Ghost purchases

It seems like every day I'm forced to face the unfortunate fact that I don't seem to understand my fellow humans very well.

All I have to do is to get on social media or -- worse -- read the news, and over and over again I think, "Why in the hell would someone do that?"  Or say that?  Or think that?  Now, I hasten to add that it's not that I believe everyone should think like me; far from it.  It's more that a lot of the stuff people argue about are either (1) matters of fact, that have been settled by science years ago, or (2) matters of opinion -- taste in art, music, books, food, television and movies, and so forth -- despite the fact that "matters of opinion" kind of by definition means "there's no objectively right answer."  In fact, at its basis, this penchant toward fighting endlessly over everything is a good first choice for "things I completely don't understand about people."

As an aside, this is why the thing I keep seeing on social media that goes, "What is your favorite _____, and why is it _____?" is so profoundly irritating.  (The latest one I saw, just this morning: "What is your favorite science fiction novel, and why is it Dune?")  I know it's meant to be funny, but (1) I've now seen it 873,915 times, and any humor value it might have started with is long gone, and (2) my reaction every time is to say, "Who the fuck do you think you are, telling me what my favorite anything is?"

So, okay, maybe I also need to lighten up a little.

Anyhow, this sense of mystification when I look around me goes all the way from the deeply important (e.g., how anyone can still think it's safe to smoke) to the entirely banal (e.g. people who start brawls when their favorite sports team loses).  A lot of things fall somewhere in the middle, though, and that includes the article I ran into a couple of days ago showing that people will pay significantly more for a house if it's supposedly haunted.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The data, which came from the British marketing firm InventoryBase, looked at the prices people were willing to pay to purchase a house with an alleged ghost (or one that has a "bad reputation").  And far from being a detriment to selling, a sketchy past or resident specter is a genuine selling point.  Comparing sales prices to (1) the earlier purchase price for the same property, adjusted for inflation, and (2) the prices for comparable properties, InventoryBase found that the increase in value is significant.  In fact, in some cases, it's freakin' huge.

The most extreme example is the house in Rhode Island featured in the supposedly-based-upon-a-true-story movie The Conjuring, which was purchased for $439,000 (pre-movie) and sold for $1.2 million (post-movie).  It's hardly the only example.  The house in London that was the site of The Conjuring 2 is valued at £431,000 -- £100,000 more than it was appraised for in 2016.

Doesn't take a movie to make the price go up.  "The Cage," a house that was the site of a medieval prison in the village of St. Osyth in Essex, England, has been called one of the most haunted sites in Britain -- and is valued at 17% higher than comparable properties.  Even more extreme is 39 DeGrey Street in Hull, which has a 53% higher appraisal value than comparables, despite the fact that the house has a reputation for such terrifying apparitions that "no one is willing to live in it."

InventoryBase found several examples of houses that were objectively worse than nearby similar homes -- badly in need of remodeling, problems with plumbing or wiring or even structure, general shabbiness -- but they still were selling for more money because they allegedly have supernatural residents.

I read this article with a sense of bafflement.  Now, to be fair, I'd be thrilled if it turned out my house actually was haunted, primarily because it would mean that my current opinion about an afterlife was wrong.  This would require a complete reframing of my worldview, something I think I would find a fascinating challenge.  The problem is, at the same time I'm a great big coward, so the first time the ghost appeared I'd probably have a brain aneurysm, but at least then I could look forward to haunting the next resident, which could be kind of fun.

But if I was in the market for a house, it's hard for me to fathom spending tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars extra for the privilege of sharing my house with ghosts.  No, for the privilege of supposedly sharing my house with ghosts; I'm guessing in the Disclosure Statement there's no requirement for anyone to prove their house is actually haunted.  So I'd potentially be spending a year's worth of salary (or more) just for unsubstantiated bragging rights.

Anyhow, this brings me back to where I started, which is that I just don't understand my fellow humans.  A great deal of their behavior is frankly baffling to me.  Given how poorly I fit in with my blood relatives -- "black sheep of the family" doesn't even come close to describing it -- I've wondered for years if I might be a changeling.  The problem with that hypothesis is that I look exactly like my dad, so any contention that I'm not really his son is doomed to be shipwrecked on the rocks of hard evidence.

And like I said, it's not that I think my own view of the world is sacrosanct, or something.  I'm sure I'm just as weird as the next guy.  It's just that the ways I'm weird seem to be pretty different from the ways a lot of people are weird.

