So awesome, so very very awesome:

Ohio:  Massillon woman gets up to four years for burning ‘haunted’ house

Ukraine:  Man steals tombstones to build house with

This is a good post by Bryan Farha on the Smoke and Mirrors blog about ghosts and ghost phenomenon that I wanted to pass along.  I’ll excerpt a few good parts below:

Why some murder victims would stick around for eternity to haunt a place while others seem to evaporate is one of the great mysteries of the spirit world.

Scientists who have investigated haunted places account for both the temperature changes and the sounds by finding physical sources of the drafts, such as empty spaces behind walls or currents set in motion by low frequency sound waves produced by such mundane objects as extraction fans.

I came across this question on a real estate forum:

Do real estates know if their [sic] selling you a haunted house?

just wondering because don’t they do reasearch on the house?

I don’t think they could reveal if it was haunted. How do they really know if they haven’t lived there. Some people swear the Amityville Horror house is haunted and the people living there at the moment swear it isn’t.

I came across this blog posting that seriously discusses what you should tell your kids if you live in a haunted house.

The really mind-boggling thing about the advice given is that the writer basically says to give as many natural explanations as possible for the natural occurrences ghost phenomena to the children so that the children will not be scared by the superstition knowledge that the house has ghosts. Basically, the author is saying that you should lie by giving natural explanations. Here look:

I remember back in my days of being a credulous youngster reading the “true ghost” books. They would include a section on poltergeist phenomena and invariably mention that such occurences often seem to focus around a child or teen living in the house. The books would state that the poltergeists must be somehow attached or attracted to the kids or that the kids somehow exuded the poltergeist energy.

In retrospect, it makes WAY more sense that events of flying plates and broken windows will naturally center on kids because the kids are throwing the plates and breaking the windows. There are all sorts of reasons why a child would be destructive. I’ll leave that discussion to child psychologists. For the purposes of this post, let’s just talk about the Czech poltergeist.

Some time ago, I had a number of friends in my  house. I was doing their FX make-up for a party. The oldest person (other than me) was 27, the rest were all 16 to 18 in age.

With that many people in the house, it was sorta chaotic and loud. I was doing the makeup in my dining room which is converted into my studio. The dining room opens onto the kitchen and the front room. The door to the basement is in the kitchen. The basement stairs are directly under the stairs that lead from the first floor to the second floor in the front room. I hope that all makes sense because it’s important to the story.