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Would you buy this house? (crime scene)

Not only would I buy the house and wear the sweater, but I also eat bread after I cut the mold off and pick up food I've dropped, clean it off and eat that as well. I also feel free to break promises made to people who die, walk under ladders and purchase generic drugs.

Rational thought gives you the power to take opportunities denied to the superstitious. It is a type of 'behind the curtain', backstage magic engineers and scientists possess. I find it quite freeing.
 
marplots said:
Rational thought gives you the power to take opportunities denied to the superstitious. It is a type of 'behind the curtain', backstage magic engineers and scientists possess. I find it quite freeing.
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Yes, but do you... double dip?

Dun dun dun!
 
I'd buy the house. I love a good bargain.

About 10 years ago I witnessed a head-on collision (sp?). Terrible thing to see - 2 dead kids, dead father, however the mother (driver) survived, and the occupants of the other vehicle also survived. It was a long time before I could pass by that accident site without being reminded of that terrible day (and I pass it about almost daily). Now, I rarely think about it.
 
marplots said:
Not only would I buy the house and wear the sweater, but I also eat bread after I cut the mold off and pick up food I've dropped, clean it off and eat that as well. I also feel free to break promises made to people who die, walk under ladders and purchase generic drugs.

Rational thought gives you the power to take opportunities denied to the superstitious. It is a type of 'behind the curtain', backstage magic engineers and scientists possess. I find it quite freeing.
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I'm fairly similar, except that I do not eat anything that has mold. I know that the mycellium of the fungus has spread much further than the visible part of the mold -- on a loaf of bread, it has usually spread throughout the whole loaf when it's showing visible mold. Plus, I can taste/smell mold fairly early. Yuck.
 
elgarak said:
I'm fairly similar, except that I do not eat anything that has mold. I know that the mycellium of the fungus has spread much further than the visible part of the mold -- on a loaf of bread, it has usually spread throughout the whole loaf when it's showing visible mold. Plus, I can taste/smell mold fairly early. Yuck.
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I cut off the mold on cheese (except for bleu cheese), but I do "try" to draw the line at moldy bread should I see it. I accidently ate a sandwich made of moldy bread and yep...I could taste the mold but didn't examine my sandwich. But being the kind of person who LOVES food - I ate the whole sandwich. It wasn't until I was about to make another sandwich (the following day) that I spotted the mold. I am finding that eye that sprouted on the back of my head very useful these days.
 
A "cool crime"?

The Central Scrutinizer said:
I would buy it for more than it was worth, just because a cool crime took place there.
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With all due respect, I find that rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl is not a cool crime. The idea that this event makes the house more attractive is frankly disgusting to me.
 
marplots said:
Not only would I buy the house and wear the sweater, but I also eat bread after I cut the mold off and pick up food I've dropped, clean it off and eat that as well. I also feel free to break promises made to people who die, walk under ladders and purchase generic drugs.

Rational thought gives you the power to take opportunities denied to the superstitious. It is a type of 'behind the curtain', backstage magic engineers and scientists possess. I find it quite freeing.
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I'm not sure why you think that honoring promises, whether to the dead or otherwise, amounts to superstition.
 
phiwum said:
I'm not sure why you think that honoring promises, whether to the dead or otherwise, amounts to superstition.
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Because the person you made the promise to no longer exists?

I thought of it because it is sometimes used as a discriminator to find out if someone has feelings of spirituality -- to what extent do they treat the dead as if they were still around? For instance, does the sweater of a dead serial killer still retain some property of ownership? Closer to home, is that still "Dad's" chair, deserving respect, after Dad has passed?
 
marplots said:
Because the person you made the promise to no longer exists?

I thought of it because it is sometimes used as a discriminator to find out if someone has feelings of spirituality -- to what extent do they treat the dead as if they were still around? For instance, does the sweater of a dead serial killer still retain some property of ownership? Closer to home, is that still "Dad's" chair, deserving respect, after Dad has passed?
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We honor wills because we respect the wishes of the deceased. This is, to my mind, a good thing. It has nothing to do with superstition.

If I made a promise, then the fact that it was to a person who is now dead is irrelevant to me. Promise-keeping is morally required, even if the person to whom the promise was made is dead. It's not just about the effects on that person. It's all a matter of whether one's promise has moral content, as far as I'm concerned.

There are, of course, circumstances in which morality requires that we break a promise. But the death of the recipient doesn't seem to be all that relevant to me.

Perhaps I am merely superstitious. Or perhaps I have different beliefs about moral duties.
 
phiwum said:
I'm not sure why you think that honoring promises, whether to the dead or otherwise, amounts to superstition.
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phiwum said:
We honor wills because we respect the wishes of the deceased. This is, to my mind, a good thing. It has nothing to do with superstition.
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This is rather a different matter, one of contract law -- it in fact creates another person under the law: the estate.

phiwum said:
If I made a promise, then the fact that it was to a person who is now dead is irrelevant to me. Promise-keeping is morally required, even if the person to whom the promise was made is dead. It's not just about the effects on that person. It's all a matter of whether one's promise has moral content, as far as I'm concerned.
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I think you are correct here. Because, I gather you take such a promise as binding on you and imbued in your own person. The locus is not the deceased person, but act of promising has made a change in you. I can't dispute this, it is a perfectly reasonable way to look at a promise.

I think what was in my mind was a sort of 'referring to the wishes of the dead'. I have heard it explained in this way: We create models of those we deal with, in a similar vein to the 'theory of other minds'. These models inform us as to likely actions and responses from others to our own actions. All quite rational. But these models, being in our heads, survive the death of those being modeled. If a promise is to this idea of a person and treats them as an existing entity, it crosses the line in my view.

