Family Flees 'Haunted House,' Sues Landlord

Did a little research. Just picked up bits and pieces from varying websites but here is what I have found. Properties that are alleged to be haunted are under the stigmatized properties disclosure law in 31 states. That can include murder, suicide, criminal activity and even paranormal activity. Which states use that law I have yet to find.

The legal precedent was set by the Stambovsky v Ackley case in NY as somone priviously posted. Apparently that case went all the way to the NY Supreme Court. See here Stambovsky v Ackley

It appears that if the seller/landlord is aware the property is haunted they need to disclose it to the realtor. Some states do not require that the realtor disclose the alleged haunting unless asked by the potential buyer or renter.

Originally posted by TZela
The next thing you know there will be a rider on the insurance policy for "paranormal damages"

Well I did see the movie "Christine" LMAO!

I find it interesting how impossible it is for some to believe in hauntings, or spirits. I grew up believing and not thinking there was a choice, it was just as real as I see you, there you are, you are real. I was too young to take it at as any other way. I think that is a big difference there- you were taught to not believe, and to laugh at other's for the belief.
I had a friend when I was very young. It was not imaginary. In my baby book(birth to 6 years old book) my mother even wrote, "_____ has an imaginary pet dog that goes everywhere with her, and it's name is Spot".
Nope, Spot was real, and wasn't a dog.

reply to post by ldyserenity


I agree with paranormal investigators and a cleansing of the house. Sometimes it only suspends the poltergeist activity for a while. If their lights are flickering i would get an electrician in there before any paranormal investigators. Im not sure if this is where the Amityville Horror happened, they just filmed the movie there. It will be interesting to see how this ends and if they get any good solid evidence. Even though the landlord said no previous tenants reported paranormal activity he could be lying. I hope they find the previous tenants and ask them personally.

Originally posted by Monger

I've lived in some pretty shady houses and apartments during my life. Several places where the previous tenant had committed suicide, a creepy old farmhouse that had been unlived in for more than a decade. Not once did I experience anything I would call paranormal, though I can't completely discount another person's experience. But I would suggest a fair amount of critical thinking.

It's easy for people to get freaked out and feel uneasy in an unfimiliar environment, such as a new apartment. Taps in the walls can be attributed to wind, rodents in the walls, a number of other things.

I'm not saying that I believe its impossile that they were frightened from their home by something paranormal, but I retain a healthy amount of skepticism.

When I was 10-11, we moved into an upstairs apartment, it was beautiful, all furnished with antiques just like new, tall carved wood beds and all glass doorknobs, beautiful rugs... it was 3 bedrooms and had a glass walled dinning room with glass and polished wood doors and a wonderful shinny wood table and fancy tall back upholstered chairs. My Mother was stunned because they rented this to a woman alone with 6 kids and a baby on the way at such a low price lower then anyplace we had lived.

The master bedroom had a mans cane and bowler hat in the closet a box of red liquid in small flat bottles with labels that's said DR (something) cure, and listed all kinds of illness it cured, clearly 1800's stuff like the house.

Anyway my mother found the back door unlocked every morning and sometimes the front one too. She stuck table knives in the sills to keep them from opening, but one night I woke and saw a man standing in the bedroom door, it was light from outside signs, light as day. He was just watching us, me and 4 sisters in two beds, he was short, he had a tweed like jacket and matching pants, a cane and a bowler like hat, he did not make me scared, he then after a bit just disappeared. I called for my Mother and she came and I told her and she was not surprised at all clearly having seen him before already...she just said, he won't hurt you, go back to sleep.

reply to post by lonewolf19792000


Ive been on this planet a long time. The only ghosts, aliens or UFO's Ive ever seen were in the movies. So, until I see it with my own eyes- Its all just trumped up crap for the movie companies to make a profit off of. Just like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, fairy tales for children

Originally posted by JayFlores
reply to post by lonewolf19792000

 

Ive been on this planet a long time. The only ghosts, aliens or UFO's Ive ever seen were in the movies. So, until I see it with my own eyes- Its all just trumped up crap for the movie companies to make a profit off of. Just like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, fairy tales for children

Surely you can't deny that people are seeing these things? Rather than dismiss these things out of hand wouldn't it be better to question what it is that people are actually seeing and experiencing?

reply to post by Insomniac


There are by far more people who have not seen Ghosts, UFO's or aliens. Therefore the general consensus is they dont exist. Drug use, need for attention, mind playing tricks and just good old fashioned lies easily explain all of these.

