To think my newbuild is haunted?

[forsythekt]

Outing so have namechanged.

I live on a smallish council estate which 5 years ago was extended with a development of 15 new council houses. I moved 2 months ago as I houseswapped with an old couple and their adult son who needed a first floor flat. I was delighted to swap as it was 3 bedrooms so both my DC (DD 3 and DS 15 months) had their own bedroom and it was on the nicer end of council estates. The reason the past owners are relevant is because I want to clarify that nobody has died in the house.

About 1 month after moving in, we began experiencing a few weird things that have been escalating. It started with little things, like hearing noises downstairs when everyone was in bed and DD's toys randomly going off in the night. After changing DS one night (after opening a new bumper box of nappies) the box fell off the changing table and nappies were all over the floor. It was the early hours and I couln't be bothered pick them up so put DS back in his cot deciding to clear it up in the morning. The next morning I went back in and the nappies were all in the corner of the room. DP thought I was being silly as it's a tiny box room so there was nowhere for them to have moved to, but I remember them in front of the changing table which is in the centre of the room.

It was then quiet for awhile until things picked up again 2 weeks ago. Our dog has been very frightened and is starting into space and barking at the walls. DD keeps coming into our bedroom in the night saying someone is whispering her name. Our usually calm good as gold DS keeps waking up in the night in hysterics and we've had to move his cot into our room. DP's older daughter (14 from a previous relationship) came to stay for the first time last week and shared with my DD. The next morning she said she'd felt a strange presence in the room, but we hadn't told her of our experience. DP was still always skeptical until what happened last night.

Me and DP are in bed cuddling poorly DS and DD was asleep in her room and we heard our dog bark and then a loud bang. Come downstairs to find the cast iron table has moved half way across the living room! And the floor is fluffy carpet so impossible for our lab to have moved it. And a few hours later a door slammed. DP admits that has made him question things. I was utterly bewildered, especially with it being a newbuild so contacted the previous tenants (with it being homeswap we still talk occasionally) to ask if they had experienced anything to which they were insistent they hadn't.

I've been doing my research on the area. It's used to be a quaint
countryside village but a lot of the old cottages, pubs and the post office etc were demolished after the war to build a city overspill estate to get people out of the inner city slums. A few other nearby estates have the same origins. The village still has a few old feautures such as a church and even some old stocks (where people used to have their hands locked in while others threw things at them for punishments) near a playing field! I think our house must be built on top of what used to be a cottage or perhaps people were buried here? Though why didn't they bother the previous tenants?

Eek! Someone tell me I'm going mad.

This post was edited by MNHQ

OP do you have a carbon monoxide monitor or alarm? Long shot but could be worth checking as CO poisoning can cause confusion and make you forget having done something, like moving things around etc

We have had odd things happen in our house, never bothered us though. You do get used to it. I have seen shadow figure. My youngest son has seen a shadow figure of a child in his room. Not scary, just very odd lived here for nearly 17 years. Often hear noises upstairs, walking etc when no one is up there, we have a detached home. Things go missing and then turn up usually where we have throughly looked!

@growinganotherhead Sorry, just saw your question - no, not in Newcastle. A lot of old hospital sites have been redeveloped in the last 10-15 years though.

Definitely change locks and check loft.

I have always tried to be skeptical but open about the paranormal. I am down to earth and would always look for all other explanations first. But, from the age of 6 to 24 I lived in a haunted house. Too many things happened to go into detail, but we all experienced it, except for my father. He was adamant there were no such things as ghosts, it was all stuff and nonsense and we were imagining it. He never noticed rooms going cold, the dog barking and growling randomly, the sudden flashes of light we would get, the footsteps, lights being turned on and off, or the strange walkie talkie like voices you could occasionally hear.
I often think of him, fast asleep, snoring and happily oblivious next to my mother, who had woken in alarm to an icy cold bedroom feeling someone stroking her hand. I only mention all this to illustrate that if you really don't believe it's possible, nothing is going to persuade you otherwise.
I do agree with a pp who rightly stated that with all the instant recording equipment that is constantly on the go (phones, cctv etc) why hasn't any decent filming of ghosts been made, if they are actually there?
As I say, despite my experiences, I remain skeptical, but I do love a good ghost story.