I am trying to think of an example. It would have to be something less than a formal, contractual type of promise... How about this? "I promised my father I would be a lawyer and follow in the family business. Now, I find I am quite an excellent trapeze artist and I feel it is my life's calling."

Or, "I know I promised I'd bury mom in the old country, but at the time I didn't realize we would be bankrupt."

The difference may be that circumstances have changed and if they were alive, you would be happy to attempt to argue your way out of the promise. Likely, you would be able to. But, alas, they are no more.

I still do agree with your moral stance that says, "I am a person who keeps my word." I am perhaps being cavalier with the term 'promise'.
 
Eddie Dane said:
OK, quite few people here would be very rational about it.

I don't know if I would feel very good about sleeping in that bedroom, or barbequeing in the garden (where he buried the body).

This house in my home town was unoccupied for many, many years.
It seems to be inhabited since a couple of years. it was the Gestapo headquarters during WWII.

Again, I would not want to live there. Even without knowing if people where tortured there.

My reasons have nothing to do with superstition, but with association.

I think I just read that someone payed a fortune for John Lennon's toilet bowl at an auction. It's the same phenomenon in reverse I suppose.
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I honestly don't get it. It's not like the house itself has done anything, and it's not like it's a physical taint. It's not like, say, they had a dioxin tanker plough through the fence and spill in the garden, which may still be actually contaminating the place.

Furthermore, wth, it's Europe. Even the most cursory read of history ought to give one an indication that just about anywhere you might go, including on a glacier up on a mountain (see Ötzi), you might be where someone was brutally murdered and executed.

We have a history where the ideals of chivalry actually included executing prisoners of non-noble rank. (See the king's motivational speech at Agincourt.) Or where it was ok to execute the unarmed _children_ at the baggage train, if you happened to stumble upon the enemy's baggage train. (Yep, the French did just that at Agincourt.) Or that if the defenders of a city didn't take the offer to surrender when the wall was breached, executing them all is the morally _right_ thing to do. Etc. Pretty much every square metre of ground in or around a city was once red with blood.

Pretty much everywhere you go, you have people who were tortured to confess something they didn't do, you have witches burned at the stake, or in pre-christian times you have burning your foe alive in his home together with his family as a way to settle disputes, or people strangled and chucked into bogs for fertility, or slaves executed at a funeral so some minor chieftain would have slaves in Valhalla, you have nobles and even minor merchants poisoning each other, etc.

If it didn't bother you to live wherever you already do, what's the difference with a house where the Gestapo once was?
 
HansMustermann said:
I honestly don't get it. It's not like the house itself has done anything, and it's not like it's a physical taint. It's not like, say, they had a dioxin tanker plough through the fence and spill in the garden, which may still be actually contaminating the place.

Furthermore, wth, it's Europe. Even the most cursory read of history ought to give one an indication that just about anywhere you might go, including on a glacier up on a mountain (see Ötzi), you might be where someone was brutally murdered and executed.

We have a history where the ideals of chivalry actually included executing prisoners of non-noble rank. (See the king's motivational speech at Agincourt.) Or where it was ok to execute the unarmed _children_ at the baggage train, if you happened to stumble upon the enemy's baggage train. (Yep, the French did just that at Agincourt.) Or that if the defenders of a city didn't take the offer to surrender when the wall was breached, executing them all is the morally _right_ thing to do. Etc. Pretty much every square metre of ground in or around a city was once red with blood.

Pretty much everywhere you go, you have people who were tortured to confess something they didn't do, you have witches burned at the stake, or in pre-christian times you have burning your foe alive in his home together with his family as a way to settle disputes, or people strangled and chucked into bogs for fertility, or slaves executed at a funeral so some minor chieftain would have slaves in Valhalla, you have nobles and even minor merchants poisoning each other, etc.

If it didn't bother you to live wherever you already do, what's the difference with a house where the Gestapo once was?
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You don't get it because it is an emotional issue, not a rational one.

I find the association unpleasant and it would diminish my joy of living in the house.

I could choose to disregard that if I chose to, off course.
Any unpleasant feelings would wear off after a while, I presume.

It is just a psychological mechanism.

What if you could get all your drinks from now on for only 25% of the price, on the condition that you drank them out of a (brand-new and perfectly clean) piss-pot?

I would not, because the association of the piss-pot collides with the associations that make culinary affairs more pleasant.

Not a totally fair comparison, I know. In the end a house is a house and piss-pot is a piss-pot.

But to some of us, a place's recent history just has an impact.
 
If it's brand new and clean, I seriously see no reason why not. It's just a container. But I guess to each their own...
 
Bluegill said:
See, I can understand that. Now,when I smell a bad smell at home, I think,
"Oh, I guess I better get the garbage out." In that house, though, I'd think, "I hope that's the garbage and not a left-over dead guy smell coming from the walls."
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Every single cloth object had to be removed from the house. Carpets drapes everything. No furniture remained in the house at all. The house was completely emptied. New carpets were put down and the house only sold after being on the market for a long time.

The current owners love the house and no odors or spirits seem to haunt the home nowadays.
 
The house of assassinated real-estate dealer Willem Endstra (organized crime connections) in Amsterdam was up for sale for ages. (he was shot on the street, not in the house).
But in this case the prospective buyers were apparently afraid that any DIY work would reveal the remains of missing mobsters.

That's a real concern IMHO.

BTW there is lots of interest for the house in the OP, I've just read.
 
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