Some of you may have noticed some stories in the press lately about spontaneous fires breaking out in a little village in Sicilly (Fortean Times FT183:8)
These kind of fires are not new - they have been around for centuries. Back in the 1980's, a young Scottish nanny was charged with witchcraft in Italy when the house she was living in suffered several severe spontaneous fires.....but that's another story......

Can certain areas of land be 'unlucky'? Can they hold some kind of negative energy that affects anyone who builds a home there?

'We purchased this home about four years ago and while the house itself is new, it sits atop a piece of land where two previous houses once stood.
All information I found out after I decided to dig into the history of the property after some strange goings on.
My youngest child’s bedroom is always several degrees cooler than the rest of the house but since it was new we figured that perhaps the ductwork for the heating/cooling system was installed improperly. So, I called a repair person to come over and check everything out and he found nothing that could explain why that one room was so much colder.
About a month after the repair person came over, we noticed a foul odour coming from the room, almost like spoiled meat. It wasn't a constant smell; it just came and went over the period of several days. Again, I called yet another service person to come over and check out under the house to see if an animal had, possibly, crawled under the house and died.
Once again, no explanation.
Not too long after that incident my husband had the night off from work so we were sitting in the living room that night around 9 o'clock, watching a movie on television. He kept looking at the front door and even got up four or five times and opened the door. He kept saying that he was seeing someone on the front porch, looking into the house through the small window on the door. Every time he got up, our mysterious visitor would disappear. I never saw this person, but my husband swears he did. About an hour after he got up to check the door for the last time, four light bulbs through out our house went out at the same time. They all burned out simultaneously. We decided it was then time to go to bed.
Ever since that night, I've heard footsteps starting in the back hallway that end about half way through our kitchen…a path of about 70 feet. We live in a ranch style house with our bedroom being the last room along this rectangular home design…the kitchen is about 10 paces from our bedroom door.
My husband worked the midnight shift so he was never around much to hear what I was hearing. He kept telling me that I was imagining things and that our incident while watching TV probably had a rational explanation, even though he has a famous haunted house in his family (famous in the area where we used to live - I'm trying to get him to submit his story, too) so he is not a sceptic.
Well, about six months ago he started working the day shift so he’s been home at night. For the first week, there was no night time walker in the house but things soon changed. He can now hear our walker at night.
At first he kept getting out of bed, thinking it was one of our children getting out of bed and goofing off while they were supposed to be sleeping because it sounds like the walking (and sometimes running) starts at one of their bedroom doors and stops in our kitchen. Every time he got up to check (to catch *those sneaky kids raiding the fridge at night*), both kids would be sound asleep in their own beds.
The kids recently spent the night with their grandparents so that my husband and I could go out to dinner and see a movie. When we got home that evening, we had the house to ourselves, or so we thought. We were both in the bathroom taking out our contact lenses when the walking started. So, he decided it would be best if we shut and locked our bedroom door. We had only been in bed for about 5 minutes when the footsteps got louder and increased in speed. It sounded like someone was running through the house. After about 30 minutes it stopped completely, much to our relief. We had just turned off the light and were getting ready to sleep when our bedroom doorknob turned sharply one way then the other. Hard, complete rotations. Since the door was locked the knob can't be turned, just wiggled. Well, it turned - all the way. First one way, then another. But there were no footsteps leading up to the door before the doorknob turned. We had been calling our house ghost “Gus” after the children’s book with the character Gus The Ghost. My husband flung open the bedroom door and said, “Gus, we know you're here. We can hear you. Feel free to roam about at night but stay away from my bedroom, please”.
We can still hear him walking his rounds at night but he stays away from the bedroom!
We researched our land not too long after this happened and found out that the house that was here before ours was the home of a young man who committed suicide. Local stories say that this was a very nice, outgoing guy in his mid 20’s who was the very picture of happiness and of sound mind. His doctor had prescribed him a medication for anxiety but he had, supposedly, underlying bipolar disorder that had never really presented any symptoms and that the medication actually caused psychotic symptoms. In a very manic like episode, he hung himself. This was indeed a tragedy.
The house stood vacant for a long time and eventually vandals destroyed it so the man’s family had the house razed and sold the lot.
Before that man had lived here, there was yet another house that stood here. That house burned to the ground killing three people in the fire. All information I dug up through public records and through the neighbours…information I could have used before buying the land and building the house here! '

What a creepy story. I'm sure I would have been freaked out by the door knob turning. Reminds me of the original film of 'The Haunting Of Hill House' by Shirley Jackson.