So maybe I shouldn't point fingers.  Other folks are weird; I'm weirdly weird.  Weird to the weirdth power.  This means that people are probably as mystified by my behavior as I am by theirs, which I guess is only fair.

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Legally haunted

Have you ever heard of the New York Supreme Court Case, Stambovsky v. Ackley?

I hadn't, until yesterday.

This came up because of a link someone sent me to an article called "There’s A House That’s So Terrifying It Was Legally Declared Haunted By New York State."  And my question, of course, was "what does it mean to be 'legally haunted'?"  If a ghost shows up in a house that is not legally declared to be haunted, do you have the right to call the police and have it arrested?  If so, how could you send a ghost to jail, when according to most people, ghosts can pass through walls, not to mention steel bars?

Be that as it may, the story centered around a house owned by a family named Ackley in Nyack, New York, a town on the Hudson River.  Soon after the Ackleys moved in, they began to have odd experiences, the most alarming of which is that family members reported waking up having their beds violently shaken by an invisible entity.  According to the article, they "learned to live with the spirits," which became easier when one of them apparently figured out that all they had to do to stop the sudden awakenings was to ask the ghosts not to shake their beds during the night.

Which I thought was pretty doggone amenable of the spirits, until I read the next part, wherein a young guest showed up to visit the Ackleys and died immediately of a brain aneurysm [emphasis theirs].  So that's not very nice.  There were also footsteps, slamming doors, and "gifts for the children [left] randomly through the house."  So you can see that with gifts on one end of the spectrum and brain aneurysms on the other, the haunting turned out to be quite a mixed bag.

The Ackley House, courtesy of Google Maps

Anyhow, all of this is your ordinary, garden-variety haunted house story until the Ackleys had enough and decided to sell the house.  The buyers, a family named Stambovsky, purchased it, but it turned out that the Ackleys didn't mention the fact that it was haunted by brain-aneurysm-inducing ghosts.  When they found out the house's reputation, the Stambovskys objected, understandably enough, and sued.  The case went all the way to the New York Supreme Court, where the judge sided with the Stambovskys.  The ruling said:

Where, as here, the seller not only takes unfair advantage of the buyer's ignorance but has created and perpetuated a condition about which he is unlikely to even inquire, enforcement of the contract (in whole or in part) is offensive to the court's sense of equity.  Application of the remedy of rescission, within the bounds of the narrow exception to the doctrine of caveat emptor set forth herein, is entirely appropriate to relieve the unwitting purchaser from the consequences of a most unnatural bargain...  Seller who had undertaken to inform the public at large about the existence of poltergeists on the premises to be sold was estopped to deny existence of poltergeists on the premises, so the house was haunted as a matter of law and seller must inform the purchaser of the haunting.

I wondered about how exactly a purchaser could demonstrate that a house was, in fact, haunted.  After all, that's usually what most failure-to-disclose lawsuits usually turn on; you find that the house you just bought has a leaky roof, and show that the previous owners knew about the leaky roof -- but along the way it's incumbent upon you to demonstrate that the roof does, in fact, leak.  How the hell are you going to do that with a ghost?

But upon reading the ruling more carefully, apparently the decision was based upon the fact that the Ackleys themselves had made public the fact that they thought the house was haunted.  So I guess it's their fault for bragging about their ghosts and then deciding not to tell the purchasers before the contract was signed.

You have to wonder, though, if this might be something that should appear on disclosure statements under "Known Pre-existing Conditions," along with leaks, dry rot, damaged windows, broken appliances, and faulty septic systems.  "Ghosts/poltergeists present" -- yes/no/unknown.  "Ghosts that result in death by aneurysm" -- yes/no/unknown.

The article ends by giving us the address of the house in Nyack, but asking us not to go there.  "Respect the current owner’s privacy by admiring it only from your screen," they tell us.  Which does bring up the interesting point of who bought the house after the Supreme Court allowed the Stambovskys to back out of the purchase, and whether the new owners have had any weird experiences or untimely deaths.  The article on the legal case (linked above) said that in 2015 the house sold for $1.77 million -- which was, they said, $600,000 higher than comparable houses in Nyack.

So maybe the Stambovskys should have stuck with it, ghosts and all.  Apparently disembodied spirits of the dead do nothing to diminish home value.  I know I'd happily sell my house for a cool $1.77 million.  I'd even sign a disclosure agreement admitting that it's haunted, and I don't even believe in ghosts.

