It’s time for you to get new digs. Maybe a job needs you to move, maybe you need a bigger place, maybe you’re just bored of your old digs. While house hunting, you spot a place that would be perfect.
You arrange a viewing. The location is great, the house itself suits you down to the ground. It’s within your price range, even cheaper than you would think, by some margin.
Just one problem. A few years ago there was a murder in the house, a jealous husband stabbing his wife to death, gruesome stuff. The current owners of the house now want to move because they believe the house is haunted and the house has a sinister local reputation for spooky paranormal goings on. Pathologists went over ever square inch and the house is as clean as the day its first owners moved in, no blood stains or anything. The murderer was caught and is spending life in prison with no chance of parole.
In my state, you have no obligation to disclose any death or crime that has occurred in a home when you sell it. I’d buy it in a heartbeat, enjoy it, gradually update the appearance of the home, and in 20 or more years when it’s time to sell I’ll bet no one will even remember the murder ever happened.
I’d jump at the chance. If and when I buy a place it’ll be for the long-term, so re-sale doesn’t bother me, and I’m sure I’d be able to find someone else who, like me, would be happy to buy the place anyway - for a slightly lower price than local places maybe, but since I’d also paid a slightly lower price, that’d be fine.
Plus it’d just be a cool story. My teenage emo daughter would LOVE it.
*If there’s no ghosts, then I get a great house at a great deal which in 20, 30 years time might actually draw a premium price due to its “colorful history” (as a realtor, excuse me, REALTOR would put it).
If there are ghosts, it confirms there is the possibility of existence after death, which is really awesome.
My only hesitation would be if the “spooky occurences” might be actual, mundane issues. “Whenever it rains heavily, a ghost causes the basement to flood 1-2 inches!”
I’d make someone check that it had been cleaned properly. I saw a show once about how the government/law enforcement/whatever doesn’t help clean crime scenes, and often people decide to do it themselves (having a pro do it properly can be very expensive) with disgusting and potentially life threatening results. If that checked out, I’d buy it, no problem.
I wouldn’t tell my kids though, they’d freak. And I won’t lie; there would be nights when I was alone that I would get seriously creeped out. But I’d still buy it, if it was clean.
I voted Other, because while I’d buy it in a heartbeat, it wouldn’t just be because I thought ghosties and such were nonsense. I do, mostly, but I also have a super-romantic-gothly side, and so both sides would be on that like white on rice, but for very different reasons.
Super-Practical Me: Hell yes I want a nice cheap house! Dumbasses can’t get past some creepy legends and a squicky past to enjoy a beautiful house in a lovely location? Sucks to be them!
Gothly-Romantic Me: Oh how nice, now we can live here and have a family and be loving and happy and counteract the negative feng shui and bad karma from the past! (Yes, sometimes my GR side makes me gag too.)
I don’t think I would. I was house-hunting a few years ago and it was disclosed to me that the place I was considering putting in an offer had had a suicide in recent years in the bathroom. Nice house, nice property, but I couldn’t get past the idea of someone killing him/herself there.
No, I wouldn’t because I would worry that I couldn’t sell it later. Death in a house is nothing to worry about. I imagine most old houses have had people die in them, but if I second guess a house where murder was done I know someone else would, too.
If it was my dream house and I planned to live there forever, I would buy it. I would probably make a condition of sale that it be check out for having been cleaned properly. I would also probably have my priest come by and bless it just to be safe.
If I was only going to be there short-term, I wouldn’t buy it.
I vote “other” because there simply isn’t enough information to give a definite answer. I’d have to know exactly how cheap the house was, and the likelihood that I would need to sell it again in the next few decades.
FWIW, after we bought our house, we learned that (1) the previous owner committed suicide, although not inside the house; (2) the owner before that one was institutionalized due to mental illness.
Of course we feel sympathy for the families involved in those tragedies, but setting that aside for a bit of black humor, we find it all pretty funny - “you’d have to be CRAZY to buy this property!” (Probably true; it’s rather odd.)
