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Would you buy this house? (crime scene)

Eddie Dane

Philosopher
Eddie Dane
Joined
Aug 18, 2007
Messages
6,681
You may be familiar with the psychology professor who asked a full room of students if they could participate in an experiment. All he needed was one student to wear this sweater.
Several students raised their hands.
'This sweater used to belong to serial killer Ted Bundy, who killed over thirty young women'.
All hands went down.
'I see there are no volunteers. I can assure you the sweater has been dry-cleaned'.
Still no volunteers.
'I'm sorry, this was actually the experiment. I wanted to see how many people would be willing to wear a sweater that had belonged to a serial killer. I made it all up, the sweater actually belongs to me. Now will anybody volunteer to wear the sweater?'
No volunteers.


Silly reaction of the students, right? It's not like evil will stick to a garment.

Now with that in mind. Here is a piece of real estate for sale at a very attractive price.
It is the house where this guy raped and killed a twelve year old girl.

Let's suppose that the house was to your liking (it's ugly IMHO), would you seize the opportunity to buy it for half the price it should be worth?

Could you reason away your emotional reaction to what took place there?

I'm curious how fellow skeptics see this.
 
Eddie Dane said:
Let's suppose that the house was to your liking (it's ugly IMHO), would you seize the opportunity to buy it for half the price it should be worth?
Click to expand...

No. I don't spend enough time in Holland and think it would be too hard to find renters to justify buying it. :D

Could you reason away your emotional reaction to what took place there?
Click to expand...

I think I could, but then I don't have any particular emotional connection to that particular crime, so there's very little emotional reaction to reason away. I would probably have more difficulty if it were a crime that I actually cared about (or knew about, for that matter).

Simply being "a crime scene" doesn't mean much; most of Europe has been a crime scene in one way or another over the past two thousand years.
 
I wouldn't buy it unless I was almost certain I would live in it until I died, as the attractive price I bought it for would become a very unattractive price when I came to sell it.

If it was a nice house somewhere I wanted to retire to then yes I would.
 
Eddie Dane said:
You may be familiar with the psychology professor who asked a full room of students if they could participate in an experiment. All he needed was one student to wear this sweater.
Several students raised their hands.
'This sweater used to belong to serial killer Ted Bundy, who killed over thirty young women'.
All hands went down.
'I see there are no volunteers. I can assure you the sweater has been dry-cleaned'.
Still no volunteers.
'I'm sorry, this was actually the experiment. I wanted to see how many people would be willing to wear a sweater that had belonged to a serial killer. I made it all up, the sweater actually belongs to me. Now will anybody volunteer to wear the sweater?'
No volunteers.


Silly reaction of the students, right? It's not like evil will stick to a garment.

Now with that in mind. Here is a piece of real estate for sale at a very attractive price.
It is the house where this guy raped and killed a twelve year old girl.

Let's suppose that the house was to your liking (it's ugly IMHO), would you seize the opportunity to buy it for half the price it should be worth?

Could you reason away your emotional reaction to what took place there?

I'm curious how fellow skeptics see this.
Click to expand...

Even though I'm a skeptic, and even though I'm no longer Catholic, I have to admit my Italian Catholic heritage still makes me a pretty superstitious person. I still wear saint medalians, for instance, or will make offerings to saints on saints days. I'll still throw salt over my shoulder if I accidentally spill it. I still wear the Italian horn to keep away curses. I knock on wood to prevent jinxes. Etc etc

It's strange, because it's not like deep down I actually BELIEVE in these things, that a saint will heal me or that a necklace will protect me from harm. I just feel better doing them. There is just a huge disconnect between what I actually believe (it's nothing but silly superstitions) and my mental state (in that I will feel better emotionally if I take superstitious precautions).

I wouldn't buy the house. I don't think it's a rational decision, so I certainly won't try and defend it as such. I don't ACTUALLY think it's haunted...but it would freak me out too much. I'd FEEL like it was a "cursed" house even if I didn't actually THINK that it was. Does that make sense?
 
It’s certainly not that evil is contagious, or that something “icky” will get on you by association. Rather is that the professor has linked the sweater to someone who did something we consider morally reprehensible, sickening, and the article of clothing is a reminder of that person, and the acts that person committed. It’s an association we would rather not make between ourselves, normal, upstanding, good people, and someone who is generally classified as a bad, bad person to the point of evil.

The same holds with the house, in my opinion. Even more so, since this is the place where the act was actually committed, and not just an article of clothing that a killer wore. I wouldn’t think that the place would contaminate me or my family, and I wouldn’t consider it cursed, but rather I wouldn’t want to be reminded that something so terrible took place in and around where I’m now living.

Even though the house is perfectly fine, I wouldn’t want that constant memory of something so horrible, especially something that already frightens me as a parent, staring me in the face each time I went for my morning eggs. With this knowledge, I would definitely have to pass on this real estate opportunity.
 
