Depends on the death, I guess. I mean, a house (or even a room) where some nice person died peacefully, or someone kicked off in a sufficiently amusing way (I guess if it was the room that a guy blew himself up after betting that eating a pounds of mentos and a gallon of soda wouldn’t kill you, the “funny” part would outweigh the creepiness or sadness), I might be okay with it. A house where fifty toddlers were sodomized to death by Nazi cultists? Ah…no.
The house we live in is 80+ years old. There have been several deaths here, all in the original part of the house.
One was a little boy that had smallpox.
His ‘viewing’ was in the room where our kitchen is now.
Of course, that was when the original part of the house was sitting in a different area.
It was moved to the current location about 70 years ago.
It doesn’t bother us at all that folks have died here. None of the deaths were heinous, and maybe the dead are all at peace.
I don’t know.
I agree with Lok, though. As long as they don’t mess with the utilities and let me sleep when I can, they are more than welcome to stay!
I sleep in the room where my grandma died, back in '73. Doesn’t bother me.
Not in an area with new housing. I grew up (kintergarden until I left home) in a house my parents built. We now live in a house that we got from the original owners–six months after they moved in.
Of course I live in the urban sprawl western US. The average house age in the immediate area is probably less than 3 years.
I can only think of a couple of places where someone might have died (house was more than 20 years old when I moved in).
My house was built in 1928. Odds are reasonable that somebody has died in it. Odds are also good that somebody has had a baby in it, made a baby in it, had a miscarriage in it, gone bankrupt in it, retired to it, come home to it for the first or last time, buried a pet in the yard, carried a bride over the threshold, or carried somebody out to die somewhere else. It’s an old house and people have lived in it a lot. Why should it bother me that somebody died in it?
I don’t think I’d have a problem living in a “murder house” either - although, say, a place where somebody had been held captive in the basement for years, or buried alive in the back yard, or something - I could see maybe having an issue with that.
Oh - an old boyfriend of mine had a couch that an old lady had died on. (I mean, not rotted on, just died.) The apartment came furnished and she had been the previous resident and died peacefully on the couch. We called it the “old lady death couch” but we sat on it.
My boyfriend has a chair that, suspiciously, they were given for free by the thrift store guy. When they got it home they found the remains of some animal, probably a cat, that had died under it (probably not peacefully - it’s a recliner, so when I think of the animal’s death I think of something awful), evidently decayed to the “balloon” point, and exploded. The guys peeled kitty out of the works and sit in the chair all the time. They told me this when I was sitting in it, of course, and I never did again. (I called it the “Dachau Chair” and the name stuck. It seems incredibly insensitive to actual victims of concentration and POW camps - sorry, guys.) The cat won’t sit on it either. So in other words, that’s the line for me - peaceful old lady death, fine. Cat crawls into a chair to die or gets killed by recliner mechanism and then has to be removed by peeling - no thanks.
PS - unfortunately, the Dachau Chair is the most comfortable one in the house. Life is so unfair sometimes.
The small shop I half own was a gas station/car dealership back in the twenties. It has the two bathrooms side by side in the back corner, (we did cover over the outside doors though.) massive sliding doors between the shop and the showroom and a grease pit in the floor for doing oil changes.
The guy who owned the shop before my friends’ grandfather bought the place had a heart attack and died in the grease pit. It was a few days before anybody found him.
It’s in a tiny little village, we joke we don’t need an alarm system, the ghost keeps the local kids from causing any mischief.
I write this entry as I sit in the room my MIL died in just 18 months ago, after almost 6 years of being bedridden with me as her primary care giver. It has yet to be painted but the hospital equipment has been replaced by my sewing machine and it is now set up as an office.
I did go through a long period where I couldn’t really fathom changing it, but it passed and I (we’re) cool with it now.
Persons who come in our house are still sometimes a little awkward with it, she was literally the centre of our existence for so long. But like us, they get past it.
Right after she passed I used to come into her room and sit in the chair beside the hospital bed and I swear I could feel her all around me. But the day came when it was just like any other empty hospital room.
Her dying at home surrounded by her loving family was the goal all along so I guess we were sort of prepared for it, on some level. Although no amount of knowledge truly prepares you for such events, truth be told.
I will always have a special attachment to this house because of the journey we shared together even though the end was both painful and tragic in some ways. Were we to move I would be very aware of leaving behind more than bricks and mortar. At some level, silly as it must sound, as long as I stay in this house I sort of feel like she’s still with us somehow.
So, no, it doesn’t bother me. But as others have said a violent crime might strike me as a different kettle of fish entirely.
Next year, I live in a dorm on a college campus that’s a remodeled hospital. Dozens, maybe hundreds of people have died right where I’ll be sleeping. The laundry room in the basement? That was the morgue. I’ll be spending the year trying not to think about it.
It doesn’t particularly bother me so long as
1- it was natural causes
2- it was not a famous death
3- the body has since been moved
When I was a kid we lived in an antebellum house where not only had people died but the place had been a funeral parlor and I don’t remember being scared (though I was really little at the time) and people had died in all of the old family homesteads where I regularly was babysat and took naps. When I was a teenager my father died during the first (and last) time we shared a bed and I could not sleep in that bed again, but mainly that’s because it was occupied by an incontinent aunt for the last few years. The house was haunted, but I don’t really associate it with my father. Over the years I’ve been in close contact with way more “fresh dead” bodies than most people who aren’t in the military or don’t have a basement/lotion buckets or big trunk come into contact with (I worked in mental hospitals and hotels where people died, an old man dropped dead of a heart attack in my front yard once, I discovered a suicide while taking trash to a dumpster at one job, the bartender at a hotel I worked at had a fatal heart attack on my shift, etc.- I’ve had to give CPR to corpses twice and to a living guy who died a day later once- goddamn that’s gross all around), so death just doesn’t freak me out that much.
When I look at places to rent I don’t ask if anybody has died there- rarely would the realtor/leasing agent know- but I don’t sign a lease if I get a “creepy” feeling. (It’s not supernatural as much as “there’s something I don’t like about it even if I can’t figure what it is” thing).
That said, though, I am currently selling my mother’s house (where I currently live) and I have made sure the realtor knows my mother did NOT die in the house just in case asked or if anybody seems at all spooked by the thought.
My brother lives in the house that my grandparents built, and Grampa died in the living room. Right after watching “Love Connection”, if I remember correctly. Other than replacing the carpet and removing Grampa’s “death chair”, he hasn’t been bothered by it.
If someone is religious and doesn’t like living in a house where there’s been a death, I’m sure most religions have ways to purify a space, which should take care of any lingering spiritual residue.
That really sounds like a line from a laundry soap commercial.