The Firewood 004: Legal liaBOOlity
I can't resist a good ghost story, so here's one that's really scary: It's about how you can get sued if you try to sell a haunted house in New York
Hello, friends.
For those of you who read last week’s newsletter, I’m pleased to report that I did indeed do the Peekamoose-Table hike last weekend, clocked in an 18.8 strain on my WHOOP band in the process, and had a lovely winding drive home visiting High Point and an eccentric northern New Jersey town called Sparta which is, contrary to its name, full of weird Bavarian-inspired architecture. (Last year there was some major drama involving its annual German Christmas market and I want to believe that behind the headlines it was basically a Christopher Guest movie.)
Today I want to talk about something wildly off topic but rather entertaining, because we are fully into Spooky Season. A 12-foot-tall skeleton from Home Depot is the latest viral product sensation, Twitter is once again peppered with faux existential dread about how no one has actually ever heard the “Monster Mash,” and you can once again go on a feminist ghost tour of downtown New York.
That last item tends to excite me. As I wrote in The Spectator last year, I love a good ghost tour. The best ones tend to be an entertaining mix of quality storytelling and things you never knew about a city, nobody really minds if you pack a flask for the after-dark tours, and they’re perfect for the COVID era because the whole thing tends to be outside. Major cities tend to offer them year-round, often with an expanded schedule in the few weeks around Halloween.
I’ve lived in Brooklyn Heights for the past decade, one of NYC’s older neighborhoods and the city’s first historic district (a designation created after Robert Moses threatened to bulldoze more of it), and for much of that time have inhabited a story of a circa-1845 brick townhouse that allegedly has a ghost living on the third floor. His name is Richard, which is also the name of the next-door neighbors’ cat, but these two things are apparently unrelated. So when I heard last October that there was a “macabre” tour of the neighborhood that month, I signed right up.
It was pretty good. I didn’t realize how many gory axe murders had happened in my neighborhood (or that H.P. Lovecraft had lived just a few blocks away). But there weren’t actually many stories about which houses in the neighborhood were haunted, and this was a bit disappointing. I didn’t want to hear about murders, I wanted to hear about ghosts.
Nearly a year later, I learned that there may be a reason why. Because in the state of New York, you can put yourself in a place of legal liability if you have ever publicized reports or allegations that your house is haunted.
“Plaintiff hasn’t a ghost of a chance”
I was in my early 30s when my dad finally stopped trying to nudge me to go to law school. I have never wanted to go to law school. And Dad was the cool kind of lawyer who got to visit crime scenes all the time and prosecuted people who inspired minor characters on The Sopranos, and let me tell you, even that kind of law career seemed boring to me.
But I might have wanted to become a lawyer if Dad had told me about Stambovsky v. Ackley. This was the legal case that, no joke, stipulates that if you’re selling a haunted house and you don’t disclose that to the buyer, they can sue you and get out of their contract. It’s known as the “Ghostbusters ruling.” And the judgment in the case is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.
Basically, in this 1991 lawsuit, the buyer of a Nyack, N.Y. house sued the seller because the house was haunted. It’s unclear how the buyer came upon this realization. But somehow the buyer learned that the house was “possessed by poltergeists, reportedly seen by defendant seller and members of her family on numerous occasions over the last nine years.” And the buyer wanted out. The judge ruled in his favor because — something that would’ve been difficult to surface in this pre-Google era — the house’s spectral residents had been written up in local papers, described as “a riverfront Victorian (with ghost),” and included on what seems to have been a local paranormal walking tour. The ruling is full of terrible, horrible, incredible ghost puns (“plaintiff hasn’t a ghost of a chance”). It is worth your time even if you don’t think you have any time.
But, I have to wonder if some of my neighbors in Brooklyn Heights were aware that they shouldn’t consent to their houses being stops on a ghost tour, and that’s why there were so few haunted houses on the spooky romp around the neighborhood. Making your house a stop on a ghost tour, per Stambovsky, could mean you would need to disclose the alleged ghosts to any prospective buyers if you choose to sell the house, or else face legal action if the buyer found out they hadn’t been adequately informed. The same also seems to stand if you do a press interview about any ghosts in your house, go on a podcast about it, host a séance and sell tickets on Eventbrite, or invite a ghost-hunting reality show crew to visit.
The S stands for spooked
That said, maybe property values aren’t the reason my neighbors keep their allegedly haunted houses under wraps: They might just be embarrassed to admit they believe in ghosts.
“The craziest stories are always the ones that customers tell me on my tours,” Boroughs of the Dead founder Andrea Janes has said. “These private, domestic ghost stories are often extremely intense, and quite emotional.”
But they shouldn’t be so shy! Slightly under half of Americans admit they believe in ghosts, and they’re in good company. Former president Harry S Truman was convinced the White House was haunted, and let me remind you, this isn’t just the guy who had access to the nuclear codes, he’s the one who actually used them.
Now that’s scary.
BOO!
Stay wild and don’t unsubscribe,
Caro
PS: Did you know an enormous demonic black cat haunts the Capitol? There’s one who haunts my apartment, too, if by “haunts” you mean “paws at my hair if I haven’t woken up in time to feed her at her preferred feeding hour.”