How being haunted affects a house's value

So, you've just moved into your new home. Beautiful house, fantastic location, and you got it for a good price. The previous owners seemed very keen for a quick sale. Wondering why? Well, could it be that they thought it was haunted? Stranger things have happened. Beautiful properties have become houses of horror thanks to unexplained happenings. Some families decide to move out. Others learn to live with their ghosts, or resort to exorcism.

Or, in the case of the actor Nicolas Cage, they simply don't sleep in the house. In 2007, he shelled out $3.5m for LaLaurie Mansion, reputedly the most haunted house in New Orleans. "At any given moment," said Cage, "I have five or six ghosts surrounding the house, all looking up at this haunted temple, and I'm in there. We'll [his family] come over and have dinner there but nobody sleeps there." The property is now up for sale.

Being saddled with an unwelcome spectral guest is more common than you might think. According to a 2005 study by the Portman Building Society (now merged with Nationwide), one in three people surveyed claimed to have lived in a house that was haunted, or rumoured to be. The question is, if you've got a resident spook, do you come clean about it to prospective buyers? And if you don't, could you be prosecuted under the Property Misdescriptions Act?

"The Property Misdescriptions Act 1991 does not refer to haunted houses," says the London-based lawyer Conor Walsh. "But it does create a general duty to avoid making false or misleading statements." Theoretically, this should stop a seller from claiming that a house is not haunted – or, indeed, that it is haunted – when he or she believes otherwise.

In the US, it's a different story. There was a case in 1991 where a seller was ruled liable to the buyer for failing to mention that the property she was selling was haunted, which could have affected the value. "The court held that a buyer would be highly unlikely to discover the existence of such activity himself prior to purchase," says Mark Pawlowski, professor of property law at Greenwich University in London. "And therefore the onus was firmly on the seller to make disclosure."

Full Article : independent