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Ghost purchases

It seems like every day I'm forced to face the unfortunate fact that I don't seem to understand my fellow humans very well.

All I have to do is to get on social media or -- worse -- read the news, and over and over again I think, "Why in the hell would someone do that?"  Or say that?  Or think that?  Now, I hasten to add that it's not that I believe everyone should think like me; far from it.  It's more that a lot of the stuff people argue about are either (1) matters of fact, that have been settled by science years ago, or (2) matters of opinion -- taste in art, music, books, food, television and movies, and so forth -- despite the fact that "matters of opinion" kind of by definition means "there's no objectively right answer."  In fact, at its basis, this penchant toward fighting endlessly over everything is a good first choice for "things I completely don't understand about people."

As an aside, this is why the thing I keep seeing on social media that goes, "What is your favorite _____, and why is it _____?" is so profoundly irritating.  (The latest one I saw, just this morning: "What is your favorite science fiction novel, and why is it Dune?")  I know it's meant to be funny, but (1) I've now seen it 873,915 times, and any humor value it might have started with is now long gone, and (2) my reaction every time is to say, "Who the fuck do you think you are, telling me what my favorite anything is?"

So, okay, maybe I need to lighten up a little.

Anyhow, this sense of mystification when I look around me goes all the way from the deeply important (e.g., how anyone can still think it's okay to smoke) to the entirely banal (e.g. people who start brawls when their favorite sports team loses).  A lot of things fall somewhere in the middle, though, and that includes the article I ran into a couple of days ago showing that people will pay significantly more for a house if it's supposedly haunted.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The data, which came from the British marketing firm InventoryBase, looked at the prices people were willing to pay to purchase a house with an alleged ghost (or one that has a "bad reputation").  And far from being a detriment to selling, a sketchy past or resident specter is a genuine selling point.  Comparing sales prices to (1) the earlier purchase price for the same property, adjusted for inflation, and (2) the prices for comparable properties, InventoryBase found that the increase in value is significant.  In fact, in some cases, it's freakin' huge.

The most extreme example is the house in Rhode Island featured in the supposedly-based-upon-a-true-story movie The Conjuring, which was purchased for $439,000 (pre-movie) and sold for $1.2 million (post-movie).  It's hardly the only example.  The house in London that was the site of The Conjuring 2 is valued at £431,000 -- £100,000 more than it was appraised for in 2016.

Doesn't take a movie to make the price go up.  "The Cage," a house that was the site of a medieval prison in the village of St. Osyth in Essex, England, has been called one of the most haunted sites in Britain -- and is valued at 17% higher than comparable properties.  Even more extreme is 39 DeGrey Street in Hull, which has a 53% higher appraisal value than comparables -- despite the fact that the house has a reputation for such terrifying apparitions that "no one is willing to live in it."

InventoryBase found several examples of houses that were objectively worse than nearby similar homes -- badly in need of remodeling, problems with plumbing or wiring or even structure, general shabbiness -- but they still were selling for more money because they allegedly have supernatural residents.

I read this article with a sense of bafflement.  Now, to be fair, I'd be thrilled if it turned out my house actually was haunted, primarily because it would mean that my current opinion about an afterlife was wrong.  The problem is, at the same time I'm a great big coward, so the first time the ghost appeared I'd probably have a brain aneurysm, but at least then I could look forward to haunting the next resident, which could be kind of fun.

But if I was in the market for a house, it's hard for me to fathom spending tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars extra for the privilege of sharing my house with ghosts.  No, for the privilege of supposedly sharing my house with ghosts; I'm guessing in the Disclosure Statement there's no requirement for anyone to prove their house is actually haunted.  So I'd potentially be spending a year's worth of salary (or more) just for unsubstantiated bragging rights.

Anyhow, this brings me back to where I started, which is that I just don't understand my fellow humans.  A great deal of their behavior is frankly baffling to me.  Given how poorly I fit in with my blood relatives -- "black sheep of the family" doesn't even come close to describing it -- I've wondered for years if I might be a changeling.  The problem with that hypothesis is that I look exactly like my dad, so any contention that I'm not really his son is doomed to be shipwrecked on the rocks of hard evidence.

And like I said, it's not that I think my own view of the world is sacrosanct, or something.  I'm sure I'm just as weird as the next guy.  It's just that the ways I'm weird seem to be pretty different from the ways a lot of people are weird.

