House of horrors defies explanation

The house of Mráček family, photo: www.idnes.cz
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A house of horrors has been making the headlines recently but it doesn’t have anything to do with Halloween. Residents of a house near the town of Rokycany, south-west of Prague, have been terrorised for weeks now by exploding electricity sockets and glass shattering of its own accord. And so far the experts have been unable to explain it.

All was well at the home of the Mráček family until three weeks ago, when the light bulbs started popping, the windows started cracking, and flames started crawling out of the electrical sockets – and all at a rate up to 25 times an hour and 60 times a day. Other things around the house seem to have spontaneously combusted, towels, curtains, even a police ribbon. For all that, the authorities in the village of Strašice have not given in to paranormal explanations, despite the fact that science is so far offering none at all. The village’s mayor, Jiří Hahner:

“We have been taking measures to clarify what is going on in that house. The electric company ČEZ has taken readings of its own frequencies, but those readings haven’t shown anything abnormal. So we brought in a geophysicist who took readings of his own over the weekend, but he too found nothing. So I have to say, we don’t yet know the cause of the phenomena occurring in the house.”

The power, telecommunications and other experts working with the unique situation have measured circulating currents in the ground, and have even fitted a geophone in the earth to listen for seismic activity, but again there were no results and the occurrences have continued. The sockets continued to burn even after house was removed from the electrical grid entirely, and the police are making sure its owners do not enter the house except to make sure it is not burning down.

“ČEZ has ordered more tests for this week, based upon which we will decide what to do next, because we are supposed to receive some guides from experts on how to proceed from here. To the extent that I have consulted with the experts though, I have to say, none of them have ever come across any similar phenomenon.”

According to ČEZ, the house is “the most electrically grounded building in the world” after all of the tests it has carried out, and its leading technicians have said there is no record of anything of the kind having happened anywhere. So far the only thing the electricity company has found is a high instance of high-frequency waves, but no clue as to where they come from or how they could cause the anomalies. Fingers have been pointed at the large army base nearby, however the army says it possesses no equipment near or far that could create those kinds of disturbances. The mayor is struggling for leads.

“It’s only occasionally that there have not been occurrences. All we know is that the problems tend to occur on weekdays, which leads us to believe that they are in some way related to some kind of process that only goes on during the week.”

The other plausible explanation of course is that of some grand hoax – after all, perhaps the hardest thing of all to believe is that all of this has played out in the village of Strašice, which means roughly “haunted village” in Czech. While plenty of reporters and technicians at the scene have witnessed the anomaly, the mayor says even a hoax is not ruled out, and that tests will continue until the strange occurrences are explained.