The "Ted Bundy sweater" example was, IIRC, mentioned in Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (which is a great pop sci book that I would recommend to anyone who comes from a family of hoarders). This particular sweater is meant, I think, to be an example of how even non-hoarders attach abstract values to concrete objects - values that are hard to defend logically. Hoarding behavior often stems from an extreme form of this, where every object touched becomes valuable as what RobRoy rightly calls a "reminder".
 
Three people have died in the house I live in- my mother, father. and the wife of the previous owner. All natural deaths, over 50 years.

No, it is not for sale cheap.
 
Sort of related... Years ago, a local resident was arrested for a particularly nasty molestation of a young girl. While he was in jail (he lived alone) his house was most thoroughly vandalized. Windows broken out, siding broken, trash and debris thrown up on the porch, etc, etc.
If you can't get your hands on the actual perpetrator, then his "stuff" becomes vulnerable...
 
casebro said:
Three people have died in the house I live in- my mother, father. and the wife of the previous owner. All natural deaths, over 50 years.

No, it is not for sale cheap.
Click to expand...

What if I make you an offer you can't refuse?
 
This sort of reminds of the time my father had a collection of letters from Charles Manson, and my mother refused to allow them in their home. I volunteered to keep them until they went to auction. My future ex-husband hated them.

I had no feeling about them one way or the other, except that it was kind of interesting to see how Manson's mind worked in his correspondence.

As far as that house goes - well, from the pictures, it's definitely not my style (I hate stairs, particularly riser-less ones), but if were the kind of house I did like, and it was half the price of similar houses, I might buy it. I probably wouldn't tell anyone about what happened in it, though - I don't trust that other people are as non-superstitious as I am.
 
Eddie Dane said:
You may be familiar with the psychology professor who asked a full room of students if they could participate in an experiment. All he needed was one student to wear this sweater.
Several students raised their hands.
'This sweater used to belong to serial killer Ted Bundy, who killed over thirty young women'.
All hands went down.
'I see there are no volunteers. I can assure you the sweater has been dry-cleaned'.
Still no volunteers.
'I'm sorry, this was actually the experiment. I wanted to see how many people would be willing to wear a sweater that had belonged to a serial killer. I made it all up, the sweater actually belongs to me. Now will anybody volunteer to wear the sweater?'
No volunteers.


Silly reaction of the students, right? It's not like evil will stick to a garment.

Now with that in mind. Here is a piece of real estate for sale at a very attractive price.
It is the house where this guy raped and killed a twelve year old girl.

Let's suppose that the house was to your liking (it's ugly IMHO), would you seize the opportunity to buy it for half the price it should be worth?

Could you reason away your emotional reaction to what took place there?

I'm curious how fellow skeptics see this.
Click to expand...

I would buy the house. I can imagine that selling it in the near future might be a little problematic but I suspect if we were to live there for a number of years that the memory of the crime which occurred there would have sufficiently fades so that it will not influence the price any longer.
 
Eddie Dane said:
Now with that in mind. Here is a piece of real estate for sale at a very attractive price.
It is the house where this guy raped and killed a twelve year old girl.

Let's suppose that the house was to your liking (it's ugly IMHO), would you seize the opportunity to buy it for half the price it should be worth?

Could you reason away your emotional reaction to what took place there?

I'm curious how fellow skeptics see this.
Click to expand...

I would buy it for more than it was worth, just because a cool crime took place there.
 
Buying it would actually be cool, because then I'd have a good reason for my fingerprints being all over it.
 
As some of you know, a very close friend of mine was in a mudslide some years back. Lost her house, many of her possessions, and her mother. Her father was badly injured, but is fine today. Now, the hill where the slide occurred has been made safe by several anti-mudslide measures, the damage and rubble has long since cleaned up, and a new row of houses has been built.

I wouldn't move there if you paid me. The mere thought gives me chills. Sure, it's safe today. Sure, the houses are probably wonderful, and wouldn't it be cool to rent/own not only a free house, but one in which you get paid for residing. But no. The whole neighbourhood is "tainted" to me and I don't even like to within its immediate distance. It doesn't even have anything to do with superstition, it's the association with the horrors that they're "connected" to.

Sure, this is more of a "first-hand" deal and I'd have less of a problem living in, say, a house in New Orleans on the site of an old house that got destroyed in a flood in which one of its occupants died... but I have no problem understanding people who shun articles and properties associated with death or evil.
 
I really don't get it; there's no "evil by association", unless you're in cahoots with someone perpetrating evil. And, as I believe myself very suggestable, because my imagination sometimes runs wild with me, I still could not see how any of the "bad mojo" would affect me.
As a matter of fact, back in the Navy, I once discovered a shirt belonging to a ship-mate who'd been killed in a motorcycle crash. It was in the lost and found bin. I took it and often wore it to tempt FATE. I'm still here.
 
If the house was in a bad neighborhood where crime flourishes and that is a factor in why a murder took place, then I wouldn't want it.

Otherwise, yeah I'll take a nice house for a good price.
 
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