/x/ - Paranormal

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This is funny enough, I'll bite.

The Baleroy Mansion of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is widely known as the most haunted home of America. Originally built in 1911, it housed numerous antique pieces including a haunted portrait and grandfather clock.

Perhaps better known, however, is the so-called Blue Room and its "Chair of Death". Supposedly once owned by Napoleon of France and now haunted by a malevolent spirit called "Amelia", the Chair of Death supposedly would see anyone taking a seat upon it die within two weeks' time. Those who had been put under the effect of the curse were said to be stalked by Amelia herself, manifest in a type of blue mist that would follow the victims all the way back to their own homes. It is said that at least four people were killed in this fashion before a cord was fastened over the chair to prevent people from sitting down on it.

The chair, alongside many other antiquities of the mansion, eventually was sold to either private collectors or local museums. It's current whereabouts are unknown.

Witch's_Chair.jpg
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>>657
That's a pretty dope chair, but have you heard of the Witch's Chair?
This one has a pretty straightforward story:
Merritt P. Wright, the Witch of Bristol, Pennsylvania, was a minor local legend until she died in 1911. She was "honored" with a wrought iron chair, i.e. "cold iron," (wrought being low-temperature iron admixture specifically...) which is thought to be animus to magical or bedeviled creatures in colloquial English & Anglo-American lore.
It is said that, at midnight and on days where the barrier between worlds is the weakest like the Solstice or Halloween (or sometimes the entire month of October), anyone sitting on the chair can feel her ghostly touch, her arms wrapped around them.
No one has attempted to move the chair to date. I'm not sure if anyone else has really pointed out the significance of a particularly wrought iron chair being placed over the grave of a witch, but many superstitions from the early 20th century and before have died, so I'm not surprised.

Image sourced from the Night Watchmen, a group of private investigators who have covered a decent chunk of US stories (and disproved plenty). In this case they didn't find anything too spooky, but they were in a group & didn't try on any notable witching date, though it was at least the month of October. Curiously, the investigator on the chair did say he felt colder on one side of his body than the other, but they didn't find anything else that night or their next visit.

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>>657
>>658
is this real?

>>659
They are in fact real chairs, yeah. The worst ones tend to get strung up or locked down to prevent further injuries/curses/etc from people getting dared to sit on them, but the more mild ones (like the Witch's Chair or the Baird Chair from MO) are still accessible.

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The Museo de Valladolid in the Spanish city of the same name houses a piece of furniture known as La sillon del diablo, or "The Devil's Armchair".

As the legend goes, the chair originally belonged to Andres de Proaza, a man of either Portuguese or Jewish origins who studied medicine at the University of Valladolid in 1550. He notably took part in the first-ever course on human anatomy held in Spain, taught by the renowned physician Alfonso Rodriguez de Guevera, who had acquired his own knowledge on the subject in Italy.

This is significant in as much as that anatomy was a truly new discipline, yet de Proaza astonished his peers by having a seemingly inherent understanding of it. More astonishing were the constant rumors of nightly screams coming from the basement of de Proaza's house. When a young boy went missing, his terrified neighbors finally alerted local authorities.

Needless to say, they found the boy down there - cut open, alongside numerous dissected cats and dogs. During his hearing, de Proaza admitted he had killed all of them, but this was just the beginning: He also admitted he had made a pact with the devil himself, using an armchair he bought from a Navarrese necromancer as a means of communication. It was by sitting on it that he had gained all of his seemingly supernatural knowledge about anatomy. However, the chair was picky - if anyone other than a well-qualified physician was to sit in it, de Proaza warned, said person would surely die.

He himself certainly did - being sent to the gallows by the Inquisition and all. After his death, the chair and the rest of de Proaza's belongings were to be auctioned off, but as no-one wanted to touch the property of a self-confessed Satanist, they ultimately were mothballed in a warehouse near his old university. 

Much later, in the 19th century, chance saw a tired university beadle stumble upon the chair. He was found sitting inside of it and very much dead three days later. After the scenario repeated with a second beadle, the chair was taken and hanged upside-down in the university's own chapel, and remained there until it was moved to its current resting place in 1890. A neat red ribbon has been spanned across his arms to politely discourage visitors from increasing the tally.

>>661
One of the fascinating things about cursed chairs is the sheer death tally some of them rack up. Most "cursed objects" have one or two people die in an untimely manner weeks or months later, cursed chairs tend to claim people within days or even while they are sitting in the very chair itself. I can see an argument that it's due to proximity & duration (you spend more time on a haunted chair than touching, say, a haunted door), or that it's due to something more symbolic, but I do think it is notable and worth considering.

>>662
Symbolically speaking, I think the underlying theme is wrongfully taking the position of someone else. Can be as general as "not a proper physician" for >>661 , or more specifically about sitting in the favorite chair of someone/something else.

If anything, it's slightly disappointing that impending death seems to be the only form of curse tied to chairs. A haunted chair that gave you diarrhea if you dare sit on it would be much more amusing.

>>667
I have found mention of the Devil's Chair in Jefferson, Texas, giving people spontaneous diarrhea, but I can't find anything more about it. I suspect that the emphasis on death is in part because death is easier to correlate to the chairs, or more dramatic and noticeable, than other effects. People generally don't watch out for chairs when they think "cursed object," another reason the number of rumors and stories around them is intriguing.

>>656 (OP) 
>>657
>>658
>>661
What happens if you collect all cursed chairs and sit upon them in a row. Will the chairs have a magical dual over who will kill you?

>>693
Musical Chairs with a bunch of haunted chairs sounds fun as fuck, if incredibly dangerous.

