"most allegedly haunted houses turn out to have gas leaks!"
no they don't. you are merely skimming the surface of mundane shit that can be wrong with old houses with your one puny little explanation that only fits a very small number of cases. try harder
They should bring back paranormal home inspectors because it is fascinating the amount of spooky happenings they resolved with one surveyor and his clipboard
not surprising AT ALL
as I said in the tags, I believe in ghosts! wholeheartedly! I believe I've had weird experiences that can't be explained any other way!
but
I work with/in old buildings professionally
they are the most temperamental, bizarre beasts you can ever imagine. the number of things that can make strange sounds, drafts, smells, or even motion in an old building are insane. like yeah, maybe you saw a ghost! or maybe you had a gas leak!
but to assume it must be one of those two things is to ignore the vast smorgasbord of Obnoxious Stuff Old Houses Do
Tell me more about the Obnoxious Stuff Old Houses Do.
[cracks knuckles]
- settling. this is a real thing, hence why people bring it up so often. wood expands and contracts, which can cause noises or doors sticking in their frames or becoming easier to open
- pressure differences in rooms. I mentioned this in the tags of my reblog, but I work in one house that has many rooms with two doors on opposite sides. sometimes, opening or closing one will cause the other to open or close if it's not firmly shut or wide open. I have had guests mistake this for Ghost Phenomena. it is not; that happens every time like clockwork and it's all down to pressure
- faulty window or door seals causing drafts
- doors not shutting all the way when you think they have, making it easier for said drafts to blow them open "on their own"
- black mold. never encountered this personally, thank the gods, but it can apparently cause hallucinations
- faulty wiring- can cause flickering lights, alarm activation, devices randomly turning off or on, etc. speaking of alarms...
- motion detectors or alarms "randomly" going off because dust blew across their sensors. one of my houses was having some plaster work done a while back, and the fire alarm kept going off because our very sensitive smoke sniffers picked up rising dust from the work site
- leaky roofs can also cause water to drip into alarms and such and short them out, which sometimes makes them emit warning noises and/or go off as normal
- weird acoustics. I lived in an apartment from 1920 once, where I could hear people in the downstairs unit as if they were in my own- ONLY when I was in the shower. terrified me the first few times I showered at home alone, until I figured it out. row houses are even worse for this
- once I was working late at the museum alone, and scared myself silly thinking I heard heavy footsteps from a floor below (I was more scared of a break-in than ghosts, though, tbh). turned out a windstorm had blown a large metal element loose from- and then completely off of -the façade, and the sounds I heard were it flapping back and forth. we got it fixed, if you were wondering
- animals get stuck places (scratching in walls) and die (smell, flies). never experienced this one either, knock on wood, but I know it happens
- thicker walls can mean less street noise gets through than in some newer buildings, contributing to a feeling of isolation that can really creep one out even if nothing is amiss
now like I said, things I can't explain away have happened to me. "I heard the staff door open and close, complete with motion sensor ding, and footsteps moving around the room it leads into- and also my coworker heard it too, from a completely different area of the house -but nobody was there and there are no other exits from that space" can hardly be chalked up to dust in that sensor
but a LOT of weirdness can