I agree! Very creepy! Many people go with the look of the house and never the "feel" of the house. I love your banner Hammy!

The bit about the smell of rotting meat has happened in my house. A few years ago I walked into my room to a reallly disgusting smell, I thought that maybe something in the bin had gone mouldy so I went to get the bag out of it, but as I stepped away from the doorway the smell just went, I stepped back and I just caught a whiff of it.
The next week I hit a wave of smell again on the landing, this time I thought it was coming from the bathroom, but again, as I stepped through it, it just went away. I'd completely forgotten about it until last month, when I was sitting at the computer I caught a horrible smell, I started to run downstairs, thinking something was burning in the kitchen, but when I got there, I couldn't smell anything. But this time, when I got back upstairs the smell was still in the room, just a patch next to the computer chair.
Weird.

Erm, at the risk of freaking you out, Fairie, that strikes me as not a good sign. Usually, spirits manifest with different smells, usually mundane or pleasant in nature (lavender, tobacco, perfume etc). When a spirit manifests with an extremely unpleasant smell, it tends not to be good.

I'd suggest cleansing your house....

I'm smelling lilacs again, Loonboy. Anything to worry about? I smelled them really strong in the kitchen a couple of hours ago and again I was the only one who could smell them. Don't know if this has anything to do with the other stuff I posted under "Looking for some input"...

Do you have any lilac trees near your house?

I'd say that the smell was a good sign. Unusual that only you could smell it, though.

A sign that a smell is paranormal, rather than natural, is that it suddenly is there with no build up, is very potent and strong, then disappears very quickly - unlike how natural smells behave.

Well, Loonboy, in an attempt to make my post shorter than they usually are I left out details that would have helped you to answer. I first encountered this way back in the mid 80's (about 18 months after my mother died). It happened when I was living in a particularly barren area down south where I was mainly surrounded by sugar cane and nothing much else. I used to jog between the rows of sugar cane in early morning and early evening before dusk and never ran across any lilacs. I would even have it happen in the house with the windows all closed up and the air on, riding in the car with the windows closed and the air on, and even while shopping in the grocery store.

At the same time this started to happen, I had a particular "feeling" of dread that something really bad was going to happen to my then-husband. The smell always did come on quickly, over-powering, and was gone pretty quick. It happened every day for a few weeks. Then I got a call that my husband got hurt out on the oil rigs (almost fatally). I never smelled the lilacs again. I always wondered if the two events were somehow related. Nobody else could smell them then. Nobody else can smell them now.

This time again the smell comes on suddenly, strongly, and leaves quickly except for a few weeks ago I had one in the living room that lasted for probably 20 or 30 minutes! Well I've had 4 spinal surgeries in 1 years time that has left me with (hopefully short-term) damage to my legs so I can't wander too far on foot myself, so I had my boys and their friends do a major search of the area because this is driving me crazy to know... and they haven't found any. This time, though, I'm not getting any feeling of dread about anyone. I guess I'll just worry about my daughter who's attending a huge DJ convention in Detroit this weekend...

But after my "Looking for some input" post I'll bet everyone will think I'm a kook! But I swear everything I've ever posted is true, and I come to UM looking for common experiences or people's thoughts on this strange stuff. Now I don't know if any of this is related, but when my father was alive he had an uncanny ability to "know" things. He would hold his stomach, for example, and say "Something's wrong, I just know your sisters got in a wreck in that car" sure enough, the hospital called and they did. (he was a TOTAL UNBELIEVER in this kind of stuff, though, until the day he died) I seem to be able to just "know" things sometimes too, and the older I get the stronger it gets. Sometimes I dream things first, and that's how I know instead of feeling it in my stomach like he did. I know how strange it sounds, but it's true, and I figured UM would be the best place to go with my stuff. But see, I over-posted again...sorry, everyone.