So maybe I shouldn't point fingers.  Other folks are weird; I'm weirdly weird.  Weird to the weirdth power.  This means that people are probably as mystified by my behavior as I am by theirs, which I guess is only fair.

**********************************

Some of the most enduring mysteries of linguistics (and archaeology) are written languages for which we have no dictionary -- no knowledge of the symbol-to-phoneme (or symbol-to-syllable, or symbol-to-concept) correspondences.

One of the most famous cases where that seemingly intractable problem was solved was the near-miraculous decipherment of the Linear B script of Crete by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris, but it bears keeping in mind that this wasn't the first time this kind of thing was accomplished.  In the early years of the nineteenth century, this was the situation with the Egyptian hieroglyphics -- until the code was cracked using the famous Rosetta Stone, by the dual efforts of Thomas Young of England and Jean-François Champollion of France.

This herculean, but ultimately successful, task is the subject of the fascinating book The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone, by Edward Dolnick.  Dolnick doesn't just focus on the linguistic details, but tells the engrossing story of the rivalry between Young and Champollion, ending with Champollion beating Young to the solution -- and then dying of a stroke at the age of 41.  It's a story not only of a puzzle, but of two powerful and passionate personalities.  If you're an aficionado of languages, history, or Egypt, you definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Unreal estate

Thanks to a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I found out yesterday that those of you who would like a nice place to retire can now buy property...

... on Mars.

I'm not joking, although the people who set up the site may well be.  Here's the idea:

Own an acre of land in our Solar System’s 4th planet; package includes the deed, a map with location of your land, and a Mars info eBook.

Which sounds like it's completely aboveboard, given that it comes with an official deed and an informational booklet and all.

Home, sweet home.  [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

They go on to give us more details:

Buying land on Mars sounds like a plot line in some futuristic sci-fi flick about billionaires.  In truth, it's a modern-day possibility for thousandaires.  Buy Planet Mars gives astrophiles the chance to buy one acre of land on the Red Planet.  Much like the purchase of a star, Martian Land Packages include a map charting your acre's location, an owner's deed, a NASA report on Mars exploration, and a photo eBook.  These packages are issued digitally, meaning they're available for download immediately after purchase.

Yes, thousandaires, as long as they have more money than sense.  An acre of land on Mars costs $35, which sounds pretty cheap, until you realize that (1) you're never going to go there, and (2) even after you purchase it, you don't really own land on Mars, because (3) the person selling the property on Mars doesn't technically own what he's selling.

Which evidently is not apparent to the 210 people who have paid actual money for this unreal estate.  The seller's Groupon page has a lot of positive testimonials, such as the following:

• When you can't afford land in California, might as well invest in the future!
• It's fun, thought provoking, unique and a great conversation peace [sic] I have never owned property, how could I pass it up?
• Fun gift, who knows what it could be in the future?

Worthless!  Yay!  Isn't that fun?

Okay, I know I'm coming across as a sarcastic, grumpy, humorless, sour-tempered curmudgeon here.  Which is hardly fair, because I am not humorless.  As far as the others, well, okay, maybe.  For example, my wife contends that I've been a curmudgeon since infancy.  I can't quite dodge the "sarcastic" thing, either, given that it's in the tagline of this blog.

But in my own defense, I'm not immune to pointless stuff sometimes.  After all, I'm the guy who was fully in favor of everyone purchasing alien abduction insurance.  (After posting that one, an anonymous reader of Skeptophilia purchased alien abduction insurance for me, and made my dog the beneficiary.)

So maybe I should be encouraging people to buy property on Mars.  You never know, maybe one day we'll have manned missions to Mars, and you could go visit your homestead.  Although this didn't work out so well for Matt Damon in The Martian.  As I recall, it became uncomfortably breezy.  He ended up having to do some impromptu self-surgery with a staple gun.  And he learned that Mars is really not the place if your lifelong dream is growing potatoes.

Anyhow.  If you've got an extra $35 that you can't think of doing something more productive with, which in my opinion would include using it to start a campfire, you can buy an acre of land on Mars.  If you do, make sure to post here and let me know the details.  I'm especially curious about the deed, because you have to wonder under whose jurisdiction it's being issued.

