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Post by GRWelsh on Jun 6, 2017 11:09:13 GMT -5
Scott, last Friday Cindy told me that she has been commissioned to remodel a bathroom at a house in Brentwood. It turns out this house is the one Bob Cranmer wrote the book about... "The Demon of Brownsville Road." It is at 3406 Brownsville Road, right in your neighborhood, and less than two blocks from where my great grandparents lived at 121 Sceneridge Avenue. Now I'm going to have to buy and read this book! I told Cindy to say, "So... what possessed you to want to remodel your bathroom?"
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Post by geneweigel on Jun 6, 2017 13:05:45 GMT -5
I'm watching it now "THE MOLECH"
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Post by GRWelsh on Jun 6, 2017 16:02:09 GMT -5
I always wonder how you perceive a demon-infested house when you're not Catholic.
"This house sure has a lot of plumbing problems."
Seriously, I accept that there are lots of unknowable/inexplicable phenomena, and that people have experiences... I try to keep an open mind. I don't necessarily think people are lying or crazy or some combination of lying-crazy when they make these sorts of claims. I do think people have experiences they cannot account for, which then get filtered through whatever belief system they have. So, I don't think a Hindu family moving into that house would have framed it the same way, even if they had similar experiences ("Demons of the Christian religion exist... Therefore, Christianity must be true!"). A big theme in Cranmer's story seems to be he thinks he was meant to move there to put an end to the haunting and also to get the word out that this is evidence Christianity is true.
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Post by Scott on Jun 7, 2017 12:31:08 GMT -5
I asked some Brentwood-ites about this. There response was basically 'he's crazy'.
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Post by GRWelsh on Jun 7, 2017 14:36:12 GMT -5
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Post by geneweigel on Jun 7, 2017 15:16:05 GMT -5
I replied twice and buttdeleted the post from my phone.
I watched the TV "The Molech" on PARANORMAL WITNESS yesterday. I think a perfect storm of something weird and a deteriorating family throw in a Fundamental Christian musings and an underlying need for a grand lifestyle. Thats the overall feeling that I'm getting. That there might be a supernatural thing in this mess.... ? Maybe. But I think these things bury themselves. If I had not experienced weird shit myself then I might not want to hear this particular story but I've learned to take it one step at a time. Shitty witnesses can fuck over the biggest thing you ever experienced. I once saw a fireball meteor and 50 people that were present were looking the other way.
The demon angle puts people off but I think its just as interesting if it was a disembodied voice saying its Bozo the Clown.
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Post by GRWelsh on Aug 11, 2021 10:45:32 GMT -5
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Post by geneweigel on Aug 11, 2021 11:20:06 GMT -5
I should stay there, I'd make it haunted by ghosts and ghouls by the end of the week... Seriously, I feel almost like I can't be Mr Spooky 24/7, I watch ghost videos on YouTube to see if I can debunk (Sir Spooks, Nuke's Top 5 and Slapped Ham) but that is about it. Every time that I pass a cemetery at night, I just want to pull over and get all creeped out but there is never any time.
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Post by Scott on Aug 12, 2021 8:31:44 GMT -5
I used to live a few blocks from there, and every time I'd walk or drive past it, I would look for signs of demonic possession. The current owners hate the reputation, and there are definitely more signs of bed and breakfast.
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Post by GRWelsh on Aug 12, 2021 8:57:04 GMT -5
I am not convinced of the existence of ghosts or demons, but I do believe there are phenomena that people experience which defy explanation. So I try to keep an open mind and not automatically dismiss everything purportedly supernatural as a hoax or lie. Sure, there are a lot of attention-seeking hoaxers, yet also I believe the universe is weirder and more complex than we skeptics usually give it credit for. I've always been fascinated with the paranormal.
I checked out a few of Sir Spooks videos and they are entertaining. With so much video technology out there, it is difficult to tell what is genuine from what isn't anymore. The humanoid figures with the glowing or reflective eyes looked obviously fake to me, as did the ghost child at the top of the ladder in the playground. The weird noises at night in the woods is something I've experienced, but nocturnal animals can make some pretty weird sounds and so I've usually ignored it... But maybe if I was alone in an old graveyard trying to scare myself it would creep me out. The whistling sound coming from the sewer was pretty cool.
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Post by geneweigel on Aug 12, 2021 9:36:43 GMT -5
The worst video was a guy harassing an old woman coming to mourn at night implying that she was an evil spirit.
As far as "real demons and ghosts" on record, I'm case by case... I don't have anything to cite at all. Mass hysteria is real as hell, I find that genuine weird incidents get buried in mass hysteria. My cousins would literally make up better stories to kill real shared experiences and eventually the association of something easily dismissible wiped away the actual event. For instance, my mystery biker group real-experienced incident was replaced by several mystery car stories of zero value.
