Haunted houses don't always spook buyers

Real Haunted House Listings courtesy of San Diego Paranormal.

Sites of murders or suicides often sit on the market, but friendly
apparitions don't seem to deter people looking for a home.
By Holden Lewis, Bankrate.com

Oh, no, not the attic. Anywhere but the attic. But the visitors insisted
on going in.
The house's owner reluctantly opened the attic door and stepped aside as
her two visitors trod into the gloomy room.
"All I know is we walked into the attic with her, and it's cavernous,
and we were just looking hard, and, I don't know, this feeling came over
me -- this warm feeling," Craig Schaible says. "I looked at my wife and
she felt it, too."

Craig and Yvonne Schaible were thinking of buying this 111-year-old
Victorian house on a tree-shaded street in Fanwood, N.J. The owner had
grown up in the house and was trying to sell it now that her parents had
died. But an uncanny presence threatened to scare away buyers and drive
down the house's value. The owner had not yet told the Schaibles about
the mysterious sounds and frightful sights that unnerved her -- and
terrified her husband.
"We were walking out of the attic," Schaible says, "and my wife said,
'Any ghosts?' And the lady said, 'Well, yeah.' We were like, 'Cool, tell
us about it.'"

The owner didn't go into much detail. She said people had seen and heard
things over the years. "We said we kind of think of it as a positive
thing," Schaible says. The Schaibles decided then and there to buy the
eight-bedroom house, a fixer-upper built in 1890. They paid the asking
price.

Ghosts can add value
If you think ghost stories make a house less valuable, you might be
right -- most of the time. But not all the time. The Schaibles weren't
your typical house buyers. They were living in a two-bedroom townhouse
and were looking for a big, old Victorian house to restore. As soon as
they stepped through the pair of 8-foot-high front doors, they knew this
house was the one. Furthermore, the Schaibles are famous among their
friends for elaborate Halloween bashes they hold every other year,
complete with caskets in the rooms and a hand sticking out of the punch
bowl.

The ghost stories about the house "made it completely more valuable,"
Schaible says. "Would I pay more money for a haunted house? No. The
decision to buy the house was based on the house itself." But, he adds,
the spectral tales "juiced it up. The fact that the Halloween people
bought a haunted house was so funny -- too perfect."

MSN Money: 'Zombie' debt is hard to kill
Is carpet dead?

MSN Money: Fend off a plague on your house
Six weeks elapsed from the time the Schaibles made an offer until
possession. During that time in spring 2001, the seller's husband stayed
behind to ease the transfer of ownership. The Schaibles loosened his
tongue with a few beers one night, and the man told them about
apparitions he had seen and described a time when he heard his wife
calling from the basement. He went downstairs, but no one was there.
Then he heard a disembodied voice chuckling in his ear. "According to
him and his wife, this thing was picking on him," Schaible says.

"I'm skeptical," Schaible says. "I'm not saying I necessarily believed
it. Everyone has their perception of things."

Then the Schaibles moved in.
The second night, it became clear that "there was something in the house
that wanted to make itself known to me," Schaible says.
They were moving in, and stuff was all over the place, including a Civil
War rifle that was resting against a wall in a 12-foot-wide hallway. In
the middle of the night, Schaible got up, "and this very heavy rifle
launched across the hall and landed at my feet." It flew about 8 feet,
he estimates. He looked for loose floorboards or anything else that
could have caused the mysterious occurrence, but he couldn't find an
explanation.

So Schaible went downstairs into the kitchen and delivered a spirited
monologue. "I said, 'Hey, I live here, I pay the mortgage, and I don't
need this scaring me out of my mind in the middle of the night.' I
ranted for about an hour or so and sat around for a while."
After that, the Schaibles occasionally heard voices and glimpsed
figures, but there were no scares in the middle of the night. Incidents
have become less frequent as restoration work has progressed.

Cindy Neivert, the real estate agent with Burgdorff ERA who brought the
house to the Schaibles' attention, says the presence of "ghosties" can
add to or detract from a home's value. It depends on the buyer and what
the house will be used for. Someone who wants to convert a big house
into a bed-and-breakfast inn might see marketing value in ghost stories,
as long as they're not too scary. Adventurous buyers such as the
Schaibles might not be spooked. But ghost stories might scare away the
squeamish.

Neivert is kind of glad that the owner told the Schaibles about the
haunting because she wasn't sure if she would have been required to
disclose it. "I know you have to disclose if someone was murdered in a
house," she says. "As far as a poltergeist or a ghosty, I don't really
know."

Bad karma can depress price
There was no history of violence in the house that the Schaibles bought,
and that's good because murder or suicide definitely can depress values.
Neivert and her husband once considered buying a house where someone had
committed suicide. "We were on the edge of yes and no, and it pushed us
over the side of saying no," she says.

Infamous deaths can make houses especially hard to sell. Think of Nicole
Brown Simpson's townhouse or the house where 39 members of Heaven's Gate
killed themselves to join a spaceship presumably hiding behind the Comet
Hale-Bopp or the house where Charles Manson's followers killed actress
Sharon Tate and four other people.

Randall Bell, a property appraiser for Bell Anderson & Sanders of Laguna
Beach, Calif., specializes in "stigmatized" properties. Often a property
is stigmatized because of an environmental or structural problem:
earthquake damage, contaminated soil, a faulty foundation. But some
properties are stigmatized because something horrible happened there.

Bell says it took 2 1/2 years for Nicole Brown's house to sell in a
neighborhood where it otherwise would have been sold within three
months. It eventually sold at a deep discount. The buyer simply was
looking for a good deal. Following Bell's advice, the buyer renovated
the façade. Afterward, Bell visited the house "and he had changed
it so much that at first I didn't recognize the property."

The house where members of Heaven's Gate committed mass suicide "was
heavily stigmatized," Bell says. "The owner tried very hard to sell it.
Eventually he gave it back to the bank, and the bank sold it at a very
deep discount. The property has since been bulldozed and may be
redeveloped in the future." If that happens, it will have a different
address. Neighbors changed the name of the street.

The Manson Family's first murder spree, one of the most infamous crimes
of the 20th century, happened in July 1969 at the home of Sharon Tate
and movie director Roman Polanski. The bungalow in Benedict Canyon was
on a prized site in Beverly Hills, with a stunning view of Los Angeles.
"It sold in the early '90s for full value," Bell says. "The new owner
bought it and tore it down and built a 10,000-square-foot Mediterranean
mansion. That showed that no matter how heinous the crime, eventually
things can return back to normal. It can take many years."

What about ghosts? "If it ties to a real event, where there was a murder
in the house, that's a whole world apart from a ghost that has been
there since the 1800s," Bell says. "If it's a fun story, it probably has
little effect on the house or might bring a small premium."

The Schaibles' house in New Jersey has a fun story. People ask Schaible
if he's scared. "No," he says. "You have to live there to understand.
It's not like a rattling of chains go bump in the night." Apparitions
happen fleetingly, "so fast that it's over before you know it."

His dream is to grow old in the house -- just as all the previous
owners' parents did.