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When people think of mass extinctions, the one that usually comes to mind first is the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of 66 million years ago, the one that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a good many species of other types.  It certainly was massive -- current estimates are that it killed between fifty and sixty percent of the species alive at the time -- but it was far from the biggest.

The largest mass extinction ever took place 251 million years ago, and it destroyed over ninety percent of life on Earth, taking out whole taxa and changing the direction of evolution permanently.  But what could cause a disaster on this scale?

In When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, University of Bristol paleontologist Michael Benton describes an event so catastrophic that it beggars the imagination.  Following researchers to outcrops of rock from the time of the extinction, he looks at what was lost -- trilobites, horn corals, sea scorpions, and blastoids (a starfish relative) vanished completely, but no group was without losses.  Even terrestrial vertebrates, who made it through the bottleneck and proceeded to kind of take over, had losses on the order of seventy percent.

He goes through the possible causes for the extinction, along with the evidence for each, along the way painting a terrifying picture of a world that very nearly became uninhabited.  It's a grim but fascinating story, and Benton's expertise and clarity of writing makes it a brilliant read.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Unreal estate

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post about belief in the occult causing you to receive visits from the Shadow World, today we have: a real estate company who will provide a paranormal investigation of any home you're considering buying, to make sure that it doesn't come with spirits pre-installed, as it were.

Bungalo, a company with offices in Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Tampa, is offering a special during the spooky month of October, providing a "Paranormal Inspection Report" of properties for sale.  Their site says:

To perform the Paranormal Inspections on our homes, we brought in known experts in the paranormal sciences.  Utilizing their keen insight into the paranormal world and the latest realm-to-realm communication technology, these paranormal pros have examined our homes from top to bottom for anything out of the ordinary. 

The inspectors then disclose their findings to you, the home buyer, through an official Paranormal Inspection Report, which you can find on any listing’s document vault on our website.  If an inspector does encounter any unwanted paranormal activity in a home, the space in question will be properly cleansed for the buyer’s peace of mind.

One of their inspectors is paranormal researcher Becky Moyer, who wanders around with a device called a "Spirit Box" that detects the EMF fluctuations many believe are associated with the presence of supernatural entities.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons LuckyLouie, Nightshot2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So I looked into that a little, and man, there are a lot of models of "Spirit Box."  One of them, the "Ghost Meter EMF Sensor," is only $34.95 (plus shipping and handling), and I thought it might be instructive to take a look at some of the (804) ratings customers had given it.  Many of them were laudatory, claiming that the thing had found ghosts pretty much all over the place, but a few of them were less positive:

• I get no response with this even in circumstance where I know there should definitely be a reading of some type.
• Doesn't work.  A waste of money.  I should have got a different version of it, this thing beeps at unnecessary stuff, the fridge, the cereal, the car, the dog, the window.  This is such a gimmick.
• Goes off on most things like couch, plastic stuff, and clothes. I guess most things I own are haunted.
• Only beeps when close to rocks.  Otherwise it stays idle nonstop.  Won’t blink or beep.  Spent 2 hours in a cemetery without a single light blip until I got to the entrance where the rocks were.  As soon as I walk away from the rocks it stopped.

And then there's this one, that should win an award in the Run-On Sentence Competition 2019:

• Do not buy I want [sic] all around my house and there was only one place in my house I thought would [sic] haunted because every time I was there in my shower I felt like somebody was behind me so I go all around my house nothing beats [sic] go figure when I go into the bathroom it goes crazy I wanted to determine if something was making [sic] sure enough it was the vent making it go off when I turn them then [sic] off it wouldn't do it the second I turn them back on it went crazy so it detected a vent not a ghost

So I guess it's useful if you're not sure where your vents are.  Or, considering some of the other reviews, your couch, fridge, cereal, car, dog, window, rocks, or clothes.

In any case, it's to be expected anything you use will get mixed results, because if there was unequivocal evidence of ghostly presences, that would pretty much settle the debate over whether the paranormal world exists.  I actually have an EMF Ghost Detector app on my phone, and periodically I'll wander around my house to see what the Spiritual Plane is up to.  Not much, most days, although it does kind of go crazy when I get near my computer, which could either be because (1) it's a piece of electronic equipment and thus emits an EMF signal by default, or else (2) it's possessed.

The latter is as good an explanation for some of its behavior as any.