>>693
the spirits that haunt them will flow into your body and you'll become a chair

>>703
>haunted chairs procreate by turning humans into additional haunted chairs.
At least they can't teleport like Weeping Angels. I hope.

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Belcourt of Newport, also known as "Belcourt Castle" is a 50.000 square foot summer cottage of some sixty rooms. Only intended to be occupied for some six to eight weeks each year, it was built for banker, publisher, and politician Oliver Belmon; with construction taking place from 1891 to 1894.

Often counted as one of the most haunted houses in America, one of the attractions in Belcourt consists of a magnificent ballroom containing a number of haunted chairs. Visitors to Belcourt have repeatedly claimed to have suffered from strange effects when in their proximity. These range from a prickly feeling on one's skin when getting close to them, to the chairs moving away on their own when someone tries to sit on them, to those who actually sat down on them being thrown off by an unseen force.

These chairs also are in good company - the same ballroom they're in supposedly also holds a suit of medieval armor that can be heard screaming every once in a while. Legend has said screams come from the armor's original owner, who was killed when the tip of a spear pierced through the holes in his visor.

>>791
I hadn't heard of these haunted chairs before, good shit anon.
The haunted armor raises a good point, too, more people died in plate armor than in or on just about any other permanent object. 
There's only a few weapons claimed to be legitimately haunted, but many homes, chairs, graveyards, etc, so why are there so few reported haunted sets of armor?

I think it comes down to usage and purpose, myself. People don't wear old, broken armor, they just collect it, so you're not likely to trigger any odd happenings or curses, while chairs are built to be used at some point. 
Chairs are also literal "resting places," much like homes and graveyards are "resting places," so if purpose matters in haunting, that might matter too. The descriptions of these chairs make it sound like they're currently in use by attendees of a past ball. I'd be pissed too, if someone came and sat in my lap out of nowhere.
I think it would be interesting to compare the rate of strange incidents reported in museums containing different types and quantities of objects. 
Museums are notoriously "haunted," but under-report questionable events due to fear of critique or stigmatization by the scientific and anthropological organizations they rely on. Data collection on events doesn't ascribe a cause to them, however, which is why I think it would be valuable here- if it turned out that museums containing lots of human-owned objects or weapons had strange incidents, while natural museums did not, then it'd be worth investigating why, if they vary by type of object or time period, etc.

A relatively common specimen is the so-called "Devil's Chair". So common, in fact, that there are multiple of them all over the US. But as always with the United States, the one found in Florida is something else.

Located between the unincorporated community of Cassadaga (which in itself is noted for its abnormally high number of self-described psychics and occasionally touted as the 'Psychic Capital of the World'), the Devil's Chair of this place does not generally bring instant death to those that would sit on it. Instead, placing a can of beer upon the chair and returning upon the next morning will see the can emptied. Which in itself is only spooky if one is scared of psychic hobos. But as the legend goes, the can happens to become empty despite of not having been opened.

The Devil himself is also said to appear to those who would sit on the chair, but he's probably just mad you didn't bring him a cold one.

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>>815
Forgot image.

So the reason this thing is supposed to be a counterfeit is because the lathework looks like it was done with a pole lathe rather than a modern one. My guess is that because pole lathes are reciprocating, there are many marks from all the starting and stopping. However, it seems like it would be possible to turn timber without leaving these marks such as by sanding more zealously, or perhaps by doing all the rough work with a lathe then using a hand-operated "spit" and an extremely sharp set of tools to so all the fine work.
The question is: Was there really anybody dedicated enough to go through that effort just to eliminate a few scratches on the final product? The answer is: Yes. Autism predates vaccines. But could a couple of scammers have managed to get their hands on such an expensive piece of furniture and just had it sitting in their home?

>>828
>by doing all the rough work with a lathe then using a hand-operated "spit" and an extremely sharp set of tools to so all the fine work.
This is entirely possible. Dating of recent objects is a heuristic process, with very few solid results, the closest you can get is an object with a complete recorded history, kept in an observed location, like a city's fountains or statues.
Experts go on norms and trends, not the full extent of possibilities. Closer examination could feasibly rule in or out alternatives like this, but you'll rarely see such thorough attention being given to anything at all claimed to be supernatural.

>Autism predates vaccines.
The first rigorous vaccine was administered in 1721, Autism was not formally classified until 1938. People with disorder reminiscent of Autism predate that classification by a few hundred years, but no retroactively "confirmed" patient cases predate 1721. That isn't to say there's any association between these two things, of course, but until records of mental treatment of an autist in the 1600s are unearthed (perhaps from a reliquary? monks used to do some mental illness work), vaccines predate Autism.

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Torcello island in Venice's lagoon is host to Attila's Throne - an ancient stone chair named and supposedly sat on by the legendary leader of the Huns that sacked large parts of Roman Italy.

While its connection to the ancient warlord are questionable as the first settlers and the throne itself only arrived on Torcello in the 5th century (between 50 to 100 years after Attila's death), local legends still hold that whoever sits down on the throne will invariably return to Torcello - whether they like it or not.

>>867
will I become attila if I sit on that

>>869
Nope. The curse only means you will eventually return to Torcello.
I wish I could offer something more interesting, but haunted chairs aren't all that common.

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>>867
>buy chair
>feel like going on vacation to Torcello
>spent the last of my money on a haunted chair though
>feelsbadman.jfif
>sit on chair
>free trip

>>870
>haunted chairs aren't all that common
They are extremely common in haunted houses, it's the rural reason why some old chairs have hinges on the ends of the legs to nail them down in position.
The urban "or real" reason is to avoid people from moving or stealing them but a conventional family house should have no reason for having them.