading under the covers and hoping the flashlight didn't give out, or sneaking out of my room at midnight to sit 3 inches from the T.V. screen with the sound down.

Looking back, I have to wonder why I felt so compelled to subject myself to it.  Imagine midnight, and a totally freaked out little FirstNations holding her screaming pillow and watching, say, The Haunting, while a windstorm is shaking butternuts the size of geodes off a nearby tree to drop KLUNK on the roof at the worst possible moments during the story.  I had to scream into my screaming pillow because I was always too freaked out to move while the movie was playing. Oddly,  during the commercials I was suddenly able to dash (stealthily) to the bathroom if I had to.  This had to be accomplished without raising my eyes from the carpet, because I couldn't risk accidentally glancing at the bathroom mirror since I was certain I'd see something messed up standing behind me.  Done,  I dashed (stealthily, eyes on the carpet ) back into the front room just in time to see Julie Christie lose her shit.
Cue screaming pillow and butternuts.

I'm long past being terrified by much of anything anymore; but to this day I'll occasionally binge on stupid crap T.V. like Ghost Adventures:

Zak:  Gasp! I just felt like something went through me!  Like a ghost or a being or something! I mean it! Get a closeup of my goosebumps!
Aaron:  I feel sick, man. Like I'm going to....all of a sudden man!  I gotta go.  I gotta go outside (rising panic) I gotta get out NOW! *exuent Aaron clutching his gut*
Nick: ...................................

or on the huge collection of stories at The Shadowlands site:

"The bathroom faucet used to go on at night for no reason.  OK so the bathroom was to the right down the hall from my baby brothers' room next to the bloodstained stairs to the attic which were were on an angle to the left but you could see when the light would go on and off in there, and just to the right of my parents room next to the downstairs landing right by my room which overlooked the carport roof where a dark figure used to stand..."

I don't know what I get out of it to this day.

What I do know, after a lifetime of this sad preoccupation, is how to deal with The Supernatural.  That's the subject of my next post.  And you have to wait for it.  So, yeah.