In any case, back to the real estate company's offer.  What I'm most curious about is the last bit, which is how you "cleanse" a place of paranormal entities.  I'm guessing bringing in a Catholic priest to do an exorcism is a bit extreme, so what are our other options?  Burning some incense?  That wouldn't work if it was, say, the spirit of a dead hippie.  Telling the spirit, politely but firmly, to get lost?  Can't imagine it'd be that easy.

But the agency's website didn't elaborate on that part, so I guess we'll just have to assume that they have their methods.

I kind of wish there'd been this option when I bought my house.  Our younger son said he always felt like there was "something there" when he was alone downstairs working in the workshop (which is where he spent a great many of his waking hours).  He said he didn't think it was hostile, but did catch movement out of the corner of his eye more than once when everyone, including the dogs, were upstairs.  And considering how weird this house is in other respects -- the previous owner was notorious for ill-conceived and (often) partly-completed home improvement ideas, what my dad called "Do It To Yourself Projects" -- it wouldn't surprise me if there were strange forces at work here.

But nothing was mentioned in the Disclosure Form, and in any case we've been here for seventeen years, so I guess we're stuck with it either way.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is from an author who has been a polarizing figure for quite some time; the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.  Dawkins has long been an unapologetic critic of religion, and in fact some years ago wrote a book called The God Delusion that caused thermonuclear-level rage amongst the Religious Right.

But the fact remains that he is a passionate, lucid, and articulate exponent of the theory of evolution, independent of any of his other views.  This week's book recommendation is his wonderful The Greatest Show on Earth, which lays out the evidence for biological evolution in a methodical fashion, in terminology accessible to a layperson, in such a way that I can't conceive how you'd argue against it.  Wherever you fall on the spectrum of attitudes toward evolution (and whatever else you might think of Dawkins), you should read this book.  It's brilliant -- and there's something eye-opening on every page.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

For sale: One castle. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms, one ghost.

I've said for ages that I would love to spend a night in a haunted house.

I would prefer not to spend said night alone, because I may be a skeptic, but I'm also (1) highly suggestible and (2) a great big coward.  I'd like to think that my generally rational view of the world would inoculate me against jumping to conclusions in scary situations, but the reality is that I adopted skepticism as a worldview largely because the other option was letting my anxiety drive me completely batshit crazy.

Anyhow, this all comes up because yesterday I stumbled upon a haunted house for sale.  Actually, not a haunted house; a haunted castle.  Better still, it's right here in the United States, obviating the need for my obtaining a resident visa from one of your usual castle-having nations.  (Although in all honesty, given the current administration, I've been considering emigrating to a small uncharted island off the coast of Mozambique anyhow, even though small uncharted islands rarely have castles, haunted or otherwise.)

This particular haunted castle is Beckett Castle, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.  Cape Elizabeth is right on the Atlantic Ocean -- another appealing point -- and is an easy drive from Portland.  This is a definite advantage, because for much of Maine, the only thing you're in an easy drive from is a shitload of spruce trees.  So the site is pretty much ideal.

Beckett Castle was built in 1874 by the eponymous Sylvester Beckett, who was a lawyer, writer, and publisher.  It has 1,981 square feet of living space, which strikes me as a little small for a castle, but after all, Maine is not generally considered castle country, so I guess you take what you can get.  It has three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and -- best of all -- a three-story tower.  It's built of local gray fieldstone, but has been recently "extensively remodeled," so it doesn't feature the usual downside of castles, which is lack of indoor plumbing.

It also has a huge rose garden and a "carriage house" that would be perfect as an artist's studio, so Carol would be happy.

Of course, there's the "haunted" part.  Paul Seaburn, over at Mysterious Universe, says that the "primary ghost" is Sylvester Beckett himself, which brings up an interesting question; how do you get appointed "primary ghost?"  Does the class system transfer directly into the afterlife?  Because that hardly seems fair.  You spend your whole life working your ass off as a servant, then you die and become a ghost, and damned if you're not still scrubbing the floors in spirit form.  If that happened to me, I'd say, "fuck it," and leave.  I mean, what are they going to do?  Withhold my ghostly paycheck?  Write a bad letter of reference for the next place I'm planning to haunt?  They could get as mad at me as they want.  I mean they couldn't even kill me, because I'm already dead.

Seems like a nice position to be in.

But I digress.

