Nothing feels as frightening as waking up in the middle of the night because of ghostly roommates that haunt the home. If you live in a haunted home, you may wonder how to deal with it.
Having lived in a haunted home myself at one point, I feel equipped to tell you about how to deal with it. Maybe you moved in without realizing it was haunted, but now, you don’t have the option to vacate the property.
What do you do in those cases? Let’s look at the best ways to deal with living in haunted houses.
Rule out any natural causes
First of all, be sure to rule out any natural causes for the ghostly events. Be sure to check your carbon monoxide detectors. Carbon monoxide poisoning can cause hallucinations that might be mistaken as paranormal activity.
Ensure that windows or drafts are not making doors slam or objects move. You can also check for rodents in the walls, which might cause spooky sounds.
It is also a great idea to ask a friend for a second opinion. Maybe they can locate the source of the strange noises or phenomena. When you are afraid, it is easy to make everything seem spooky.
It is also a great idea to check if you have high EMF levels in your home. This can cause anxiety and feelings of being haunted by ghosts. High electromagnetic fields impact humans and animals and often cause misidentified supernatural phenomena.
Always remember that, in most cases, ghosty events have natural causes.
Research and Learn About the Ghost
If you have ruled out all natural causes for the events, it is time to dig deeper. Try to learn the story of what may have happened on the property to cause it to be haunted. For example, check out your home’s and neighborhood’s history to see if it shows clues about what may have happened. In learning this information, you can figure out what might help the spirit to move on.
You can do multiple things to check the history of a home, such as:
- Search the registry of deeds
- Ask the realtor about the history
- Read books about the area
- Ask the neighbors
Search the Registry of Deeds
You can begin with a basic search of your home’s registry of deeds. Either visit in person or check online to see who owned the home before. Doing this will tell you about the story that your home may have seen and why the home has ghosts. In some cases, the deeds won’t go back far enough, but you can work with those who work in this area to help you track it down.
Ask the Realtor About the History
Speaking with a realtor, you will learn how much value they offer as a source of information. They can help you learn if your home sits in a historic neighborhood, and they can, in some cases, tell you the history of a home or who previously owned it.
Read Books About the Local Area
Books about the local area can give you a ton of valuable and detailed information that few other sources can compete with. It can tie up loose ends and explain the reasons behind the haunting.
For example, I had a friend who had a home built in an area that was well-known for Native American conflicts with the newly arrived settlers, and there was a lot of bloodshed in the local region.
In this case, the home wasn’t haunted but the land was. This past trauma caused hauntings in his home, despite the conflict happening to the land.
You can’t unwind the clock and change the past, but it can help to understand why these things happen, and in some cases, you can help the distressed to feel at peace.
Ask the Neighbors
Especially if you have a neighbor who has lived in the area for a long time, they can tell you about the people who may have lived in the home.
They could tell if an accident happened there. Another example of why a home might be haunted is due to the person who lived there previously being into occult practices, which can open a spiritual door for ghosts and demonic entities.
Haunted houses happen for various reasons, and you want to research home or the ghost because it may help you lay the burdens of the past to rest.
Researching the ghost can also help you to avoid angering the spirit by accidentally doing something that causes them pain.
You can find helpful information in the article below if you want to learn more about how to research a haunted site. The article is geared towards ghost hunting, but it can be very helpful in these situations as well.
Related article: How to hunt ghosts: A beginner’s guide
Always Act Respectfully
Even if the ghosts don’t act respectfully toward you, you should never taunt or say anything disrespectful to the ghost. The one thing about this being a fringe science is that we don’t fully understand the abilities of spirits. It would be a mistake if you were to disrespect them because no one knows what they can do.
Before you ever walk into the home, remember that the ghost will think of it as their home. If they want to make you leave, they can do things to scare you away or even hurt you. Acting disrespectfully toward them could also cause them to have ill intentions if they didn’t before.
When you move things into the home, exercise caution not to move the other items too much at first. Doing this can rile up the spirits and cause more paranormal activity.
Avoid the Room the Ghost Resides
Sometimes, you can’t avoid a ghost because it haunts the entire home. You have other situations where it will only haunt a single room. You can avoid encounters by staying out of that room as much as possible and warning guests about it. Turn the room into a storage room to respect to ghost’s wishes. This simple act of respect, like with humans, will keep issues from arising—at least, you hope that the ghost will extend the same respect toward you.
Some ghosts will leave you alone as long as you show them respect and don’t overstep your boundaries.
Never Respond in Anger
You can act respectfully toward some ghosts, but they won’t care. They will still do scary things to try to make you lose your nerve. Some ghosts will continue to act aggressively toward you, and they will either prevent you from sleeping or enjoying life at home. Getting angry can feed unwanted behavior, especially if the ghost likes negative energies. Demons, in particular, feed off negative emotions like anger, guilt, sadness, and envy.
Focus on love because even if the spirit has negative energy toward you, it can’t abide those emotions for long. Directing positive emotions toward them can sometimes stop unwanted ghost activity. Sometimes the ghost feels lonely and unloved, and this causes them to act out.