Originally posted by ldyserenity
reply to post by Whateva69

 

Wow so I guess they could win I mean NJ pretty much follows NY laws and court cases. Wow, I have to say this is news to me. A real court case found on the side of the complaintant. WOW.

Just boggles the mind. Lol.

From Wikipedia: "Stambovsky did not attend the closing which caused him to forfeit the downpayment (although he was then not obligated to buy the house).[2] A New York Supreme Court (trial court) dismissed the action, and Stambovsky appealed."

I took that to mean that he didn't win the case. I could be reading it wrong though.

I don't think the renters are going to win though because there is no precedent to this case and I don't think they have enough evidence to set one.

reply to post by JayFlores


I would say 'can' explain all of these and in many cases that's undoubtedly true. But look at the number of reliable and credible witnesses and the whole thing becomes less clear cut. Also most people who claim to have seen these things don't claim to have seen them all. For example I've seen two UFO's - I don't claim that they were extraterrestial or anything else - they were objects, they were flying and they are unidentified, that's all. I've not seen aliens or ghosts. I think you'll find that's true of most people - very few have collected 'the full set', and I'm sceptical of those who claim to have done so - of course that doesn't mean that they haven't.

reply to post by JayFlores


It's easy to ridicule ghosts, etc. The truth is it smacks of superstition and attention seeking cat hoarders and I'm partly glad that the world (well, some of it) disdains such things as the number of witches burned has lessened and the number of neat tech advances has soared... and I cheer the scientific method.. however...

I've had the full breadth of weirdness happen to me and I was straining to give it a prosaic answer to no avail... I don't pretend to know what "ghosts" and UFO's, etc., are, or what they mean, but to (at least some of) the people who experience them they are very real... but we can't prove this to the greater world ... yet.

The truth is we humans know nearly nothing; but if it makes you feel swell to be a true believer (in non validity of anything "weird") then perhaps you (in a general sense) simply need a more secure worldview. I sympathize as it's unsettling in my world sometimes and I am considering hoarding cats.

Call them ghosts or just odd phenomena - but my Dad has had his fair share of odd events in a number of houses. I personally think he's either 'tuned in' or just unlucky, but he's had numerous incidents in various places.

One particular house of his was a country cottage a few miles from anywhere besides five other small cottages and a couple of old roads. Anyway lots of things happened in that house - a pyrex dish shattered for no good reason on the kitchen surface, his model railway tracks and trains would be found disturbed despite nobody being in the house, his TV would sometimes be on after returning home (despite him needing to save electricity and making sure everything was switched off), but the oddest things were the knocking sounds.

Day or night my dad and other various members of the family (but never myself) heard tapping, knocking sounds on the front door, both like a fist tapping and also the letter box being tapped. Even when he immediately opened the door there was never anyone there. It was not the wind either.

I remember the house always being cold, although to be fair it had no central heating or major radiators, but it always seemed unnecesarily gloomy and dull and cold. Like it could never get warm. I'm very glad he moved away from that place.

As I mentioned these things seemed to have followed him around, like something mischevious. In his latest house, switches have been found turned off (in inaccessible places like behind a kitchen unit), items have vanished and reappeared in odd places (keys, money, and other small objects) and even when he re-married and went on his honey moon in France - he managed to pick a haunted guest house. Strange tapping, clicking sounds through out the night, like wine glasses being 'flicked' and a creepy, dark feeling from one side of the room. Naturally my Dad and stepmum ignored it and didn't tell each other, until their 3rd night, when they both confessed that they both felt very uneasy and my stepmum complained of having bad dreams of a man standing over them in the corner of the room.

Very strange, thanks to my Dad I discovered my passion for discussing the unknown.

Umm...this was on the news last night and they said the family had been living in the house for almost 10 years and they hadn't made a payment in 11 months....

Going to go try to find a source, cannot remember what news we were watching, but I will post if I find it.


Edit: I see it says they have rented the property for 10 years, but not to the same family. The news I watched didn't make that clear. After searching, I have come up with nothing about 11 months of non payment, the family didn't even live in the house that long from what I can tell. I'd also like to note the news I watched said the sound they had recorded said" I hate you" not " let it burn" as every other article says. I remember clearly because my husband and I laughed at how the reporter said it. Starting to think it was just crappy news reporting and I wish I could remember what news channel it was!!!!

Originally posted by ldyserenity

Originally posted by Destinyone
reply to post by ldyserenity

 

I don't know about other states, but in mine. Real Estate Agents must disclose if there has been a previous death in the home to potential buyers.

