Sometime last year, an electrician told me about a “generator” that made “sounds” being used to harass people. With the potential use of such a generator, it’s possible that some mobbings are an application of haunted house effect. Mobbing for haunted house effect could be intended not only to exorcise residents and put the house on the market, but to decrease the valuation of a home for a predatory buyer. The use of haunted house technology to turn over properties would surely be a real estate scam.
It’s clear that those who began mobbing my rental home in Seattle were aware of the impact of a haunting on real estate. One of the accusations made against me by the owner of the south mobbing house in Seattle was that I told the prospective buyers of a new house nearby that the dwelling was haunted. Having been raised and educated in the Berkeley area, a milieu favoring reason over superstition, I found it yet another bizarre statement with an unethical—if not illegal—goal. The one reason millennials are more likely to buy haunted houses, a 2018 article on realtor.com, states that one of three buyers are more likely to buy a haunted house because they expect a better deal out of it, with millennials the most likely age group to put down an offer with the expectation of a sweet deal (https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/millennials-more-likely-to-buy-haunted-houses/).
After coming across an article in engineering magazine on how to make a haunted house, I wrote a long piece called Is it or isn’t it infrasound? Only your mobbers know for sure. This entry includes so much detail that it hides information that might prove useful to those are being mobbed. In some cases, it’s possible that the goal of mobbing is not to overtly “harass,” but to use haunted house effect to frighten residents into moving without understanding that the haunting is manufactured. Buried in the same blog entry is a summary of three ways that a close-range haunting might be possible, as noted in the October 31, 2013 article on Engineer.com, Haunt Your House with Infrasound (https://magazine.engineerjobs.com/2013/haunt-house-infrasound.htm). In this case, the haunting relies on infrasound. The reference to the use of a truck with a generator in the article could also explain the presence and use of work trucks or load-carrying vehicles in some kinds of mobbing.
This blog has explored other ways criminals exploit technologies of sound to evict, including boosting and signal diversion onto the available speakers and speaker-enabled devices in your environment. In other applications, we might find criminals using technologies of virtual reality or game development to do the same. Evading prosecution for mobbing requires some understanding of sound, sound propagation, and hearing.
Before you sell, make sure your haunting comes from beyond, and not from next door. If you think you’re being conned, check to see if there’s an office tasked with handling real estate scams in. your area. If you’re in Alameda County, California, visit the website of the Alameda County District Attorney.
