Future Haunted House for Sale!

Are you looking for a bargain on a used house? Consider the property at 2791 Calkins Place in Broomfield. It is now for sale after sitting vacant for nearly two years. Why?

On September 12, 2009 a 36-year-old woman and her 46-year-old ex-husband were found shot and killed in the home in an apparent murder/suicide. Three children under 5 years of age were in the home at the time of the killings along with a male acquaintance of the woman. This acquaintance apparently called the police.

The house is listed for $264,500 which is a little low for the neighborhood – probably due to the poor condition of the yard – but seemingly high considering the nasty history of the property. But why should it be that way?

We all know how it works. When people die in particularly violent ways, their spirits tend to hang around the scene of the crime to torment future inhabitants. They open and close doors, make the floors creak, and cause vases to fall from their tables. And, of course, they restrict their activities to the evening hours. We all know this, right?

According to a CBS News Poll, nearly half of all Americans – 48% - believe in ghosts. Women are more likely to believe in ghosts than men – 56% for women and 38% for men. In addition, according to the poll, 22% of Americans actually believe they have seen or felt the presence of a ghost.

These are staggering numbers considering there is absolutely no evidence that ghosts exist. In fact, for all practical purposes, ghosts are imaginary. And yet, this imaginary belief has real-world consequences that can be reflected in the actual sales prospects of this house in Broomfield.

Would I be bothered to buy a house with such a sinister history? Not at all. We would have hellacious Halloween parties and we would give guided tours of the scene of the crime. And, year-round, I would greet visitors at the door with a zombie mask and fake blood running down my face. But the reality is that if we were to buy this house at a cut rate price due to its history, we would have an equally difficult time trying to resell it due to the same history.

And all because of an imaginary set of beliefs held by half of all Americans. A house with a violent past is doomed to sit vacant or sell at a bargain price because half of our neighbors believe that this residence may be the home of ghosts. Is this home at 2791 Calkins place haunted? Not in any real sense, but for all practical purposes – yes.

Stan Monroe

Miraculous Feat of Engineering? Nope!

How did the Neolithic inhabitants of England create Stonehenge? How did they raise horizontal lintel stones - weighing up to 30 tons each -  22 feet into the air and place them on top of the vertical sarsen stones? These people must have had special knowledge or even help from aliens. Wrong. They were dumber than a box of rocks and this explains how they did it.

Even today, the construction of Stonehenge seems a monumental task. Many of the heaviest stones were transported from quarries 25 miles away and the task of raising these huge stones high into the sky without modern tools seems impossible. So we make the mistake of assuming that our ignorance of the exact methods implies extreme knowledge or secret abilities on the part of the ancients. Instead, in order to understand how they did it, perhaps we should turn the question on its head. How would you build Stonehenge if you had kumquats for brains? If you think about this for ten minutes, I bet that the answer will come to you. Go ahead; take ten minutes to think about it…

Time’s up. We know that these ancient builders had only simple tools including ropes, log rollers, pails, shovels and picks. But did the ancients have anything else that we do not possess in our modern age? Of course they did. The ancients had three key ingredients in abundance – time, labor and capital. It is known that many ancient societies – including the Egyptians for example - built projects over generations and employed nearly endless slave (or conscription) labor. The same is true of the Stonehenge builders. These were not 12-month projects with limits on capital, labor and time. The ancient Stonehenge builders had 1) endless time, 2) endless labor, and 3) endless capital in the form of available building materials - stone. (And remember – the purpose of a tool is to multiply labor. If you have endless labor, tools become largely unnecessary.)

OK, so how would you raise a 30-ton horizontal stone 22 feet into the air if the only tools you had were ropes, shovels, pails and picks? After the vertical stones have been raised and placed into their proper locations, you give thousands of slaves shovels and pails and you bury the site under a massive mound of dirt and rock creating a 360-degree ramp of dirt. It is that simple. It may take 100 years to do this, but the ancients did not care much for time. Once the site is buried, thousands of slaves using ropes and log rollers then drag the 50-ton stones to the top of the mound and then place them on the vertical stones. Finally, you spend another hundred years and countless slave labor hours removing the mound. After generations of back-breaking work, Stonehenge is complete when the mound has been removed – one pail at a time.

Knowledge accumulates – we know more about the universe now than we did 3,000 years ago. We make a grave mistake when we assume that our ancient ancestors possessed knowledge and abilities that we do not possess. And this is why we make a mistake when we worship their monuments, healing practices or religious writings. They did little more than fumble around in the dark. Do not get me wrong, they accomplished much with their limited knowledge, but their abilities were far from miraculous.