Haunted houses & the law
• Spooky Nonsense: Ghosts & Hauntings
As silly as it sounds, if your home has a reputation for ectoplasmic activity, you should disclose it.
Disclosing things that go bump in the night, as well as more tangible stigmas could certainly cause your home's value to drop, but failing to disclose them could cost you a much scarier liability suit.
Most states's disclosure laws don't deal with the forms the deceased take in the afterlife, but they do address death as a stigma. ...
In 1989, naive out-of-towners Jeffrey and Patrice Stambovsky, purchased an 18-room rambling riverfront Victorian mansion on the Hudson River in scenic Nyack, N.Y.
Unbeknown to them at the time, the $650,000 home was haunted. ...
According to Ackley's Digest account, there were at least three ghosts thought to date back to the Revolutionary War, a red-cloaked woman often seen demurely descending the staircase, a wandering sailor with a powdered wig and an elderly gentleman sitting in the living room suspended four feet above the floor. ...
Jeffrey Stambovsky insisted he didn't believe in ghosts, but the possibility of living with them spooked his wife. ...
The Stambovskys demanded that Ackley return their $32,500 binder and ax the deal. Ackley refused to return the money, claiming that the Stambovskys had agreed to purchase the home "as is."
Instead of taking metaphysical law into their own hands, the Stambovskys took it to court.
"We were the victims of ectoplasmic fraud," Stambovsky moaned.
A lower court ruled in favor of Ackley, but later Justice Israel Rubin of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court reversed the decision with a devilish tounge-in-cheek ruling.
"(A) very practical problem arises with respect to the discovery of a paranormal phenomenon: 'Who you gonna call?' as a title song to the movie Ghostbusters asks. Applying the strict rule of caveat emptor to a contract involving a house possessed by poltergeists conjures up visions of a psychic or medium routinely accompanying the structural engineers and Terminix man on an inspection of every home subject to a contract of sale," Rubin said.
"Whether the source of the spectral apparitions seen by defendant seller are parapsychic or psychogenic, having reported their presence in both a national publication and the local press, defendant is estopped to deny their existence, and, as a matter of law, the house is haunted," he finished with a flourish.
Broderick Perkins, Realty Times: Do You See Dead People? Disclose It
Comments
Posted by: Emily | November 30, 2004 12:10 AM