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Post by GRWelsh on Aug 12, 2021 11:46:47 GMT -5
In the summer after high school a few of my friends and I wanted to find a 'real' haunted house to stay overnight in. We searched but ended up not doing it. We found some abandoned places but there was more concern about getting permission or trespassing illegally than fear of the supernatural. I often think ghost-hunters and such people do not really believe the supernatural exists, otherwise they wouldn't seek it out. When you think it is possible, but doubt it, then it is thrilling. But if I genuinely believed that demons were real, and could possess minds and do violent and disturbing acts as seen in the movies, there is no chance I would go anywhere near them without a priest or exorcist.
There was another time a friend and I (around ages 11 or 12?) slept outside on the back porch in summer and we heard snuffling or grunting sounds down by the driveway. It sounded like some big animal. That sent us inside.
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Post by geneweigel on Aug 12, 2021 12:48:56 GMT -5
Dorothy always jokes after I finished telling one of my experiences something like: "...And they call these spirits 'schizophrenia'..."
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Post by GRWelsh on Aug 20, 2021 11:26:33 GMT -5
I never did finish this book, so I signed it out of the library again. I am now on p. 87. The co-author Bob Cranmer is the guy who claims this happened to his family. He isn't well known nationally but was a fairly big deal here in Pittsburgh as he was a County Commissioner in the late 90's. He was involved in the development of Brentwood Towne Square and later "Renaissance II" with the building of the new baseball park for the Pirates, new stadium for the Steelers and new convention center. Sadly, he was considered a traitor by Republicans for working with Democrats to get these things done. That is a shame that the parties can no longer work together without being called traitors. He quit politics and it was soon after when he claims the really bad demonic events at this house took place. Some reviewers complain Cranmer engages in a lot of self-aggrandizement in this book, but I have no problem with someone talking about their accomplishments and I'm enjoying the biographical elements as a precursor to describing all of the supernatural events. It is fascinating to me that this is set two blocks from where my great grandparents lived at 121 Sceneridge Avenue. I spent a lot of time there in the 70's and early 80's so I'm very familiar with Brentwood. Scott lived in Brentwood at two different locations from mid-2000's up until a few years ago before moving further south to Venetia. Anytime we would game at Scott's in Brentwood it would remind me of the times I visited my great grandparents back in the day. But I never heard anything about the haunted house before this book was published.
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Post by geneweigel on Aug 20, 2021 11:54:09 GMT -5
...and after a quick browse, a suppressed memory of playing tag with an 13 foot tall, nude, and unnaturally reddish man named Mr Ball-Zoo-Pool...
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Post by GRWelsh on Aug 20, 2021 12:32:59 GMT -5
Heh, there's nothing like a suppressed memory to help a horror novel plot move along...
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Post by geneweigel on Oct 15, 2022 9:47:19 GMT -5
I lost interest in the videos of the supernatural. The level of fraud has reached point blank idiocy. It's people upgrading their "every day" video streams with a "supernatural episode" for higher ratings. The days of the believability of the professional frauds (meters, infrared, radio voices, etc) are almost now gone. Replaced by "trusted favorite channel" videos that go supernatural. The aggregator channels will lean towards fraud to cover the obvious prior slip ups to make it seem credible. I watched all of them cover this "hand in the ceiling space" video and conveniently left out that the night guard who filmed the hand was levitating while steadily holding a phone just prior. I'm going to go check out some known haunted locations myself but this video era is not even worth paying attention to.
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Post by GRWelsh on Oct 15, 2022 12:12:43 GMT -5
The irony is with phone cameras being ubiquitous the amount of evidence for the supernatural should be higher than ever, but that doesn’t seem to be true. It just seems like a proliferation of low effort fakery. “With modern technology, now you too can be a hoaxer.”
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Post by geneweigel on Oct 15, 2022 13:16:48 GMT -5
Its like now with video being on TV as app. Its like mixed drink click click click then low grade entertainment. My red flag alert came a few months ago when I was watching a "story" of a bigfoot encounter which was done so intentionally ironic that it was sickening. I started auditing all these channels to see where they are getting their information and some of them were flat out admitting fiction in the channel credits. I've started watching true crime, missing persons, and validated strange stories. At least, its not some guy walking into a room and never pointing the camera where the "ghost" assistant is hiding over and over again.
Then there was this one "unexplained" video that was so preposterous in its "You've got to believe me" that all these channels were pushing but it never panned out. Some guy on TikTok saying that he is filming a giant on a mountain in Canada and the more that he looks into then the more a vast "giant on a mountain" conspiracy is at his front door. If you screenshot his original video it looks like a flat rounded construction rather than a humanoid and all the videos afterwards have friends with bland cars driving around seemingly to be government investigators.
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