Frightworld 2013

I held my annual fall open house on Saturday, and part of our plans this year was a trip to Frightworld.

Frightworld is a powerhouse in the haunted attraction world, as well it should be. Housing five separate attractions, the house is frequently ranked in the top ten haunted attractions in the US-and often the world. With traditional style jump scares and some pretty offbeat scares it’s a really fun event.

Tickets are a little pricey, at $25 (cash) but you get five houses for the cost of admission for a world ranked house. The house has been featured on the Travel Channel at least once and it’s become a national attraction as well as a local tradition. I’ve not been in a few years before Saturday but honestly a trip each year is worth it-while some of the five houses may be repeated at least a couple will be new.

I’m not sure how kid friendly this event is but there were children there that seemed to be fine with the attraction. As with most Halloween events, you’ll probably want to gauge it against your own kids. The closer it gets to Halloween the earlier you’ll want to attend. Doors open at 6:30, and Frightworld only accepts cash but there are several Key banks on Sheridan with ATMs.

Frightworld is located on the corner of Sheridan and Niagara Falls Boulevard this year.

Haunted Houses-Amityville

There are some horror films that even the non-fan are familiar with: Dracula, Frankenstein, Poltergeist, The Exorcist, and The Amityville Horror.

The house in Amityville has such a complicated, twisted history that it’s hard to parse apart what’s real and what’s been created through legend, rumor, and flat out deception. However, it’s hard to deny that this is one of the most, if not the most, haunted houses in America. The reality of the haunting may have little to do with the appeal of the story.

The short version of the story: the Lutz family purchased the house in Amityville, NY in 1975. The house was the site of a violent murder in 1974. Ronald Defoe, Jr killed his parents and four siblings on site while they slept; Defoe, Jr was tried and convicted of his crimes. The Lutzes were not overly concerned with this history and moved into the property. First, however, they had the house blessed by a Catholic priest who claimed to think the upstairs felt odd. He told them to avoid one bedroom, and left.

The family noticed strange activities almost immediately. Issues ranged from ‘normal’ haunted house phenomena like noises and lights, to strange behaviors among the family members including a spike in violence, bodily contact, and body modification. The family didn’t want to abandon the property, but eventually the activity grew so intense they felt they had to leave.

Eventually the family contacted local media, as well as the Warrens (two of the most famous paranormal researchers in the States at the time).  The Warrens stopped just short of claiming that the house was possessed by something demonic, but insisted that whatever was in the house was dangerous; the most active investigation involving the Warrens led to everyone on site to have experiences. The Lutzes eventually sold the house back to the bank and left.

As late as the early 2000s the Lutzes were claiming that their stories were true. However, this has come under question in recent years when it’s been suggested that one of the original attorneys for Defoe claimed that the entire set of experiences were fabricated. Events were either modified for better effect or completely misrepresented. It is the attorney’s assertion that the Lutzes couldn’t afford the mortgage on the house, and the only spirits involved was a massive amount of alcohol.

It should be noted that since the house was been sold (and remodeled), owners have not reported activity on property, at least according to urban legend.

Amityville Hauntings

My Amityville Horror

Sunday Legends-Terms of Use

You begin to get settled into your new home. Everything seems quiet…at first. It starts fairly small, with items being left on one side of the table being found on the other. But when you come home and find your belongings stacked neatly in one corner of the room like a giant game of Jenga, you decide that it’s time to take action.

After doing some digging you find information that suggests that the house has a known haunted history with documented reports stretching back at least 159 years. There is no way that your realtor could not have known about this; the most recent report on file was when the last tenant was living on site.

If your realtor did in fact know about the haunting, does it violate the New York Supreme Court’s ruling in Stambovsky v. Ackley?

There are several states where it is necessary to disclose whether or not there is a belief that a property is haunted. The level to which the property ‘needs’ to be haunted is dependent on the level of haunting; in Virginia the haunting must somehow affect the actual property (no, I’m not sure what that would entail either). Some states have decided that you don’t have to disclose if the property is believed to be able to cause some level of psychological harm. In California if a death has occurred on premises within a certain length of time it has to be disclosed during sale, but a haunting need only be disclosed if the realtor is asked directly about it.

