Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Haunted Real Estate

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

Do you have to disclose the notion that your house may be haunted upon sale? Listen in to find out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, this is Josh talking, and there's Chuck sitting there waiting on standby

to launch this short stuff about real estate. But wait, wait, scary real estate. Yeah, and this is one that you were pretty convinced we had done before. We may have talked about it, I think. But I cannot for the life of me figure out where. Like we've never done an episode on selling your house, we've never done one on haunted houses,

like we've done haunted house attractions, we did ghosts, but I don't know where this would have come up. Yeah, someone'll know. Yeah, and they'll be like, you guys really screwed up again this time. You did a short stuff of something you'd done already, I quit.

How could you be such idiots? I'll never listen to you, I question everything you say from now on and everything you've ever said, and stop being so liberal, I hate you. You stop talking about politics. Oh man, election year emails have been fun. But this is about something else, this is the scary season, and this is about something

that I was kind of curious of, not that I've ever looked at a haunted house, but I just kind of wondered if your house is haunted, or at least you think it is, and you believe in that kind of thing, if you have to tell a potential home buyer, if you have to disclose that, like the basement leaks,

the windows are fairly drafty, and there's a specter on the third floor. A what, excuse me? I didn't catch that. Did you say a specter? A specter says what? Yeah. So your house is pretty old, do you suspect it's haunted?

No, although it's funny you mentioned that, last week there was one night where a few weird things happened and they weren't like noises, they were just like all of a sudden something would be in a weird part of the house, or there were just a few, I can't remember what they were, but three very not intuitive placements of things,

where I was like, did you put this there? And I was like, uh-uh. What? And then suddenly you guys looked like little orphan Annie with cartoon sweat jumping off your foreheads and your pupils were gone. Maybe, and we kind of laughed, we were like, is this house haunted?

But I think after 13 or 14 years, we would have seen something by now. So I agreed, and sorry to get off track because I know this is short stuff, but have you watched The Haunting of Bly Manor yet? No. Oh my God. Is it really scary?

Maybe the best of the best anyone's ever put to film. It's so well done, it's so great. And I wasn't a fan of The Haunting of Hill House, this is everything you wanted The Haunting of Hill House and basically every ghost movie or TV show to be, it's so good, man. Wow. I'm going to love it.

I put it on par with like the others and the orphanage. It's just beautifully done, okay? Awesome, I'll check it out. Okay. I didn't see the other one. Yeah, I watched a little of it and then just kind of stopped, but check this one out, okay? All right.

So the question you posed was, if you think your house is haunted, do you have to disclose it? And the short answer is no, you don't have to disclose it. But the longer answer is if you don't disclose it and you actually do think your house is haunted and everybody else thinks your house is haunted, then you could actually get sued

if the person you sold your house to finds out that the house is haunted and decides they don't want to own a haunted house and you might have to give their money back and now you own two houses. The one you bought after you sold that house and the one you sold originally. And that's actually based on case law

from the 1980s in New York, isn't it? Yeah, there was a woman named Helen Ackley and she and her family lived in an old Victorian in upstate New York. And she claimed that they had ghosts there and she didn't keep it quiet. She was in the newspaper, she was in Reader's Digest. She kind of talked to anyone who would listen about,

they were on the ghost tour of the town. And everybody knew this, I guess, except for the guy that bought it, one Jeffrey Stambofsky. And in 1989, he came from New York City, bought the place for a tidy sum of 650 grand. Yeah, back in the 80s, that was a lot. Yeah, totally.

I mean, this must be quite a house. And then the neighbors were like, oh, so you bought the old haunted Ackley place. And he was like, what? A goo? And he got mad and sued. And originally the judge said, no, sorry, it's kind of buyer beware.

And then that was overturned in an appeal. And I think you should read the part of the decision there. It's pretty good. Okay, this is me doing an appeals court judge from New York, reversing the decision in Stambofsky versus Ackley, okay? Yes. Whether the source of the spectral apparition seen by defendant Sela are parapsychic or psychogenic.

Having reported their presence in both a national publication, Reader's Digest, and the local press in 1977 and 1982 respectively, wrote the court, defendant is stopped, prevented from going back on her word to deny their existence. And as a matter of law, the house is haunted. So for those of you listening,

this is just a little preview of what's to come for our annual Halloween episode. I'm down to one accent, basically. I got one accent. He's doing accents now, everybody, 12 years in. I'm doing accent. It's the best news that I've had in a long time. Josh is doing accent.

Well, I was doing it for the Halloween episode and I just thought I'd trotted out for this one. I love it, yeah, because in real time, we just read that, but this will serve as a little teaser. So just hold onto your hats for that one, everyone. And in fact, maybe we should take a little break and then I can get myself together and then come back right after this.

Okay. I wanna see myself together, fall for something. I want you, come with me. Come with me, come on. Come back on once you're fucked. I just wanna build a kitchen. I gonna get there, butt deep. Make it right, or you may leave it behind.

