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How can you tell if your home is haunted? The signs range from the old fashion strange sounds to the hard to describe creepy feeling you experience in a certain room. It would be nice if ghosts would just leave a note on the fridge notifying you of their occupancy and offering to kick in for rent, but that's not likely to happen. Barring direct communication it's going to take some work to figure out what's going on.

One of the best examples of clear signs indicating a haunting is the Black Hope case. Documented on the Unsolved Mysteries television program along with numerous other sources Black Hope has all the classic markers of an intelligent haunting. Appliances suddenly seeming to have a mind of their own, glimpses of dark figures darting back and forth into the shadows, a feeling of unease or outright malevolence in some rooms of the house, odd noises, strange pet reactions and unexplainable sounds.

Sam and Judith Haney and their family experienced terrifying situations in the home they purchased near Houston, Texas in 1982. What makes their situation all the more unusual is while they found themselves fighting some strange paranormal force seemingly bent on driving them from the home it wasn't the stereotypical older looks-spooky-so-must-be-haunte d house. Their home was in a new subdivision just outside of town. When the toilets started to flush and the lights dimmed by themselves or appliances went haywire the couple naturally assumed a few bugs in the wiring and plumbing were the price paid for a brand new home. Then the real aspects of a haunting began. They heard voices, saw shadowy figures, experienced bad dreams, and finally tragically lost their daughter to health problems she developed in the house.

Eventually they found a logical reason, if you can use such as term when talking about the paranormal, for the haunting. If you remember the plot to Steven Spielberg's horror classic Poltergeist the explanation sounds extremely familiar. When a neighbor of the Haney's began digging a swimming pool the crew accidentally disinterred two bodies buried in plain wooden coffins. They'd discovered what was left of Black Hope cemetery.

Used after the Civil War by freed African American slaves graves were often sparsely marked. Carved wooden or memento type indicators were sometimes used by former slaves since engraved tombstones were beyond their means. When the subdivision was planned the builders claimed to have removed all the graves, but might not have realized

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