Des

Yes, that's true, but Death doesn't always = Haunted and neither does haunting always = death in the home...could be anything from the nether world. Land has a long history even before these homes are built on them and there are also doorways that just happen to be in certain spots where people build. So yes, death in the home would have to be disclosed but a history of haunting? Who knows?

True. When I was looking at houses in Southern MD, I would ask if anyone died in the home. They would look at me like I was nuts.

I'm not a real estate expert but according to a quick internet search here in NJ (yep I live in NJ about five minutes from Toms River LOL) homeowners and landlords are not required to disclose any type of death or suicide to anyone interested in buying or renting a home. I doubt if the judge is going to investigate anything to be honest beyond the fact that they are breaking the lease. Even if they were let out of the lease I would think that if I was truly terrified that the home was haunted losing my security deposit would be a small price to pay to be free of such a fearful situation. I myself don't have any belief in ghosts or hauntings. Let me be honest here everyday we are walking on someones grave from the past no matter where we go. I have no idea how many primative men or indians graves I have lived on in my years of moving. Many times during the civil war people were buried without markers all the time. But thats my opinion which is quite possibly wrong

This is the 'haunted house' realtor case I remember when I lived in New York:
en.wikipedia.org...

Sorry, just read someone already referenced this case above.

I notice that many here are being supersillious about "hauntings", like as if such a thing does not have any scientific foundation ? Or as if those affected are suffering from some kind of disease of the brain ? Anyone who has suffered a ghost in their house knows that the paranormal is real. Most learn to live with it, like as I have, but in the event that a landlord or agency knew the house to be haunted, but knowingly with held that information from the tenant or buyer, then I see legitimate grounds for litigation.

It is a common misunderstanding about the paranormal that people believe that spirits do not exist, or that science has no idea about these phenomenon. Actually cutting edge science knows about such phenomenon. Science is about coming up with a paradigm that is able to explain all the data. Ignoring data that does not fit in with the prevailing paradigm is simply not real science. We have to accept all the data, no matter how weird the data might be. So that particle physics cannot explain such phenomenon. So we must arrive at a new paradigm that can explain such "hauntings". We do have a paradigm that adequately explains such hauntings. It is called "Multidimensionality Physics". Albert Einstein called it the "Folding of the Fabric of Time and Space". Also it is now widely known as "Quantum Entanglement". Or also one can call it "Wormhole Physics" or "String Theory".

We all carry this "Quantum Entanglement" around with in us. We call it our "Subliminal Consciousness". However, one is mistaken if one is thinking that the realm of the sub-conscious is just chemicals reacting in the brain. Ghosts exist as a measurable field phenomenon. One can buy "Ghost Detectors". These device are various forms of radio receiver. You see, each radio frequency is a window or portal through which we can see into the etheric realms, where the ghosts are living, relative to our dimension. As much as they are ghosts to us, we also are equally as much ghosts to them. We are haunting them just as much as they are haunting us.

Anyone can tune in on the paranormal just by sitting still and listening to the environment. Look very concentratedly into a mirror. Doing these mind exercises will always improve your psychic awareness. Most hauntings are as a consequence of mirrors in the house. If your house is haunted, the first thing to do in order to remove the haunting, is to remove all the mirrors in the house. If that fails to bring improvement then by all means bring in a ghost buster team. However, they are not a free service. Sometimes inviting a priest in to perform an exorcism can actually make the haunting even stronger and turn what was a mere inconvenience into a literal nighmare from hell.

Some people are so into the occult that they are eager to buy or rent houses that are certified as being haunted. It is a specialist market. So the landlord or agency should always let everyone know about any haunting. It can be a profitable aspect of the property. My house was haunted. It still is, but I have it under my control now. Initially I was so affected that I ended up in a psychiatric hospital for six months. After all these years it has become something that I have learnt to live with. Even as I am sitting here writing this I can hear the usual sounds that are absolutely paranormal. Most of the time I basically ignor it all.

In my house there is a particular corner where the disturbance is strongest. If I speak into that corner I can easilly converse with the entities. It is a "StarGate" as they say. Like as in the classic movie "Poltergeist". These doorways are in every house to greater or lesser extent. The doorways are our interaction with parallel universes. Literally the "wormholes" that scientists are talking about in their theories. Every mirror is such a "wormhole", but no one looks into a mirror long enough so as to be able to see it as such. Just recently, after more than fifteen years, I have installed a new mirror in my livingroom. Suddenly the psychic manifestations are returning again. Gaining in strength. Some old mirrors are really spooky. Such haunted mirrors can fetch a really good price, since occultists are on the look out for such things for their research. I am working with a brand new mirror and already I am getting results. Think how much more psychically powerful certain old mirrors can be ?

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