The previous owner, Nancy Harvey (who died in 2016; her family is handling the sale) was interviewed prior to her death and went on record as saying that she'd never had any paranormal experiences in the place, despite Sylvester's reputation for appearing as a "radiant blue orb" and pulling the sheets off you while you sleep.  Harvey, however, didn't attribute this lack of ghostly goings-on as evidence that the place wasn't haunted; she said that Sylvester didn't disturb her sleep because he was happy about the renovations she'd done.

I guess even when you're a ghost, you care that people are keeping your house in good shape.

Unfortunately, I don't think I'm going to put an offer on Beckett Castle, as attractive as it seems, for the very good reason that the asking price is $2.5 million.  I just don't have that kind of cash lying around.  Plus, I'm not known for my housekeeping skills.  Most of the time, my approach to housekeeping can be best summed up as "There appears to have been a struggle."  One friend said the interior of my house looks like "a museum maintained by toddlers."  So buying Beckett Castle seems to me to be asking for Sylvester to come back and rip the sheets off my bed at one AM and demand to know why I didn't do last night's dinner dishes.

It's a pity, because the place is beautiful, and it's a great location.  But I think for the foreseeable future, we're going to stay here in upstate New York.  If our current house is haunted, I've seen no evidence of it.  Or maybe the ghosts were people who, when they were alive, were also terrible housekeepers, and are happy the place is owned by kindred spirits (as it were).  That'd also explain it.

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This week's book recommendation is the biography of one of the most inspirational figures in science; the geneticist Barbara McClintock.  A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller not only explains to the reader McClintock's groundbreaking research into how transposable elements ("jumping genes") work, but is a deft portrait of a researcher who refused to accept no for an answer.  McClintock did her work at a time when few women were scientists, and even fewer were mavericks who stood their ground and went against the conventional paradigm of how things are.  McClintock was one -- and eventually found the recognition she deserved for her pioneering work with a Nobel Prize.

Unreal estate

Thanks to a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I found out yesterday that those of you who would like a nice place to retire can now buy property...

... on Mars.

I'm not joking, although the people who set up the site may well be.  Here's the idea:

Own an acre of land in our Solar System’s 4th planet; package includes the deed, a map with location of your land, and a Mars info eBook.

Which sounds like it's completely aboveboard, given that it comes with an official deed and an informational booklet and all.

Home, sweet home.  [image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

They go on to give us more details:

Buying land on Mars sounds like a plot line in some futuristic sci-fi flick about billionaires.  In truth, it's a modern-day possibility for thousandaires.  Buy Planet Mars gives astrophiles the chance to buy one acre of land on the Red Planet.  Much like the purchase of a star, Martian Land Packages include a map charting your acre's location, an owner's deed, a NASA report on Mars exploration, and a photo eBook.  These packages are issued digitally, meaning they're available for download immediately after purchase.

Yes, thousandaires, as long as they have more money than sense.  An acre of land on Mars costs $35, which sounds pretty cheap, until you realize that (1) you're never going to go there, and (2) even after you purchase it, you don't really own land on Mars, because (3) the person selling the property on Mars doesn't technically own what he's selling.

Which evidently is not apparent to the 210 people who have paid actual money for this unreal estate.  The seller's Groupon page has a lot of positive testimonials, such as the following:

• When you can't afford land in California, might as well invest in the future!
• “It's fun, thought provoking, unique and a great conversation peace [sic] I have never owned property, how could I pass it up?
• Fun gift, who knows what it could be in the future?

Worthless!  Yay!  Isn't that fun?

Okay, I know I'm coming across as a humorless curmudgeon here.  Which is hardly fair, because I'm not humorless, although my wife contends that I've been a curmudgeon since infancy.  And after all, I'm the guy who was fully in favor of everyone purchasing alien abduction insurance.  (After posting that one, an anonymous reader of Skeptophilia purchased alien abduction insurance for me, and made my dog the beneficiary.)

So maybe I should be encouraging people to buy property on Mars.  You never know, maybe one day we'll have manned missions to Mars, and you could go visit your homestead.  Although this didn't work out so well for Matt Damon in The Martian.  As I recall, it became uncomfortably breezy.  And the upshot of it was that you might want to consider doing something with your land other than potato farming.

Anyhow.  If you've got an extra $35 that you can't think of doing something more productive with, which in my opinion would include using it to start a campfire, you can buy an acre of land on Mars.  If you do, make sure to post here and let me know the details.  I'm especially curious about the deed, because you have to wonder under whose jurisdiction it's being issued.

Unreal estate

I've always wanted to spend a night in an (allegedly) haunted house.

