Selling a Haunted House
Category: All Articles » Motivation and Inspiration
The term “historic” is relative depending on your point of reference. Several years ago, a client, relocating from London, asked us to find her a newer home, and since she made a point of the fact that she didn’t want something “old”, we set up showings on homes that were built within the past three years only to find upon her arrival that, her point of reference being London, she was actually willing to consider anything built within the last fifty years. Over the past few years, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Saint Charles, Missouri. I absolutely love the Saint Louis metro area, but I find it funny how often the residents ramble on about how incredible it is to live in an area that is really old and historic, by which they mean anything that dates back to the days of Lewis and Clarke. These are people who would probably be shocked to learn that there are homes in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where I’ve spent most of my career, that predate Saint Charles by about 200 years.
Allentown and Bethlehem are very old cities when compared with most of the country, with some homes dating back to the 1600’s, which helps to explain the number of ghost stories that are connected with various properties. In one instance, my team listed a historic bed and breakfast for sale, a gorgeous three-story Victorian style house which featured a beautiful turret and a wrap-around porch decorated with very intricate latticed woodwork. The home was located in a coal mining area, where most of the coal mines had closed.
But as far as the owners were concerned, the attractiveness of the property, which had been built at the turn of the century, was not the most important marketing ploy since they were convinced that the house was haunted, not simply by one apparition, but by three. They told me that their guests traveled from all corners of the country in hopes of catching a glimpse of these restless spirits, Pamela’s favorite being the one that now and then marched through one of the second floor bedrooms, looking as human as life, except that it walked about eighteen inches above the floor. And although I never personally saw a ghost, goblin or ghoul, I did manage to sell the house for them in relatively short order.
Because of my success with this unique property, I received a call from the owner of another like it, a two hundred year old house located in Allentown. The owner specified that I arrive between seven and ten after seven in order to see the ghost which, he claimed, made an appearance every evening at precisely 7:17 pm.
Sure enough, seventeen minutes past seven, on the dot, there was a slam of a door on the second floor. The dog perked up his ears and stared at the staircase that stretched down to the kitchen and the hair on the back of my neck stood up as I heard the steps creaked as if someone was coming down them.
The dog appeared to follow the wrath’s progress with his eyes as it moved through the kitchen and out onto the back porch. I actually heard the screen door slam, despite the fact that, to my certain knowledge, it never opened or closed. Once the apparition was gone, the dog once again rested his head on his master’s lap.
The owner claimed that since this event happened each and every night, this was his ticket to a high price for his home since a haunted house would attract buyers from far and wide.
Whether the home was truly haunted or this was an elaborate hoax, I thought the idea was terrible. Who in their right mind would buy a home simply because they believed it to be haunted? The bed and breakfast had sold because of its many unique characteristics. However, if a buyer is planning to purchase a home, whether or not he or she believes in ghosts, he or she is probably not taking the chance on meeting one in the middle of the night, when there are plenty of other homes out there to purchase.
However, Brian’s enthusiasm convinced me that perhaps some other avid ghost enthusiast would appear to purchase the home, and as a consequence, we advertised the property locally and in the tri-state area for months, but no one even came to view it. In fact, I received calls from competing agents who thought I was completely out of my gourd.
We contacted newspapers and expanded our marketing and our search for a buyer further and further. No one looked. The owner eventually grew tired and removed the home from the market.
Loren Keim is the Broker / President of Century 21 Keim Realtors, an Adjunct Professor of Real Estate at Lehigh University, in the Top 1% of Realtors, a National Speaker and Author of
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