In today’s paper I saw a friend’s house. The story was not about their house but the efforts to convert the former girl’s school into a quirky housing development. They live across the street and are involved in the Save Our Seminary and have been doing an excellent job preserving the history and the buildings.
The preserving part sometimes takes a real active part. One night Stue (St&Su, the friends) were hosting a party and several of us were out on the deck when I swore I saw an odd light coming from the seminary across the street. I mentioned this to St and we headed out to the seminary. We snuck around in an attempt to catch the trespassers and did catch up to them, chasing them off the property. Problem is that people go to the seminary at night for lots of stupid & destructive reasons, one being ghost hunting. The seminary is supposed to be haunted. It’s been a hotel, a school, an Army Annex and in the space of a hundred or so years, I’m sure bad things have gone down, but I don’t see why it should be haunted.
If someone dying, or a bunch of people dying is enough to make a place haunted then I should be tripping over ghosts and slipping on ectoplasm everytime I wander over to the Dunkin Donuts. I remember once seeing a Post article on unsolved murders in the District with a map of little dots of murders during DC Crack Period. There was one big splotch of unsolved deaths over by where the BP station sits on Rhode Island and 4th. But I am not tripping over or running into ghosts, unless you count the few dealers and addicts that still, still haunt the area.
So where is the logic? Why is X supposedly haunted by ghosts and Y isn’t? Yes, there is no logic in superstition. Part of me says class, age and maybe play a part and tell a better story. Note our own present and how the news gets all excited when certain people get shot, kidnapped, or go missing and others don’t get the same attention.