Have you ever dreamed of living in a haunted house? Making that dream come true is as easy as believing the home you are in is haunted. But if you want a haunted house that has been scaring other people for years, you can certainly purchase one. For example, there’s the Priestly House in Canton, Mississippi.

Originally built by physician James Priestley in the 1950s, this Greek Revival home stayed in the Priestley family until the 1990s. When new owner Frankie McMillan moved in, she became concerned that Priestley’s wife, Susan, hadn’t gotten the message to clear the premises. McMillan claimed to have seen Susan in hallways and in the bedroom where the woman is believed to have died. The home was restored in 2004 and is listed for $699,000.

There are a range of locations, prices, and ages among the eight haunted houses on the market right now that you can check out at mental_floss.

A new gadget lets you drink wine straight out of the bottle without looking like a wino. Well, you’ll still look like a wino, just one with a bit of class. It’s a glass wine goblet with a tube for a stem, wrapped in rubber in order to screw it into the neck of the bottle. I didn’t laugh until I saw the name of the product: the Guzzle Buddy. “Plug it and chug it.” Seems like a lot of people don’t mind looking like a classy wino, because Amazon is temporarily sold out. -via Laughing Squid

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Scientists study families a lot, because it’s an extremely important human unit both socially and genetically. How different or alike are siblings? How does birth order affect your life? Studies like this help to determine which traits are genetic and which are learned. Sometimes those things are hard to separate, since families not only share genes, but also learn from each other. We also have new research about how families have changed over time. John Green has some really interesting findings about families this week’s episode of the mental_floss List Show.   

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.

Holiday songs are nothing new. Whenever Christmas approaches, we will all be bombarded on our radios and at the malls we visit, by various Christmas carols, classic songs and novelty tunes. “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)" sung by Alvin and the Chipmunks is as expected at Yuletide as electric razor commercials for Dad or diamond ring commercials for your girlfriend.

More recently, we have Randy Brooks' “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” Even Hanukkah now has Adam Sandler's recent classic “The Hanukkah Song.” These are all categorized as "holiday novelty songs.”

But for Halloween, for the past almost 50-odd years, we've all become accustomed to listening to the musical strains of a man named Bobby "Boris" Pickett and his main contribution to musical immortality. It is almost impossible for most of us (especially those of us who grew up in the '60's) to think of Halloween novelty songs without immediately thinking of "The Monster Mash."

Robert George Pickett grew up in a movie theater in Massachusetts where his father was the manager. Like countless millions of kids before and after him, he fell in love with the movies and dreamed of growing up and becoming a movie star. Bobby started doing impressions of the various movie stars he'd see on the silver screen. He did various impressions of the stars he loved, but by far, his favorite movie star was horror movie icon Boris Karloff.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.

(Image credit: Taph Madison)

Death. The great equalizer.

Life may be infinitely unfair, but in death, we're all in the same boat. Here are tombstone inscriptions from the graves of famous people. Some funny, others clever, some insightful, others angry, some sad, others optimistic.

Winston Churchill: “I am ready to meet my maker. Whether my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another question.”

Rodney Dangerfield: “There goes the neighborhood.”

(Image credit: Alan Light)

Merv Griffin: “I will not be right back after this message.”

If you want to sell a leather couch in Boston, there are worse ways of doing it. This Craigslist ad has since been deleted. I’d like to think that it was because someone bought it, but the ad itself is a work of art that should be preserved. Luckily it was.

Before purchasing this piece of furniture from me, please be aware of the following:

-The couch is very comfortable, and it will make you want to watch 12 hours of football on Saturdays and Sundays in the Fall. If you’re married, and a homeowner, divorce will probably be eminent as you will not complete any tasks on your Honey Do List. I accept no responsibility for this.

-Boston sports teams are undefeated in championship games when watched on a television in front of this couch. I know a good luck charm when I see one, and the fact of the matter is that the Bruins, Celtics, and Patriots would each have another championship if I had opted to stay home instead of watching the games at a bar.

-I’ve had several mutli-million dollar ideas strike me while on this couch. Granted I’ve been too lazy to implement them, but this couch will probably pay for itself within a week of sitting on it. I won’t be surprised if Harvard or MIT wants to buy it to help out their students that seem to be lacking inspiration.

But that’s not even the best part. The seller goes into detail about who has sat on the couch and the story of the guy who slept on it for an entire month. You might be able to guess who it is. Read the complete archived version of the ad (but with only one remaining picture).  

“Don’t tell Mom!”

Oklahoma redditor hinkster81 has five children. Here he is with the three youngest. He’s learned a bit about parenting by now, specifically how fun it can be. Or maybe he is trying to convince his wife to never leave him alone with the children again. -via reddit

Dr. Oscar Ruiz of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center won top honors today at the annual Nikon Small World competition with this image of a four-day-old zebrafish. The story of why he took it is as fascinating as the image. The Nikon Small World contest honors the beauty and technical skill shown in the tiniest parts of our world found through microphotography. See the top twenty photographs from the competition right here.

