Ghosts And Haunted Houses Can Be A Nightmare For Home Owners

October 30, 1996

GAINESVILLE — You’ve just moved into your dream house. There’s just one problem: You think it may be haunted.

Who you gonna call?

A lawyer?

In some jurisdictions, a buyer is to be told if the house he or she is buying is haunted. Same goes for houses where there has been a murder or suicide. It can be a real nightmare for buyer and seller alike, says a University of Florida law professor.

“It’s so easy to laugh at it, but if you’re a party to a transaction, it’s not necessarily funny,” said Julian Juergensmeyer, a professor in the UF College of Law who teaches on the subject. “You thought you had your house sold and you already bought another house. And all of a sudden you discover your buyer can back out because you didn’t tell them about something that you didn’t think was real.”

Juergensmeyer talked about such a case involving a New York City man who bought a house in the Village of Nyack north of the city near the Hudson River. To his horror, the man soon after discovered the house was widely reputed to be possessed by poltergeists, which reportedly had been seen by the seller and members of her family on numerous occasions over the past nine years. The man went to court seeking rescission of the sale and won.

That scares Juergensmeyer. A leaky roof is one thing, he said, but a poltergeist? How on earth does a home owner fix that?

“The legal system was the loser because we came up with an extension of duty to disclose’ to things that are just impossible to measure,” Juergensmeyer explained. “When you get beyond the physical, how do you ever cure a defect. You’ve got property that’s unmarketable forever potentially, if people really take that type of thing seriously.”

Apparently, many people do take ghosts seriously. Though he counts himself among the non-believers, Juergensmeyer said a vast majority of his students favored the court’s decision in the case and believe there should be a duty to disclose poltergeists. He sees some generational differences there. While he thinks most people in his generation don’t put much stock in ghosts and haunted houses, younger people raised on movies such as “Poltergeist” and “Ghostbusters” and television shows like “The X-Files” might be more inclined to think ghosts are “real.”

Where does it end, Juergensmeyer asks. He recalled one student who told him her family bought a house from a man who didn’t tell them he was a mortician.

“She thought that should have been disclosed to the family,” Juergensmeyer said. “That’s the thing that bothers me. Once we start and leave the leaky roof situation, how far do we go? It becomes a matter of total individual sensitivity. And how can we say that one shouldn’t be sensitive to something or should be? If we introduce that into real estate transactions, I think we have to use a more objective standard.”

For whatever reason, many homeowners aren’t candid about ghosts. Many states free brokers of the responsibility of disclosing whether a property is tainted by the macabre or supernatural. Twenty-nine states plus the District of Columbia have enacted laws that generally lift the burden of disclosure from brokers representing “stigmatized” properties.

The laws are designed to balance a seller’s privacy rights with a buyer’s right to know. The effect is that buyers must investigate a house’s past and decide whether they would be spooked by it. Stigmatized properties are defined as ones that bear no physical defects but have a lower value or are more difficult to sell for emotional or psychological reasons.

The potential effect on real estate transactions concerns Juergensmeyer. Will homeowners have to get a certificate that says, “This house free of ghosts”?

“Do we really want to create a whole new sort of occupation here?” Juergensmeyer asks. “We’ve got a termite inspector, the roof inspector and now the poltergeist inspector.”