 

The official stance of the state of New York, as expressed in Stambovsky v. Ackley is that a known haunting can affect a house’s value, thereby potentially influencing the outcome of a sale. It’s not whether or not the house is actually haunted that is in dispute, just how much damage a suspected haunting may have on property values (though I suppose that a haunting can actually increase a value in some cases). In the case of Stambovsky v. Ackley, a house was sold with a haunted history so visiable that the house was included on ghost tours, but the new owner didn’t know about it-and would not have purchased the house had he known.

The State ended up ruling in the buyer’s favor, citing that the emotional defects should have been disclosed at the time the contract was being drawn up. Again, the State was not ruling on whether or not the house was actually haunted, or whether or not that haunting was affecting the property, just that the rumors that it was had an influence on value that should have been disclosed (however, this was only found in an appelliate ruling-the initial ruling was that the buyers should have done more to uncover the house’s history prior to the sale).

The Law and Haunted Houses

Stambovsky v Ackley

Other Entries in the “Your First (Haunted) House Series)

Spiritual Cleaning

Brownies

Dead Fairies (Are Not What You Think)

Haint Blue

13 Floors

I’m not sure where I first heard this legend, but I know that when I heard it, it was just called the house with 13 floors or the unfinishable haunted house.

In the legend, it is claimed that there is a haunted house somewhere in the American mid-west that is too scary to be able to be finished (with haunted house here being a scare attraction, not a house with ghosts). The house has a few different names depending on location but Wikipedia refers to it as the Chimera House. Houses seem to pop up anywhere from Georgia into Minnesota; while it’s possible that other countries have similar stories every variation I’ve heard has it placed in the States. According to Snopes the legend actually predates a popularity spike that haunted attractions experienced in the 1990s.

Regardless, the story says that there is a haunted house that charges a fee. The catch is that the fee will be refunded, generally a dollar or so for each floor that the house has set up. The house generally has 13 floors, and if a person were to complete all 13 floors not only would the fee be waived the person would win a price. A group of friends set out to complete the house and win the price but are never heard from again- the main catch of the house is that no one has ever actually completed the walk-through.

Depending on source, the house is fueled by human created scares but is structured to never let anyone out (i.e., the guests are killed) or by more supernatural scares (hence why no one can actually locate this attraction). In some versions that I’ve heard on comms online, the house is actually run by the devil and part of the reason you don’t come back is that the 13th floor leads into Hell; the floor is actually a basement. Most variations have the house being staffed by run of the mill humans, though the outcome is the same; occassionally variations appear with bodies being found where people were ‘scared to death’.

Chimera House

Unfinishable Haunted House

Shunning Hell House

Lovecraft’s short piece “The Shunned House” sets up the premise that a house exists in Rhode Island that is capable of killing off the inhabitants, one by one, to the extreme that no child is ever born alive on that property. Of course, Lovecraft being Lovecraft, the root cause in this situation is an eldritch horror living in the depths of the Earth underneath the property.

I found the piece to be much more readable that most of Lovecraft’s work, and in reading it I started thinking about a subject that comes up in blogland every so often- the idea that places have their own health, and if a place gets sick, what then happens to the inhabitants of that place.

I rarely go into what my social circle calls ‘woo-woo’ since that’s not the intent of this blog. But let me tell you about my tenure at Hell House.

When I finished grad school, I was completely broke. As in, I had something like $20 to my name and was about to start a job making $12,000, give or take a few hundred. Someone kindly offered to take me in- and while it was definately preferrable than some of my options this didn’t work out to be one of the more pleasant eras of my life.

There were some personality issues that needed to be worked out but I will be damned if the house itself wasn’t part of the problem. The house needed work, and there was a mold issue- so yes, the house was adding a physical element to it.

I swear though, that there was something about that property that was just…angry. At the risk of sounding like I’ve gone completely crazy (finally) there was a day that I was upstairs by myself where I really believe that something in that house wanted to push me down the stairs.

I thought about not telling anyone about this because, well, frankly I know how this sounds. But the subject came up on one of my comms awhile back and the response I got when I told the story was, no, I’ve lived in sick houses before or, no, places can pick up energies and they may not be pleasant ones.

I’m not suggesting that America is studded with hellmouths or something. But I do wonder sometimes if the energy that we do put out is picked up by something somewhere, and if certain places are just better at holding the negative emotions more than others.

6 months ago- the walking dead