{"id":245438,"date":"2012-10-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-12T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sdnews.com\/ghost-in-the-house\/"},"modified":"2012-10-12T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-10-12T07:00:00","slug":"ghost-in-the-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/ghost-in-the-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghost in the House"},"content":{"rendered":"

Having problems with a ‘filmy’ apparition? You\u2019re not alone<\/strong><\/p>\n

House Calls | Michael Good<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Ghost
The Whaley House was named \u2018America\u2019s Most Haunted\u2019 (Photo by Sand\u00e9 Lollis\/Save Our Heritage Organisation)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My grandmother loved people. She managed to spend her entire life in the company of others. Four husbands (at least), two children, a lifetime of work in crowded factories (Showley Candy, Convair), big holiday family gatherings and even bigger holiday parties meant she was never alone. She even took on boarders.<\/p>\n

So it came as no surprise that, after she died, her presence was still felt by those who knew her. When the door of her china cabinet mysteriously swung open of its own accord one morning, her last boarder, who was packing up to leave as we were packing up her belongings for an epic estate sale, said, \u201cThat\u2019s your grandmother letting us know she\u2019s still around.\u201d<\/p>\n

A week or so later, as the house filled with excited people \u2013 she had a ton of interesting stuff \u2013 Grandma was still on our minds. But I didn\u2019t really feel her presence. What I did feel was the presence of her house. With the blinds open and a stream of sunlight and humanity filling the place, I realized the old house had some life in it still. So I surprised myself and just about everyone else by deciding to buy it.<\/p>\n

A few months after that, when the cabinet door swung open again, and stayed open, refusing all attempts to keep it shut, the heating and air conditioning guy weighed in with his opinion.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know what causes that?\u201d he asked. He\u2019d been crawling around under the house all day so I was willing to indulge him.<\/p>\n

\u201cGhosts?\u201d I ventured.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, earthquakes. Thousands of tiny little earthquakes.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was my introduction to the wisdom of the aged, contractor edition. Fifteen years ago, anyone with experience working on old houses was at least past retirement age. And their home repair theories teetered on the edge of folk wisdom. Science, engineering, logic and education: these were not familiar fields of inquiry to the old guys who patched together my old house.<\/p>\n

Though I\u2019ve since changed professions (I now restore old houses), I haven\u2019t changed houses, and it\u2019s still not paranormal. I\u2019ve worked late at night in many darkened, empty, even a little bit creepy old houses where bad things have happened \u2013 people have died, cried, gone a little crazy and had moments of desperation, and those are just the tradesmen working there \u2013 but I\u2019ve yet to see an apparition.<\/p>\n

In fact, the houses I\u2019ve worked on are the opposite of haunted. They are pleasant, nice places to be. That\u2019s why I work in them (just don\u2019t ask me to venture into the crawl space).<\/p>\n

An informal survey of the homeowners I\u2019ve worked for yields a similar conclusion. No one has seen so much as a wisp of a ghost. But that\u2019s not to say they haven\u2019t seen some pretty weird stuff. Most mysteries have fairly mundane explanations, however.<\/p>\n

A circle of pinholes in the middle of a bedroom door? Someone had a dartboard. Scratches at the bottom of a door inside a closet? Someone locked his dog in there.\u00a0 Frequently. Writing on the wall? One local builder signed his houses by writing on the head casing in the hallway, but most writing is just identifying marks used in construction.<\/p>\n

I once found writing on a door I had stripped. I tried to decipher the surprisingly florid cursive: \u201cClos\u2026 I think it\u2019s French\u2026 Closay?\u201d That\u2019s when I saw the letter \u201ct\u201d and remembered where the door came from: closet.<\/p>\n

Not that the dead aren\u2019t trying to communicate, they just did it while they were still alive.<\/p>\n

\"Ghost
The so-called haunted china cabinet (Photo by Sand\u00e9 Lollis)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve found post cards and memorabilia enclosed in walls, newspapers showing the date the house was built, a union appointment book showing when the electrical work was redone, a message from the 1970s explaining the history of a 1880s Victorian, much of which turned out to be wrong, and a surprisingly well-preserved rat. I think the exterminator left that for me.<\/p>\n

Speaking of which, if you sometimes feel you\u2019re not alone, you\u2019re probably not. That creepy trifecta \u2013 rats, cats and bats \u2013 do a pretty good ghost impersonation. And they\u2019re not alone. Mice scamper through walls, squirrels race through attics, skunks make some unearthly sounds and possums (the world\u2019s dumbest animals) scratch stupidly at everything.<\/p>\n

Houses can seem alive, not only because animals are living in them, but also because they are constantly on the move. It\u2019s not just the earthquakes; it\u2019s the steady expansion and contraction of the clay soil beneath raised foundations.<\/p>\n

Wood takes on moisture, too, and then dries out again. Termites do their work and nails eventually rust and come loose. Nothing stays the same. Our houses, like us, are slowly aging. Unfortunately, they aren\u2019t aging as fast as we are, and will likely outlast us, just as my grandmother\u2019s house outlasted her.<\/p>\n

If it\u2019s any consolation, San Diego does have some certified haunted houses. The Travel Channel\u2019s \u201cAmerica\u2019s Most Haunted\u201d has named the Whaley House the most haunted house in America. But don\u2019t expect levitating chairs and rivers of ectoplasm. Listen for the knocking boots of Yankee Jim, a guy lynched on the property in the 1860s for attempted grand larceny (imagine what they would have done to him had he actually succeeded).<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the minor meltdown by Regis Philbin, who tried to spend the night there in 1964 but couldn\u2019t quite cut it after seeing a \u201cfilmy apparition.\u201d He is, after all, in the film business. \u201cYou know, a lot of people pooh-pooh it because they can\u2019t see it,\u201d he said at the time, \u201cbut there was something going on in that house.\u201d<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll find the Philbin quote on the San Diego Ghost Hunter website, along with details of the Whaley House Halloween ghost tours, which take place on Oct. 12, 13, 19, 20 and 29.<\/p>\n

If you do encounter something filmy this Halloween, here\u2019s a word of advice: magnetism. On my \u201chaunted\u201d cabinet door I attached a small metal plate. On the opposite shelf, I screwed in a small magnet. When the two meet, something mysterious happens. The door stays closed. Score one for science.<\/p>\n

\u2014Michael Good es contratista y escritor independiente. Su empresa, Craftsman Wood Refining, restaura carpinter\u00eda arquitect\u00f3nica en casas hist\u00f3ricas de San Diego. Es un San Diegan de cuarta generaci\u00f3n y vive en North Park. Puede comunicarse con \u00e9l en housecallssdun@gmail.com.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having problems with a ‘filmy’ apparition? You\u2019re not alone House Calls | Michael Good My grandmother loved people. She managed to spend her entire life in the company of others. Four husbands (at least), two children, a lifetime of work in crowded factories (Showley Candy, Convair), big holiday family gatherings and even bigger holiday parties […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":245439,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11555","_seopress_titles_title":"Ghost in the House","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11547,11551,11555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-news","category-uptown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}