It’s interesting reading this thread how adamant non believers are and how adamant believers are. If anyone is adamant about something that they’re aware can make them open to being mocked I believe them.

I wonder if some parts of some people’s brains are more developed and are more conscious of energies around them. We really haven’t fathomed much about our universe - we think space goes on for infinity - we have no real way of knowing yet, so I’m very open to other energies around us. It might be more odd to consider people’s energy just disappears when they die.

DH and I lived in a relatively new flat one time, no one had died in there, either, but it had some seriously fucked up juju. Turns out one of the former tenants had been heavily into the occult and messed around with ouija boards and seances and shit like that. We moved out after a few months.

It's not always a place where someone has died.

My friend and her family had to quickly move house due to a poltigest. Things moved on their own in front of them, things went missing (especially money) and plates/cups would crash. She said it was a scary experience and as soon as they moved home (to another rented house literally down the road) it stopped. They have never had another problem since.

Posters who say there's never any film footage of this sort of thing: There is! There's tons of it. Check out you tube.

But then if you don't believe then you won't believe any of the footage is real either, so there's no point ...

Posters who say there's never any film footage of this sort of thing: There is! There's tons of it. Check out you tube.

When put up for scrutiny, they are always shown to be fake. No argument I'm afraid. There is no genuine film of any supernatural event. None.

It is most likely to be of this earth, so change the locks and check the loft. But all of my relatives have had my grandma and grandad visit after death. We think grandma moves things to let us know she's there. It's comforting. We've seen them for a split second, in the day. I get feelings in places and one of my friend's was definitely living in a house with an evil presence. We also see a black cat. Also in the day. I think some people are in tune to it. I wonder if it's because I'm autistic that my brain is making up for the general level of confusion I have to deal with living in a neurotypical world, that I pick up on a different kind of energy. Most of my blood relatives have seen ghosts.

When we lived abroad in a hot country we would go to bed with just a sheet covering us. Every night I was vaguely aware of OH going to the bathroom, coming round to my side of the bed, pulling up a blanket, tucking it round me and kissing my shoulder. A couple of years later, living in a different flat, we were talking with friends about small kind gestures and I mentioned this. OH went pale, 'But I didn't, you did that every night'. We always had the blanket over us in the morning.
We then moved to another country and met up with a couple and we found they had lived in the same flat a few years earlier. 'Oh' she said, 'Did you get tucked in at night?'

Talking of things being attached to the person as opposed to the place.....a friend of mine was away at uni. She shared a lovely old house with mates from her course. She told me one night, she was washing her hands in the kitchen and her housemate started screaming, saying her hands were on fire. She looked and also saw her hands on fire. I thought ‘mass hysteria/power of persuasion’, possibly drink taken!

When she came back to our town, strange stuff started happening. She went to open the gate of the stables to drive out, turned back to the car and saw a shadow getting in. No-one else was on the yard. We all walked through cold spots and she could see a girl where we’d just walked through. Eventually, because so many incidents kept occurring, seeing a figure, hearing voices, she decided to seek advice at the local spiritualist church and was told to ask/tell whatever was harassing her to leave her alone. It did.

She did some research and found out that the house at uni had a fire and a young girl died in it.

What was weird about this was that she was totally sceptical, not at all woo, very practical and logical. So odd.

Thanks for that, I'm home alone and now I'm scared to go to bed, freaked me right out!

I think a lot of the paranormal can be explained in that there are phenomena that are perfectly normal but we don't have the science to explain it yet. Think how much of our daily lives involves objects that would be magic to earlier people; the moon landings used less complicated science than most of us carry around in our pockets today - their 'computers' were quite literally people who calculated all the necessary maths. Both my grandmothers were born before manned flight and both saw the moon landings. So much of what is unexplained today may be normal science next century.