A stray cat secretly enters local studio, pops up on TV show in Denizli province, surprising the presenter, audiencehttps://t.co/7IOd1Q6gT7 pic.twitter.com/Wwe9QbyV22

— DAILY SABAH (@DailySabah) October 18, 2016

Kudret Celebioglu kept his cool when a strange cat jumped up on the news desk as he was live on air. The cat even sat down on the computer keyboard like he owned the place! Celebioglu finished the story he was doing, but took a moment to announce that it was getting colder outside, and people should take in the stray cats that roam the streets. Afterward, the TV station adopted this cat. -via Buzzfeed

Remember twenty years ago, when we thought dinosaurs were terrifying reptile monsters that we could make movies about? In such a short time, we’ve learned they were feathered, not as cold-blooded as once thought, and they couldn’t even sing. What else are we going to find out that will ruin our childhoods? This analogy is the latest from Randall Munroe at xkcd. See the hovertext punch line there.

In the latest adventures of Tiny Hamster, several hamsters are resurrected from the dead by a mad scientist. The zombie hamsters crawl out of their graves and go on a rampage, wreaking havoc on a tiny town of Barbie dolls and action figures!

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Can the scientist reverse the spell before it's too late? Watch for yourself and see! -Thanks, Jake Wyatt!

The British government established workhouses in 1834 as a cheaper alternative to “outdoor relief,” or the practice of giving food or money to the poor. Instead, they would be offered “indoor relief,” a chance to work for their keep. Workhouses were meant to be intimidating places, a deterrent to becoming so poor that one had to ask for help there. Northwich Workhouse was one such institution that has since been converted to a museum. While the workers’ dormitory has been demolished, visitors can get a glimpse of what life was like for those destitute enough to work there.

Men, women and children were separated on arrival, partly as a means of maintaining order, but also to prevent what was often referred to as ‘pauper breeding’. Families who had arrived together were only permitted to see each other for a few hours a week, while husbands and wives ate, slept, worked and exercised independently of each other in separate parts of the building.

Clothing and possessions were removed, washed and then placed in storage. Inmates were given a brief health check by a medical officer, issued with a workhouse uniform – and made to take a bath. For many, this was a terrifying prospect. In 1891, a newspaper reporter who had visited the workhouse wrote: “The state as to filth and vermin in which some old neglected people arrive, on their entering the house is indescribable. To have not washed the body for years and years is a common state of things with them...”

Read more about the Victorian workhouse experience at History Extra from the BBC. -via Digg

If you’ve ever purchased a costume fashioned after a pop culture character, the odds are good that it came from Ruble’s. The company started selling costumes at a small shop in Queens in the 1950s and now has licenses to produce costumes of characters from Mattel, Marvel, DC Comics, Playboy, Nickelodeon, Star Trek, and Star Wars, among others. Howard Beige, who runs Ruble’s with his siblings, tells us how they prepare for Halloween by anticipating what costumes and masks will be popular a year ahead of time, so customers can get exactly what they want.  

But figuring out what that mask should be, and how many to make, isn’t easy. More people are dressing up for Halloween, but they’re doing it differently, picking costumes in early October based on news events, movies, or internet memes that went viral only a few weeks or months before. Rubie’s tries to anticipate Halloween trends a year in advance, but it’s constantly adjusting its plans as expected blockbusters flop (The Legend of Tarzan), beloved actors die (Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka costume will be popular this year), or millions of people get swept up in the Pokémon Go craze and Beige finds himself mass-manufacturing last-minute Pikachu costumes to fill thousands of back orders. Pokémon will break into Rubie’s 10 best-selling costumes this year, which didn’t happen when it was popular the first time around. “Thank God we already had the license and the designs for that one,” he says. “Otherwise, it would’ve been a disaster.”

Read about the history of Ruble’s Costumes, and how they operate today, at Bloomberg Businessweek. -via Digg

(Image credit: Emiliano Granado for Bloomberg Businessweek)

Rhett & Link have a new song about their fear of the dark, appropriate for the Halloween season. The song is not bad, and the lyrics are pretty goofy. The video is downright cool, with all the fluorescent touches. So what are they afraid of?

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They are afraid of the same things you and I are afraid of: athlete’s foot and fractions. -via Tastefully Offensive

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Research about smells of sociological interest
compiled by Otto Didact, Improbable Research staff

(Image credit: cometstarmoon)

Political Ideology Stinks, or Smells Agreeable
“Assortative Mating on Ideology Could Operate Through Olfactory Cues,” Rose McDermott, Dustin Tingley, and Peter K. Hatemi, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 58, no. 4, October 2014, pp. 997–1005. (Thanks to Tony Tweedale for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Brown University, Harvard University, and The Pennsylvania State University, explain:

[RESULTS:] individuals find the smell of those who are more ideologically similar to themselves more attractive than those endorsing opposing ideologies....