Hello, you all. Thanks for the wonderful episode! Thank you all so much for joining us on the show. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like Poltergeist? Don't leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, that judge reversed the decision and said, nope. I don't think you mean my distraight.

This is exactly, you have to give that $650,000 back to Mr. Strombavsky and, um, or Stan Strombavsky, I'm sorry, and she, she did, she had to, she was stuck with two houses now. And the reason why is, you know, traditionally with law, it's buyer beware, caveat emptor, which is basically saying like, if you didn't take the time to examine a house, um, you, you are, it's your own fault basically, but this, this circuit, the, or the appeals court judge said, well, this is a material defect. Everyone knows it's haunted.

So if you tried to sell it, whoever you sell it to is going to find out it's haunted. So it's a problem unless somebody wants to buy a haunted house. So it's affected. The real estate is affected. But then secondly, you couldn't possibly find this out just by examining the house, right? Right. Um, and so they'll accept that it's an old Victorian and upstate in New York. You could make presumptions, right, right.

But he was saying like, so buyer beware doesn't, doesn't, um, doesn't apply in this situation and actually overturned it. So when he did that, there's no state laws on the book. There's no state. Zillow did a survey, there's no state that says you have to disclose whether people think a house is haunted or not. But because that decision was made, there's now, um, precedence for it and people can point to it when they try to sue other people and say, look, see, other people have said

this is correct. So fine in our favor. Yeah. I think Minnesota has, uh, in its disclosure law, something that says you, um, it frees sellers up from having to disclose non-material facts, including if the home has any perceived paranormal activity. So it is actually listed, but it's listed in reverse, right? Like saying if your house is haunted, you don't have to say so.

Um, and I think it depends on what state you're in as, I mean, I guess this is precedent in New York, but would that be true for everywhere? Yeah. I think that that would apply in the country and possibly even in other Western countries too, um, because it's such a rare, unique ruling that I think you could cite it elsewhere. I don't know if it would hold up, um, depending on where you were, but it is legal precedence in the United States. Yes.

Well, there's a woman named Cindy Hagley, uh, Cindy with an eye and she is a real estate broker in California. I think she was forced to change the Y2 and I when she became a real estate broker. Yeah. So she could dot it with a balloon hanging above the sign. That's right. She's in her own house. She's with the Hagley group and also president of something called past life homes, which

is a business, uh, where she consults to sell houses that may be haunted. It's pretty cool. And her deal is she's like, listen, um, you've got to disclose it in a couple of cases if it will affect the value of a home, kind of like what the court case said, like, Hey, like this thing, you can't sell it for as much in the future. So you have to say something. Uh, that's one reason and the other reason she says is if it's, um, open and notorious, right?

Like if everybody in the town knows about this, like if just the person that lived there said, Hey, there's a ghost, trust me, all this weird stuff happened. Yeah. If it's been in readers digest. Yeah. If it's been in readers digest and it's on a ghost tour, uh, she thinks she feels like she has to disclose it. Uh, and the other sort of sticking point here is if someone asked directly, Hey, is this

old spooky farmhouse haunted? Then you have to answer if you know something. Yeah. Which I think is pretty cool, but that's really, really, um, that's a useful thing for everybody to know when you're buying a house. Just always ask. I think is the rule. Right.

I mean, the worst they could do is be like, you're a cuckoo, but you know, then just, just send them send them our way and tell them to listen to this episode. And then we'll be like, Oh, okay, now that makes sense. But what about if it's not necessarily haunted? What about if there was, you know, if a father killed all of his family in their sleep one night, 20 years ago? Creepy Chuck. So that would be something that's called psychologically affected real estate, um, or stigmatized

real estate, something that was like the side of a murder, a meth lab, um, the, something that's openly and notoriously haunted, those are called stigmatized properties. And when it comes to an actual physical death, not a haunting or anything like that, but somebody has died in the house, especially if they've died violently, whether by suicide or by homicide, there are actually some states that say you have to disclose this. Almost all states don't say you have to disclose it. Again though, you would be probably better off in the long run, just to cover your, your bases legally afterward, to disclose it after you're basically signing papers.

You're like, by the way, you know, my grandmother died in this, in your bedroom, um, and then just run out the door with her check. But in Alaska, California and South Dakota, you actually are required to disclose it ahead of time. Right. And so if someone said, is Bly Manor haunted? You would have to say, oh yes. This is pretty cool stuff.

It is. I love stuff like this. So, yeah, I guess the thing here is, is to be truthful, is to be honest and open about everything from homicides to hauntings to, if you've been making math, you know, let the people know, I've been making math here, no big deal. This house is probably just infected forever. Right. Uh, well, that's it.

That's it about distressed, um, real estate. And if you want to know more about it, go home shopping and see what you find and let us know what you find too. And in the meantime, short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.