The tale of the oil suicides (or, No Blood For Oil)
I recently had to get the condenser replaced for my central air conditioning system. For those of you not in the know, this is an expensive task. $3,600 to be precise. Ouch. My installer was friendly enough. He'd been an oil technician before moving to air conditioning. I sat right back while he told me a tale. I'll relate it to you as accurately as I can.
I used to work on oil furnaces, but it's dangerous. I don't like oil heat. The next house you buy, make sure it's gas. I've seen people die from oil heat.
There was this guy who left for work. He came back home that night and found that his wife and children were dead from an oil leak. He was devastated. After they buried them, he came back home with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a photo album of all their memories. Then he took a 9 mm to his mouth and BLAM! Blew his head off.
My dad and I went there to clean up. They had sealed the house up for four years. It was like a time capsule. The clothes were still out, the food still out on the tables, everything left exactly like it was. It was eerie. And we walked into the living room and all the splatter of blood on the wall was still there, where he killed himself. You could walk over to that section and just feel a cold chill. There was a ten degree difference between the rest of the house and that spot right there!
We can't explain everything. Humans haven't been around for all that long, but still. That was a definite drop in temperature! After that, we said no more! Stopped working on oil right then and there.
OK, the dude's position is obviously riddled with logical fallacies. It makes for a nice story, but come on. Families die from gas heat too. And wood heat. And kerosene. And shark attacks (but not usually in the living room, granted).
His bigger mistake is not really understanding how your brain fucks with you. Let's break it down:
(1) Expectation can color your experience. If you hear about this awful home you're walking into and what happened there, and you get to the area with a chair and blood all over it, that's bound to shake you up a little. Cold chills are a sign of psychological effects as often as physical effects. Hell, some songs give me cold chills and I don't think my mp3 player is haunted. Feeling a cold chill while looking at such a sight would be normal, not proof of paranormal activity.
(2) Let's say that the air really was colder there. So? Homes have areas which are naturally warmer or cooler than others. Having lived with no a/c in June the past few days, I'm acutely aware of this. Even my cats know this, which is why they pick certain spots when they're not happy with the temperature in the house. It goes even father - if the guy was like me, he would've picked a cool spot to put his chair in because he's a warm-blooded male and likes the home to be cooler than his wife would prefer. Guys tend to run a little warmer than girls, so it's only natural that he'd want to sit in a cool spot and get used to that being "his" spot. I'm just speculating here, but all of the assumptions I'm making fit in perfectly well with a non-paranormal view of the events described.
(3) Memory is a malleable thing. The more emotionally intense an experience, the less likely we are to remember the details correctly. We also tend to embellish stories after the fact, even if only on a subconscious level. You can't take these stories at face value. Not even from yourself, as counterintuitive as that seems. Memory isn't like a VCR or DVR. It's more like your grandmother trying to recall which of her cousins died from a stroke 15 years ago.
So we have the expectation of creepiness, actual creepiness, and years of retelling after the fact. This is what makes anecdotes unreliable. I don't doubt that the experience creeped him out. The circumstances were chilling quite on their own. I just don't see any need to bring paranormal activity into the equation. Never posit a supernatural explanation when a natural one will do. This case? The natural ones work just fine.
Labels: blood for oil, memory, suicide
