[Playing UC]

So I'm not sure if this actually a problem or what, but one night in the dead of winter, the Witch Doctor showed up to read the newspaper and he never left. He's fallen over frozen in the snow a few times and he stinks to high heaven but he won't leave. He just keeps staring in through the windows with his mask on.

I'm guessing this isn't normal, as in all my years of playing TS2 I've never seen him outside of his Twikki hut. Is my lot/game corrupted now?

As background, I was having corruption issues previously, so I deleted all the files from the TS2 folder and started the game with fresh neighbourhoods. I didn't do a full uninstall. Could this have caused the problem (if it actually is a problem)?

That's not good, I would run hood checker and you may need to repair your game. Make a back up first.

I vaguely remember him showing up on someone's lot when they didn't have Twikkii Island created. Do you have all your vacation neighbourhoods?

I ran hoodchecker and it just gave me a few invalid memories from sims I killed off. yeah, I do. I also used moveobjects to delete the witch doctor and then bigfoot showed up

so my game is obviously a mess, and I'll probably have to do a repair or a fresh install, but is this particular lot corrupted? or could I package it for later use?

You don't have to do a completel reinstall, the problem might be easier to solve.

First thing I can think of, do you have any graves of children on your lot? Because there's a known bug with sims from the Unknown family showing up if child ghosts are present.

Other than that, does this happen on any other lot, or just with this one? If it's only this lot, move your family somewhere else and bulldoze the lot.

If it's not just this lot, does it happen in other neighborhoods? Could it be related to a download? There are a lot of things you can try before doing a complete reinstall.

If you want to be on the safe side, look at your objects.package files (Program Files folder) and see if they've been modified in any way. If they haven't, you don't need to reinstall. Make them read-only for safety.

As for the lot, any lot that has had sims live in it shouldn't be packaged.

Hey, my gosh, thanks for this!

There were actually quite a few children's graves on the lot. As I mentioned previously, I restarted with a fresh hood, so I killed off all the pre-made binned sims for my graveyard.

Since I only just started a fresh hood, it was no hardship to do a fresh install. Still, I like working with small custom hoods, so in future when I kill the sim bin again, how can I prevent this glitch from occurring? Should I move all kid graves straight away without allowing their ghosts to spawn?

I had no idea what the problem was - but I thought it was very funny

If you don't want the bin sims, you can have a look at this download here: http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=520751

I admit, it was pretty hilarious when the Witch Doctor was just staring in through the window at 3am. And then when Bigfoot let himself inside, I thought that was enough hospitality

Thanks for the link! Just to be clear, I start the game so that the folders are created (after a fresh install), but don't load any hoods? Just exit at the neighbourhood selection screen and place the files into the folder and then restart? And no more Ottomas family?

Yeah when that happened in my custom hood to "experiment" on Sims, every time a child ghost tried to haunt, I got dangerous NPC after dangerous NPC visiting my lot (Grim, Spectral Assistant, Baby New Year, Bigfoot, you name it!). Since I didn't save after the kids died, I could easily exit the lot and go back before they were ghosts. I'm so glad I'm not the only one with that glitch because of kid graves. But I do admit, it is kinda funny seeing the Hula Zombie dance in the dead of winter with only a grass skirt and coconut bra.

That was my daughter's hood. In her case, though, she did not have all the vacation hoods, and the dude just walked by, paused, walked on. Scared the crap out of her. She did NOT have child graves, though. It never happened again, much to her relief.

I have very occasionally had strange walkbys; once with the carpool driver (in all fairness, though, I believe I did a bad save while my Sim was on vacation) and once with the food court judge on a community lot (not sure about that one .... MAYBE that was one of the hoods where I found a weird way to corrupt it ... I don't remember anymore). Personally, when I encountered this sort of weirdness, I went to a backup. Better safe than sorry.

There have been a couple of posts on here and Tumblr about strange walkbys. It's certainly a fun way to raise your blood pressure! Glad to see the OP found a possible cause; at least for the Witch Doctor.

You will still get the hoods, but there will be no sims in the bin.
Just make sure to read the instructions so that you install them into the right place - these go into your program files.

That's good to know, your game probably isn't bugged at all then. You could even have kept the neighborhood.

If your family has a child visitor too late at night, an adult from the child's househole will arrive to take them home. Since dead sims are in the Default family, where all the NPCs hang out, this causes those sims to appear when the child's ghost is active. As you have seen for yourself, this can cause problems with your game. Unfortunately, the only solution to this that I know of is to move all child graves to a public cemetary.

What do you mean by "a bad save"?

That makes complete sense. Thanks for explaining it!

It's okay, I didn't lose anything other than remodeled mobile homes, a cemetery and a church lot with all the graves and bad NPC visitors. I'll definitely try to be more careful next time I have a child death though.