Forever Indebted: Hauntings and Debt

The best ghost stories are typically made by a compelling history. A ghost isn’t that exciting unless there is a macabre reason that they feel the obsessive need to remain. While often these stories are tales of love gone wrong or other natural disasters, sometimes money, debt, and bankruptcy are known to play a role.
With Halloween approaching, it can be interesting and fun to look at how money troubles, debt, and bankruptcy find their way into several well-known tales of hauntings. Following are three prominent haunting that prove that debt does live beyond the grave.

Lemp Mansion – The Lemp Mansion is the one-time residence of the family that founded the Lemp Brewery dynasty, one of the first and largest St. Louis brewhouses in the 19th Century. Lemp beer became a staple around the world. Over the next century, a chain of suicides, a mysterious death and other events ensued in the house. Once Prohibition hit, the business headed to bankruptcy. After restoration, visitors have reported strange sounds, locking and unlocking doors, candles lighting on their own, a beer glass flying off the bar, and figures appearing and disappearing.  Among them is a lady dressed in lavender, allegedly one of the departed Lemps still walking about the home. Did we mention the legend that persists of a “monkey-faced boy” who was kept in the attic for a time? No. Well, you can see there’s more to the story.

Nakagusuku Castle Ruins – Okinawa is a ground zero for ghosts – an island where buildings are left unfinished after construction rattles the nerves of unknown spirits, according to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. In 1975, an Okinawan businessman decided to build a hotel-casino resort near the Nakagusuku Castle Ruins. Local monks warned him that he was building too close to a cave with restless spirits. During construction, several workers died, and the rest of the spooked builders eventually walked off the project cold. Construction stopped, the businessman went bankrupt and ended up in an insane asylum. How’s that for a real-life Halloween ending?

Black Hope Curse – Allegedly the inspiration for the movie Poltergeist. Residents of the Newport subdivision in Crosby, Texas, allegedly had “strange experiences” in the early 1980s after discovering their suburban homes were allegedly built on top of an old cemetery for slaves.  The phantoms allegedly helped drive one family to bankruptcy, or so it is claimed. But money problems were preferable to some of the other spooky things and reported strange deaths that happened to the families of the residents. Or so the story goes. Or at least as it is told on various websites dedicated to hauntings.   

By the way, if your house is haunted and you are trying to sell it, that can be a financial blessing or a curse. Not a lot of people want to live in a haunted house. However, if you can find the right type of buyer who is looking for a haunted house, then it’s a plus, since haunted houses are not exactly easy to find. However, in some states, the law requires the sellers reveal if a house is haunted. So be aware of the laws of your state.