If you study “Yin House” feng shui, which is the divination of grave sites, you learn that the good or bad feng shui of the grave site can affect up to three generations of descendants. You read that right. Where your grandfather was buried can affect his child, who is your parent, as well as you and your children if you have any. After that, is it lights out? Lock the door on your way out!

The answer is yes and no. This branch of Feng Shui is very hard to verify, compared to Yang House Feng Shui (which deals with homes and businesses). With the Yang House, where we live and work, the influence can be immediate and the remedies can work pretty swiftly also. But with a grave site, we might not know for a generation or two, the full influence of that spot.

I have never seen anything so specific about the time line, but we can assume that there will be about 20-30 years (average) between generations. With that loose calculation, the grave site could hold power over direct family descendants for roughly 100 years. Compare that to how long it takes a non- embalmed body to decompose underground, which could take eight to twelve years. If embalmed, the decomposition could take 50+ years depending on how much the coffin protects the corpse.

Once the remains are down to just a skeleton, those bones still have the DNA capable of transmitting influence. One of the weirder functions of a compass is to test whether or not there is spirit activity. If the arrow starts to spin around or act erratically, that can be an indication of spirits present, warping the local magnetic field. I remember visiting two different cemeteries one day on a San Diego Ghost Tour. With one cemetery, there were some fairly recent burials and my compass registered as being influenced by some grave sites. Later we went to a much older cemetery, where it had been a couple hundred years since the last burial and my compass behaved normally, to imply that there were no “hungry ghosts” wandering around close by.

One time I was helping a client house hunt in New York and one of the apartments she was considering was in a building that was a remodeled hospital. Is it bad feng shui to live in an apartment building that used to be a hospital? I hate to make generalizations, but this is not a good precedent, to remodel or build on a site where there has been death and sickness. She also wanted me to evaluate a totally new building that had been recently built over an old church site and the church had been built over an even older cemetery. You would assume correctly that I dissuaded her from both of those properties.

Land, earth, and mountains can store energy and I do think this can transcend even beyond the 100 year mark for the last person who died on the site or was buried in that location. We have sites that are hundreds and thousands of years old, where people still feel the haunted and draining aspect to these locations. Since I have never heard of anyone being limited in their property search to just former hospitals or cemeteries, I don’t think there is any reason to settle on such a site when you know about the hidden and potentially negative influence.

When people live on, or very close to, these “yin” sites (grave yard, battle field, any place where there has been a violent or tragic death), the living can get sick more often, have lowered energy, and possibly even be visited by the spirits who inhabit the area.

If you would like to read a primer on this branch of feng shui called Yin House, I have a case study Intro to Yin House Feng Shui available on my website.

Author: Kartar Diamond
Company: Feng Shui Solutions ®
From the On-Line Student Blog Series