What Do You Do if the Spirit Dislikes Your Presence in the Home?
You can take several actions to try to make peace with the spirit, but it won’t always work. Now, you can either deal with the ghost scaring you and taking abusive actions toward you, or you can leave the home altogether.
Some say you could hire a priest or smudge the rooms and hope the spirit leaves. That’s an option, but in some cases, it won’t remove the spirit from your home. You can try it and hope that the spirit leaves, but I’ve heard of plenty of people who tried all of the suggestions, and the ghost remained afterward.
In those cases, you either need to accept its presence in the home or move to a new home.
Remodeling the Home: Talk About It with the Ghost
In a home with a ghost that causes you no problems, beware of making big remodels and changes to a home. You want the ghosts to know about the remodel ahead of time. In some cases, new floor plans or tearing out walls can anger the spirits. Renovating a home can quickly stir up spirits. The ghost may even make a sudden appearance.
Spirits unhappy with a remodel might hide building materials or move tools. In some cases, they will scare workers into leaving. Empathizing with the ghosts and trying to understand their feelings can keep the peace. In most cases, they will leave after a while from the renovations.
Never Open Yourself up to a Spirit
You never know the true intentions of a spirit, so you should never open yourself up to them completely. If a situation becomes more than you can handle, leave the home. Your well-being matters more than a home. You can call in a priest or a paranormal investigator, but at some point, you may have no choice but to leave. The spirit will continue in the home because we don’t understand enough about this phenomenon to force them to leave.
As one exorcist put it, getting rid of demons can be extremely hard. Even if you get rid of them in the beginning, they will sometimes come back with more spirits. In a truly haunted house, you can’t get rid of them.
Keep Control: Stay Firm in Your Commands
You must stay firm about when you want a ghost to leave or stop scaring you. In some cases, this will work, but you have other cases where this can worsen the problem. The people who don’t believe in the supernatural or act disrespectfully toward it are often the first ones to experience something bad.
Wear Good Shoes
Especially in cases where a spirit has acted aggressively toward you or someone else, don’t wear flip-flops or high heels. If you need to run out of the home, you want something where you can do it easily. Having a good pair of shoes can keep you from a broken leg or ankle.
Never Lose Your Head
You must continue to think logically about the situation of living in a haunted house. Don’t lose your head about it. If the situation takes a toll on your mental health, leave the home. Your well-being matters more than a home.
Keeping calm in dangerous situations can help you to get through hard situations. In some cases, ghosts want to scare you to make you leave.
You can also make things worse by thinking of the home as haunted because your mind will start to play tricks. The power of suggestion can make a situation worse.
Not Always Paranormal Activity
I highlighted the above because you must think logically. That doesn’t mean that your home isn’t haunted, but you want to avoid making it more haunted through the power of suggestion.
In some cases, you might pretend your home isn’t haunted for a while to see if that eliminates the ghostly activity. Granted, this won’t always work, but it can keep your mind from playing tricks on you.
Take the time to rule out the non-paranormal activity before you call it haunted. You need to acquaint yourself with the noises of a new home.
You also have some cases where people originally thought the home was haunted, and it turned out that it was carbon monoxide poisoning. That isn’t always the case, but you want to rule out all the non-paranormal causes.
Don’t Bring out the Ouija Board!
You may have heard about some people who will bring out the Ouija board in a haunted house to try to communicate with the residential spirits.
The issue with this is that the Ouija board can open a spiritual door that will attract more than the ghosts already in the home. In some cases, it could attract demons, and you don’t want to deal with this inside an already haunted house where you live.
Most paranormal experts recommend avoiding the Ouija board in graveyards and haunted houses. This is because it can disturb the local spirits and anger them toward you so that they would cause harm.
If you want to learn more about Ouija boards and if they are dangerous to use, I invite you to read the article below.
Related article: Is the Ouija board dangerous? What you should know
Say a Prayer in the House
You can say a prayer to help the deceased pass over to the other side. For example, you might pray a prayer of peace over the home. Sometimes, you need to pray in direct response to the spirit and for protection. In all cases, if the home starts to overwhelm you, leave it.
Staying in a haunted home can harm your mental health, and it’s better to go somewhere else in those cases. Especially if you tried all of the above to get rid of them, this could help.
If you want to learn more about cleaning prayers, you find more information in the article below.
Related article: 9 ways to protect yourself from ghosts
Cleanse the home
It is always a great idea to cleanse the home using Palo Santo. Burn the wooden sticks with the intention to remove all negative energy. The great thing about Palo Santo is that it keeps positive energy and removes the nasty ones.
This means that you never have to fear that you bandish your decieced loved one watching over you. Sage tends to remove all energy, which might not be needed in most cases.
Final Thoughts
In some cases, you can’t get rid of the ghosts in a haunted house, and you either need to learn how to peacefully coexist with them, or you would be better off moving to a new home. People in truly haunted houses often learn how to coexist with ghosts peacefully. Getting rid of it isn’t easy because if a spirit truly wants to stay, we can’t do anything about it.
If you are worried that you might have a negative energy in your home, you find more information about this in the article below.
Related article: 21 signs of negative energy in your home