Much could be linked to what is described as 'energy'. We know what the energy of a place or person feels like, less so why. Lethbridge did some interesting experiments and he believed that water could be linked to retaining memories of events. Limestone has also been linked to the retaining of memory, not so much necessarily as spirit but in the 'stone tape' theory where certain conditions can record a particularly high emotional energy event and replay that event when the conditions are right. We are energy ourselves and is it possible that somehow that energy lives on in another form? Or do we somehow retain memories of our ancestors passed down in the genes? Is there a collective unconscious that we can access? Why, when something previously impossible is achieved by animal or human do members of that species begin to do it even in unconnected groups to the original and not knowing of the original achievement? All these things are being looked at in the light of science.

I don't know how certain sounds or tones can 'clear' energy but the difference can be felt even by people who weren't there at the time and who don't know what has been done.

Just a quick word about so-called 'child' ghosts. These are actually very rare; most children move on readily. Be very careful if you experience or see such activity because there's a more than slim chance it can be demonic, with the demon imitating a child in order to ingratiate itself to the inhabitants. And again, there doesn't need to have been a death on the land or property for activity to occur, particularly if a former occupant has messed with the occult or if there is a troubled person, particularly a young person on teen, in the family.

Yeah, @tuxedocatsintophats, thanks for that valuable contribution from the world of the dangerously deluded. That’s really what the OP needs, rather than changing her locks and calming down.

Those who mock the massive distinction between demons and spirits are showing themselves to be dangerously deluded. If the OP is experiencing any type of incursion from the demonic realm which is carrying sufficient energy to cause locomotion of objects within this realm then frankly she needs to be extremely concerned.

Well this thread has me well and truly freaked out. I’m not woo at all, but believe that we don’t yet understand all types of energy, and the way it moves and interacts. I think in that same sense of the thread about people giving off ‘evil’ vibes, there is palpable energy that comes off of people. Once those people are gone, where does that energy go?

Once those people are gone, where does that energy go?

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can't be created or destroyed. It can only change forms. Anyone who says that there is no scientific basis for spiritual and demonic activity is simply ignorant. Science absolutely predicts that experiences like those of the OP will happen. The human species, and beings of other types, have occupied our domain, and filled it with energy (good and evil) since time immemorial.

I belong to a spiritualist church and have experience in this area.

I fully believe in earthbound spirits (i.e. the spirits of the dead) but IME, those who experience something they consider 'demonic' are actually projecting their own 'demons' (i.e. fears, anxieties, emotional pain) onto their environment. How does this work? Well, you sense an earthbound spirit (which are incredibly common) or just something else that can be explained rationally and get so scared you imagine it is evil and after you. It isn't.

OP, please don't listen to these scare stories about demons.

Earthbound spirits are just like you and me, but dead. They need a little help crossing over, or they can be booted out of your space in various ways like burning sage or shouting at them. As my dad used to say when I was a little girl scared of ghosts, it's only the living that can hurt you - not the dead.

I also agree that it is unscientific to pooh pooh anything paranormal as write it off as impossible.

If you take this position, you are a materialist (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism), you are not a scientist.

@FiddlesticksAkimbo - poltergeists move objects. They're not demonic, they're simply human spirits who are stuck and who have amassed enough energy to move matter. They can also draw it from susceptible people. The manifestation of their presence may be frightening but it is possible to help such spirits to cross over and they are not necessarily malevolent spirits.

Some of what is being posted here on demons and other manifestations is not necessarily reliable. Earlier this year reddit closed three forums down and deleted everything due to questions lingering around some postings. Just be aware that just as some particularly powerful and malign paranormal energies can move earthly objects, so they can easily manifest themselves in the digital realm.

@FiddlesticksAkimbo - Damn you blew my cover. I am, in fact, a demon digital bot here to lull you all into a false sense of security on Mumsnet so that my fellow demons may more easily steal your souls, right when you least expect it.