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OrphanWilde comments on Personal Evidence - Superstitions as Rational Beliefs - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't know the incidence of gaslighting. I'd be more inclined to blame something like EMFs screwing with me, given that the house did have bizarre electrical issues - lights that are turned off flicker on irregularly, and appliances with safety features have to be reset regularly owing to line voltage fluctuations.
Since everything you describe is highly plausible given gaslighting, then you only have a right to assign a high probability to something you should have assigned a very low prior to (such as supernatural events) if you can almost completely rule out gaslighting.
How likely of an explanation is that, really? How often does this happen? I feel like giving this phenomenon a name and a wiki page has artificially increased your probability of it. If you had just said "this could easily be explained by someone having a powerful grudge on you, sneaking into your house and waging a several month long campaign of psychological warfare on you", that would sound absurd.
I don't blame supernatural events. I believe the house is "haunted," but purely as a description of the events. (Smallpox is still smallpox even after we discover that it is caused by microorganisms rather than, say, angry spirits, or an imbalance in our body fluids.)
I think this was misleading.
Ok, you win. Now I'm confused. I don't interpret "haunted" in such a ... mundane way, and rereading your post with your connotations in mind, little of controversy remains.
It will probably help if you frame the post with my previous skepticism that even mundane hauntings existed. (With some extremely exceptional cases, like the guy living in the crawl spaces of somebody's home.)
If lights that are turned off are flickering, I recommend getting an electrician in to look at them. That's clearly not supposed to happen (should be impossible, actually), and might be an indication of a potential electrical fire hazard. Just curious, does this house often blow breakers?
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one needs to hire a electrician that is somewhat above the mean in their understanding
several possibilities, hot neutral, aluminum wiring[gaping]. somebody cross wiring a neutral and positive
It uses fuses, and not unusually often, no, just the usual "Too many things plugged in to an outdated electrical system" situations. If they blew more frequently I'd have yanked the fuse box and replaced it with breakers, as fuses are expensive.
I've fiddled with the electrical system, replacing light switches and a few fixtures - it predates aluminum wires quite considerably, the biggest problem being that many of the fixtures predate grounding wires (which started becoming standardized around the same time as aluminum wires, actually), and there don't seem to be issues with the lines themselves, nor with the fixtures (even new fixtures exhibit this behavior, at least until they stop working). My father, an electrical technician, also took a look, and threw up his hands.
Electromagnetic flux is the only explanation I can come up with for the behavior. (The lights don't flicker to full brightness - you can only tell that it's happening if the room is very dark, and it certainly isn't bright enough to see by. CFL bulbs actually exhibit the behavior significantly worse than incandescent bulbs, another suggestion that it's EMF.)
It sounds unlikely to me that EMFs would screw with you that badly. (But I'm not an expert about these things.)