Not alone, preferably.  It'd be nice to have someone's sleeve to clutch whenever a branch creaks against the roof.  But still.  There's nothing like direct experience.  Even though I tend to cast a wry eye at eyewitness testimony, the human memory and perceptual apparatus being what they are, having a personal encounter with the spirit of a dead guy would go a long way toward convincing me that this stuff is real.

Apparently, I'm not alone.  Not only do we have the whole ghost-hunting industry (and the television shows it's spawned), we now have people who seem to consider a resident ghost to be a selling point in real estate deals.

Just in the last week, I've seen four advertisements for houses in which hauntings were mentioned -- and none of them seemed to be the sort of mandatory disclosure statement you'd make about, for example, leaky plumbing.  All of them had the air of a brag -- "You definitely want to buy our house.  It comes with a pre-installed ghost."

First, in the UK, we have Sawston Hall, a grand Tudor manor house in Cambridgeshire.  It comes with a hundred-foot-long "great hall," a moat, an arboretum... and a disembodied spirit of a dead queen.

 The house was a favorite hideout of Queen Mary I, better known to history as "Bloody Mary" Tudor -- and it's said that she still haunts the place.  Stephen and Claire Coates, the current owners, say they've never seen her.  Still, having a royal ghost is quite a selling point, and they'd like a cool £4.75 million for the place.

If you'd like the UK but are looking for something a little more... "atmospheric"... then consider Dornoch Castle, which is a bargain at less than half of what Sawston Hall is going for -- only £2.25 million.

Consider the selling points -- an already-outfitted restaurant that seats ninety, a bar with an open fireplace, proximity to prominent whisky distilleries and golf courses, and a dead Sutherland sheep rustler.

The ghost at Dornoch is apparently one Andrew McCornish, who was hanged there in the 19th century for stealing livestock.  Which opens up an interesting question; why would ghosts linger around the place they were executed?  If I were hanged, and found myself a ghost, I would get the hell out of there.  Bad memories, you know?  But to each his own, I suppose, and I'm sure that Dornoch is charming in many other respects.

If that's still too rich for your tastes, or if you'd like something a little more subtropical, there's this lovely historic home in Punta Gorda, Florida, on the market for $1,590,000:

Vander and Natalie Wynn have this house for sale, and proudly include a 14-year-old dead girl as one of the house's selling points.

"It's a great view so it's a great place to be. And if you have a perpetual 14-year-old teenage girl playing tricks on you, kinda fun," said Wynn.  "I hear my wife walk down the stairs, and I call out her name and she says yes from a different part of the house.  There's some weird things like that you really can't explain."

"She's really not scary, she just makes noise.  Sometimes I've told her you need to be quiet," his wife, Natalie, added.

Apparently the ghost belongs to a girl who died in an unfortunate accident involving kerosene and a match back in the early 20th century, once again raising the "painful memories" question.  But you can't argue with the location.  Given that we're currently in the dead of winter in upstate New York, I'd happily move to Punta Gorda even if I had to content with a perpetual noisy adolescent.

Last, we have this lovely 19th century house in Dunmore, Pennsylvania, which is a steal at only $144,000, probably because its owners say it is only "slightly haunted:"

It does, however, make me wonder how a place can be "slightly haunted."  Either it has a ghost, or it doesn't, right?  "Slightly haunted" is like "a little bit pregnant."  And from the description, it's sounds like it's more "pretty freakin' haunted," if the owners are being straight with us:

Slightly haunted.  Nothing serious, though, e.g. the sound of phantom footsteps.  A strange knocking sound followed by a very quiet (hardly noticeable, even) scream at 3:13 AM, maybe once a week.  Twice a week, tops.  And the occasional ghastly visage lurking behind you in the bathroom mirror.  Even still, this occurs very rarely and only in the second-floor bathroom.

It also has a "study/library that has a secret door behind a moving bookcase leading into a small office," and a "large unfinished crawlspace behind a concealed door hidden in a bedroom closet."  All of which sounds like horror movie material, to me.

Oh, but the house has "tons of charm."  So there's that.

Anyhow, if you're in the market for some unreal estate, there you have it.  And I'm sure that's just scratching the surface.  A Google search for "haunted house for sale" got over 100,000 hits, so there has to be one in your area.  Make sure to find out the particulars about the ghost before you put in a purchase offer.  Caveat emptor, you know.