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Burham House Sociology

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Monterey House Located on the grounds of Roanoke College’s campus is the reportedly haunted house known as Monterey. This house was built in 1853 by the Huff family, over time passed through many different owners, and in 2002 was officially bought by Roanoke College. Throughout the history of the house several of the occupants are known to have died within the premises of the property, thus contributing to it’s reputation of being haunted. In our investigation of the Monterey house we spent two nights in the house gathering various types of data to aid us in our attempt to discover what theory of haunting is consistent with the experiences within the house. The experiences within the house can be explained through several different theories …show more content…

The physiological explanation attributes the impression of paranormal activity to physical causes such as tilted floors, unsquared rooms, blood sugar imbalances and eye floaters (McCue, 2002, p. 6). Lastly, the parapsychological theory includes phenomena that cannot be explained through physical or psychological factors.
The data types that were collected and these theories can be applied to include dowsing, electronic voice phenomena (EVP’s), music experiences, unsealing a room, room temperatures, and vigils across two separate nights. The first set of collected data was dowsing: a technique that uses two L-shaped metal rods to locate water, minerals, unmarked graves, and potentially changes in energy indicating the presence of a ghost . During the first night team one experienced a large number of dowsing hits while Robin lead the sweeps. The group appeared to notice this and conducted a dowsing sweep of room five without Robin. Their initial sweep showed no dowsing hits, however, once Robin entered the room, she received several dowsing hits in various spots around the room. On the second night of the …show more content…

For example, the numerous dowsing hits found in the house can be attributed to the priming or bias of the people conducting the dowsing sweeps. They might be unaware of the priming and the bias caused by following or trying to repeat the results of another. In addition to the dowsing hits, the psychological theory of explanation is also supported by the reports of hearing voices that are not actually there. This can be attributed to a lack of sleep causing hallucinations, fueled by a self fulfilling prophecy, like purposefully looking for a specific piece of evidence in your data until you find it, and can even be attributed to hearing damage or impairment due to health problems or old age. Another possible explanation for the hauntings can be seen with deja vu, or the experiencing of intense familiarity with something in the present environment that leads you to believe you have experienced it before. An exemplification of this theory can be seen when Robin experienced feelings of familiarity while listening to a song during one of the vigils, but could not place where she had heard it before. This feeling of familiarity is derived by the brain’s inability to recall the information related to the potential memory, and is sometimes referred to as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomena. Overall, the data collected from Monterey is mostly explained by the

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